David Harsanyi on the
demented interrogation of Dept. of Education nominee DeVos:
[M]inority groups in America’s largest cities are lagging in proficiency in reading and math. Most of them are at the bottom 5 percent of schools in their own state. There is only so much an education secretary can accomplish, but being accused of being a “grave threat” to this system is a magnificent endorsement.
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. . . Democrats on the committee stressed that DeVos was a Republican appointed by a Republican president who had given money to Republican organizations. They further pointed out that DeVos was a Christian who had given money to Christian organizations (often referred to as “antigay groups”) that didn’t meet with their moral approval.
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. . . [R]ich and middle-class Americans already have school choice. In most places, the whiter the neighborhood the better the school system, and the better the school system the higher the prices of homes, making it impossible for those who aren’t wealthy to escape substandard schools (rural school also often suffer.) This is the status quo Warren, Murphy, and Murray hope to preserve.
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You can visit heavily Hispanic areas in Denver and watch mothers cry when their kids’ numbers don’t come up in a charter-school lottery. Or you can listen to technocrats in editorial board meetings, whose kids live in prosperous districts or attend private schools, telling you why too many of those parents have a choice.
I've been told over and over that school choice will be the death of the public school system. I consider that an admission that the public schools are substandard and have no capability to deliver a product as good as private schools. If that is true, then we do not need those schools.
ReplyDeleteValerie
I'm not sure if public schools are substandard, but they're certainly not good enough.
ReplyDeleteThese are the same Democrats who turned a blind eye to the Eric Holder DoJ suing Louisiana for the heinous crime of helping black children go to schools that actually would educate them. These Democrats would prefer black children--and minority children generally--grow up to be unthinking prisoners of the Democrat welfare cage. They would be, then, votes and continued personal political power.
ReplyDeleteHow are we to talk with--much less reconcile with--folks who are so morally bankrupt they don't even understand how dishonest they are? And who refuse to reconcile with us?
I'm all for trying to talk with them, even attempting reconciliation, but I'm not for spending a lot of energy on the effort. They can come along, or they can be left behind. They have, after all, already placed themselves outside our social compact. Complete with resumed rioting, this time over the inauguration.
Eric Hines
"I've been told over and over that school choice will be the death of the public school system."
ReplyDeleteThat's probably true in the school systems located in the urban, inner-cities where [mostly] Democrat urban leadership has squandered what educational quality these systems might once have had. Detroit, Atlanta, L.A., Memphis, Philadelphia, .... These are the school systems that are the worst of the worst, and that SHOULD be replaced in toto, either by wholesale firing & replacement of the staffs, or conversion to a 100% charter system.
My Colorado g'kids attend suburban (Jefferson County) mainstream public schools that are excellent, address the whole spectrum of learning levels from the severely-challenged to the gifted, and have not been threatened by incorporation into the system of charter schools.
I also have a lot of sympathy for teachers, well-meaning dedicated teachers, who must try to educate students who may show up in their classroom one day out of 5, in an environment where the school has metal detectors at the entrances, where in-classroom fights are the usual rather than the rarity, and so on.
I wish that the opposing sides on this issue would entertain discussion on a more nuanced level that allowed for a more productive process.
Forgot to add: I am also sympathetic to those inner-city teachers' laments on the social factors: lack of parental supervision or interest; drugs in the house, not books; lack of role modeling of personal responsibility and diligence in work habits; etc. The school environment is only one factor of several that have huge impact on whether these kids learn anything....or not.
ReplyDeleteThe discussion has gone completely awry when it focuses obsessively on whether public school teachers are being paid a fair wage, considering that their students are failing but it may not be their fault. Maybe it's not their fault, but that's not the point. Nor is whether their salaries are fair the point. The point is whether the state schools are doing a good enough job for the students to justify a monopoly power. Any analysis of the public school system that loses sight of whether they're the best way to give kids the best shot at an education is a delusional distraction from the real problem, and in the end a weak effort to entrench a failure that happens to be providing a convenient solution to a completely different problem.
ReplyDeleteColo,
ReplyDeleteI am talking about San Diego Unified School District. Do not presume.
Valerie
My mother is a retired public school teacher. In her lifetime she saw her district go from one of the poorest in Georgia to one of the richest, due to the expansion of Atlanta. The quality of education steadily rose, until her school was qualified to issue International Baccalaureate degrees. These highly prestigious degrees offer an increased rate of acceptance at top-flight schools worldwide, as well as cachet if you want your child to be in a position to compete for entry to the lower levels of the global elite.
ReplyDeleteIf the parents are rich enough, the public schools get better -- even good enough to provide bush-league feeder teams to Wall Street or the Hague. If the parents are poor, they don't. That's interesting, since in theory these are public goods that are supposed to be equally provided -- Brown vs Board of Education turned on the importance of providing genuinely equal levels of public education across the system as a whole.
I am for school choice and a wholesale reformation of the system, but to be fair the anti-choice side has a few points that we should acknowledge.
ReplyDeleteOne background factor must be taken into account: If the parents care about their children's education, the kids will generally get a good education, even in a bad school. If the parents don't care, the kids generally won't, even in a good school.
The kids that leave public schools are usually kids with parents who care about their education. This further concentrates the kids with parents who don't care in the public schools. This means an increasingly higher percentage of kids with behavioral problems, drug and alcohol problems, more violence, etc. This makes it harder for all of the kids who can't get out into private and charter schools and it turns teachers into detention officers and social workers. School choice really does hurt public schools in ways that aren't the schools' fault.
One of the arguments for school choice is free market competition. If the public schools were competitive, then they would do well. However, public schools are hog-tied by all kinds of laws and regulations that make change difficult. For example, if public schools had the option to just kick kids out for ongoing behavioral problems, as private schools do, then public schools would improve a great deal. But they don't have that option due to the law, so they can't compete with private schools that do.
The issue with teacher pay is simple: You get what you pay for. Pay crap and you'll get crap teachers.
That said, school choice is the best solution available right now. In the long term, we need to completely change how teachers are educated, how the education system works, and we need to address parental responsibility as a society. I'm not sure how all that happens, so maybe in the end we need to end public schools, and the kids who get left out just get left out.
Grim, in what ways did more money mean better education? Was it the money itself, or the types of families that tend to be more successful?
ReplyDeleteTo go back to teacher pay for a moment, I was giving the argument from the anti-choice side. There are problems with that formulation. Some people just feel called to be teachers, and they would go into that field whether the pay was high or low.
In addition, pay would affect recruitment, but not necessarily the work by teachers already in the field. That is, if you have a crappy teacher and give him a raise, it won't suddenly make him a better teacher. But if you aren't recruiting quality in the first place, how do you expect to get it? A complicating factor is making teaching a decent paying job, recruiting better quality at the bottom, but then having them mentored by older, poorer quality teachers.
Also, I think education schools are generally rotten at producing good teachers, so paying more without changing how teachers are educated wouldn't necessarily improve quality. You really don't always get what you pay for.
...we need to completely change how teachers are educated....
ReplyDeleteNot entirely. The teachers in the voucher and charter schools seem to be doing well enough on the kind of education they've gotten. Too, the education of teachers in the public schools has already been changed: their degrees now depend on their knowledge of the process of teaching and not on their knowledge of the content they're nominally supposed to be teaching. The change here, and it is needed desperately, is to go back to emphasizing knowledge of the content they're supposed to be teaching.
As to parents who don't care, those who don't care because they don't have time need a much less regulated economy so they have a chance to get better jobs, if not jobs at all. Those who don't care because they don't care are just abusing their kids. I'd say take the kids away, but too many States' CPS facilities are themselves abusive of children.
Reforming our education system involves far more than just our education system.
Eric Hines
Yeah, on teacher education, my proposal is to require degrees in the field to be taught plus a one-year teacher certification course. Education bachelor's degrees would not qualify one for a teaching position, or anything with the state or local governments.
ReplyDeleteYou are right about parents who don't have time. However, for parents who just don't care, part of the solution there is also solving the economics of it. My impression, based entirely on anecdata (not real data), is that drug abuse and welfare dependency play a big role in that, as well as illegal immigration.
That's not all if it, though. You're right that the problems are a lot bigger than the education system.
Grim, in what ways did more money mean better education? Was it the money itself, or the types of families that tend to be more successful?
ReplyDeleteNot the latter in the usual sense in which we talk about that. Normally what we mean like that is 'stable families encourage and discipline their offspring, leading to greater success.' Here, I mean that the rich families were able to effectively demand a higher quality of education from the same government that, previously, had provided a much lower quality.
I assume this has something to do with the ability to make campaign donations, either to county commissioners or to their primary opponents if the first one doesn't get the job done. It probably also has something to do with the willingness and ability to pay for Special Purpose Local Option Sales Taxes, which are used to fund localized improvements in education in Georgia.
"The kids that leave public schools are usually kids with parents who care about their education. This further concentrates the kids with parents who don't care in the public schools."-No doubt, just as a neighborhood suffers when responsible citizens move out and leave hoodlums behind. Nations suffer when responsible citizens emigrate and leave losers behind. My reaction: tough. I find few things uglier than the notion that kids should be trapped in a failing school because they will somehow ameliorate the failing system for the kids whose parents don't care enough to get them out. Should they go to bad hospitals, too, out of solidarity?
ReplyDeleteI don't know of any good ways to improve institutions like schools other than to let people vote with feet, so that eventually the abandoned institution withers, dies, and is replaced by one that people want to attend. As soon as an institution argues, in effect, that we owe it to them to keep coming because otherwise the institution will suffer, which misfortune it will then inflict on its own members, I say "burn it down." Get out while you can, and withdrawn your support. Stand on the borders and welcome anyone with enough good sense to escape after you. Let people know there's an alternative over here.
Here, I mean that the rich families were able to effectively demand a higher quality of education from the same government that, previously, had provided a much lower quality.
ReplyDeleteInteresting. I need to learn more about the political aspects of our education system.
I find few things uglier than the notion that kids should be trapped in a failing school because they will somehow ameliorate the failing system for the kids whose parents don't care enough to get them out.
Sure, I agree. The point I was making, though, is that it isn't a fair competition because public schools operate under more onerous regulations. If we could do one thing that would almost immediately improve low-performing public schools, it would be to allow them to operate the way private schools do. Then, problem students would be expelled, and problem teachers would be fired, and within two years you would have better outcomes for those who remained.
... eventually the abandoned institution withers, dies, and is replaced by one that people want to attend.
But that doesn't necessarily follow. You could just as easily find that no one is willing to replace a dead public school because the district has too many problems and so it would never be profitable to run a successful school there.
Then a school will operate elsewhere that can draw those students. If the parents haven't the financial means to send their kids to school, aid of that kind is another kind of enterprise entirely. If the parents aren't interested enough to make the effort to find a new school after the nearest one collapses, nothing we do to reform the public schools is going to help that problem.
ReplyDeleteI don't see it as a question of whether the competition is fair to the schools. I only want to be fair to the customers. Nothing good ever comes of protecting providers of goods and services by guaranteeing them customers who can't escape.
"Colo,
ReplyDeleteI am talking about San Diego Unified School District. Do not presume.
Valerie"
Valerie, please accept my most abject apologies for my inadvertent presumption. It appeared to me that you had made a broad, generalized statement about public schools v. choice. I completely overlooked where you mentioned the San Diego Unified School District.
I was merely trying to drill down into that generalization to refine the discussion a bit.
Kindest regards,
/s/
Tex, I am all for school choice. My point is that you can't discuss this in terms of the free market because it's not a free market. Public schools don't operate under the same rules as private ones, so it's not a fair comparison.
ReplyDeleteI'm NOT talking about being fair to schools in terms of where students go. There, I'm with you.
I guess my point is there's nothing preventing public schools from operating under the same rules as private ones. That is, they could be funded from the public treasury in whole or in part, but otherwise function like private entities in seeking and retaining customers. Public universities work this way, more or less: no one is forced to attend any particular one, and universities fail if no one wants to attend them. It's the same whether the endowment is entirely private or wholly or partly public.
ReplyDeleteYou're right. Nothing but laws, and those can change.
ReplyDelete