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.

Via email, I’ve been asked my thoughts on tenure and the troubles it can cause, so I’d like to wade into that very heated debate. Hopefully, the piranhas aren’t biting today.

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 →]

By my lights, they’re in descending order of plausibility.

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.

Somewhat belatedly I’d like to link to this piece about slum urbanism: how environmentalists and other city-lovers can learn from the way slums are pieced together.  “Slum” here is used to mean an informal settlement within a city, usually in the developing world. Spending time in these slums is a revelation to any American, I think, partly for the expected reasons, namely that they’re squalid, dangerous on account of the ubiquitously shoddy construction and exposed electrical wire. Less expected is that the streets of these slums often seem full of life and happy, not only in comparison to American urban ghettos, but also compared to our wealthy suburbs. Often there are a multitude of small shops, neighbors pausing in their daily errands to gossip, and children playing. It’s worth thinking about what a tremendous indictment of our built environment that this fact represents. Unlike the slum-dwellers we are subject to laws ensuring our buildings are built safely, but also unlike them we’re subject to laws that make our neighborhoods isolating, ugly, environmentally disastrous and hostile to all forms of retail except the big box stores we’ve been talking about on the blog. As Austen Bramwell writes:

sprawl — an umbrella term for the pattern of development seen virtually everywhere in the United States — is not caused by the free market. It is, rather, mandated by a vast and seemingly intractable network of government regulations, from zoning laws and building codes to street design regulations.

My own experiences with slums contributed mightily to my conviction that the built environment is a major determinant of our politics, culture, and even our religion. I wrote a post some time ago about urban form and religion by a particular slum, and since almost no one was reading Plumb Lines back then, I’ll take the liberty of quoting it in full:

I recall walking through a slum once in India, girdled by a wide moat doubling as a sewer, where the buildings were built so close to one another that at times I had to turn sideways to fit between them. Occasionally I had to duck while turning to avoid the naked electrical wires strung overhead. No street ran in a straight line for more than twenty feet without careening off at a random, vertiginous angle.

After advancing through this maze for several minutes, I emerged into a courtyard built up to two stories on all sides, not more than 500 feet square, with a great blue god in the middle, twice the size of a human being. This was the only space in the slum where the watery sun could illuminate the pavement without passing through a trellis of clothes lines, power lines, and architectural promontories, and the only space wide enough to walk with comparable ease for more than a few paces. The effect was intoxicating and over-awing, long before the arrival of the inevitable and cliched am-I-the-first-Westerner-to-see-this moment.

This memory returned to me as I was reading Lewis Mumford’s The City in History, when he discusses the invention of the formal axis terminating in a church or some other monument. This is a familiar form in our age, since it was considered the exemplar of civic grandeur for several centuries in Europe (it is also a natural, if rarely employed form in a gridded city built of skyscrapers — the view up Park towards Grand Central in New York and the view down LaSalle towards the Board of Trade in Chicago being notable examples).

According to Mumford, the axis was the quintessential urban form of the Baroque city, first employed in the approach to Santa Croce in Florence and spreading from Florence like a disease to the rest of  Europe. His contempt for the form is obvious, and he laments in particular the “dreary” approaches opened up in front of the old cathedrals, which used to be approachable only by twists and turns, like the idol in the slum. Certainly, even if used in the service of the Church, the linear approach to Santa Croce testifies to the glory of Man, not G-d. Mystery has been conspicuously eradicated; every form is patent and legible. From the formal axis it’s a short step to van der Rohe.

There is much to be said for the beauty of straight lines, and for Baroque urbanism in general, but the slum-dwellers and the medieval Europeans understood religion better than the Florentines. A visitor to a medieval European town looking for its church would stumble suddenly into a small open space in the presence of a tremendous vertical element whose face was a mass of flowers, monsters and saints. Like my sudden stumbling onto Krishna,  this slow, difficult approach to the transcendent could be read as an allegory of Augustine’s approach to G-d: a slow, difficult inward movement until you come to the very center of yourself and find G-d pulling you up and outside.

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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.

I’m happy to see that disenchantment with Woodrow Wilson – the most bizarre candidate for the pantheon of great American presidents – is reaching a wider audience on the American Right. But this nascent critique of Wilsonian progressivism seems to have missed one of his worst legacies. Namely, Wilson’s blatant disregard for civil liberties (from Wikipedia – emphasis mine):

On the home front in 1917, he began the United States’ first draft since the US civil war, raised billions in war funding through Liberty Bonds, set up the War Industries Board, promoted labor union growth, supervised agriculture and food production through the Lever Act, took over control of the railroads, enacted the first federal drug prohibition, and suppressed anti-war movements.

–

To counter opposition to the war at home, Wilson pushed the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918 through Congress to suppress anti-British, pro-German, or anti-war opinions. He welcomed socialists who supported the war and pushed for deportation of foreign-born radicals.^[86] Citing the Espionage Act, the U.S. Post Office refused to carry any written materials that could be deemed critical of the U. S. war effort. Some sixty newspapers were deprived of their second-class mailing rights.^[87]

Wilson is usually associated with a stirring ideological defense of democratic self-determination. In practice, this amounted to little more than crude ethnic partitioning, but more importantly, Wilson’s respect for the forms of Republican governance was severely lacking.

Perhaps Wilson’s enthusiasm for curtailing civil liberties was entirely unrelated to his progressive politics. But it’s hard not to see the same impulses that animated Wilson’s domestic agenda – a desire for control, rank disregard for individual liberty, confidence that the messy business of civil society can be micromanaged from Washington – behind his horrific record on civil liberties.

So my question for newly-converted Wilson-phobes is simple: If you’re concerned about government overreach, why restrict your criticism his domestic legacy? Why do torture, indefinite detainment, and the PATRIOT ACT get a free pass? Compared to his draconian wartime crackdown, many aspects of Wilson’s progressive agenda look downright benign, or even admirable, in retrospect. Wilson’s blatant disregard for civil liberties, on the other hand, remains one of the most enduring – and bipartisan – legacies in contemporary American politics.

Whatever else one thinks of how we live these days, it’s hard to not see it as temporary, historically anomalous, a peculiar blip in human experience. I’ve spent my whole life riding around in cars, never questioning whether the makings of tomorrow’s supper would be there waiting on the supermarket shelves, never doubting when I entered a room that the lights would go on at the flick of a switch, never worrying about my personal safety. And now hardly a moment goes by when I don’t feel tremors of massive change in these things, as though all life’s comforts and structural certainties rested on a groaning fault line. ~ James Howard Kunstler

Perhaps the most compelling argument I’ve read against Walmart is the very same argument that one hears against sprawl – namely, that it is the result of a vast network of government intervention and central planning.  The very nature of Walmart is one which requires a car culture, and as we all know, the car culture would not have been possible without enormous amounts of state subsidies, draconian zoning laws, and so forth.  In other words, without the highway projects, the protection of the auto industry, and the many zoning practices in place in modern America, Walmart would not exist – at least in its current form.  As it stands, given our car culture, given our sprawl, Walmart acts as a benefit to many consumers.

That is the stumbling block I come back to when I consider my own distaste for Walmart.  In a real free market economy, sans all the government regulations and subsidies, Walmart would not even be an issue.  The many more diverse and denser places in America would not wanted or needed a Walmart to come set up shop.  But given the world we have created for ourselves, what is the alternative?  Can we very well deny poor people one of the only places that they can afford to buy cheap goods at?  Or, more to the point, should we demonize what is quite obviously a symptom of the larger problem?

Taking a closer look at the problem, we turn once again to Austin Bramwell, who has penned a brief response to James Howard Kunstler’s take on John Stossel on the subject of sprawl.  He writes,

Stossel defends suburban sprawl and accuses its opponents — like Kunstler — of forcing lifestyle choices onto others “by limiting where they can build.” The fallacy of this view has been pointed out about 100 times. For the 101st time: sprawl — an umbrella term for the pattern of development seen virtually everywhere in the United States — is not caused by the free market. It is, rather, mandated by a vast and seemingly intractable network of government regulations, from zoning laws and building codes to street design regulations.  If Stossel wants to expand Americans’ lifestyle choices, he should attack the very thing he was defending, namely, suburban sprawl.

It’s odd that self-described libertarians such as Stossel are so slow to grasp that government planning makes sprawl ubiquitous. You would think that libertarians would instinctively grasp the deeply statist nature of suburban development.  First of all, with a depressingly few exceptions, virtually every town in America looks the same. That is, it has the same landscape of arterial roads, strip malls, and residential subdivisions, accessibly only by car. Surely, given America’s celebrated diversity, you would also see a diversity of places. As it turns out, all but a few people live the same suburban lifestyle.  Government, as libertarian assumptions would predict, is the culprit.

Second, the few places in America that have a distinctive character are also exceedingly expensive. John Stossel himself admits to living in an apartment and walking to work most days. Now, I don’t know where exactly Mr. Stossel lives, but it sounds as if he lives in Manhattan, where residential space costs over $1000 a square foot (that means a two-bedroom apartment where a family of four could fit costs at least $1.5 million).  If Mr. Stossel’s lifestyle, as he puts it, is less popular than the suburban lifestyle, then why does his cost so much more? He apparently never asks himself the question. Had he done so, he might have discovered that government artificially restricts the supply of Manhattan-like places but artificially increases the supply of sprawl. That’s the reason Americans “prefer” to live in the suburbs. They don’t have a choice.

At this point ‘choice’ becomes a very tricky thing indeed.  Now that we’ve been, essentially, pushed into the suburbs – where cars and big boxes are simply a matter of life – what should we do about it?  Should we choose somehow to limit the existence of these big boxes?  Would this help us in our addiction to vehicular transport?  Many of the restored walkable communities around the country are either prohibitively expensive or Disney-fied versions of the America that once was.  Those who benefit the most from Walmart and its big box counterparts in this sprawling world of ours are also the poorest among us.  Would they benefit, also, from some other world?  I think so – but getting there is fraught with danger.

As I can’t currently comment on the site during the day, I struck up a conversation/debate with Mike at the Big Stick via email about my Dubai assassination post. Mark eventually got in on the act and we thought that the back and forth was good enough to post here for your review.

Scott: I can’t respond to your comments on the site because I no longer have access to the League from work. But if it would be of interest to you, I’d be happy to have a bit of an email exchange to explore things further. I’ve got some work to which I need to attend this morning, but I’d be happy to fire back an initial response to you comment a little later. Let me know if that is of interest.

Mike: Sure Scott – fire away.

Scott: This is less in depth than I had hoped for, but the long and the short of my post can be summed up as follows:

• I’m not condemning Israel, I identified that I was not prepared to forgo the conclusion that Mahmoud al-Mabhouh deserved to die and that the Mossad were the right folks to do it,
• I worry that using tactics like assassination leave us feeling less morally culpable,
• I feel like we ought to be wracked with every bit as much doubt, uncertainty, and moral consternation over the decision to assassinate someone as we are when deciding whether or not to engage in conventional warfare, granted over different dynamics,
• And that a belief that it does as a tactic does leave us less morally culpable in terms of state sanctioned violence can and in this case seems to have lead to an attitude that is counter-rpoductive to actually ending the conflict in question.

In terms of your Hitler example, believing that Hitler should have been assassinated does not absolve us from a critical analysis of the use of assassination as an acceptable tactic in all future instances, which is, really, all I’m calling for.

Mike: I’m more inclined to say that it makes us more morally culpable. When we’re talking about general war quite often the higher-ups are insulated from the decision making. How often does the President or the Sec. of Defense get a call asking permission to fire a rocket at a Taliban position or lob a grenade into a cave where bad guys are hiding? On the flip side, when you arrange for an assassination somebody pretty high up the food chain has to say, “Yes, I want you to kill this man”. To me that’s what makes it real for them.

I also think, as many commenters pointed out, that assassination is actually better because there’s no collateral damage. One target, one dead. If you’re going to wage war, they should all be fought that way.

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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.

My contribution to our symposium on the Symposium, which unfortunately doesn’t answer Rufus’s questions. Or for that matter any questions at all.

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Update: I’ve been asked to link to some translations. Here is the Perseus Project Symposium English translation which includes the Greek linked at the right. There is also the Internet Classics Archive Benjamin Jowett translation. Angie Hobbs did a great podcast on erotic love in the Symposium. Here is the Gutenberg Project’s Jowett translation. Google Books also has a translation.

As planned, today (technically, tomorrow) I’d like to get a conversation going about Plato’s Symposium. What I’ve done is to write down some questions while reading the text. They certainly aren’t exhaustive or expert, but I think they’re a start. Also, I would definitely not take them as a questionnaire. Instead of trying to answer all of them, please feel free to post comments about whatever questions strike your interest, or pose questions of your own.

The theme of the Symposium is éros, which can be defined as desire or longing, often of a passionate nature. Socrates, of course, has a very different definition. Any students of classical Greek are hereby invited to offer additional definitions.

As the framing story sets the stage, we hear about Aristodemus, a student who is in love with Socrates. A lot of students fall in love with Socrates. A repeating theme here and in other dialogues is the (homo) erotic aspect of the search for truth. Should we understand philosophical education as, in some sense, basically erotic?

The conversation turns to a recent symposium. The symposium was a sort of ritualized drinking party. Often conversation at a symposium would focus on a chosen topic. Here, the question is how best to celebrate the god of love. [Read more →]