73 Comments

> Unless the supply of homes can increase in line with demand

There exists the technology to vertically stack homes in DC. But luckily we have sensible federal legislation preventing it from destroying DCs character.

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I think your point saying that performance assessments are nobody's favorite thing about work is fairly dead on. To me the reason for this is that for most people in the middle of the pack performance-wise the assessments are fairly arbitrary and somewhat pointless. Most employees have a lot of good qualities, want to do a good job, and a few areas they need to work on but are overall big contributors and you wouldn't want to lose them.

The purpose of performance assessments is to identify the top 10-20% of talent that can rise up or is underutilized, and the bottom 5-10% who need to go. For the middle ~60% evaluations create a lot of stress without much relevance.

Additionally, even if you don't have very clear metrics-based criteria, the top talent and people who need to move on become pretty clear over the course of a few eval cycles.

One problem with teaching from this perspective is that the structure of the occupation sort of precludes an "up or out" mentality, even a soft one. In most occupations people want to acquire more responsibility or a new role throughout time. If they are unable to secure a better job, they'll eventually move on.

But classroom teachers can basically do the same job from age 23-retirement... so the evaluation process does not serve its function of identifying top talent for promotion and also serves as the only mechanism for getting rid of low performers since it is less likely a low performer will become disenchanted with their lack of opportunity. I would imagine this makes perceptions of the eval system much worse for the workforce.

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School *clap* performance *clap* is *clap* dominated *clap* by *clap* out *clap* of *clap* school *clap* factors.

While your point is taken that improving public schools, even marginally, is a good thing for local government to do, I really wish the above idea had a larger role in the debate.

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Between reading your post last week and this one, I read Freddie deBoer's post on "Is the Conventional Wisdom on Educational Spending All Wrong?"

In that post, he has a chart that compares state spending vs educational achievement and it shows DC as an extreme outlier of high spending and terrible performance. The chart was using data from 2003-2005, so I thought maybe something had changed, but comparing the data again, DC continues to have a top 3 spending per student while having a bottom 5 results.

Matt mentioned in a recent podcast that DC is able to make these very high investments in teacher pay that other districts aren't able to make because of the small size and wealth of DC relative to the US as a whole. However, I'm not sure that this extreme investment is actually doing anything other than make people feel like they are doing something.

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"...anything you do to make a neighborhood a better place to live...risks setting off a cycle of displacement."

Don't you mean, "a flywheel"?

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I'm extremely skeptical, from a kind of effective altruism point of view, that our public K-12 funding isn't aggressively wasteful. This seems like a highly compelling case that DC is really doing everything you possibly can to put the most elite, well payed, well vetted, well resourced teachers you can possibly identify into classrooms and just get... not much to show for it at all. The marginal impacts of this massive level of funding just seems almost completely negligible next to the conditions in kids homes. And I don't see how you could possibly be doing it much better than DC is doing it.

It just seems overwhelmingly like childhood poverty is the real issue a lot of this funding should be targeting.

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I don't blame the people who live in those communities to be concerned about the gentrification effects of improvements. They are barely hanging on to housing as it is. A world where a Starbucks moving in is likely to be a harbinger of rent going up and you losing your place is one where you probably don't have the luxury of voting on a principle.

I don't blame them. I blame the people in the surrounding affluent neighborhoods and their exclusionary zoning policies, often filled with people like Dean Preston (SF District 5 Supervisor) who, from his 3M mansion, uses California environmental law (CEQA) and any other tool at this and his constituents disposal to shut down any affordable housing project - even ones where 100% of the units are Below Market Rate. I keep waiting, in their attempts to goalpost shift, to hear a demand for 120% of the units to be BMR.

The utter failure of urban NIMBYism (meaning, rich faux-left NIMBYs like we have in spades in SF) is reflected in the fact that the mere act of improving a school, park, or other amenity is shunned because it will raise property values.

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An addendum to a previous post on DC teacher policies, relating results from previously unreported research. Yes, of course, this is one of the posts that are free to the public, meant to attract new subscribers.

Tomorrow's post on the economics of OnlyFans (*) will only be for subscribers, of course.

(*) And needless to say, its impact on housing density. SFH-only zoning delenda est.

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I don't know who the American professors were with their 46 interviews, but a sample "of convenience", which is all it was, cannot be the basis for any generalized statement on the teacher reforms.

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Imagine how it would complicate and worsen things if each neighborhood in DC had its own independent school district, dependent on the revenues it could raise from its own tax base, with its own teacher salary negotiations and hiring, etc., and where districts in the richest neighborhoods in DC spend twice as much or more per student as the poorer neighborhoods.

That's the situation in most States. Philadelphia and its suburbs are a good example. It's true that neighborhood effects matter a lot and can swamp resource differences -even within the unified school district of Philadelphia schools in the most expensive neighborhoods are most highly regarded. But they don't even compare resource-wise to neighboring suburban school districts, such as Lower Merion. And that has a feedback into the housing market that creates islands of artificial scarcity -- there's more demand for housing in suburbs that want to remain low density suburbs than there would be if the urban neighborhoods next door had better schools. (Notice that's a feedback loop not a flywheel).

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Hi Matt,

I would just like to ask about a tweet of yours where you were mocking Afghanistan hawks, by comparing them to the Padish Emperor, our Cher Cousin, for wanting to leave Sardaukar on Arrakis to continue pogrom against the Fremen…. All comparisons and metaphor or simile aside…. Shouldn’t the Emperor, and Baron Harokonnen have accepted that Sardaukar on Arrakis to fight the Fremen?

SPOILERS FOR DUNE AHEAD;

It is always the weirdest pat of the book for me; after his ultimate victory over Leto Atreides, Barron Harkonnen starts making some straight stupid decisions.

He asks the right questions of his guard captain about how nobody can confirm that Paul and Jessica are dead, but right away he says that he’s just doing this to scare his Captain, and that of course they are dead. There are at least two instances where Count Fenring and the Beast Rabban tell the Baron “Hey, these Fremen are actually a huge problem, and they’re beginning to follow this weird religion…” and he continues to just be like “Either those are survivors of the Duke’s men, or they are just rabble.”

He specifically denies the continued use of Sardaukar in Harkonnen livery on Arrakis after the conquest.

Wouldn’t a garrison of Sardaukar permanently stationed on Arrakis have hindered Maud’Dib’s plans? Couldn’t it have forestalled the Jihad?

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"And since people who don’t like the system are raising spurious racial equity complaints, it’s worth noting that retention of Black and Latino teachers is better than retention of white teachers."

So its racist against white people, just like the style guide you're following?

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I have no doubt that if you pay more money the possibility exists that you will be able to hire more able teachers. Maybe. But raising salaries on your existing teachers seems rather suspect if you expect that alone to raise performance. It shouldn't unless teachers are considerably less noble than is currently thought. It would allow you to replace the more poorly performing teachers.

Generally speaking though, unless you are robbing other school systems of their better teachers, then most of your new hires are going to be shiny new teachers or teachers with only a few years experience. They generally are lower down the pay scale. Which, as you rightly point out, brings us circling back to affordable housing to make relocating inviting. Funny how that always works that way.

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"If the school got better, that would be great for the whole community, including the low-income families who rely on it. But the price of housing would also go up, which is great for incumbent homeowners but bad for renters — especially low-income renters."

This statement would only be true if rental rates > income growth rates. That could happen but won't necessarily happen and more likely would only be true for a subset of the existing low-income renters.

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In other words, improving the quality of urban life is just like improving labor productivity (through automation, less overstaffing, etc). People won't support it unless the background conditions--full employment, housing abundance--assure that everyone will benefit

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Since lower housing prices are MY’s panacea, I’d love some rigorous data on how much de-zoning would help. I suspect that, just as out of school factors dominate school performance, the attractiveness and economy of different cities dominates housing prices.

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