Anybody up for a grand bargin? I'll trade you Medicare-for-All in exchange for a complete privatization (w/ vouchers) of education.
The fix is to monopolize signalling value through legal fiat - make it illegal to ask job applicants or allow applicants to disclose the school they attended, and replace it with an examination and/or interview based certification monopoly.
Granted, kids who go to them do tend to get better test scores, go to better universities, have more successful careers, etc. But that's because the whole education industry is a massive exercise in selection bias. The most careful studies I've seen, though, seem to indicate that, all other factors being equal, a typical kid is going to learn more in public school than in private or charter school.
This rather mirrors my own experience. I did 2 years of public high school, and 2 years of college prep. I can say that it's absolutely true that my classmates were generally smarter and more studious in the prep school. But the prep school was also easy. It really didn't particularly matter how much effort I put into my homework. As long as I didn't blatantly blow it off, my teachers would dutifully send my parents a report card full of the As and Bs they were paying for.
By contrast, it was the public schools where I had the teachers who'd keep ratcheting up their expectations until they could sense that I was actually working to try and get good grades on my papers.
When we provide "options" -- charters, private schooling, even public magnets-- the parents who are motivated and concerned enough to build those networks tend to pounce on them. The "default" public school loses its champions and ends up producing worse outcomes for everyone whose parents aren't tuned in.
That's one of the most compelling arguments against school vouchers I've encountered. Especially as that is exactly what has happened in higher education where consumer choice is higher.
Most universities here are private, and everybody knows that you have to get "a college education".
The end result being that, outside of a select few national institutions that appear to have some degree of academic rigor, university in Japan is referred to as a "four-year vacation", and graduation is effectively automatic.
Reflecting back on the original post, I'm not sure that nationalization of universities in the US would help. We have plenty of high-quality state schools as-is, but Harvard and friends are prestigious because their brands come with deeply powerful social networks.
The same effect applies to making it illegal to put university names on resumes.
Sure, there is definitely a halo effect in being able to put Harvard or Stanford on your resume, but I would wager that the vast majority of top-tier university students don't apply by (metaphorically) filling out a job application and handing it to the shift manager.
Instead, your work comes through your network. Alice introduces you to Bob who knows that Charlene has invested in TinyCo, which is poised to be the next unicorn, and so you get in on the "ground floor" in this fashion.
That's not the kind of thing you can really address via legislation.
(Note that there is an assumption here that you can Do The Thing. Charlene probably doesn't want you working at TinyCo and squandering her investment if you aren't going to help make it the next unicorn.)
GPA for example is arbitrary yet colleges and employers are basically asking schools to 'optimize' / maximize it. Standardized testing (ACT/SAT) is much better, but still misses important aspects like leadership ability. Even the prestige of the school is a poor signal.
Give employers / colleges a better objective measure and they will gladly use it. Perhaps we should have a post-college standardized test.
edit: This comment has gone from 8 points to 4 points in about 10 minutes, so I can only assume this thread has become the target of a downvote brigade from some other web site. The joys of discussing politics in the age of 4chan!
The problem with applying these standards to education is that the timeframe to assess damage is very long, and it's more or less irreversible.
If you spend a week driving a car and the engine dies, you can take it back and get a refund and then go get a new one.
If you put your kid in a charter school and they fail to learn math for a year, you can't get that time back. It's gone forever, and your child will be behind for anywhere from months to years to forever.
This is why we need to treat certain specific sectors differently. Consumer goods, sure, whatever, the government can make sure that toys don't contain lead and that our TVs wont randomly explode, and after that it's up to us to decide.
But education, healthcare, etc., the consequences of giving consumers "choice" and allowing those sectors to advertise freely and self-regulate are severe and often irreversible.
As an aside, while looking this up I found news stories that demonstrated the rumors about sex abuse were true and a few coaches-turned-principals got nailed. While your theory about regulation seems well-intentioned, I'm just not sure it is worth anything in practice. Lots of governmental theory seems revolutionary until it ends in failure (and, at worst, bloodshed).
To be clear, the United States' public education system is BAD. It is sometimes VERY BAD. But it's not consistently bad; there are public schools that are quite good.
There are other countries with heavily regulated public education systems that are so much better than the United States - read up on Finland's remarkable public education system if you don't believe me. (And don't get tripped up on inconsistent usage of "public" and "private" to mean opposites in different countries!)
So logically, the problem isn't that government regulation of education is inherently bad; Rather, the problem is that we (in the United States) are doing a bad job of it. Splitting public education funding between public schools and charter schools and forcing public schools to compete with test scores and other proxy metrics is demonstrably making things worse, not better.
Anecdotes are not data, but it would be foolish to throw them away blindly. Anecdotes become data when they can be used to answer questions that can inform future decision making processes. For example, we could ask, "is more politics and political process positively impacting education?" If the answer is that no, one hundred years of American politics hasn't improved the situation [0] despite it costing far more than it used to per-student [1], then we should probably conclude that said process is a dead end and look elsewhere.
I never claimed that the anecdote I provided was data; I would rather like to know the answers to the questions I asked. Handwaving them away seems closer to arguing in bad faith than what you accused me of doing elsewhere. Further, I would suggest that the increased presence of School Resource Officers in schools, the increased usage of courts for school-related punishment, and the continued emotional and physical violence experienced by students from their peers show that, indeed, forced participation in government schools does indeed involve violence. That your experts have been unable to solve this problem (and that you hand wave it away) does not generate confidence in your position.
[0] https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ltt_2012/summary.aspx [1] https://www.cato.org/blog/public-school-spending-theres-char...
This is a pretty bad correlation/causation argument.
You're making arguments that only make sense if: 1: The United States is the only country in the entire world with a government-run education system and there are no other examples to look to 2: Every decision made that has negatively impacted our education is the only possible decision that could have been made under the circumstances
Neither of these are true.
Just because our government has made some really bad decisions doesn't mean that this is the only possible outcome of government-run education. If you look at education rankings globally, the United States is pretty far down the list, and most if not all of the countries above us use government-run education systems. The number one in the world, Finland, prohibits private schools all together.
It simply does. not. logically. follow. that the overreach of our criminal justice system is the inevitable result of a government-run education system.
You're ignoring so many political realities that are unique to this country.
There is nothing hand-waving about saying that your anecdotes are not data. I went to a school that had exactly zero teacher/child sex scandals, can I use that to "prove" that the system is working? No, I can't.
Our public education system delegates a LOT of responsibility down the line. The federal government offers some funding that is contingent on certain requirements being met, but the states are responsible for the execution. The states have elected officials and appointed boards of education, but they delegate a lot of decision-making to individual districts, which also have elected and appointed officials.
Finally, just because I am defending the idea of government-run education doesn't mean I am defending the implementation of it that we have. Please do not confuse those two distinct positions.
The role of the state is to regulate positive and negative externalities. And students learning something is actually a (positive) externality. Neither the student nor the parent or even the district directly care about everyone learning basic skills - that provides no relative advantage for them. Signals of being superior are worthwhile to the individual. Those might actually result in the individual being smarter but if an individual is "selfish" or thinking in pure "homo-economicus" terms, they are just happy being able to always seem competent rather than being competent.
So the state (or whatever institution can represent "all of society") is what is needed to increase the base competency of a society.
It's a lie perpetuated by capitalists that the government can't do things efficiently. The government can absolutely do things efficiently, the costs are usually by having more protections for the employees, which is good. Additionally, we remove the need for a profit layer that would go to owners (the nation is the owner in this case) so to achieve the same results as nation owned companies
Not to mention that there is no exit to look for, nation owned companies cannot be stripped of assets and they cannot claw and scrape the consumer, which is how for-profit-private companies would operate.
Now am I saying that all things should be nation owned? Of course not. I'm saying that monopolies, infrastructure and huge old government companies should be and should stay as nation owned. Private companies will work with providing for these companies resources that they don't have and would pay more to develop themselves.
On the flip side, I'm also against certain things being incentivized by the government. I'm against private prisons on pure premise.
In the end, I'm pragmatic and prefer to optimize for those solutions which require the least oversight and ensure for the best competition practical. I'd also like to see an "open body" of course content made more widely available, so that districts and teachers may pull in said content for individualized courses. Educational publishing is about as corrupt as it gets IMHO.
I do think that for most things, there are ways to incentivize appropriate outcome from private businesses and initiatives with the government. This includes more appropriate provisioning and budgeting practices.
Your characterization of the difficulty of choosing a school is overdramatic. A person could devote fifteen minutes to googling "best schools in {area}", maybe even turning up a government sponsored list. If they ever notice the chosen school is bad, say from complaints of their ward or from bad grades, they would switch schools, improving the situation via negativa.
One or two more sets of eyes in most classrooms each day, more people to help answer questions, etc. Far fewer WTF moments with some schools.
What do you think MY argument was? I suspect you misread.
I really miss the good old days of Hacker News when there was literally none of that kind of nonsense.
While I'm glad you're able to infer implications, it would be wonderful if you could take it a step further to find that an argument cannot be true if a necessary premises is false. That's not bad faith, that's logic.
Governments can hire experts to determine standards by doing research, and then can apply those standards over time to the schools they regulate. They can also collect massive amounts of data and compare performance between schools, across time, determine means and check for outliers, etc. etc. etc.
My argument is that consumers don't have time to do any of that. They have time to do what they do with colleges: Read a limited number pamphlets, thumb through Newsweek's annual "best colleges" report, maybe spend a few minutes here and there checking data online.
We can, as a society, devote more resources to making sure the government regulation side of things improves. What we can't do is collectively give OURSELVES more time to do that research individually.
I would argue that these experiential data are more valid than metrics like standardized test scores by ethnicity or "letter grades" that the government gives itself for its school. Ultimately I question the motives behind many of these testing methodologies, because when they're not meant to satisfy the motivation of the student and/or their parents, the student (and their parents) become the product.
But even if parents could choose between multiple public school pedagogical methodologies, many can't simply because it requires selling the family's house and relocating to a different district. It's hard to have time to impact a situation when the situation is already fixed before the fact, but of course then it's not a time issue at all.
Ultimately I was responding to a two-sentence comment from you. I don't think complaining that my response was "bare minimum" is an appropriate way to handle the challenge, and I find the resort to name-calling about the "age of 4chan" particularly off putting.
Maybe you should poke around the rest of the comments for the article, because I've gone into a lot of detail about it.
"Parents and students have plenty of time to research important aspects of their lives"
I've addressed this elsewhere in the thread, but this assumption penalizes the children of parents who are poor, working multiple jobs, or dealing with health issues. It penalizes single parents as well. Basically, if you put the onus on parents to do the research, parents with more disposable time will make better decisions for their children, thus exacerbating the existing inequalities in the system. The whole point of the public education system is to level the playing field; what you're suggesting will increase the gap between the haves and the have-nots.
"...starting with the experiential reality of the school they're subjected to for several years. One of your argument's shortcomings is the implication that only an a priori decision making process is possible for the over-a-decade process of going to school."
What you're suggesting is that it's okay to have a system where parents and students make the decision about whether or not schools are good or bad by spending time at them. That is a ludicrously impractical suggestion. What happens if your kid hates their first day of school? Their first week? Their first month? How do you decide when they can make decent decision about it? What if they just hate going to school? Are you going to go sit in the classroom and watch the teacher for hours or days at a time?
Experiential data is not particularly useful on an individual basis; There are so many kids who just have a bad time at school no matter what, often for reasons that don't implicate the school directly as good or bad. And there are plenty of kids who have a great time at school precisely because they're not getting a very good education. (IE they're ignored, the work is too easy, etc.) Their experience is going to be fantastic, and they will enter college completely unprepared.
I'm not arguing that the EXISTING methods for measuring school performance are perfect; I am arguing that theoretically, the best possible version is mass-collection and analysis of data. Relying on individual decisions based purely on experience is a recipe for chaos; Kids would be begging their parents to change teachers and schools all the time, and how would parents have any idea if the kids were right?
I didn't complain that your response was the bare minimum, I complained that it was LESS than the bare minimum. And my 4chan comment was about the downvoting, not about your comment. Please read more carefully.
The idea that parents who don't care are penalized is simply a fact of life. Should we make the same argument about diet— that the state has the resources to appoint Top Dietitians and mandate a uniform State Diet? In fact, the experts that the state has hired have been corrupted by players like the corn and dairy lobbies and the nutritional advice they've given in the past has been roundly derided as terrible. Further, obesity has gotten worse since that advice has been given. Why would we think that the same state mandating institutional assignment would produce better results? Apparently, according to you, because other State education departments in other cultures and parts of the world have had comparatively more success by state-reported metrics? Again, I'm unimpressed at this justification for property taxes.
"What you're suggesting is that it's okay to have a system where parents and students make the decision about whether or not schools are good or bad by spending time at them"
In part, Yes! The way every other cooperative voluntary arrangement works! Do you even have children? I do. I have had babysitters that have made me uncomfortable on the first day. Yes, I have fired them and made the necessary decisions for my children. Why you think I should be legally prevented from doing that in the case of decades of dubious-quality education is a complete mystery to me at this point.
Experiential data are extremely useful on individual bases. Children who enjoy school because they don't have to do anything have been taught that education is painful. Anyone without that supposition would simply be bored, which would be a negative complaint rather than a positive review. The fact that we culturally accept common utterances like "school sucks" should tell you everything you need to know about a one-size-fits-all approach to educating a population. The argument here is to walk back the do-this-or-lose-your-house force-based approach and move toward a competitive and innovative approach toward improving individuals' quality of life. Your argument against this seems to be that, while it hasn't worked here, it theoretically (under some theory you've yet to elucidate) could, because infinite resources by fiat magically translate to infinite productivity and efficiency in real life. I don't think you've just done a poor job at defending that claim, I think you've simply done the best job you could of defending a bad idea.
Now what's that they say about ideas being so good the have to be mandatory?
This is the core conservative argument for abolishing just about every government service: "We screwed it up in the past. Rather than trying to fix our past mistakes, we should instead give up."
And I am well aware of the problems with the "food pyramid." Your example here ignores the fact that the government has since acknowledged that the original recommendations were wrong, and has been updating them over time to reflect the best research. The argument that "the process can be corrupted therefore we should give up" ignores that it can also be improved over time, and that governments are accountable.
"Your argument against this seems to be that, while it hasn't worked here, it theoretically (under some theory you've yet to elucidate) could, because infinite resources by fiat magically translate to infinite productivity and efficiency in real life."
I did provide evidence that it could work, which was that it has worked in numerous other countries. You just chose to dismiss that evidence out of hand because you'd rather come up with an excuse to disbelieve it rather than accept that a system you fundamentally disagree with can work. Whether you mean it to or not, it comes off as utterly and completely bad-faith argument to dismiss the evidence I provided out of hand and then tell me several paragraphs later that I haven't adequately described how it can be done. I pointed you in the direction of a perfect example, and yet apparently you haven't even checked to see if it's a valid example.
The short version is this: Finland had a crappy education system, and they made a decision as a country to fix it. They approached it with open minds, willing to throw out any ideas that were outdated and not backed up with evidence. What they ended up with was little to no homework, fresh-made school lunches, and the abolition of private schools. (The reason for the last bit is that as long as wealthy people can use private schools as an escape hatch for their own kids, they have zero political incentive to fix the public schools.)
You mentioned in another comment that you would absolutely accept a system that rewarded parents who spent more time researching schools, and I think this is where we fundamentally disagree. You want a system that allows people succeed if they have the time and resources to do so. I want a system that does its best for all people, even though that takes a lot more work and coordination.
Now, I'm not exactly sure what your motivation for this is. Pessimistically, it looks like a very selfish line of reasoning: Since you have the time and resources and think you're smart enough to choose wisely, you want the choice to do so, and if other people don't have the same opportunities then too bad for them. Or, more optimistically, you just can't imagine a system that works adequately the way I describe, so you just think your way is safer.
I appreciate your extrapolation on your ideas. While I'm sure neither of us have changed our minds, I find your position interesting and I'm sure others reading have been able to see a small amount of the breadth of the topic at hand.
I don't agree with your developed argument either but that's a different matter.
Richard Feynman relates a fascinating account of this in his book "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!". Aside from him, every "expert" gave good scores to books that were entirely blank.
Some quotes from that: https://fs.blog/2016/07/richard-feynman-teaching-math-kids/ http://whyhomeschool.blogspot.com/2006/08/richard-feynman-on...
It's not only a bad deal, but you don't have the power to deliver your end of the bargain, and the people that would have the power are at least as opposed to M4A as Conventional public schools, so no, it's not worth considet on many levels.
And, anyway vouchers aren't really privatization, it is public with either reduced accountability or increased overhead or both, depending on the conditions attached to the vouchers, which are just a mechanism for outsourcing delivery of a public function not actually privatizing the function so that government is not involved.
It's not even clear what this modest proposal has to do with the article, which is written from the premise that the whole enterprise of college-oriented secondary schooling is misguided, that no matter how well-taught the subjects, secondary school educational objectives are about signaling --- to colleges --- and not human capital, and that there's even more broad acceptance of the notion that college is itself about signaling to the labor market.
How would privatizing schools address this person's concerns?
As it is, though, if I want actual human capital in my child's education, it's either private school or homeschooling. To the degree (if any) that private schools emphasize human capital over signalling, I'm not sure that privatizing schools plus vouchers would make them change to emphasizing signalling. So I don't think the situation would become worse, and it might become better.
The point is that you have a bunch of independent entities competing with each other. You don't have that with a government school district.
Given the way most things seem to eventually consolidate, the latter scenario would be the more probable one--a WalMart of education so to speak.
In that case, if the government is the one signing the checks, it is also in a very strong position to dictate how the whole thing is operated. Not that it will--see WalMart again--but it could.
OK, how fucked up do you want to allow the unlucky kids to become?
I mean, it's a given that in a Pure True Private Education System, anti-vaccination propaganda will be unchallenged dogma in some schools. It's a big deal now and this will just remove the few impediments it has to becoming the majority opinion in some regions. Medicare-For-All means precisely shit if the people in that region think modern medicine is pharmashill toxins gunna make you an NWO Zionist zombie-slave.
But that isn't even the worst of it. Public school is, at the very least, a way to get kids out of the house and into an environment where it isn't normal for parents to fuck their children. Teachers are mandatory reporters for a reason. I'm not saying that public schools are perfect at detecting child abuse, but completely privatizing the whole thing will shove that effectiveness right off a cliff. Don't piss off the people paying your bills, eh?
We already have segregation academies, but complete privatization will remove all choice in some regions, in that only the segregation academies will capture enough vouchers to be effective educators. Well, if you consider "The David Duke School of Racial Tolerance" to be effective education.