The Failure of "Public" Education

[jmcrae]

Ah yes, I recall the same thing. Having absolutely nothing to do was a great learning experience. We actually walked all over town, sometimes taking the bus, just for the heck of it, took walks in the woods, got lost, found our way back. Nobody had a cell phone! It was great!

Making little forts for the garter snakes in Weaselhead Park. straying on to the Indian reservation and hanging out with the Indian kids, tasting alcohol for the first time (and hating it, but acting cool), getting back on the path but going the wrong way and coming out in Oak Ridge, and taking a two-hour bus ride back to our side of town. Finally getting home, just in time for supper. “How was your picnic in the park, dear?” “Fine.” “Did you clean up your room yet?” “No.” “How many times do I have to tell you … ?”

Those were the days, for sure.

 

[Tony_the_mad]

Wow, so many posts so little information.

The only way to get to the truth is to see things from every angle.

Let us start with the issue of money. Cost comparisons with charter schools and European schools, etc. are completely useless since apples are not being compared with apples. Some examples: (Some of these were mentioned but not all in one spot.)

1. Health Insurance and social security taxes. These effectively double the cost of teacher salaries. If your government paid for the health care for everybody then that cost is not included in their education expenses.
2. Special education. It is not as big of an issue as some claim, but it is an issue. Students who need special education do take up significantly larger per student costs and there are some infrastructure issues as well, but they still make up a minority. I don’t begrudge the parents of these children nor the children themselves any of that costs. Should 100% of it be included as educational expenses though. I am unsure about what the European model for this is.
3. Buildings and maintenance. This is a MUCH larger portion of the cost of education then people think. I have heard of more than one private Catholic school for instance going belly up because someone had a bright idea of donating money to build a gymnasium. (The classic white elephant gift if there ever was one.) Gymnasiums, sports complexes, auditoriums, and the like take up a disproportionate share but classrooms themselves are quite expensive. One of the biggest gains of charter schools if not the biggest is that they rent out old buildings instead of building new ones. Such a strategy is effective in the short run, but it is my understanding that not so much in the long run. If there is anything we should have learned about capitalism in our country is that is horrible at long term planning; it routinely sacrifices the future for today.
4. Sports programs, arts programs, ag programs, etc. Not that these don’t have a place in the school, they do, but public schools pay for way too much of the expenses for quite a few facilities and programs that the entire community uses. Private schools have absolutely no incentive to provide these. In the school that my wife used to work at suspending the ag program which serviced a handful of students would have allowed them to keep 3 teachers full time. Why does a rural school have to teach farmers how to farm? These programs won’t go away if we completely privatized the school system. The money would just have to come out of the education expenses (where the just don’t belong anyway) and be paid some other way. This is just another case where it appears that privatizing saves money, but the reality is quite different.
5. Administrative overhead. While it is quite convenient to bash on government for having too much overhead, that is at least partially unfair. Things that don’t need much administrative overhead don’t need government intervention. Things that need government intervention need administrative overhead. The need for government intervention won’t be lessened by privatizing education. That overhead cost won’t be paid by the charter school but again be paid by the public school system.
6. Salaries of Catholic school teachers and other Christian schools are artificially reduced by a factor of two by taking advantage of teachers who want to give back to their Church.

All of the above factors make any simple comparison of costs meaningless.

 

[Tony_the_mad]

A second issue I would like to address are those who worship the god of capitalism (or perhaps I should say Mammon). I am not against capitalism, far from it. But certain people elevate it as a cure-all for everything; which it is definitely not.

The problem as I see it is that some groups elevate philosophy above experience and knowledge. Communists think government is the solution to everything and apply it where the should not; fascists think that government by the elite is the solution to everything and apply it where they should not; and capitalists only people think that capitalism is the solution to everything and apply it where they should not; libertarians think that individuality is the solution to everything and apply it where they should not, etc. Our government needs all four of these solutions and more applied in the appropriate spots.

The capitalism knows best philosophy is probably about the worst in our society. (Not because it is necessarily the worst of the bunch but that they are the strongest in our society.)

Capitalism, while being very good at what it does has a number of well understood flaws that precludes it from being useful (and indeed can be very damaging) in certain situations. I will contend that charter schools are one of those areas. Examples of the flaws of capitalism includes:

1. The common good problem. The classic example is a common lawn that everyone benefits from people not overgrazing but it is more of an advantage to an individual to overgraze even though it destroys it for everyone. Capitalism in the common good problem drives systems to the worst possible situation. Example of common goods are things like clean air, a healthy Ocean, making certain that everybody has a good paying job, and a well educated populace, The common good problem can also infect government as well but is a little less likely since democracy is a capitalism of ideas. Government can only function when it overall benefits everyone.
2. When one party pays for something while another reaps the benefit. This is another area where capitalism fails and that applies to vouchers. The vouchers are being paid for by the government but the choice falls on the individual. (This is also an example of the common good problem since the entire society has a vested interest and benefit from everybody being well educated, but those who don’t care that they or there children are educated will find a way to waste the money for their benefit.)
3. When competition occurs in a way that does not benefit the product. Marketing is an example of this. Competition that drives the quality down in favor of lower costs can be another if people waste more money on many disposable units (where disposing of it is another common good) then they would if they bought one more expensive quality item. Capitalism is not a solution to this problem it is the cause. Market forces on schools can easily hurt the schools by forcing them to compete in ways that hurts the product rather then helping it and by focusing on short term gains that have very horrible long term problems.
4. When companies get big enough that they can change the market so that the quality of their good/service has no meaning. The classic example of this is the monopolies and cartels. Capitalists argue that government is this way, but at the very least the government is under ‘our’ control; where our means everybody through a process of compromises, etc.

I am not saying that socialism is the solution to the problem or any of the other forms of government I mentioned; I only think that capitalists saying that we should worry about not being like communists is like Stalin saying that Hitler is so bad that we need to follow everything Stalin says without question. What I say is a pox on both their houses. (I know I have that backward but my point is not to compare anyone with Hitler only that I think both philosophies left unchecked are bad.)

 

[Tony_the_mad]

Ok, I probably should not post at 3 AM. I have caught a lot of gibberish already and I only hope that I don’t have too much left in what I type. Nonetheless, this should be my last post for now on the subject, and if you have been following along I appreciate it.

The problem is how shall we judge the quality of the teaching and compare public and charter schools, or for that matter individual schools. This is a HARD problem and people are way over simplifying it. It boils down to three problems:

1. The data is hard to do correctly and both sides are deliberately designing studies that are flawed and cherry picking data that agrees with their position.
2. The differences between the public and charter school test scores, in either direction, are relatively modest. They don’t even come close to solving the problem. It is clear that this issue is a political football on both sides.
3. It is unclear whether the test actually has any meaning at all. Tests designed to measure the knowledge of students does NOT test how good the teacher is. Teachers make up such a small fraction of the variation in learning that the effect is practically swamped in the noise. How well a student does depends largely on genetics, followed by personal determination, discipline, and interest, followed by available resources and help at home, followed by school discipline and if all these things are good enough the quality of the teacher. Teachers should be judged by how well they teach not by how well their students learn. Teachers lead horses to water and they try to coax them to drink with fancy straws so they don’t need to bend their heads and specially flavored water but if the horses don’t want to drink the teachers cannot be blamed for trying.
4. Nobody is interested in talking to the people in the trenches to determine what the problem actually is; rather political philosophies are driving the discussion. It is much easier to blame the teacher then to blame parents or politicians or badly thought out laws. Yet when we look at the number of teachers who quit after a year or two (usually they are the best and brightest) or the quality of the students who receive education degrees (usually the lowest g.p.a.s) we should be asking why and asking them. If teachers say they want smaller class sizes we should listen; not necessarily by reducing class size maybe the problem is giving them better tools such as principals doing their duty about disciplining their students. We should listen not belittle them just because their belief does not fit into our petty philosophy about government. Neither should we say the problem is a handful of bad teachers; for one thing a handful is not near enough to make a difference. For another it encourages witch hunts when we need to be working together.

 

[sedonaman]

In whose plan? Are you talking about a specific district’s voucher plan, or your own?

A voucher, I would imagine, must be accepted by any school, public or private, for the full cost of the education of that child. What happens when that child needs special education? The county/district by law has to provide services to that child. Does the special ed teacher come into the private school? Does the child go to a public “base” school? They “vouchered out” of the public system, but still are required by law to have services from them.

It is very complicated at the 100% voucher level. At 10%, it is very easy to understand. But, isn’t the way to reform education to reform education instead of creating a new bureaucracy to manage the voucher system and the new private schools?

Oh, and income and parental education level are the greatest predictor of student success, not which school they go to.

We’ve covered all this already. It is obvious you want to keep the status quo, which is your choice. The only alternative way to improve education in that case is to fire all the teachers and burn down all the buildings, for the child who knows nothing is smarter than the one who has been filled with lies and misrepresentations. At least every child will be treated equally. :tiphat:

 

[rhmom]

You keep sayign the state has a monopoly on education, do you know the actual menaing of the term monopoly? They are FAR from the only provider, there are 33,000 private schools (25% of all schools) educating 5.5 million kids (10% of all students) so please quit saying “the state has a monopoly on education” because it isn’t true.

capenet.org/facts.html

Obviously, you don’t follow anti-trust suits. Generally, the courts rule a business has monopoly power if it owns 75% of the business in an area.

rhmom

 

[rhmom]

ACCT, I believe that you have quoted enough Friedman that you have gone beyond fair use. I’m sure there’s a whole book in this thread.

You’re quotations haven’t answered my questions from a few days ago. If a district goes fully voucher, how are the special ed kids and mandated ESL and all of those others taken care of? The state/county/district *MUST *educate those kids for free.
PaulinVA;9307549:

If there are vouchers, then teachers of all stripes (including special ed teachers) will start businesses (schools).

There are plenty of articles on the subject, but here’s a good summary:

ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_ID=6415

rhmom

 

[jmcrae]

If there are vouchers, then teachers of all stripes (including special ed teachers) will start businesses (schools).

This would not be financially viable, since each special ed. student would bring only the $9,000.00 of average money, but each requires at least $60,000.00 for the wage of their one-on-one aide, plus the cost of the specially designed building with wheelchair ramps, wide doors, all on one floor to avoid stairs and elevators (thus occupying more land), plus the ordinary cost of school supplies.

 

[septimine]

A second issue I would like to address are those who worship the god of capitalism (or perhaps I should say Mammon). I am not against capitalism, far from it. But certain people elevate it as a cure-all for everything; which it is definitely not.

I don’t think that’s the case, at least not for everyone. I see capitalism as a format, not a specific solution. It doesn’t do anything, which is why it works. The idea is that rather than approach the problem from a top-down viewpoint in which some one single person or a group decides what works, we solve the problem by giving space for thousands of solutions to come out. So while some students might find success in home-schools, others might do better in catholic schools or montessori schools or apprentice-type programs. Kids are different, and what works well for an average of all kids doesn’t really work for everyone. So solve the problem in parallel – a school to meet any kid’s needs because we have a thousand school systems with a thousand approaches, and you pick what works for your kid.

The problem as I see it is that some groups elevate philosophy above experience and knowledge. Communists think government is the solution to everything and apply it where the should not; fascists think that government by the elite is the solution to everything and apply it where they should not; and capitalists only people think that capitalism is the solution to everything and apply it where they should not; libertarians think that individuality is the solution to everything and apply it where they should not, etc. Our government needs all four of these solutions and more applied in the appropriate spots.

Well again, I think we’re not communicating. I’m not opposed to having some government, but I think it’s kind of silly to say that a solution that allows for many solutions to come out (ie libertarian or capitalist) would be the same as a solution in which one guy decides how everyone must act.

The difference would be something like the difference between a restaurant and a school cafeteria. In a restaurant, you have 1000 choices: 5-6 soups, 7-8 salads, 15 entres (each coming with a choice of sides), 7-8 desserts, and 4-5 drinks. You come in, and maybe you’re not that hungry, so you just have soup. The other guys at your table may be starved, and thus pick a huge meal, complete with apetizers and desserts. The couple across from you choose the most expensive stuff on the menu – because it’s a date, and the guy next to you doesn’t have a lot of money and picks the least expensive item on the menu. Everyone is eating at the same place, but they aren’t all eating the same way. You have soup, the couple across the way has lobster, and the poor guy next to you eats a tuna sandwich. Not the same meal, but people generally get what they want. In a cafeteria, there’s not really a choice – everyone gets the exact same meal, say a sloppy joe and tater tots, with milk on the side. It doesn’t matter why anyone’s there, it doesn’t matter how hungry or full you are, it doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor – you’re getting sloppy joes and tater tots and milk because that’s what the lunch lady decided to make. It’s really only the second solution to the food problem that’s a problem, because we have one person deciding what works for everyone, and in most cases without bothering to find out what’s really going on.

 

[jmcrae]

I don’t think that’s the case, at least not for everyone. I see capitalism as a format, not a specific solution. It doesn’t do anything, which is why it works.

Capitalism is about making a profit for shareholders. One capitalizes financially on a perceived market that is willing to buy what you have to offer at a price that is at least double what you paid out for it, so that you can pay employees to run it for you and pay dividends to shareholders.

The idea is that rather than approach the problem from a top-down viewpoint in which some one single person or a group decides what works, we solve the problem by giving space for thousands of solutions to come out.

That’s not Capitalism - that’s Democracy.

The function of Democracy is to provide choices. The function of Capitalism is to capitalize, financially.

So while some students might find success in home-schools, others might do better in catholic schools or montessori schools or apprentice-type programs. Kids are different, and what works well for an average of all kids doesn’t really work for everyone. So solve the problem in parallel – a school to meet any kid’s needs because we have a thousand school systems with a thousand approaches, and you pick what works for your kid.

Nice theory, but once the requirement to make a profit for the shareholders is factored in, most of these options will price themselves out of the market, and you will be down to one or two options that provide the most bang for their buck. Students with special needs won’t be part of that equation.