Why Innovation Can't Fix America's Classrooms
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
If the Prussian model is soooo spectacularly wonderful, then you have nothing to fear from it being exposed to a competitive environment. It'll win. No worries.
On the other hand, if the Prussian model is, shall we say, less than optimal for the 21st century, the fastest way to find out is free market experimentation, and rather than giving ourselves the same cultural shackles that everybody else has, the American exceptionalism that will justify our salaries will be our willingness to experiment, learn, and refine from there where everybody else insists on the Prussian model. Unless, of course, a 19th century schooling model is just so damned perfect that it will admit of no significant improvement. In which case we'll still find that out pretty quickly. The maximum downside is sharply bounded and the upside of cracking open the monopoly on education is hard to bound. (I can't call it "unbounded" with a straight face, that's hard to justify, but it really is hard to know how much better truly 21st schooling could be.) Failing to at least try some innovation isn't even remotely justified with a cost/benefit risk profile like that.
Had some other country beat us to the punch and exposed their schooling system to free market competition before us, we really would be up the creek without a paddle.
>exposed their schooling system to free market competition
not all things can be effectively put under free market framework. Bottom line optimization and profit maximization, natural main objectives of the known free market implementations, don't work well for nuclear weapons maintenance, law enforcement ... healthcare and education for that exact reason that the main objectives in all these areas aren't the bottom line and profit maximization. For example, private prisons and healthcare in the US is highly profitable enterprises, while they serve their main objectives worse then their non-free-market counterparts in comparably developed countries.
What mechanism prevents competition and free markets from providing good performance in health care or education?
EX: There is significant evidence the cheapest way to improve the public education system is to provide free, healthy, and tasty foods to students. Students are both better behaved, have better attendance, and are better able to learn. However, people seem more willing to pay for apple laptops than apples.
This has nothing to do with the "social cost" (whatever that is).
The definition breaks down for some of the earliest forms of public goods like irrigation systems. Roads and bridges are either 'rivalrous and excludible' or at best a major grey area. So, unless you want to really twist the definition it's simply a poor metric.
PS: Digital copy's of music is another area where excludible is debatable. Library books are another example where they are considered a public good even though they are both 'rivalrous and excludible'.
Perhaps a free market system (used very loosely) with the goal of pursuing profits would, as a byproduct, maximize the health of the people or of learning. I see no evidence that this is the case or that it should be the case. Indeed, in the case of healthcare I have very strong evidence that profit seeking isn't a great motivator.
The U.S. spends by far the most on healthcare as a percent of GDP. It spends far more for certain drugs than socialized systems, has worse health outcomes, and far greater health access inequality.
There is also a moral aspect. It is morally wrong for someone to profit from denying someone else healthcare. Unless a free market system can be devised in such a way that maximizing profit = maximizing healthcare then such a system is immoral. Cartels and cartel pricing come to mind as something that would prevent such a system from ever being successfully implemented.
Everybody disagrees with this. A more plausible statement would be that it ought to offer the best health/price trade-off. But even then only crazy fascists think that would be ideal. Go watch that Sliders episode where the CDC rules America.
> The goal of an educational system ought to be maximizing learning.
Really? Lots of people would disagree. You've avoided the question of what's worth learning, and I'd say it's far more important that an educational system instill a strong work ethic and a sense of morality that I can tolerate.
> Perhaps a free market system (used very loosely) with the goal of pursuing profits would, as a byproduct, maximize the health of the people or of learning.
You have created an impossible standard. No system you describe in three words is going to maximize your utility function, especially not one as absurd as yours. Also the free market vs. non-free market dichotomy is completely silly. With all the government funded research and state schools, you can't say that America's universities are a "free market". But they do have an important free market feature that lower-level public schools lack: choice of what school to attend.
> It is morally wrong for someone to profit from denying someone else healthcare.
I profit by not financing a tunnel through the mountain to the hospital. Sometimes an emergency vehicle takes too long to get to the hospital and this causes the patient to die. How is my behavior morally wrong?
> Indeed, in the case of healthcare I have very strong evidence that profit seeking isn't a great motivator.
No you don't.
> I don't think Sliders is a good reference for discussions on health care policy.
Why?
My employer, who pays me to write software. As we can see, writing software without seeing to it that the road gets built makes me X dollars, but writing software while seeing to it that the road gets built makes me X - Y dollars, where Y is the cost of seeing to it that the road gets built.
If the idea of me being obligated to spend my personal income on this matter makes you quibble about the definition of income and profit, pretend I'm a contractor with an LLC, and my LLC pays for the road. Either way, that's immaterial. I am letting people die by not building that road.
In that case, you are an evil person, since you have profited by engaging in activities that don't deliver healthcare to others.
A person with even a basic understanding of economics would attempt to assign utility to human health and then measure whether or not a system is utility maximizing.
Personally I attempt to do this via revealed preferences - use people's choices to infer their values. And many people reveal that they don't care a great deal about health. For example, an obese person feels their health is less valuable than the enjoyment they receive from a cake or pie. Why should I assign a higher value to that person's health than they themselves do?
My statement wasn't that it is wrong to profit from doing something other than provide health care. My statement is the it is wrong to profit from denying someone care. I have not denied anyone care and I have not increased my income as a result of such denial.
You appear not to understand what profit is and your statement regarding a basic understanding of economics is ironic given this. Your response would have been better without resorting to such a tactic.
Your last paragraph is disconcerting to me. There is much wrong with your position. People do things that are against their long term interests. People sometimes do things they don't want to do. People can be manipulated into doing things they regret. Humans, are by and large, not rational. Part of the purpose of a society is having share responsibilities. To share our burdens. It is sometimes advisable for society as a whole to look out for our long term interests and this is a good thing.
Lets treat profit as income. Your income is not increased, but your potential consumption is increased every time you decide not to buy health care for someone who might benefit from it. Is this immoral? I'm guessing not.
If an insurance company denies someone care (increasing revenue) and spends the money on perks for the CEO (increasing expenses commensurately, for a net profit of $0), would that be moral?
People do things that are against their long term interests.
So your belief is that you know what is best for everyone else, and their choices should be subsumed to your opinions? Um, ok.
"It is sometimes advisable for society as a whole to look out for our long term interests and this is a good thing."
with knowing what is best for everyone else. You logic is faulty. I used the word 'sometimes' and this is an important word in the sentence I wrote. I also never used the phrasing that I know what is best. I said society. Your conclusions are not logically supported from what I've written or stated.
You make too many leaps and appear to go from one extreme to the other. There is a huge gap between "let everyone do as they please" to "I know what is best for everyone".
I don't see how law enforcement is more of a public good than donuts. There is enough wealth in the country, and enough means to provide decent donuts to everyone and decent law enforcement. Why are donuts not a public good when law enforcement is?
What, you don't agree with the use of public funds to supply the basic human right of donuts? Too bad, you have to pay anyway whether you like it or not.
If that sounds ridiculous to you, you now understand how many people feel about other uses of public funds that you happen to agree with.
that is true only in the ideal situation of unlimited law enforcement resources and the type of crimes affecting everybody. In real situation going after specific criminals or crimes [esp. the ones affecting only specific subset of the society] leaves other crimes unpunished and laws unenforced. Thus any real law enforcement inplementation (not theory) demonstrates rivalness and excludability.
Law enforcement, streets, libraries, museums, and education are commonly misclassified as public goods, but they are technically classified in economic terms as quasi-public goods because excludability is possible, but they do still fit some of the characteristics of public goods.
Since ERs can't turn away indigent patients, health care also has some degree of non-excludability, in practice. Perhaps the question of whether or not it's a public good lies at the heart of the health care debate. Here's the argument in favor: http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2009/08/is-health-care-a-public-...
"A school that has only profitability as it's goal will be outed as such in a free market, and will not be chosen by consumers that care more about their children's experience."
Consumers make bad choices. They do so frequently. Besides there is a moral aspect to this.
Suppose a school is very bad. People discover this and go to a competitor school. In the time it takes for people to wise up to the school's terribleness damage has been done to society. I don't see how the free market would be any better at determining this than the current system in the U.S.
As to healthcare; think cartels. What there is no choice for consumers to choose a provider that doesn't "try to bend them over backwards for their own bottom-line"?
If you don't understand how markets better allocate resources than top down rationing systems I suggest you go take economics at the nearest community college.
One of the concepts in the micro-economics principles class you will learn is that education has positive external benefits (beyond the market). In other words there is a marginal social benefit to education that exceeds the market demand. The best way to address this is not to have public school system monopolies of supply and take the cost to near zero - a much more efficient mechanism is to harness (superior) market resource allocation through demand subsidies.
better for what? If you study the economics, you'd know that free market naturally results in the outcomes like "food deserts" and 10%+ uninsured precisely because markets better allocate resources for profit maximization, not for universal coverage (which is a main objective of the public education system and must be, for basic human decency and net positive economical result for the whole society, made an objective of the healthcare system)
"A school that has only profitability as it's goal will be outed as such in a free market, and will not be chosen by consumers that care more about their children's experience. Schools that provide the best long-term experience for the students will have the best profits, no shady practices required."
The reason why the first sentence is poorly phrased is because the second sentence says in effect "if a school really has profitability as a goal, it will naturally avoid shady practices because otherwise it will be destroyed." It's a classic example of short-term vs. long-term decision-making, and in this case suggesting that long-term profitability requires that no shady practices are used for long and will beat out short-term profitability employing shady practices.
It's not a towering argument in favor of free market education, but I'm not sure that University of Phoenix is a counterexample. Do you have more information on this? My understanding was that their main evilness is taking advantage of the public non-free-market federal student loans business to get more students and money instead of lowering their prices, which is what some say would happen if you took the government out of the equation for public and private loan backing.
My own view is that education costs are tightly tied to the school brand first (which includes the most general brand of being able to say you're college-educated anywhere, which is very important for many jobs and shouldn't be (the knowledge yes, not the "spent time at this location with these people" part)), administrators next, then professors, and the actual knowledge somewhere further down near the bottom. MIT's OCW is just one of many places showing you're not paying for the information, but for status, facilities, and someone to help you learn. So education costs aren't so much a public/private or profit/non-profit problem but a cultural one.
no. Both - right for basic education and right for not being robbed/killed - are just guaranteed rights that the government is supposed to deliver upon.
>A school that has only profitability as it's goal will be outed as such in a free market, and will not be chosen by consumers that care more about their children's experience.
speaking about tired argument. To make your argument stronger you should have added some statement about "tricking down of good education from good school students to the students of bad schools".
Without going into how fast and effectively free market can out a bad school, i'll just note that basic education isn't object of consumption, it is a right of the children.
Or are you just saying that currently education is required by law and should remain so?
A non-government school does not have to be for-profit, and can be very good.
Example: the schools run by the Roman Catholic Church.
Also: the small private school in Dallas my wife taught at for three years.
This is readily apparent in East Asia, where the Chinese system of schooling, civil examinations and the mandarin official/gentry system only began to fracture when exposed to Western schools of thought, particularly the latter's advantages in the sciences.
I predict the current system will only even begin to fracture when it is no longer able to perform its primary function on a massive scale - i.e. to enable people who graduate from college to obtain a job.
I was being VERY optimistic. The system I just described would be roughly modelling the free market system, which education is not. Wholesale governmental support of the present system will make it much more "resilient" than it should be.
The good news is that the internet works in our favor--we already have alternative tools which mitigate the lack of good schools. I'm talking about Khan Academy and MIT OpenCourseWare, of course.
edit: correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the US is one of the few countries on earth that has had a consistently high standard of living since WWII, right? My guess is that a few generations of unparalleled abundance has helped atrophy a once voracious society.
is that
>US children
is pure virtual "statistical" entity. The education in the US is local. Chinese children from Bay Area Cupertino are tigers ( as i heard, don't have direct experience). Children of my Russian or "native" (WASP type) American friends in the Bay Area have no problem being accepted to Stanford, Harward, Berkeley (though one "lazy" one was forced to go to lesser known UC campus).
On the other side, beside obvious case of black ghettos, there are well known areas in the US where school boards decide to teach Creationism, where people "cling to their guns and religion" while waiting for the President to bring back from China and hand them down "good paying jobs". What kind of motivation and resulting education will children get there?
The children must not be held hostages of the local political, religious, economical situation. Alabama didn't want to integrate schools - the real force was apllied to enforce the right of the people. The same way here - the basic education is a guaranteed right and the children don't have a way to defend their right. That means that federal government must step in and apply necessary resources (and force if necessary) to make sure that the children's right for the basic education (and that has very specific meaning in the 21st century, and isn't subject to specific religious beliefs of local school board members) isn't violated.
The US has an achievement gap of about 20 pts on PISA, compared to roughly 40 for Norway and even higher in Finland and Sweden.
http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-abou...
This isn't a big deal for nations with few immigrants, but it is a problem for the US.
(Of course, for the sake of making a snarky argument, I'm making the same fallacy as the author: if we copy other nations education systems blindly, we'll get the same result.)
I think other factors like innate curiosity and developed capacity for work are more important.
[1] Franklin's entire formal schooling consists of 2 years at the Boston Latin School, from which he did not graduate. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin#Early_life
I've read a longer article by the same author (Marc Tucker) called "Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: An American Agenda for Education Reform."
http://www.ncee.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Standing-on-t...
I just tested to see if that had been submitted to HN before, and it had not, so now it is linked to from a new thread.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3321124
Tucker underestimates, in my opinion, the importance of learner choice, but based on international comparisons he correctly identifies several management practices that would make the school system in the United States better for most learners. I have rather more fondness, based on life experience, for learner choice in schools because I live in a state with statewide public school open enrollment,
http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/StuSuc/EnrollChoice/index.h...
http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/JustParent/SchChoice/index....
which has encouraged Minnesota school districts to offer innovative programs to draw in students.
A couple of my math professors at the university I attend went to China over the summer to get an idea of what their primary education classrooms are like and compare them to ours. One of the things I've heard regarding the overall demographics is that there they don't have the expectation that all students are going to get educated to the extent that we attempt to here. At a certain point if students don't perform well enough they are transitioned out to a vocational school instead of following an academic track.
This very well could have a profound effect on comparing scores across countries, their top percent of students is being compared to our entire population of students.
If you consider some of the books that are being tossed around in these threads, e.g. Liping Ma's Knowing and Teaching..., one of the small things that sticks out is a language issue that can have an impact on a young child's number development.
Also, according to that book there is an entirely different mindset when it comes to not only teaching as a profession but in their professional development as well. They are afforded more opportunities for planning and collaboration compared to what is often experienced here.
I think we as a society have to consider whether it is feasible to continue down this road where we attempt to educate everyone to the same level.
In any case, as soon as an author writes something like
>To many in the financial community, these market-inspired reform ideas are very appealing.
I know this is smear job rather than an intellectually honest appraisal. I mean, really. We shouldn't try new models of schooling because they are basically like the financial crisis? Are you kidding me?
When you optimize for creation of wealth for others (products / services) and for yourself (positive life experiences), you end up with a very different solution: http://www.sudval.org/
E.g., in Germany at one time, the secondary schools that were measured was the academic track, this was being compared against the US's schools which was the general secondary school population.
I'm not sure if this still holds true but it's something to be aware of - the measurement bias.
Paying teachers well & requiring them to have in-depth knowledge of the subject is good. No argument there!
The top performing countries' strategy is to have mostly Asian or Northern European students, and very few of third/second world extraction.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3319177
was able to verify what I had read in other official sources on international testing programs, namely that United States students underperform (because their schools underperform) on an ethnicity-matched basis. One detailed report on the issue that I think you will find to be interesting reading is the Education Next report on mathematics learning opportunities for top mathematics students in the United States,
http://educationnext.org/teaching-math-to-the-talented/
which shows that United States students miss opportunities in school to develop their abilities to the fullest. A look at the content of mathematics textbooks in different countries, and specialized studies on differences in teaching practices
http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary-Mathematic...
http://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Gap-Improving-Education-Class...
in different countries have helped me understand the differences I frequently observe between people of the same ethnicity who received their primary and secondary education in different countries.
The other participant did not verify that it was caused by school underperformance, merely that I misread the numbers. The correction puts Asian Americans at #5 in the world rather than #4. It does not change the fact that Asian Americans are still 32 points higher than the first non-Asian nation (Hungarians). Nor does it change the fact that European Americans are #1 among European nations + Anglosphere.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trends_in_International_Mathema...
Incidentally, any claims one makes to the inherent superiority of Asian education systems must be limited to math and science. Asian Americans are #1 in combined literacy (#2 if you consider Shanghai as a separate group), and European Americans are #2 among primarily European-descended nations.
(See tables R1 and R3. http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2011/2011004_1.pdf )
(As before, I'm only posting this so others are not misled by tokenadult's logical fallacies and intellectual dishonesty.)
You point to the fact that Asian Americans underperform most all east-Asian countries. This is certainly interesting, but it hardly shows that the US's underachievement isn't mostly explained by ethnic make up. In particular, one would expect that a hypothetically strong group to perform worse when educated in a diverse system than when that group is educated in a system designed just for it.