Category — education reform

Kyle writes:

[F]or decades, we’ve allowed students in need to get federally subsidized loans to attend both public and private colleges and universities. Some states, even provide scholarships and grants that can be used at private institutions of higher learning. So how is it that for years we’ve used public funds to support sending needy children to private schools and the public university system has yet to collapse under the weight of such anti-public measures? Nor has public support for public universities declined in the interim.

First of all, comparing our public education system at the elementary and secondary level to our system of public universities is a lot like comparing apples to arugula. Whereas public schools let anyone sign up and attend for free, public universities are still exclusive institutions, and charge a fee in order to attend.

Second, who says that all these loans and grants have actually benefited poor students?  Many private institutions already had (and still have) their own scholarship programs for low-income students.  There was no need for government’s to subsidize their tuition further. (Actually, many private schools have similar programs at the elementary and secondary levels….)

All that extra federal cash simply allowed public universities to keep raising their tuition higher and higher and higher over the years. That’s the thing about subsidies. The more you subsidize something, the more expensive it becomes.

Who’s to say private schools accepting vouchers wouldn’t simply start charging more for their tuition as well?  I’d say that is a very likely outcome.  Meanwhile, public schools – which don’t charge admission like public universities and which must accept every student who comes knocking – will have fewer resources at their disposal.

This is not to say that we shouldn’t rethink public schools.  We might even find ways to make entire districts operate more like a batch of charter schools, with far more independence and autonomy and creative license.  But providing subsidies to students will only make good education more expensive.  It won’t necessarily destroy the public school system.  But I don’t think it will help it much either.

Rick Hess makes a great deal of sense in his critique of Diane Ravitch (and this bit echoes what Mark Thompson has pushed in the comments, arguments I also find compelling):

A lack of choice can force educators to simultaneously serve families with very different demands and responses to discipline or calls for parental involvement, making it difficult to establish common norms. A lack of autonomy makes it difficult for principals to assemble a team of teachers who embrace shared expectations and instructional principles. The institutional and political turbulence endemic to school systems means that superintendents change jobs every few years, and district priorities and initiatives change along with them. Bureaucratic and contractual rules governing discipline, the school day, or professional development can trip up district leaders seeking to emulate effective school models.

Organizational focus and instructional coherence are made vastly more difficult than they need to be by our K-12 systems, with their "little-bit-of-everything" mission, geographic monopoly, industrial era contracts and staffing arrangements, ill-defined aims, balky governance structures, contested disciplinary arrangements, and the rest. Choice and accountability, at their core, are an opportunity to create systems where focus and coherence are easier to come by and where robust curricula, powerful pedagogy, and rich learning can thrive.

I think this is all very true.  But on the flip side, I think that in the push for more accountability and more choice, we open a Pandora’s box of sorts, really allowing room for more federal involvement in our schools, less autonomy, and so forth.  There is a very real chance that in our Race to the Top, we end up racing directly to a new level of mediocrity.

There are a number of other very real detractions from the school choice movement, including the way the government could insert itself even into private institutions (see: Canada) as well as the very real possibility that the most talented students will be siphoned out of the public school system into an ad hoc network of charters and for-profit schools.

That being said, I’m all for re-structuring our schools to be less like industrial-era monoliths and more responsive to parents, students, and teachers alike.  If school choice really does lead to more autonomy and fewer standardized tests, I’m all for it.  If it really can avoid the dangers of a national curriculum, I’d be sold on it.

I just think, like Hess mentions, that school choice has been seen as too much a panacea and not as a means to an end.  And not enough public schools have learned from the success of their charter counterparts, either.

There is no silver bullet in education reform.  I will stick to my mantra: Education is local.  That includes school choice!

P.S.

Kyle asks:

You’ve persuaded at least me that trade schools should have a bigger role in our overall educational system, but wouldn’t their expanded prominence also attract students with aptitude for those trades? How is siphoning off the pre-college smart kids into a school focused on the continuance of academics study not just an academic trade school?

That’s a good question.  However, I’m much less interested in trade schools, per say, as I am in the concept of apprenticeship programs.  What I envision would be schools partnering directly with the local community to develop on-the-job apprenticeship opportunities for students who weren’t on the “academic” track.  This would take place in 11th grade.  They would still attend some classes in school, but would spend a portion of their day working in the community and learning relevant skills as well.

I think that ‘mainstreaming’ students works as long as their are extra opportunities for ‘gifted’ students to be challenged in higher level courses at a certain point in their education as well, and special-resource classes for ‘challenged’ students.  I don’t think 100% mainstreaming would work for a variety of reasons, but I do think we should move toward greater integration.

Okay, the argument against tenure is easy to understand. How many jobs have a milestone which, once one has passed it, makes it nearly impossible to be fired? And many students have encountered tenured professors who are somewhat hostile or arrogant. There are incidents of professors abusing their position in any number of ways. In particular, tenure critics site professors using their classroom to promote what they see as “correct” political opinions. This, conflated with the fact that a numerical majority of academics are registered Democrats, seems to indicate a situation rife with abuse. Add in the fact that academics are, to some extent, subsidized by taxpayer money, and the anti-tenure argument pretty much writes itself.

Here is the argument in classical form by Megan McAardle: to wit, professors are jerks and the system sucks; let’s get rid of tenure.

Those who are against tenure have reason to be happy too, since American universities are already phasing out tenure in what’s been called a massive nationwide structural change. As tenured profs retire, many universities are simply replacing them with adjuncts, part-timers, and grad students. This makes economic sense: you can pay grad students and adjuncts considerably less money per course. It’s easy to prevent abuse because it’s easy to fire an “at will” employee: you just don’t renew their contract. Administrators gain a great deal control over the course material and classroom environment in this way. In the future, university courses will rarely be taught by tenured academics. In fact, at present, the majority of American college courses are taught by instructors who are neither tenured, nor on the tenure track. [Read more →]

James Joyner shares my view of sanctions and adds another reason to mistrust them:

Sanctions almost never work, since the ruling class is the last to feel the pain and there are always state and non-state actors willing to circumvent the sanctions regime for a price. As a general rule, sanctions make those enacting them feel like they’re doing something but wind up hurting the very people we’re ostensibly trying to help, the ordinary citizens suffering under repressive regimes.

What’s less widely understood, as Damon Wilson, the Atlantic Council vice president and International Security Program director, noted in introducing the panel, is how incredibly hard sanctions are to undo. Years after we toppled Saddam Hussein and replaced his regime with one friendlier to the United States, a myriad of sanctions remain in place.

James Hanley doubts the doubters of charter schools. I’m sympathetic, but the school choice debate here at the League is one I’ve chosen to stay out of. There are only so many hours I can spend on blogging:

There is a persistent tendency among educators, and left-leaning folks in general, to claim that education is a distinct type of good, so that unlike other goods, a competitive market is an inferior way to produce it. I once had a college prof tell me that all monopolies were bad, except the state’s education monopoly. But I have yet to hear one of these folks make an argument for why education is so distinct. It’s rather remarkable how persuasive they find the words, “it’s just different,” to be.

And education is different in some ways. Quality assurance is just really damned hard (and standardized testing doesn’t do it). And it is primarily a private good, but one with substantial positive externalities. But neither of those make it peculiarly appropriate for monopoly production, or even for wholly (as opposed to partially) public production.

Ditto all that to health care.

Theodore H. Frank notes a curiosity in the Toyota recalls:

The Los Angeles Times recently did a story detailing all of the NHTSA reports of Toyota “sudden acceleration” fatalities, and, though the Times did not mention it, the ages of the drivers involved were striking.

In the 24 cases where driver age was reported or readily inferred, the drivers included those of the ages 60, 61, 63, 66, 68, 71, 72, 72, 77, 79, 83, 85, 89—and I’m leaving out the son whose age wasn’t identified, but whose 94-year-old father died as a passenger.

These “electronic defects” apparently discriminate against the elderly.

Further considerations here. Were it not for the magic of the state, which makes all action seem public and impartial, we might suspect something fishy. But I am sure our regulators only have our best interests in mind, and not the welfare of their GM subdivision.

Finally, does the advent of GPS mean we’ll no longer need signs? The answer seems “yes” to me.

In former times, buildings located on city streets didn’t have numbers. You’d just go to King’s Street and look up and down it for the sign of Saint Jerome. (Woe to you if you don’t know that Saint Jerome’s attributes include an owl, a lion, a skull, a trumpet, a cross, and a book.) There was a better way, we found it, and we used it. The same principle applies here.

Note, however, that while we may achieve a world where signs are unneeded, achieving a world where they do not exist is another question.

[updated]

Here’s the part that gets me – if, as is assumed in this critique (an assumption I largely agree with by the way) that it is not possible to adequately measure performance via testing, then by what standard is it appropriate to say that parents shouldn’t have the ability to determine their own criteria for evaluating their child’s education, and then act on that criteria to send their child to the school that best matches that criteria? ~ Mark Thompson in the comments

Here’s how I see this.  Standardized testing is a shabby substitute for actual community and parental involvement in our schools.  It’s a crutch.  Inevitably, it’s a crutch that empowers bureaucrats and enfeebles teachers and students and schools and families and communities.  If we want our schools to be more ‘accountable’ and our teachers to perform adequately, then we as a society need to reintegrate our schools and our communities. No man is an island, as Donne so aptly put it.  Well, no school is either.  Nor should they be.  School should be a piece of the larger community.  We should hold our schools accountable by holding ourselves accountable first, by being a part of our children’s education. 

There are many ways to do this, including more community partnerships and, as I’ve said before, apprenticeship programs.  In some places, this means we need to reevaluate how much influence teacher’s unions have.  Not everywhere, by any means, but in those places where bad teachers get preferential treatment over their students.  It strikes me that more and more we feel that all of this should be done for us.  How well are our schools performing?  We don’t know because we aren’t involved in them so we’d better have them take lots and lots of tests!  How are our teachers performing?  We don’t ever see or speak with our teachers, or really with our kids, so we’d better grade their performance based on these tests!

If parents want ‘the ability to determine their own criteria for evaluating their child’s education’ they should simply be more involved in that education.  Some school choice probably won’t hurt here, but I worry that school choice in general will be used as an excuse not to really become involved in the first place.  ‘Well we picked a really high-performing school for our kids, so everything will be just fine!’  Again – I think some school choice is probably not a terribly big deal.  It may do some good.  But I think it only addresses one tiny sliver of the problems our schools face*.

In a sense, this is the problem we’ve seen with retirees in places like Sun City who want to avoid paying taxes to pay for public education.  That is more malicious, obviously, than simply wanting to pick a better school for your kids – but both actions undermine a commitment to our communities.  And that comes back to haunt us.  In the end, I think you get what you put in.

By chance, I happened to be driving and listening to NPR today when Diane Ravitch had a guest slot on the Diane Rehm show.  I only caught parts of the program, but what I did hear jived very nicely with some of the things I’ve been thinking (and writing) about on the subject of education lately.  A quick list of the points she made:

• School choice has a brain drain effect, drawing the most talented and motivated students out of their communities and placing them in high-performing charters, leaving public schools loaded up with the lower-performing students (and creating a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy in the meantime).  Same goes for students with disabilities.  The most expensive inevitably end up at the public schools.
• Charters and private schools put public schools out of business, making schools in some communities non-existent.  Essentially she said that the idea of an education market was misguided because it kills the neighborhood school in favor of the “best deal”.  I tend to agree.  I would go even further, in fact.  If I had it my way we would work to reverse the brain drain at every level, including higher education.
• At the same time, Ravitch sees schools becoming more like businesses.  Instead of educators running schools and coming up with creative ideas, corporate suits are beginning to dictate how we should run our schools.  The ‘rainmakers’ behind charters are often paid exorbitant sums, while the teachers are over-worked and burn out quickly.  Instead, we should have teachers assuming administrative roles and taking leadership positions.  Not politicians or businessmen.
• One area I very much agree with Ravitch is her stance against rigid testing.  She claims the states cheat on their scores anyways, and that there is no evidence this sort of testing has led to any gains in performance.  Quite the contrary in fact.  NCLB, she says, has been a huge failure.  Schools were improving before it was enacted, and have regressed since.
• I also liked the idea of collaboration vs. competition.  I think we need much more of an open-source model for teaching, connecting teachers and schools across the country in as organic and natural a way as possible, allowing for the free exchange of ideas and techniques.  Rather than seeing it as a competitive process, we should view it as a collaborative process.  Indeed, Ravitch mentions that charters were initially intended to act as tiny R&D laboratories but that mission quickly turned to one of competition.  Also on this note, I’d like to address the notion of a national curriculum.  While open-source education would allow for tons of innovation and different ideas bubbling to the surface, a national curriculum would do just the opposite – creating a rigid, inflexible, and ultimately stifling (and easily captured!) curriculum.  A commenter asked if I would support a local public school’s teaching of creationism.  While I would leave that to the courts, let me just say this: I would rather have a handful of local schools teaching creationism then a national curriculum under the sway of the religious right.  That’s the danger with a national curriculum.  Well, that and the whole stifling of innovation and crushing of the very soul of our American education system.

(P.S. at this point I’d like to just add that while I advocate local solutions and “localism” writ large, that is not the same thing as saying I support all actions of local governments.  Local governments can be very tyrannical, very corrupt, etc.  I just think top-down solutions are generally ineffective and can actually exacerbate local problems.  Nor do I think that we, as a nation, shouldn’t come up with as many good ideas as possible.  That’s part of open-source education, after all.  I just bristle at the notion that we should somehow implement these ideas from the top down, as NCLB did.)

I didn’t hear the whole program, and I hope to listen to it the next chance I have.  You can stream it online here and read a section of Ravitch’s book, as well as some highlights from the program.  I wonder about a few things that this anti-school-choice position leaves open-ended:

• What about unions?  There are some very serious problems with too-powerful unions making it almost impossible to get rid of bad teachers.  Leaving aside the question of merit pay, what about simply getting rid of these awful teachers?  Something needs to change, especially in heavily unionized areas.  Again, this is a local problem.  Schools in Arizona do not have the same union-related problems that Californians or New Jerseyans (Jersyites?) face.
• Along these lines, how do we get more, better teachers into the system?  I think more creative autonomy is more important than more money – and I think this touches on something Ravitch said, which is that we need to make teaching more professional.  I agree, but it’s only one part of what I think will be a much more difficult problem.
• Schools are facing serious budget issues, and will need to cut back on the excessive budgets of the housing boom years.  How can we do this without causing a great deal of pain?  In my home town we voted to raise property taxes to help ease the pinch, as the state legislature oscillates between sheer madness and sheer stupidity in their attempt to pass a damn budget.  More and more I think we need to make schools less dependent on state and federal governments, but it won’t be easy.  Autonomy for schools and teachers is key here, but how do we implement autonomy?  The nature of the beast is to take it away!

As always, I appreciate your thoughts on all of this.

Lots of interesting feedback on my last post.  Kevin Drum and Ryan Avent  both focus on the notion that the sort of choice Bramwell describes is only available to higher-income families, leaving poor Americans and their children to waste away in subpar schools in broken neighborhoods. (Avent called my defense of public schools regrettable, though I think he focused entirely on Bramwell’s argument instead…)

My point, however, while riffing off of Bramwell’s initial argument, was simply that schools are a secondary issue, and won’t be fixed until the neighborhoods and communities are fixed first.  Without fertile soil for public schools to grow and improve in, all the school choice in the world will have negligible effects.  Even the sort of choice Bramwell claims we already have.  A couple quick thoughts:

• School choice not only undermines public schools by draining their coffers, it creates a “brain-drain” on communities, often pulling the most determined, driven students out of the local school and placing them elsewhere.
• Notably, many voucher-proponents are wealthy, and as is the case with many charters, it seems likely that the already wealthy would benefit the most from any voucher program. 
• School choice does not address the problems of affordable housing, restrictive zoning, and lack of business investment in many of these communities.  Avent makes a really good point about zoning in particular:

But that doesn’t mean that the issue of affordable housing should just be forgotten. It’s really important. The quality of schools isn’t the only thing capitalized into the price of a home. So too is the value of neighborhood amenities, including things like public safety and convenient grocery stores. And of crucial importance to home values is access to employment centers, and the stronger the local labor market, the higher are home values. You’re not just paying for a building or a piece of land; you’re paying for a location that secures for you certain opportunities and a certain quality of life.

I just think it’s strange — and really troubling — that writers of all stripes shrug off the huge set of regulatory and legal restrictions that hold down housing supply and density in the country’s strongest economic centers. There are serious consequences to these rules, and we should take them seriously.

I think that while many Americans can move across town to a better school, it certainly doesn’t hurt to have a charter or magnet nearby as well.  Some school choice, I believe, can be a net benefit to a community.  Too much, and I think you’ll start to see an even greater divorce between schools and communities than already exists.  Focusing instead on creating cities that have mixed zoning, better opportunities for low-income families to live in nicer areas, and better climates for business investment in areas that are currently low-income will do a better job at addressing the problems with our public schools than simply busing students off one by one to better schools elsewhere.

What’s going on, in very general terms, is the states have been gradually cutting funding to their public universities for a few decades now (sound familiar?). Meanwhile, the state universities, instead of tightening their belts, have been in a bit of an arms race with each other to see who can offer the most extravagant perqs to prospective students. Explicitly remaking themselves along the lines of consumer capitalism, most universities are starting to resemble vacation resorts with 24 hour gyms, alumni fairs, and free rock concerts. None of this actually relates to education, but none of them want to back down and the students and their parents apparently buy into the nonsense about college being an “experience” first and foremost.

Freakonomics: “When I visited my undergrad alma mater a few years ago, the chancellor pointed out that three buildings had gone up in the past decade or so that were each larger than any existing building on campus. There was a library, a convocation center (a multipurpose arena), and a huge student gym. The gym, he said, was a top priority because parents and prospective students increasingly think of themselves as customers, shopping for the most amenities for the best price, and the colleges that didn’t come to grips with this would soon see their customers going elsewhere.”

Trust me, they all talk about their “customers” now. [Read more →]

Arizona is considering selling off its prisons as part of a larger process of balancing the budget.  Even death row would be privately run.  The state government predicts the move could save them $100 million dollars, which is a sizable chunk of change until you consider the budget shortfall totals over $2 billion dollars.  According to the New York Times:

Private prison companies generally build facilities for a state, then charge them per prisoner to run them. But under the Arizona legislation, a vendor would pay $100 million up front to operate one or more prison complexes. Assuming the company could operate the prisons more cheaply or efficiently than the state, any savings would be equally divided between the state and the private firm.

I can certainly see why governments would want to contract out the building of prisons, or some of the services surrounding the management of prisons.  But I get wary when we start talking about wholesale privatization of prisons or any other part of the legal system.  The whole “crime doesn’t pay” thing should apply to everybody, not just the criminals.  When we start profiting of the results of crime, a whole lot of bad incentives come into play, not the least of which is lobbying to keep current bad laws in place or to crack down even further on easy targets like non-violent offenders.

But there’s more to this story.  At the same time as prisons are being privatized, school budgets in Arizona face major shortages.  There’s talk of a number of schools being shuttered entirely, massive layoffs, and increased classroom sizes.  Last year, in my home town, every teacher with fewer than three years service, every art and music and extra-curricular teacher, every counselor and school psychologist, and a number of other education professionals were advised that their contracts would not be renewed.  They were saved by the stimulus.  This coming year, with no bailouts for the states, and with over $300 million likely to be cut from education and social services by the state – not to mention the falling local revenues from decreased home values and sales taxes – things look much more grim. [Read more →]

Bill Maher, Drew Westen, and Arianna herself get in on the act.  To be fair und balanced for a second, there a number of alternative responses as well.

With the special elections today, a documentary coming out, a David Plouffe book being released, this one year retrospective since the election meme is in the air.

Not much of which (not surprisingly) I find really at all grounded or particularly intelligent (this goes basically for both the pro and anti-Obama positions).

To answer Fred Willard’s timely question: I think what happened is pretty much basically what was bound to happen and the people who are acting all disappointed now (or worse think Stalinism is inches away) just became overly wrapped in the emotion/hype of the campaign. A sober rational analysis of the guy’s past I think is pretty well 100% indicative of where we are now.

The three articles I linked to above all start from the premise that the place to begin the assessment of Obama’s presidency is so far is his campaign.  Which is a reasonable enough (I guess) place to begin, except that they start from the wrong data to be gleaned from the campaign. Basically my take is that all of them are just basically reading their own political perspective/point of view/ideology into Obama not actually looking at Obama himself.   (Again this also on the positive Obama side, say with Jacob Heilbrunn or Joseph Nye or Robert Creamer).

e.g.

Arianna:

Indeed, reading the book [Plouffe's book], I often found myself wondering what Candidate Obama would think of President Obama. Would he look at what the White House is doing and say, “that’s what I and my supporters worked so hard for?”

How did the candidate who got into the race because he’d decided that “the core leadership had turned rotten” and that “the people were getting hosed” become the president who has decided that the American people can only have as much change as Olympia Snowe will allow?

Westen:

Leadership is a quality Barack Obama showed on the campaign trail. It is a quality he has failed to show as president.

Maher:

Yeah, I’m disappointed, too. I thought we were sweeping into power; I thought change meant Change. I believed all that talk about another First 100 Days, a la Roosevelt. Well, that didn’t happen. The question is, is this as good as it gets from Obama, or is he pacing himself?

Now I’m known as something of a political determinist around these parts, so you can read what I have to say in light of that and argue that I’m just doing the same thing I criticize in the other writes–i.e. just projecting my point of view onto blank slate Obama.

The problem I have with these analyses is that they assume Obama’s campaign message and/or process was in any way indicative of what he would do as president.  While on the hand I’m often accused of being very cynical, I’m actually one of these people who think that politicians actually basically do tell you how they are going to be and what they are going to do when President.  If you do the supposedly boring (but actually illuminating) work of investigating their actual records. [Read more →]

Here’s the thing – during those same years that the federal government has increased its role in education funding, state and local governments have become increasingly dependent on the federal government to shore up budgets, step in during a crisis, and keep them solvent.  Look no further than the recent stimulus money and the bailout of the states.  Many states could barely sustain their commitments to education budgets without federal padding.  Is there any reason to think this will change next year?  Next recession?

It’s not so much that this is a serious problem right now, either.  As Will notes, the federal government is responsible for only about 8.3 percent of all education spending in the country.  The problem lies in the future, as state and local governments continue down the path of dependency, relying more and more on the federal government to catch them when they fall, and doing whatever it takes to make sure they qualify for the handouts.  [Read more →]