Will Wilkinson has some comments about an article by Malcolm Gladwell from The New Yorker. I basically agree with him about Gladwell, but I’m bothered by the last paragraph:
Now, there’s no point in saying things that will make your readers think you are an evilcrazy person, so I can understand why Gladwell wastes words on quarterbacks instead of on the deeper mechanisms at work here. But why is it that “society devotes more care and patience to the selection of those who handle its money than of those who handle its children?” The obvious answer is that care and patience are in greater supply when care and patience pay. When the provision of education was made a predominantly public, not-for-profit affair, “society” basically ensured that teacher selection would receive far less care and patience than money-handler selection. Maybe we should do something about that.
This strikes me as the sort of obligatory “markets uber alles” stuff that libertarians throw out without thinking about it too much. Refreshing as it is to hear someone of a libertarian persuasion admit that teachers ought to be paid more, I don’t think he’s really thought through the implications of this.
The problem with education funding isn’t that capitalism hasn’t been allowed to run rampant. Schools are underfunded precisely because people get to vote on how much they pay for it, in the form of school taxes.
The school budget vote is a regular feature of life, at least here in the Northeast. And every time the budget comes up for a vote, teachers and school administrators work really hard to get out enough “yes” votes to counter the people who reflexively vote against anything using tax funding. And when budgets come up for a vote one piece at a time (as sometimes happens), there are a really depressing number of people who will vote “yes” on funding sports programs, and “no” on books for the library and salaries for the teachers.
Now, it’s true that there are people out there who are willing to pay large sums of money to have their children educated by exceptional teachers. That’s pretty much the whole business model of my alma mater and current employer. There aren’t enough of these people to support good teaching at a broad enough scale for the current level of general public school education. Particularly in rural areas, there just isn’t the base to support a good educational program.
“So what,” you say, “If they don’t want to pay to educate their kids, why should they have to?” That’s fine, as long as you’re willing to be honest about the consequences, which will disproportionately fall on poorer children, and children of less educated parents. Education is one of the keys to upward mobility, and the people most in need of it would be least able to afford it in an all-for-profit educational system. You’d be locking in a class system, even more than we do now.
I suppose you could argue that the market will take care of it, but I’m highly skeptical to say the least. The negative consequences of poor schools aren’t immediate, but fall on the next generation. Short-sighted parents can make an immediate gain by skimping on their kids’ education, but it’s the kids who will suffer the long-term negative effects. Straightforward market mechanisms are unlikely to push people to educate their children properly for the same reason that the market has thus far failed to deal with pollution or global warming– profits are short term, consequences are long term.
You can perfectly well advocate a profit-driven all-private education system, and it would probably have some benefits for affluent, educated people near major urban centers. For the country as a whole, though, it would be a disaster.
I think you have an untested premise here: that poor families aren’t willing to fund their schools to the same degree as rich families. That is obviously true if you just look at absolute dollar amounts. But I’ve seen lots of evidence to the opposite if you look at relative amounts, i.e. that poor areas pay disproportionately more of their income to their schools than rich areas do. When a poor area has a 5% school tax, they still can’t afford to pay teachers well. A rich area can hold a bake sale.
-kevin
Schools are underfunded precisely because people get to vote on how much they pay for it, in the form of school taxes.
Well, one could argue that schools are not underfunded precisely because the people have voted on how much they want to spend. Here in California we have apparently abandoned trying to manage our budget, but at least in theory there are hard decisions to make about allocation of resources. If we spend it all on education we don’t get to have roads…
Most people can easily see the value in paying more for their own child’s education. Giving your own child a leg up in the world is an obvious good move. What people don’t generally get is the value of helping to pay for educating someone else’s kid. That’s the premise of public schools.
There are lots of underfunded schools out there, but I suspect the worse problem is poor spending of the money that’s available. The US, after all, is not actually so shabby in terms of its per-capita school spending. But somehow the results tend to be lacking anyway. The classic case in point is the Washington DC system, which spends something like $25,000 per student per year to rather poor effect.
I haven’t got a solution though. It’s a tough problem.
I think you have an untested premise here: that poor families aren’t willing to fund their schools to the same degree as rich families. That is obviously true if you just look at absolute dollar amounts. But I’ve seen lots of evidence to the opposite if you look at relative amounts, i.e. that poor areas pay disproportionately more of their income to their schools than rich areas do.
And that’s another major problem with the way we run education in this country– local control and local funding of schools mean that schools in poor areas suffer severe shortages relative to more affluent areas.
Well, one could argue that schools are not underfunded precisely because the people have voted on how much they want to spend. Here in California
California is pathological, thanks to the ballot initiative system. I don’t think I’d trust any attempt to generalize from California.
Giving your own child a leg up in the world is an obvious good move. What people don’t generally get is the value of helping to pay for educating someone else’s kid. That’s the premise of public schools.
1) You’d be surprised at how many people don’t see education as a worthwhile investment of time or money.
2) So, should people who don’t own cars get a tax rebate because they’re not using the taxpayer-funded highways?
Yes Chad, local funding is very problematical. I still don’t get why there are “X City School System” and not “X State School System.” (BTW, is there any state that literally runs education from the top down?) So regions that are poor get the least money. Conservatives like to say, the money spent isn’t what matters so much (compared to teacher spunk, parental guidance or whatever) but if it doesn’t, why do they still want to get the big money for their school systems?
I think property tax (major source for schools) is bad also, because it encourages “development.” City governments want a bigger tax base, they encourage building, including corrupt sweetheart deals. Funding everything through income/money transfer taxes would be better IMHO.
The classic work on how money inequality affects education is Savage Inequalities … by Jonathan Kozol
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savage_Inequalities:
Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools is a book written by Jonathan Kozol in 1991 that discusses the disparities in education between schools of different classes and races. It is based on his observations of various classrooms in the public school systems of East St. Louis, Chicago, New York City, Camden, Cincinnati, and Washington D.C.. His observations take place in both schools with the lowest per capita spending on students and the highest, ranging from just over $3,000 in Camden, New Jersey to a maximum expenditure of up to $15,000 in Great Neck, Long Island. …
“You can perfectly well advocate a profit-driven all-private education system, and it would probably have some benefits for affluent, educated people near major urban centers. For the country as a whole, though, it would be a disaster.”
You have just described the status quo American public school system! We HAVE an apartheid system and poor families have no way out. Sad to say, they have folks like you to thank for that.
BTW, is there any state that literally runs education from the top down?
Yes. Hawaii does this.
On the next coarser level, Florida (where I grew up) runs its school districts at the county level. In theory, this is supposed to ensure that all schools in a given county have the same access to resources. In practice (at least in Dade County in the 1980s), the schools that serve wealthier neighborhoods still tend to get more than their fair share of resources, in part because the parents in those neighborhoods have the time to agitate for it while parents in poorer neighborhoods are too busy working.
City governments want a bigger tax base, they encourage building
No, because suburban development as traditionally done in this country does not cover its costs. Not even in New Hampshire with its notoriously high property taxes (needed for lack of income and sales tax revenue). What it does do is skew the kind of development that gets done (and in many cases you are correct about the sweetheart deals). A McMansion on a given lot generates more property tax revenue than a starter home on that same lot, so there is a tendency to build big houses, and to use the highest density they can get away with. I’m sure there is a similar dynamic with commercial development, but I don’t know enough of that side of things to go into detail.
Will W., I am not sure why you say “folks like you to thank for that” – you mean, the OP? He doesn’t say we should have “a profit-driven all-private education system,” with the presumable result of rich people buying really good education, and poor people not. If you mean, such a private system would really be good for some libertarian-fundamentalist reason (you know, everything would have to be wonderful if government got out of the way, because dogma says so) then support such a notion don’t just cryptically presume it. But it looks already, that if we funded schools in a more nationalized or State-based way, the funding would be more equal. Finally, there’s no basis for the idea that “government schools” have to stink: our own were better decades ago, and all advanced nations have them and many do quite well. Is there a “libertarian paradise” anywhere? I doubt it, not even Somalia.
Eric Lund, you seem to contradict yourself because you say “No” to the building stimulus idea, but then agree there’s pressure to build McMansion instead of shack, etc. OK, so maybe per building issue not how many of them, but then it’s still a distorting and corrupting influence.
Gladwell makes himself, and readers of the MTV generation, glad with superficial froth, which froths well.
What he fails to address and should have: do teachers get better with experience? Not a trivial question. I saw a double-blind experiment once, and have wished ever after that I had the citation, that psychiatrists do no better after 20 years experience than in their first year of practice, with respect to “cure” rate of patients. Null hypothesis is that teachers are the same. That is, there are born teachers, who will do well regardless of what pedagogy is forced upon them in College of Ed, and born non-teachers who will do poorly even if coached and mentored by Master Teachers. In New York State, where the unions are powerful it is ILLEGAL to hire, fire, promote, or non- promote a teacher on the basis of that teacher’s students’ performance.
Next point: there is not only a correlation between poverty and academic under-performance, but causation both ways. Yes, there’s a class system which, for the past 2 decades, as widened the income disparity in the USA, because upper-middle class and upper class parents buy good education for their progeny, who thus have a sustained competitive advantage in employment. Given that in the USA class depends almost entirely on Income, Wealth, Education, and Profession — no wonder the rich get richer. The other way is also established by scientific analysis: poverty causes decreased brain attention and processing akin to a stroke.
So what is to be done?
(1) Fight poverty and ignornace in a coordinated way. Neither can be significantly ameliorated unless both are tackled.
(2) Determine what makes good teachers good. Rebuild the foundations of pedagogy based on science, not pop-psych, pop-sociology, ad-hoc handwaving. Implement the re-founded system in schools of ed. Determine if adequate teachers can be made good, and good teachers made great. Lather, rinse, repeat.
(3) Profit!
<<2) So, should people who don't own cars get a tax rebate because they're not using the taxpayer-funded highways?>>
Yes, there’s a good economic efficiency case for people who don’t drive to pay less in taxes than people who do.
Most economists think it’s a good idea to fund highways via some form of “user-fee” type taxes (gas excise taxes and/or some kind of EZ pass charge system.)
Driving creates a lot of “negative externalities”–everything from wear and tear on the roads to increased congestion which slows others down to increased probabilities of accidents to carbon warming and pollution.
Education, on the other hand, creates mostly positive externalities, so there’s a case that everyone should contribute to the cost of educating the next generation, regardless of whether they have children or not. All of society will be better off if the next generation is educated, because those children are more likely to grow up to be self-sufficient citizens who can contribute to society, create inventions and innovations that make life better for everyone, vote and serve on juries in more intelligent ways, be more productive and therefore pay more in income taxes down the road, etc.
Sorry–in case it wasn’t clear, my previous comment was a response to the following excerpt from Chad’s comment above:
“So, should people who don’t own cars get a tax rebate because they’re not using the taxpayer-funded highways?”
Though roads, like education, provide a wealth of services.
Think of Alaska, where some of the more remote tundra towns have gas/food/etc. prices well above what we see down in the lower 48 because of the sheer difficulty in getting supplies to these towns. If we didn’t have the Federal Highway system, I’d argue that the price of goods and services would prove to be more expensive for many more of us, as well as other losses for commerce and so forth.
I also feel like there could be several arguments of negative externalities for education as well (but I’ll have to spend some time thinking of them, given that I’m pretty staunchly a pro-education side).