The fact that most of the new funding in education goes to a bloated administrative class rather than teachers and instructors make me wonder if perhaps that are ulterior motives to the never ending calls for additional funding.
I just retired after a 35 year teaching career. I spent 27 of them working fot the Los Angeles USD. I also worked for 6 years in a tiny small-town district in rural Nebraska and 2 in a suburban Southern California district. Bureaucratic bloat is directly related to scale.
That's interesting and I'm sure you are correct, Tim. Why do you think the bloat happens? My school district is 90k kids. Maybe I'm just ignorant on this one. I can assure you that the software companies I worked for with 80,000 employees had orders of magnitude more "what do you actually do?" people than the 500 person companies. Is it just empire building? What's the solution?
It is an interesting question and from my limited knowledge of bureaucratic dynamics I’d say it’s a common pattern. I think it’s related to such dreary phenomena as mission creep, fiefdoms patched together by managerial types and loose oversight of institutional-level grant programs, among other things.
The legit bloat is the massive staff needed to comply with state and federal mandates.
The non-legit bloat is often done in urban school districts with massive poverty when the district is run as a jobs program. If you read Dale Russakoff's "The Prize" (I forget if this was in the article or the book), she talks about clerks having clerks having clerks. It's not so much waste as it is getting a lot of moms in the district employed. Ok, that's waste, but you see what I mean.
Other than that, I'm with you--I dont' see a lot of staffing waste that isn't occasioned by law.
Is that just bc they can? I was reading in another substack’s comments about how small school districts like those on Long Island are really expensive and wasteful bc of duplicated administration. That being said, that may be different than the type of administrative bloat you’re talking about, as those small districts probably don’t have some of the more exotic or specialized roles that a large urban sd does
The basic problem is the conviction that throwing money at a problem is a sufficient response. Laudable goals are primarily first addressed by being forced into a reductive equation: more $ = the only hope of satisfactory resolution. When they become available the funds essentially become part of a slush fund. Reporting requirements and guardrails aren’t necessarily absent or lacking - often exactly the opposite - but putting everything in motion as intended becomes a time consuming additional burden, which necessitates hiring people to assume the duties or free up others for the task.
Which makes me wonder if funding that is actually spent on students and teachers (as opposed to spent on administrators) is in fact an important factor. If there is a disconnect in the data between spending vs. student outcomes as spending has risen to pay for admin, this really could be a question of that extra money is not actually going to students in a meaningful way.
I agree that admin bloat and it's associated cost are too high. The money needs to be used more wisely.
I would ask where we would spend it to make a difference. According to what Freddie posted above, lowering class sizes only has a small impact, as hard as that is to believe, which tells me that simply hiring more teachers instead of additional admins wouldn't move the needle.
I have a suspicion that if we were going to slide the money somewhere else, then bringing in additional teachers for additional very small classes for the most disruptive students would probably pay the most dividends. It would not necessarily improve the bottom performers, but it would separate them from the rest of the student body and allow most classes to proceed at an improved rate and with better focus.
I wouldn't be surprised if this actually helped the kids on the border between "good" kids and "bad" kids the most by removing a disruptive influence. I don't see this as politically feasible unless things get way worse but it's the direction that I would look if we actually wanted to improve student outcomes.
I was working as an assistant a while back and it was all to help minimize the damage that one child was inflicting on the entire class. This kid took close to 30% of the teacher's time.
I definitely think removing the most disruptive students makes a difference but mostly on the social/emotional well being of the class. Those aren't things to be looked down on. But will it really move the needle on the reading/math scores, maybe a little, but not a lot.
I mean if one child out of say 30 is monopolizing 10-30% (in case 30% is accused of being hyperbole) of the teacher's time then removing the major source distraction as well as allowing the teacher to better focus on the lesson instead of classroom management then I'd find it hard to believe the actual educational results wouldn't improve. I have a feeling that the benefits would also compound over time leading to small but steady gains similar to the small but steady losses that we've been seeing for decades.
Regardless as you said if that improves the social atmosphere of the class and frees the teacher up then I believe we still have a positive outcome by switching admin paychecks for teacher paychecks.
Not hyperbole. I was there in a temporary part time position because I was also a teacher and had those skills. ( I had four kids and only wanted local part time work)
Education is not uniform nationwide. There is a tremendous amount of difference even within a school district.
You do occasionally get kids who delight in disruption and they're very good at it.
I had one kid in my class (when I was a full time teacher in an inner city school) who took at least 10 to 20% of my time when he was there. I also had kids who had serious learning disabilities and challenging family situations; those I could deal with quite well. It's the kid whose mission in life is to be the focus of attention and cares nothing for anyone else who that you can't really make accommodations for.
Many people are certain they know what is what in schools, though they've never taught in a real classroom situation. You can have a Ph.D. in Education and never have been a classroom teacher...or have only taught in college, which is a whole different ballgame than compulsory education.
I imagine that they'll eventually need to pivot to another party line once the underspending myth is accepted as debunked. I'm curious to see what that is and where it goes.
Maybe all the education wonks will start pushing Charter Schools, just as soon as the PMC has moved themselves there in force as well.
Just as the Military Industrial Complex always has another hot or cold war around the corner to boost spending, I'm sure eventually, the PMC types in the education sector will have another expensive fix ready to go just in time.
I don't think they'll ever need to pivot. If people accept that there is no way to equalize opportunity for success in school, they'll have to accept that people don't necessarily deserve the level of success they have in life. This would mean that we couldn't continue to let talented people grow as rich and keep untalented people so terribly poor, because a great deal of that is just chance. Even if the evidence is overwhelming (and it is), the talented people are never going to accept it as valid, because doing so is part-and-parcel to accepting a tax increase.
I don't totally disagree; however, I do find genetic determinism based on talent to be partially inaccurate as it assumes an equal level of effort, which I simply don't see in the world historically or currently.
If everyone tried 100% all the time then talent would be the predominant factor and the talented paying higher taxes would be justified. In the real world, talent, while undeniably important and absolutely required at the highest levels of any endeavor, is wildly overrated in its ability to predict a middle-class outcome, which I believe is reasonable for most non people to aspire to.
Assuming talent, in this case, is mostly to mean IQ, while IQ absolutely tracks with income (and many other positive metrics), there are entirely too many over- and under-achievers for me to believe that drastically changing our taxes/incentives to support a permanent underclass is the right way forward.
As to whether that's a major reason why they'll never pivot on their messaging is a very fair point.
Theres no doubt that IQ itself is not the end-all-be-all, but what I’m struggling with is the certainty many have that the other traits that cause success are not heritable. Everyone knows a few bright people that cant stop screwing up and a few dull people who can grind out long workdays and produce effectively for professional organizations. But who is to say that there are not hereditary traits that cause some people to be natirally inclined towards applying sustained effort to things over a long period of time? In the time since Locke first wrote about the blank slate, the advances in scientific knowledge have only pointed in the direction of heredity being much more important than previously thought… how confident can a thoughtful person be that heredity doesnt influence “effort”?
Agreed that there are absolutely genetic traits besides IQ that cause success. One of the more noticeable ones is the need for sleep. Amongst the CEO class, including big companies as well as "smaller" successes (only millions in revenue), something I've noticed both from personal contact and reading interviews, biographies, etc. is a need for substantially less sleep than most people. Typically about 4 hours and this type of person is refreshed and ready to attack their much larger day. For the vast majority of people, no amount of sleep hygiene, diet, exercise, or pharmaceuticals is going to make them productive over a long course of time with less than 6 hours of sleep.
There are several issues we come to though, when taking genetic determinism to its logical conclusion. The first is that general history and experience simply contradict the idea at least as it applies to effort/hustle/work ethic. People have worked in various jobs for millennia, with typical work hours ranging from 8 to 16 hours, often in far worse conditions than most of us can imagine in our air-conditioned workplaces. I don't simply don't believe we've changed genetically that much in the last few decades to centuries to believe that an identifiable subset of the population lacks the "work ethic" to succeed at a basic level even if some people are "gifted" with an extraordinary work ethic.
The next issue I can see is that if you can prove empirically that some people are simply not intelligent and/or hard-working enough to "get by" whatever that means, then it opens the door to a number of terrible ideas that are better left in the past, such as eugenics, caste systems, and worse. I don't know enough to say if the largest reason these systems have fallen into disuse is morality or if it's been science showing them to be unsupportable however, if you could scientifically prove this to be true, then a lot of things would come roaring back, which I'm against but I also doubt that people who were hard-working and intelligent would consent to be an "elite slave class" supporting a large underclass.
Finally, the last argument you would hear from "useful" people who would have to work harder and pay more in taxes would be, "I'm genetically disinclined to care about your plight, thus I'm voting to not raise taxes," which is just as valid as the other way around.
There were drifters and slackers in previous eras, too. The drivers of improvements in working conditions have never been hustle-culture/CEO types, but rather less greedy people who wanted to be able to focus on love and leisure. This fact supports the idea that it is good to reward people less for being greedy hustle-culture CEO types, because rewarding people for such behavior has in the past made the world worse. I think your observations about sleep may have the causal arrow pointed in the wrong direction--greedy people are just too consumed by greed to sleep well.
There are too may definitions of "eugenics", but I don't think anyone is really against it on a deep, meaningful level--the elimination of hereditary disease is an incredibly popular idea. There is already an extant (if informal) caste system, and no one with power or influence seems to have much of a problem with it. I don't think its right to say that either of these ideas are "in disuse".
There is an extent to which the hardworking and intelligent folks are already an "elite slave class", but they would always live materially better lives than less intelligent people by virtue of being more capable and farsighted. The issue is that we have to find a way to raise the floor on the human experience, and there doesn't seem to be any way to do that other than by lowering the ceiling.
A lot of people already believe that Charter Schools have been pushed by the right in order to defund Big (public) Education and privatize for-profit Charter Schools (https://www.gse.harvard.edu/ideas/ed-magazine/17/05/battle-over-charter-schools). Like privatizing Social Security, I imagine this push is some combination of dogma that says everything the government does, private markets can do better plus a money grab. In the case of Social Security, money management fees for Wall Street. For education, an opportunity for MAGA to fight "Woke" curriculum in schools and inculcate kids with America First ideology.
Time to do your homework. Charter schools have historically attracted substantial support from neoliberals at the highest levels of government. Maybe digging into the background of Obama’s Secretary of Ed. would be a good starting point,; watching “Waiting for Superman” would cover the socio-cultural angle. Your 5 page report is due Friday at the beginning of class. No late papers accepted.
As an interested observer in the local urban school system my son attends, I’ve noticed that a higher than demographically representative percentage of our school admins are African American and I’ve often wondered if school funding is at least politically intended to further school administration as something of a professional jobs program.
When calls for cuts in admin spending have been made, it’s a fairly predictable set of political representatives who have opposed it and those representatives are coincidentally generally representatives of districts whose demographics align with African Americans.
It’s unsurprising that urban school districts became something of a professional bastion for African Americans, given historically weaker job options and school desegregation timelines and probably due to the logic that suggests hiring African American admins makes sense if the largest underperforming group of students is also African American.
Unfortunately streamlining school administration just becomes that much harder because you’re now having to cut jobs with an employee demographics that are biased towards an underprivileged group.
"Poorer schools with more students of color on average receive more per-pupil funding that schools with richer and whiter students."
Does this mean funding of all types? Or just more state/federal funding that is intended to offset disparities in local funding?
Comparing public schools where I live, salaries for teachers vary quite significantly between school districts, with poorer communities typically paying lower salaries and therefore often having a difficult time hiring and retaining teachers. I've always believed this was due to less funds being available at those schools but I'm wondering if I've been wrong in that understanding.
Title I funding for a variety of non-salary items is federal and based on SES levels; the poorer the students and community the higher it goes. Salaries for almost all teachers are are generally dependent on state and local funding.
Historucally many districts with an abundance of wealthy locals pay relatively low salaries - Santa Barbara CA comes to mind. There are many factors at play, and average income rank isn’t necessarilly directly related to relative teacher pay.
"The NYT piece quotes experts who are ensconced in the Official Dogma and who would never let these studies shake them out of it."
I had a discussion today with a young attorney, a goodthink striver who recited all the latest Team D platitudes concerning a certain issue of the day, and all of which were easily debunked. Not because I am so much more clever or better informed, but because it was obvious that this guy hadn't thought any of this through other than reciting the party line. Even he admitted it.
But it doesn't matter. He is acutely aware of what the High Status opinion on any given issue is, and, like the good striver he is, he will never deviate from it, as long as it is the High Status position at the moment.
I had a similar jaw-dropping experience with a colleague who, when offered irrefutable evidence contradicting his party stance, simply refused to even look at it for fear of upsetting an apple cart either at work or at home, I never found out which.
The idea that money can alter outcomes to any significant degree seems like the type of opinion only a person who has no real experience with public schools in economically diverse communities could hold.
Ask anyone who went to a public school that draws from a wide variety of backgrounds and it's abundantly obvious that the primary factor is their home life/family involvement/emphasis on education at home/whatever else you want to call it. That's why, in a classroom where all have largely the same resources, the outcomes couldn't be more disparate. The parents that care tend to have kids that care. The parents that don't tend to have kids that don't. Don't think there's enough money in the world to fix that.
“ the primary factor is their home life/family involvement/emphasis on education at home/whatever else you want to call it.”
False. The primary factor is genetically low academic ability. How do we know? Adoption studies. You take a kid born to parents with low acetic ability and adopt them into highly educated households and they still struggle academically. All the reading and stress on education can’t overcome a profound lack of ability.
I have no doubt that is true, but at what percentage is that the issue? I mean, if there are schools where only 10% are meeting grade level proficiencies, is it your opinion that 90% of the kids in those schools lack the cognitive ability to complete the course work? Or are there multiple factors (of which genetics is likely one) that explain it?
I don't proclaim to know, but my hunch is while there is a small percentage who simply lack the aptitude to do the work, it's not the biggest driver. My suspicion is still that the biggest driver, as a percentage of the student body, is work ethic/commitment to education. Which gets back to my original point.
There is a small percentage but the percentage isn’t uniform across communities. In a community of highly educated professionals only a small percentage of kids will lack the ability. But in a community made up of low skill workers the percentage will be much higher.
We’d also have to look at how proficiency is defined. If it’s defined as the median then it’s easy to imagine 90% of kids in a low skill worker community being incapable of proficiency.
Certainly possible. But my understanding is the minimal proficiency standards in most states are not centered around the median. We don't fail half the students every year in this country and never have. I think, almost by definition, it's a standard that the vast majority of students, with a base-level of effort, should be able to pass. Now, I could see clusters in extremely poor areas where you could have an atypical collection of cognitively impaired students. But my guess would be those are few and far between and certainly doesn't explain wholesale failures of entire school districts. I mean, unless we're just going to take the position that Detroit is populated almost exclusively by sub-90 IQs, there's more going on.
82.5 million Americans have an IQ below 90 - they are concentrated in low income areas. It makes perfect sense that a high percentage of students in Detroit have IQs below 90z
This is true, but I believe that those who were adopted tend to have better outcomes as adults... more likely to have stable jobs and families. Environment does matter...a lot.
I also don't think you can discount the instability that comes with crime and poverty when it comes to academic outcomes.
But we keep focusing on success being about getting the high test scores, going to college and becoming an engineer, doctor etc.
Also, this is doubtless racist, sexist and homophobic, but I suspect that educational outcomes are first and foremost a matter of how motivated the students are. The amount spent per student is at most irrelevant.
One can "suspect" all one likes, but no matter how motivated a student is, if the student does not have the genetic potential to succeed intellectually, he or she will not. Past that, then, yes, the amount per student spent is indeed irrelevant.
Grades, yes. And admissions tests have been made simultaneously easier and harder in ways that make it easy for someone relatively smart, but not a genius, to get higher scores.
Still, I doubt you've met anyone with a 1200 or higher SAT or 28 or higher ACT that is intellectually mediocre.
I didn't ask their SAT scores or whatever, but they were graduates of Ivy League institutions and they weren't exactly athletic heroes or legacies or whatever, so they must have done tolerably well.
It’s always fun to have a kool kat around. Makes me want to join the game. So hey! Here’s some wet food fresh out of the can for you both: maybe Century 21’s widely accepted metrics, particularly those used to discern academic potential and ‘merit’ are actually much thinner indicators than they’re advertised to be. Or simply aren’t worth their current weight. To get my drift allow me to suggest some off-the-wall juxtaposition of historical cultural figures with a contemporary high-achieving elite straw man. Who would have the higher tested IQ, a 30-something software genius pulling down a fat 6-figures @Google, or, say…Edgar Allen Poe? Louis Armstrong? Gregory Peck? Richard Pryor? Napoleon? Marie Curie? Mother Theresa? Just a parlor game, like batting around a ball of yarn or something…but fun for awhile.
I'm not sure why you think I was being a kool kat, but you certainly aren't. I mean, good lord, are you unaware that it's fairly easy to look at a person's life, their education for the time, the nature of their achievements, and their demographics and make a ballpark guess?
Statistically, odds are likely Louis Armstrong had a sub90 IQ. Ditto Richard Pryor, whose mother was a prostitute and who was in jail or in trouble constantly. No real correlation between Pryor's comic genius and brains and he time and again made shit decisions in his life. Gregory Peck, on the other hand, was one course short of graduating from Berkeley at a time when a college degree required calculus, so odds are he was quite smart. Nothing about Mother Theresa indicates more than slightly above average brains, maybe over 100. Marie Curie's writings and ideas have been evaluated and she's well beyond genius level.
30 something software "genius"? What's that mean? IQ over 130, probably, not any guarantees of more, so probably competing with Gregory Peck. Armstrong and Pryor are great creative talents, but not geniuses. Not even particularly smart.
The question is this: how consequential is ‘IQ’? Certainly it is obvious that it does have some utility, but my point is that the actual limits of that utility are inescapable considerations. I appreciate you taking my comment seriously enough to respond thoughtfully - thanks for that. As to Armstrong’s IQ (or that of anyone else who made the list), my ultimate point is that the result of any IQ test are essentially irrelevant in many important contexts. He grew up with a significant amount of adversity and was fortunate, as a virtual orphan, to be taken-in by a family that kept him fed and clothed when even that much was in doubt for him at a very young age. He undoubtedly, by contemporary standards, received a sub-par formal education, and, in fact, we really have no way to accurately estimate his IQ. To do so is speculative, as you must grant. I have used him as an example for that reason. The truest measure of his overall aptitude as a person is, of course, his substantial contribution to 20th century music, which was a socio-cultural force that helped move technological development forward. (Not something that we can say about such reputed ‘geniuses’ as, for example, John Cage.) Armstrong’s improvisational ability as an instrumentalist, which is not within reach of any multiple choice test (or any other typical academic assessment tool), was truly exceptional. Descriptors appropriate to that manifest ability include such earmarks of singular achievement as ‘complexity’, ‘high-level processing’, and ‘originality’. This isn’t a subjective evaluation. Listen to his best work and see what you think. You may need to familiarize yourself with early jazz to gain a genuine appreciation of it, and perhaps it isn’t a project you have much interest in, but before making blythe assumptions about his IQ score you could consider how poorly limited assessment tests can serve as a comprehensive measure of individual potential. Suffice it to say that while I recognize the usefulness of IQ tests within many economically valuable niches, they are also potentially misleading in a way that intelligent people should be consistently mindful of. And btw, you are clearly smart, but Feral Finster was the kool kat in question.
The vast majority of students can succeed intellectually, given motivation and proper resources. But those with lower intelligence above that threshold will probably still rank lower *relative* to the smartest. But outside of the truly disabled, human beings can succeed in intellectual pursuits.
Sure, but "how motivated the student is" is itself a product of the genetic and environmental factors Freddie mentions - I don't think it's meaningfully distinct.
The effect of spending on education outcomes is an empirical question best addressed by well identified statistical studies. If you want any academic social scientist to take you seriously you have to deeply understand that form of rhetoric and engage with it deeply. I don’t really see any of that in your post, just graphs and hand waving. Personally, I’m most convinced by exhaustive posts that track down every single study on the topic, explain which ones are high quality by referencing statistic principles, and then show that the preponderance of results fall on one side rather than the other. I know this can be boring, but you do want to be taken seriously, right?
I linked to studies, and I also referred to general knowledge among people who regularly consume educational studies, as I have done for fifteen years. Have you read my book? Have you read the dozens of posts I've written that extensively cite the research? More to the point, three NYT piece that I'm in direct conversation with here has dramatically less reference to research than this post. You see, there are different types of engagement for different audiences; if I wanted to write a formal literature review, as I've done before, I would have done so.
I suspect in fact that you know very well that there are different standards of evidence in different contexts, and you're just mad because you disagree with me. Indeed, I find the idea that you don't know the difference between the level of evidence required in a blog post to be absurd. And I see that you read writers that regularly cite essentially no research. So I think this is about protecting your priors. You're also grandstanding and condescending in my own space, which I don't tolerate, so you're banned.
Isn't part of the low academic achievement related to this mania to turn high schools into college prep programs?
I was shocked several years ago when a friend of mine, a high school chemistry teacher, informed me that it is actually way more expensive to maintain high schools with vocational-tech programs (arguably, far more valuable to many students) than it is to operate college prep high schools. That's the reason why American schools are now overemphasizing "academic potential."
I honestly don't think many students need to possess much intrinsic academic potential at all to benefit from education. They just need to have access to the _right_ type of education. College prep may only be it for a minority.
It's amazing how few people understand that CTE classes are wildly more expensive. However, the classes are also very well funded. The hard part is finding the teachers who will get the credentials. I am a gen ed teacher with three CTE credentials that I got purely to qualify for Perkins funding. My sections were free to the school for three years and I got 16000 or more for equipment.
That said, no, schools don't push college prep because the classes are cheaper. The primary reason is the achievement gap. Any school sending fewer blacks and Hispanics to college is going to be blamed for failing them and there are all sorts of federal and state laws that will kick in if they actively seek to move kids out of the college track.
Moreover, your entire premise is goofy, if you understood how school worked.
Basically you think that kids who aren't interested in academics are just longing for some real education to get serious about and hahaha ha.
CTE is expensive, remember? The tracks are demanding and require expensive equipment. Many CTE tracks result in college anyway (info & comms, engineering, pharm, marketing) and even many of the ones that don't (hospitality, woodwork, hospitality) are rigorous programs that require commitment and good academic skills.
So the fond notion that all the kids who cut class and watch TikTok during algebra are just looking for demanding job oriented skills based ed is, again, hahaha.
By the way, another fond delusion many share is that in the past, auto, shop, and home ec were effective routes that were tragically cut in the obsessive push for college. Nope. Voc ed classes were dumping grounds since the 30s or earlier.
Voced classes were cut in the 80s when Nation at Risk report bewailed all the wasteful classes that high school kids took while the commies were eating our lunch. That's what ended the supposedly halcyon era of shop class and home ec that was actually, as noted, a dumping ground. CTE was then reborn into the program I described above.
Any student with the commitment to succeed in CTE tracks will have the ability to take the academic course as well. There are some kids who don't care about academics that love their noncollege CTE courses, but their drive ensures they'll get the minimum done so they qualify for internships.
A useful voced class for the kids we need to divert out of school would be "get up in the morning and show up at school every day for 6 months". If they get through that then maybe "make a bed with hospital corners " and "sweep out the kitchen". Then "shake hands and make intelligent conversation " would be useful, along with "here's the actual amount your paycheck will be after taxes and soc sec".
Because basically, the kids who can't manage school are really low achievers and. to add to the bad news, don't present themselves in racially felicitous percentages.
Hey! I appreciate the information. I don't know a helluva lot about public education.
In the post above, I was basically quoting My Pal, The High School Chemistry Teacher, who is completely convinced that college prep is all about excising operational costs and supplying logs to the Great Higher Education assembly line.
I’m assuming that when you say dumping ground you mean all the morons and behavior cases would get thrown into technical path in high school. That’s what I remember at my public school (TN, late 90s). Technical path courses were basically just babysitting for the dumbest and most troublemaking students, usually bc they had coaches for teachers.
But what a real technical path should have offered is actual shop training, apprenticeships, etc. nothing those kids did in high school counted towards any certification or training in a trade or blue-collar field. No wonder the kids didn’t do shit in those courses, there seriously was no point.
CTE classes in autoshop, woodworking, hospitality and culinary, firefighting, all offer those things. The others (engineering, digital photography) are more geared towards college. So they do offer those things.
And the "dumping ground" era was before CTE classes, before Nation at Risk.
I went to suburban public high school in the South in the late 90s/early aughts. I hope that those courses are meaningful now, but they weren’t then, and that was almost 20 years after A Nation at Risk.
I dunno this was a well-resourced district. Though yeah, we didn’t have wood shop or metal shop just some dumb shit like air cooled engines which I think is basically lawnmower repair. But this lack of investment in a real technical path was districtwide or, I imagine, statewide.
I’m guessing you worked in the Northeast somewhere, which is known for investing in meaningful technical path programs. But most places aren’t the northeast. I contend that in the vast majority of school districts CTE was left for community colleges to do and high school CTE was meaningless bullshit to dump the kids who chewed tobacco during class in. And that’s bad: we should move to real, meaningful CTE. But I don’t think that’s happened very many places. Instead high schools are embracing dual enrollment (god I wish this had been an option for me) and CTE can be farmed out that way, which I have no problem with. The last two years of high school should be community college work anyway, regardless of what path you’re on to graduate.
You make some good points. Bravo for getting your CTE game going. You’ve put yourself at the leading edge of an improvement in public education’s update of the old shop class paradigm. Interesting that you mention Perkins funding. I taught in a very small rural high school/jr. hi for 6 years and a Perkins grant helped an energetic and conscientious young shop teacher put together an excellent program that served our students exceptionally well. In a larger sense it is important that the word about good stuff in schools and ed. gains some traction, given how reliable a whipping boy role they often play for complainers across the political spectrum.
But it is undoubtedly true that the relatively recent emphasis on college prep. classes is at least partly motivated by the lower overhead they impose on school budgets. My former employer (I’m recently retired), LA Unified Schools, has completely shut down all of its old shop programs in middle and high schools. Updated CTE programs are available in some of them (including my last school), but they aren’t remotely as common as shop or home ec. classes were decades ago. In California it is likely that the trend away from the old status was the advent of Prop. 13 limits on property taxes, which dates back to 1978. It had a big impact on school funding overall, though I am uncertain how specifically it affected voc. ed.
Century 21 CTE has great potential as a feature of public schooling that non-public schools will struggle to match, so savvy strategists ought to prioritize it. They’re badly in need of some good selling points.
Just to be clear, I had the experience for the CTE credential. I was in tech for years. I just never expected to be teahing it.
"Updated CTE programs are available in some of them (including my last school), but they aren’t remotely as common as shop or home ec. classes were decades ago."
I agree. But again, it's not because they are expensive. It's because Nation at RIsk in 1983 and then focusing since then insisted that all CTE be career-oriented. Look at the research. It's all about "how many credentials did kids get" not "did the kids find the courses interesting and useful". There's no room for investment in vocational ed that isn't directly linked to a credential or in some cases a college degree.
THe focus on college prep is not because CTE is expensive. It's because it's much harder to fake success in CTE and schools and colleges both are motivated to at least facially claim they've reduced the achievement gap.
I’ve worked as a secondary teacher in very different settings. The small rural school I taught in was never going to abandon shop classes - they serve a genuine need for the small-town / ranch kids who go there. That’s typical for the region and its many similar schools. I also taught in a very large suburban Southern California high school for a couple years. It had a thoroughly tricked-out voc. ed. program along the traditional lines. The medium-sized district had dropped a lot of money on an extensive campus revamp, including a new main building with darkroom facilities. This was 2005, so they weren’t exactly anticipating future outside developments very well, though they did have a newer video-production program. My pal the young wood shop teacher was still there doing his thing the last time I glanced at the school web site.
Since then I have taught exclusively for LA Unified Schools, my original employer (first 10 years). Most of my first stint was spent at a middle school and during that time a guy who had worked as an aid for me got a chance to re-open the wood shop. He did well with that and stuck with it for years. He has had to adapt to new priorities, though, and has de-emphasized the hands-on aspect. I also spent a year at a nearby high school back then (late ‘90s) and its shop offerings were being passively phased-out through retirement attrition. This detail is telling. The old style voc. ed. had been part of the core mission of urban public schools in much the same way it remains so in rural ones. It wasn’t merely a ‘dumping ground’ for dumb kids. The movement away from that level of priority since then is obvious. And that’s what it is: a change of priorities. Old style voc. ed. was geared to a society and economy in which skilled manual labor was more common.
Another frequently overlooked factor that has diminished it is the fear of liability and litigation among ed. leadership. No one sues over a paper cut. But if a goofy 14 year-old cuts off a finger his own demonstrable negligence will no longer be enough to get the school off the hook. So it’s not just teacher salaries competing with other outside employers, the need to maintain and periodically replace expensive equipment, or inappropriate emphasis on college prep for students who aren’t academically sharp enough to warrant it. It’s all that plus the prospect of major settlement cash being paid-out on the public’s dime.
I can only tell you that pushing college ed courses is manifestly not about money.
It's hard to get CTE teachers, and I absolutely agree that having CTE classes without CTE teachers is hard to fund. I'm just categorically not agreeing that we push college prep because it's cheaper. Not in a billion years. If we wanted to be inexpensive, we'd stop pushing four years of math, English, etc.
I’m not an advocate of limiting voc. ed. at all. I’m just trying to note trends I’ve seen as a career high school teacher who worked in different places. Personally I think the upside of CTE is worth the expense and that it is ultimately affordable if school districts play the cards right. But LAUSD is very large - 2nd biggest enrollment nationally- and can probably serve as a leading indicator. It has also been plagued by very expensive litigation and settlements for a variety of reasons (many of the biggest related to administrative malfeasance in child abuse cases) over a long period - decades now. I can’t cite any specific document or quote about de-emphasizing voc. ed. but doubt there would be much hard evidence like that anyway unless one were to unearth transcripts of board members or superintendents speaking candidly in executive session. But actions speak louder than words and telegraph strategic priorities clearly enough. They may realize that more new-&-improved CTE is desirable and affordable. What I mentioned previously are the excuses they would likely employ so they can throw money at other things instead. The objection to it that it was historically used to sideline black and brown students would also certainly be included, despite the fact that it is no longer the substantial issue it once was. But would any of them dust-off A Nation at Risk, which came out in 1983? I seriously doubt it. I worked closely as a mentor teacher with a woman who is now a board member. She’s smart, well read and has a law degree from UCLA. But any influence it may have on her is almost certainly indirect at most. She may have heard of it but it came out the year before she was born.
This was an excellent piece. You obviously have a real world (and historical) understanding of the problems endemic in education today. I read this and think how can you get this guy, and people like him involved in the education system, at the right places and positions, to address problems without just throwing money at them?
Freddie - I think it would be smart to combine your areas of expertise on education and interventions, and help folks disentangle two ideas 1) increased funding or fancy new education interventions don't meaningfully improve your child's academic performance, and 2) yes, many American schools are wildly mis-managed or are modeled on delusional ideals, and there are good reasons to address both of those things, but it might not influence your child's academic performance.
I think parents should be forgiven for thinking that obvious education mismanagement adversely affects their children's learning. And parents can see mismanagement everywhere. Ask any parent or teacher about the school experience, you'll get a long laundry list of insane administrative decisions that they just have to accommodate. Or with new initiatives, every year the spending goes up or a new program is announced, with promises for better outcomes, and every year there are no returns. Parents conclude that the administration is ineffective due to persistence with these illogical ideas and bad policies. Who could blame them for asking for more from schools?
Do we know whether the increase in funding is spent on the traditional scope of academic learning or whether it's being spent on trying to address social problems? Food and clothes, yes, but also a 1:1 aid for a kid who can't regulate because they aren't cared for at home and just watch violent tv all day?
No. One to one aides are for kids who will never, ever live outside an institution once they hit 21, which is how long public schools have to pay for them. They are kids who can't walk and require very expensive wheel chairs and regular diaper changes and "summer school" and yes, a lot of the expenses are due to special ed mandates.
that's not how 1:1s are used where I am. Most classes have 1-2 kids with a 1:1. It's our solution to extremely poorly behaved kids (maybe disabled, maybe just unmet needs at home) who do things like bite, destroy classrooms, shout and run around during class, etc.
In rural areas like where I live, a teacher's pay isn't bad. I'm sure it's terrible in places like SF and NY where the cost of living is so high, but in a lot of places a teacher's salary is fine. It also depends on what state you live in and what sort of funding they have for schools.
For the average person who still believes the funding thesis, I wonder if a big part of it is people not updating their knowledge over decades. If you're 40+, you may vaguely remember hearing that school funding is important anytime between 1990-2010, then just didn't read about it again. It's similar to people who when they hear "energy efficiency" or "water efficiency," they think about bad 90's low-flow toilets or older ugly fluorescent lights and don't realize that there have been decades of technological improvement.
That doesn't excuse the NYT though for not researching the topic enough before publishing.
"We live in a reality where New York annually spends the most on school funding per pupil while barely outperforming Utah, which spends the least; where the United States, a very rich country, spends around eight times as much per pupil as Vietnam, a very poor country, and yet is essentially at parity in international educational comparisons; where the United Kingdom spends dramatically more on education than South Korea but does dramatically worse."
Apologies if you have addressed this elsewhere, but what do you believe accounts for Vietnam & South Korea's educational performance? 100% cultural differences?
Have you ever written about what is actually taught about American history class vs. what liberals claim is taught? I keep hearing these claims that high school history class basically doesn't mention the Native Americans and slavery is glossed over and they give this whitewashed version of American history etc., but somehow I learned all of this stuff in a public high school 20+ years ago. I also work in education and all this stuff is very obviously covered in history textbooks. It's this really bizarre situation where around 2020 people kept posting about things like the Tulsa massacre or the Chinese exclusion act with this "they don't want you to know this but.." type attitude and somehow I learned about all this stuff in A.P U.S history.
AP is different. You probably had a better textbook at least, if not a better teacher.
There wasn’t such a push 20 years ago to remove the darker parts of US history from the curriculum. There was a window of about 30 years where schools (outside of the South, at least) stopped teaching the Lost Cause version of the Civil War but before there was this concerted whitewashing effort. In the South, they generally continue to teach some version of the Lost Cause. I didn’t hear of the Tulsa massacre until about ten years ago, and I went to a decent high school in the late 90s and took AP, but it was in the south. We learned the civil war was about fucking tariffs, too.
I think you mean “toe the line.”
Wow...I thought it was 'tow' as well. Thanks for saying this!
I think you mean 'tow the lion'.
The fact that most of the new funding in education goes to a bloated administrative class rather than teachers and instructors make me wonder if perhaps that are ulterior motives to the never ending calls for additional funding.
how do you know that? (asked earnestly. I want to find out if it is true in Canada, as well)
It's very well documented in US colleges. https://students.bowdoin.edu/bowdoin-review/features/death-by-a-thousand-emails-how-administrative-bloat-is-killing-american-higher-education/ . Anecdotally, it doesn't seem true in the public K-12 schools my kids are in.
I just retired after a 35 year teaching career. I spent 27 of them working fot the Los Angeles USD. I also worked for 6 years in a tiny small-town district in rural Nebraska and 2 in a suburban Southern California district. Bureaucratic bloat is directly related to scale.
That's interesting and I'm sure you are correct, Tim. Why do you think the bloat happens? My school district is 90k kids. Maybe I'm just ignorant on this one. I can assure you that the software companies I worked for with 80,000 employees had orders of magnitude more "what do you actually do?" people than the 500 person companies. Is it just empire building? What's the solution?
It is an interesting question and from my limited knowledge of bureaucratic dynamics I’d say it’s a common pattern. I think it’s related to such dreary phenomena as mission creep, fiefdoms patched together by managerial types and loose oversight of institutional-level grant programs, among other things.
The legit bloat is the massive staff needed to comply with state and federal mandates.
The non-legit bloat is often done in urban school districts with massive poverty when the district is run as a jobs program. If you read Dale Russakoff's "The Prize" (I forget if this was in the article or the book), she talks about clerks having clerks having clerks. It's not so much waste as it is getting a lot of moms in the district employed. Ok, that's waste, but you see what I mean.
Other than that, I'm with you--I dont' see a lot of staffing waste that isn't occasioned by law.
Is that just bc they can? I was reading in another substack’s comments about how small school districts like those on Long Island are really expensive and wasteful bc of duplicated administration. That being said, that may be different than the type of administrative bloat you’re talking about, as those small districts probably don’t have some of the more exotic or specialized roles that a large urban sd does
The basic problem is the conviction that throwing money at a problem is a sufficient response. Laudable goals are primarily first addressed by being forced into a reductive equation: more $ = the only hope of satisfactory resolution. When they become available the funds essentially become part of a slush fund. Reporting requirements and guardrails aren’t necessarily absent or lacking - often exactly the opposite - but putting everything in motion as intended becomes a time consuming additional burden, which necessitates hiring people to assume the duties or free up others for the task.
Which makes me wonder if funding that is actually spent on students and teachers (as opposed to spent on administrators) is in fact an important factor. If there is a disconnect in the data between spending vs. student outcomes as spending has risen to pay for admin, this really could be a question of that extra money is not actually going to students in a meaningful way.
I agree that admin bloat and it's associated cost are too high. The money needs to be used more wisely.
I would ask where we would spend it to make a difference. According to what Freddie posted above, lowering class sizes only has a small impact, as hard as that is to believe, which tells me that simply hiring more teachers instead of additional admins wouldn't move the needle.
I have a suspicion that if we were going to slide the money somewhere else, then bringing in additional teachers for additional very small classes for the most disruptive students would probably pay the most dividends. It would not necessarily improve the bottom performers, but it would separate them from the rest of the student body and allow most classes to proceed at an improved rate and with better focus.
I wouldn't be surprised if this actually helped the kids on the border between "good" kids and "bad" kids the most by removing a disruptive influence. I don't see this as politically feasible unless things get way worse but it's the direction that I would look if we actually wanted to improve student outcomes.
I was working as an assistant a while back and it was all to help minimize the damage that one child was inflicting on the entire class. This kid took close to 30% of the teacher's time.
I definitely think removing the most disruptive students makes a difference but mostly on the social/emotional well being of the class. Those aren't things to be looked down on. But will it really move the needle on the reading/math scores, maybe a little, but not a lot.
As noted elsewhere, aides aren't given for disruption, but for special ed.
I mean if one child out of say 30 is monopolizing 10-30% (in case 30% is accused of being hyperbole) of the teacher's time then removing the major source distraction as well as allowing the teacher to better focus on the lesson instead of classroom management then I'd find it hard to believe the actual educational results wouldn't improve. I have a feeling that the benefits would also compound over time leading to small but steady gains similar to the small but steady losses that we've been seeing for decades.
Regardless as you said if that improves the social atmosphere of the class and frees the teacher up then I believe we still have a positive outcome by switching admin paychecks for teacher paychecks.
Not hyperbole. I was there in a temporary part time position because I was also a teacher and had those skills. ( I had four kids and only wanted local part time work)
Education is not uniform nationwide. There is a tremendous amount of difference even within a school district.
You do occasionally get kids who delight in disruption and they're very good at it.
I had one kid in my class (when I was a full time teacher in an inner city school) who took at least 10 to 20% of my time when he was there. I also had kids who had serious learning disabilities and challenging family situations; those I could deal with quite well. It's the kid whose mission in life is to be the focus of attention and cares nothing for anyone else who that you can't really make accommodations for.
Many people are certain they know what is what in schools, though they've never taught in a real classroom situation. You can have a Ph.D. in Education and never have been a classroom teacher...or have only taught in college, which is a whole different ballgame than compulsory education.
But noooooo everyone has to be mainstreamed!
I imagine that they'll eventually need to pivot to another party line once the underspending myth is accepted as debunked. I'm curious to see what that is and where it goes.
Maybe all the education wonks will start pushing Charter Schools, just as soon as the PMC has moved themselves there in force as well.
Just as the Military Industrial Complex always has another hot or cold war around the corner to boost spending, I'm sure eventually, the PMC types in the education sector will have another expensive fix ready to go just in time.
I don't think they'll ever need to pivot. If people accept that there is no way to equalize opportunity for success in school, they'll have to accept that people don't necessarily deserve the level of success they have in life. This would mean that we couldn't continue to let talented people grow as rich and keep untalented people so terribly poor, because a great deal of that is just chance. Even if the evidence is overwhelming (and it is), the talented people are never going to accept it as valid, because doing so is part-and-parcel to accepting a tax increase.
I don't totally disagree; however, I do find genetic determinism based on talent to be partially inaccurate as it assumes an equal level of effort, which I simply don't see in the world historically or currently.
If everyone tried 100% all the time then talent would be the predominant factor and the talented paying higher taxes would be justified. In the real world, talent, while undeniably important and absolutely required at the highest levels of any endeavor, is wildly overrated in its ability to predict a middle-class outcome, which I believe is reasonable for most non people to aspire to.
Assuming talent, in this case, is mostly to mean IQ, while IQ absolutely tracks with income (and many other positive metrics), there are entirely too many over- and under-achievers for me to believe that drastically changing our taxes/incentives to support a permanent underclass is the right way forward.
As to whether that's a major reason why they'll never pivot on their messaging is a very fair point.
Theres no doubt that IQ itself is not the end-all-be-all, but what I’m struggling with is the certainty many have that the other traits that cause success are not heritable. Everyone knows a few bright people that cant stop screwing up and a few dull people who can grind out long workdays and produce effectively for professional organizations. But who is to say that there are not hereditary traits that cause some people to be natirally inclined towards applying sustained effort to things over a long period of time? In the time since Locke first wrote about the blank slate, the advances in scientific knowledge have only pointed in the direction of heredity being much more important than previously thought… how confident can a thoughtful person be that heredity doesnt influence “effort”?
Agreed that there are absolutely genetic traits besides IQ that cause success. One of the more noticeable ones is the need for sleep. Amongst the CEO class, including big companies as well as "smaller" successes (only millions in revenue), something I've noticed both from personal contact and reading interviews, biographies, etc. is a need for substantially less sleep than most people. Typically about 4 hours and this type of person is refreshed and ready to attack their much larger day. For the vast majority of people, no amount of sleep hygiene, diet, exercise, or pharmaceuticals is going to make them productive over a long course of time with less than 6 hours of sleep.
There are several issues we come to though, when taking genetic determinism to its logical conclusion. The first is that general history and experience simply contradict the idea at least as it applies to effort/hustle/work ethic. People have worked in various jobs for millennia, with typical work hours ranging from 8 to 16 hours, often in far worse conditions than most of us can imagine in our air-conditioned workplaces. I don't simply don't believe we've changed genetically that much in the last few decades to centuries to believe that an identifiable subset of the population lacks the "work ethic" to succeed at a basic level even if some people are "gifted" with an extraordinary work ethic.
The next issue I can see is that if you can prove empirically that some people are simply not intelligent and/or hard-working enough to "get by" whatever that means, then it opens the door to a number of terrible ideas that are better left in the past, such as eugenics, caste systems, and worse. I don't know enough to say if the largest reason these systems have fallen into disuse is morality or if it's been science showing them to be unsupportable however, if you could scientifically prove this to be true, then a lot of things would come roaring back, which I'm against but I also doubt that people who were hard-working and intelligent would consent to be an "elite slave class" supporting a large underclass.
Finally, the last argument you would hear from "useful" people who would have to work harder and pay more in taxes would be, "I'm genetically disinclined to care about your plight, thus I'm voting to not raise taxes," which is just as valid as the other way around.
There were drifters and slackers in previous eras, too. The drivers of improvements in working conditions have never been hustle-culture/CEO types, but rather less greedy people who wanted to be able to focus on love and leisure. This fact supports the idea that it is good to reward people less for being greedy hustle-culture CEO types, because rewarding people for such behavior has in the past made the world worse. I think your observations about sleep may have the causal arrow pointed in the wrong direction--greedy people are just too consumed by greed to sleep well.
There are too may definitions of "eugenics", but I don't think anyone is really against it on a deep, meaningful level--the elimination of hereditary disease is an incredibly popular idea. There is already an extant (if informal) caste system, and no one with power or influence seems to have much of a problem with it. I don't think its right to say that either of these ideas are "in disuse".
There is an extent to which the hardworking and intelligent folks are already an "elite slave class", but they would always live materially better lives than less intelligent people by virtue of being more capable and farsighted. The issue is that we have to find a way to raise the floor on the human experience, and there doesn't seem to be any way to do that other than by lowering the ceiling.
Yeah I mean if one sucks at something it’s a helluva lot harder to persist
A lot of people already believe that Charter Schools have been pushed by the right in order to defund Big (public) Education and privatize for-profit Charter Schools (https://www.gse.harvard.edu/ideas/ed-magazine/17/05/battle-over-charter-schools). Like privatizing Social Security, I imagine this push is some combination of dogma that says everything the government does, private markets can do better plus a money grab. In the case of Social Security, money management fees for Wall Street. For education, an opportunity for MAGA to fight "Woke" curriculum in schools and inculcate kids with America First ideology.
Time to do your homework. Charter schools have historically attracted substantial support from neoliberals at the highest levels of government. Maybe digging into the background of Obama’s Secretary of Ed. would be a good starting point,; watching “Waiting for Superman” would cover the socio-cultural angle. Your 5 page report is due Friday at the beginning of class. No late papers accepted.
As an interested observer in the local urban school system my son attends, I’ve noticed that a higher than demographically representative percentage of our school admins are African American and I’ve often wondered if school funding is at least politically intended to further school administration as something of a professional jobs program.
When calls for cuts in admin spending have been made, it’s a fairly predictable set of political representatives who have opposed it and those representatives are coincidentally generally representatives of districts whose demographics align with African Americans.
It’s unsurprising that urban school districts became something of a professional bastion for African Americans, given historically weaker job options and school desegregation timelines and probably due to the logic that suggests hiring African American admins makes sense if the largest underperforming group of students is also African American.
Unfortunately streamlining school administration just becomes that much harder because you’re now having to cut jobs with an employee demographics that are biased towards an underprivileged group.
"Poorer schools with more students of color on average receive more per-pupil funding that schools with richer and whiter students."
Does this mean funding of all types? Or just more state/federal funding that is intended to offset disparities in local funding?
Comparing public schools where I live, salaries for teachers vary quite significantly between school districts, with poorer communities typically paying lower salaries and therefore often having a difficult time hiring and retaining teachers. I've always believed this was due to less funds being available at those schools but I'm wondering if I've been wrong in that understanding.
And as a follow-up, do poorer schools have higher costs/unique costs that pull money away from students/teachers?
All in public spending, including local, in the linked study.
Title I funding for a variety of non-salary items is federal and based on SES levels; the poorer the students and community the higher it goes. Salaries for almost all teachers are are generally dependent on state and local funding.
Historucally many districts with an abundance of wealthy locals pay relatively low salaries - Santa Barbara CA comes to mind. There are many factors at play, and average income rank isn’t necessarilly directly related to relative teacher pay.
"The NYT piece quotes experts who are ensconced in the Official Dogma and who would never let these studies shake them out of it."
I had a discussion today with a young attorney, a goodthink striver who recited all the latest Team D platitudes concerning a certain issue of the day, and all of which were easily debunked. Not because I am so much more clever or better informed, but because it was obvious that this guy hadn't thought any of this through other than reciting the party line. Even he admitted it.
But it doesn't matter. He is acutely aware of what the High Status opinion on any given issue is, and, like the good striver he is, he will never deviate from it, as long as it is the High Status position at the moment.
I had a similar jaw-dropping experience with a colleague who, when offered irrefutable evidence contradicting his party stance, simply refused to even look at it for fear of upsetting an apple cart either at work or at home, I never found out which.
The only thing you get from having a low status opinion is low status.
The idea that money can alter outcomes to any significant degree seems like the type of opinion only a person who has no real experience with public schools in economically diverse communities could hold.
Ask anyone who went to a public school that draws from a wide variety of backgrounds and it's abundantly obvious that the primary factor is their home life/family involvement/emphasis on education at home/whatever else you want to call it. That's why, in a classroom where all have largely the same resources, the outcomes couldn't be more disparate. The parents that care tend to have kids that care. The parents that don't tend to have kids that don't. Don't think there's enough money in the world to fix that.
“ the primary factor is their home life/family involvement/emphasis on education at home/whatever else you want to call it.”
False. The primary factor is genetically low academic ability. How do we know? Adoption studies. You take a kid born to parents with low acetic ability and adopt them into highly educated households and they still struggle academically. All the reading and stress on education can’t overcome a profound lack of ability.
I have no doubt that is true, but at what percentage is that the issue? I mean, if there are schools where only 10% are meeting grade level proficiencies, is it your opinion that 90% of the kids in those schools lack the cognitive ability to complete the course work? Or are there multiple factors (of which genetics is likely one) that explain it?
I don't proclaim to know, but my hunch is while there is a small percentage who simply lack the aptitude to do the work, it's not the biggest driver. My suspicion is still that the biggest driver, as a percentage of the student body, is work ethic/commitment to education. Which gets back to my original point.
There is a small percentage but the percentage isn’t uniform across communities. In a community of highly educated professionals only a small percentage of kids will lack the ability. But in a community made up of low skill workers the percentage will be much higher.
We’d also have to look at how proficiency is defined. If it’s defined as the median then it’s easy to imagine 90% of kids in a low skill worker community being incapable of proficiency.
Certainly possible. But my understanding is the minimal proficiency standards in most states are not centered around the median. We don't fail half the students every year in this country and never have. I think, almost by definition, it's a standard that the vast majority of students, with a base-level of effort, should be able to pass. Now, I could see clusters in extremely poor areas where you could have an atypical collection of cognitively impaired students. But my guess would be those are few and far between and certainly doesn't explain wholesale failures of entire school districts. I mean, unless we're just going to take the position that Detroit is populated almost exclusively by sub-90 IQs, there's more going on.
82.5 million Americans have an IQ below 90 - they are concentrated in low income areas. It makes perfect sense that a high percentage of students in Detroit have IQs below 90z
" I mean, unless we're just going to take the position that Detroit is populated almost exclusively by sub-90 IQs, there's more going on."
That's unintentionally hilarious. Yes, that is exactly the position that we can't take, even though it's true.
This is true, but I believe that those who were adopted tend to have better outcomes as adults... more likely to have stable jobs and families. Environment does matter...a lot.
I also don't think you can discount the instability that comes with crime and poverty when it comes to academic outcomes.
But we keep focusing on success being about getting the high test scores, going to college and becoming an engineer, doctor etc.
Whenever I read anything about education it makes me feel like I'm the only person in America who went to a public school.
Also, this is doubtless racist, sexist and homophobic, but I suspect that educational outcomes are first and foremost a matter of how motivated the students are. The amount spent per student is at most irrelevant.
One can "suspect" all one likes, but no matter how motivated a student is, if the student does not have the genetic potential to succeed intellectually, he or she will not. Past that, then, yes, the amount per student spent is indeed irrelevant.
I dunno, I've met plenty of academic high achievers who themselves were pretty mediocre, intellectually.
Grades, yes. And admissions tests have been made simultaneously easier and harder in ways that make it easy for someone relatively smart, but not a genius, to get higher scores.
Still, I doubt you've met anyone with a 1200 or higher SAT or 28 or higher ACT that is intellectually mediocre.
I didn't ask their SAT scores or whatever, but they were graduates of Ivy League institutions and they weren't exactly athletic heroes or legacies or whatever, so they must have done tolerably well.
Which means they are probably smart, just not in a way that impresses you. Which I quite understand.
I thought it was well-established that you can teach to a test.
It’s always fun to have a kool kat around. Makes me want to join the game. So hey! Here’s some wet food fresh out of the can for you both: maybe Century 21’s widely accepted metrics, particularly those used to discern academic potential and ‘merit’ are actually much thinner indicators than they’re advertised to be. Or simply aren’t worth their current weight. To get my drift allow me to suggest some off-the-wall juxtaposition of historical cultural figures with a contemporary high-achieving elite straw man. Who would have the higher tested IQ, a 30-something software genius pulling down a fat 6-figures @Google, or, say…Edgar Allen Poe? Louis Armstrong? Gregory Peck? Richard Pryor? Napoleon? Marie Curie? Mother Theresa? Just a parlor game, like batting around a ball of yarn or something…but fun for awhile.
I'm not sure why you think I was being a kool kat, but you certainly aren't. I mean, good lord, are you unaware that it's fairly easy to look at a person's life, their education for the time, the nature of their achievements, and their demographics and make a ballpark guess?
Statistically, odds are likely Louis Armstrong had a sub90 IQ. Ditto Richard Pryor, whose mother was a prostitute and who was in jail or in trouble constantly. No real correlation between Pryor's comic genius and brains and he time and again made shit decisions in his life. Gregory Peck, on the other hand, was one course short of graduating from Berkeley at a time when a college degree required calculus, so odds are he was quite smart. Nothing about Mother Theresa indicates more than slightly above average brains, maybe over 100. Marie Curie's writings and ideas have been evaluated and she's well beyond genius level.
30 something software "genius"? What's that mean? IQ over 130, probably, not any guarantees of more, so probably competing with Gregory Peck. Armstrong and Pryor are great creative talents, but not geniuses. Not even particularly smart.
The question is this: how consequential is ‘IQ’? Certainly it is obvious that it does have some utility, but my point is that the actual limits of that utility are inescapable considerations. I appreciate you taking my comment seriously enough to respond thoughtfully - thanks for that. As to Armstrong’s IQ (or that of anyone else who made the list), my ultimate point is that the result of any IQ test are essentially irrelevant in many important contexts. He grew up with a significant amount of adversity and was fortunate, as a virtual orphan, to be taken-in by a family that kept him fed and clothed when even that much was in doubt for him at a very young age. He undoubtedly, by contemporary standards, received a sub-par formal education, and, in fact, we really have no way to accurately estimate his IQ. To do so is speculative, as you must grant. I have used him as an example for that reason. The truest measure of his overall aptitude as a person is, of course, his substantial contribution to 20th century music, which was a socio-cultural force that helped move technological development forward. (Not something that we can say about such reputed ‘geniuses’ as, for example, John Cage.) Armstrong’s improvisational ability as an instrumentalist, which is not within reach of any multiple choice test (or any other typical academic assessment tool), was truly exceptional. Descriptors appropriate to that manifest ability include such earmarks of singular achievement as ‘complexity’, ‘high-level processing’, and ‘originality’. This isn’t a subjective evaluation. Listen to his best work and see what you think. You may need to familiarize yourself with early jazz to gain a genuine appreciation of it, and perhaps it isn’t a project you have much interest in, but before making blythe assumptions about his IQ score you could consider how poorly limited assessment tests can serve as a comprehensive measure of individual potential. Suffice it to say that while I recognize the usefulness of IQ tests within many economically valuable niches, they are also potentially misleading in a way that intelligent people should be consistently mindful of. And btw, you are clearly smart, but Feral Finster was the kool kat in question.
The vast majority of students can succeed intellectually, given motivation and proper resources. But those with lower intelligence above that threshold will probably still rank lower *relative* to the smartest. But outside of the truly disabled, human beings can succeed in intellectual pursuits.
Sure, but "how motivated the student is" is itself a product of the genetic and environmental factors Freddie mentions - I don't think it's meaningfully distinct.
The effect of spending on education outcomes is an empirical question best addressed by well identified statistical studies. If you want any academic social scientist to take you seriously you have to deeply understand that form of rhetoric and engage with it deeply. I don’t really see any of that in your post, just graphs and hand waving. Personally, I’m most convinced by exhaustive posts that track down every single study on the topic, explain which ones are high quality by referencing statistic principles, and then show that the preponderance of results fall on one side rather than the other. I know this can be boring, but you do want to be taken seriously, right?
I linked to studies, and I also referred to general knowledge among people who regularly consume educational studies, as I have done for fifteen years. Have you read my book? Have you read the dozens of posts I've written that extensively cite the research? More to the point, three NYT piece that I'm in direct conversation with here has dramatically less reference to research than this post. You see, there are different types of engagement for different audiences; if I wanted to write a formal literature review, as I've done before, I would have done so.
I suspect in fact that you know very well that there are different standards of evidence in different contexts, and you're just mad because you disagree with me. Indeed, I find the idea that you don't know the difference between the level of evidence required in a blog post to be absurd. And I see that you read writers that regularly cite essentially no research. So I think this is about protecting your priors. You're also grandstanding and condescending in my own space, which I don't tolerate, so you're banned.
Isn't part of the low academic achievement related to this mania to turn high schools into college prep programs?
I was shocked several years ago when a friend of mine, a high school chemistry teacher, informed me that it is actually way more expensive to maintain high schools with vocational-tech programs (arguably, far more valuable to many students) than it is to operate college prep high schools. That's the reason why American schools are now overemphasizing "academic potential."
I honestly don't think many students need to possess much intrinsic academic potential at all to benefit from education. They just need to have access to the _right_ type of education. College prep may only be it for a minority.
It's amazing how few people understand that CTE classes are wildly more expensive. However, the classes are also very well funded. The hard part is finding the teachers who will get the credentials. I am a gen ed teacher with three CTE credentials that I got purely to qualify for Perkins funding. My sections were free to the school for three years and I got 16000 or more for equipment.
That said, no, schools don't push college prep because the classes are cheaper. The primary reason is the achievement gap. Any school sending fewer blacks and Hispanics to college is going to be blamed for failing them and there are all sorts of federal and state laws that will kick in if they actively seek to move kids out of the college track.
Moreover, your entire premise is goofy, if you understood how school worked.
Basically you think that kids who aren't interested in academics are just longing for some real education to get serious about and hahaha ha.
CTE is expensive, remember? The tracks are demanding and require expensive equipment. Many CTE tracks result in college anyway (info & comms, engineering, pharm, marketing) and even many of the ones that don't (hospitality, woodwork, hospitality) are rigorous programs that require commitment and good academic skills.
So the fond notion that all the kids who cut class and watch TikTok during algebra are just looking for demanding job oriented skills based ed is, again, hahaha.
By the way, another fond delusion many share is that in the past, auto, shop, and home ec were effective routes that were tragically cut in the obsessive push for college. Nope. Voc ed classes were dumping grounds since the 30s or earlier.
Voced classes were cut in the 80s when Nation at Risk report bewailed all the wasteful classes that high school kids took while the commies were eating our lunch. That's what ended the supposedly halcyon era of shop class and home ec that was actually, as noted, a dumping ground. CTE was then reborn into the program I described above.
Any student with the commitment to succeed in CTE tracks will have the ability to take the academic course as well. There are some kids who don't care about academics that love their noncollege CTE courses, but their drive ensures they'll get the minimum done so they qualify for internships.
A useful voced class for the kids we need to divert out of school would be "get up in the morning and show up at school every day for 6 months". If they get through that then maybe "make a bed with hospital corners " and "sweep out the kitchen". Then "shake hands and make intelligent conversation " would be useful, along with "here's the actual amount your paycheck will be after taxes and soc sec".
Because basically, the kids who can't manage school are really low achievers and. to add to the bad news, don't present themselves in racially felicitous percentages.
Hey! I appreciate the information. I don't know a helluva lot about public education.
In the post above, I was basically quoting My Pal, The High School Chemistry Teacher, who is completely convinced that college prep is all about excising operational costs and supplying logs to the Great Higher Education assembly line.
No, that's definitely not the case. It's all about the achievement gap.
I’m assuming that when you say dumping ground you mean all the morons and behavior cases would get thrown into technical path in high school. That’s what I remember at my public school (TN, late 90s). Technical path courses were basically just babysitting for the dumbest and most troublemaking students, usually bc they had coaches for teachers.
But what a real technical path should have offered is actual shop training, apprenticeships, etc. nothing those kids did in high school counted towards any certification or training in a trade or blue-collar field. No wonder the kids didn’t do shit in those courses, there seriously was no point.
CTE classes in autoshop, woodworking, hospitality and culinary, firefighting, all offer those things. The others (engineering, digital photography) are more geared towards college. So they do offer those things.
And the "dumping ground" era was before CTE classes, before Nation at Risk.
I went to suburban public high school in the South in the late 90s/early aughts. I hope that those courses are meaningful now, but they weren’t then, and that was almost 20 years after A Nation at Risk.
Then perhaps you didn't have CTE funding, which makes it a moot point.
I dunno this was a well-resourced district. Though yeah, we didn’t have wood shop or metal shop just some dumb shit like air cooled engines which I think is basically lawnmower repair. But this lack of investment in a real technical path was districtwide or, I imagine, statewide.
I’m guessing you worked in the Northeast somewhere, which is known for investing in meaningful technical path programs. But most places aren’t the northeast. I contend that in the vast majority of school districts CTE was left for community colleges to do and high school CTE was meaningless bullshit to dump the kids who chewed tobacco during class in. And that’s bad: we should move to real, meaningful CTE. But I don’t think that’s happened very many places. Instead high schools are embracing dual enrollment (god I wish this had been an option for me) and CTE can be farmed out that way, which I have no problem with. The last two years of high school should be community college work anyway, regardless of what path you’re on to graduate.
You make some good points. Bravo for getting your CTE game going. You’ve put yourself at the leading edge of an improvement in public education’s update of the old shop class paradigm. Interesting that you mention Perkins funding. I taught in a very small rural high school/jr. hi for 6 years and a Perkins grant helped an energetic and conscientious young shop teacher put together an excellent program that served our students exceptionally well. In a larger sense it is important that the word about good stuff in schools and ed. gains some traction, given how reliable a whipping boy role they often play for complainers across the political spectrum.
But it is undoubtedly true that the relatively recent emphasis on college prep. classes is at least partly motivated by the lower overhead they impose on school budgets. My former employer (I’m recently retired), LA Unified Schools, has completely shut down all of its old shop programs in middle and high schools. Updated CTE programs are available in some of them (including my last school), but they aren’t remotely as common as shop or home ec. classes were decades ago. In California it is likely that the trend away from the old status was the advent of Prop. 13 limits on property taxes, which dates back to 1978. It had a big impact on school funding overall, though I am uncertain how specifically it affected voc. ed.
Century 21 CTE has great potential as a feature of public schooling that non-public schools will struggle to match, so savvy strategists ought to prioritize it. They’re badly in need of some good selling points.
Just to be clear, I had the experience for the CTE credential. I was in tech for years. I just never expected to be teahing it.
"Updated CTE programs are available in some of them (including my last school), but they aren’t remotely as common as shop or home ec. classes were decades ago."
I agree. But again, it's not because they are expensive. It's because Nation at RIsk in 1983 and then focusing since then insisted that all CTE be career-oriented. Look at the research. It's all about "how many credentials did kids get" not "did the kids find the courses interesting and useful". There's no room for investment in vocational ed that isn't directly linked to a credential or in some cases a college degree.
THe focus on college prep is not because CTE is expensive. It's because it's much harder to fake success in CTE and schools and colleges both are motivated to at least facially claim they've reduced the achievement gap.
I’ve worked as a secondary teacher in very different settings. The small rural school I taught in was never going to abandon shop classes - they serve a genuine need for the small-town / ranch kids who go there. That’s typical for the region and its many similar schools. I also taught in a very large suburban Southern California high school for a couple years. It had a thoroughly tricked-out voc. ed. program along the traditional lines. The medium-sized district had dropped a lot of money on an extensive campus revamp, including a new main building with darkroom facilities. This was 2005, so they weren’t exactly anticipating future outside developments very well, though they did have a newer video-production program. My pal the young wood shop teacher was still there doing his thing the last time I glanced at the school web site.
Since then I have taught exclusively for LA Unified Schools, my original employer (first 10 years). Most of my first stint was spent at a middle school and during that time a guy who had worked as an aid for me got a chance to re-open the wood shop. He did well with that and stuck with it for years. He has had to adapt to new priorities, though, and has de-emphasized the hands-on aspect. I also spent a year at a nearby high school back then (late ‘90s) and its shop offerings were being passively phased-out through retirement attrition. This detail is telling. The old style voc. ed. had been part of the core mission of urban public schools in much the same way it remains so in rural ones. It wasn’t merely a ‘dumping ground’ for dumb kids. The movement away from that level of priority since then is obvious. And that’s what it is: a change of priorities. Old style voc. ed. was geared to a society and economy in which skilled manual labor was more common.
Another frequently overlooked factor that has diminished it is the fear of liability and litigation among ed. leadership. No one sues over a paper cut. But if a goofy 14 year-old cuts off a finger his own demonstrable negligence will no longer be enough to get the school off the hook. So it’s not just teacher salaries competing with other outside employers, the need to maintain and periodically replace expensive equipment, or inappropriate emphasis on college prep for students who aren’t academically sharp enough to warrant it. It’s all that plus the prospect of major settlement cash being paid-out on the public’s dime.
Again, that's what Perkins funding is for.
I can only tell you that pushing college ed courses is manifestly not about money.
It's hard to get CTE teachers, and I absolutely agree that having CTE classes without CTE teachers is hard to fund. I'm just categorically not agreeing that we push college prep because it's cheaper. Not in a billion years. If we wanted to be inexpensive, we'd stop pushing four years of math, English, etc.
I’m not an advocate of limiting voc. ed. at all. I’m just trying to note trends I’ve seen as a career high school teacher who worked in different places. Personally I think the upside of CTE is worth the expense and that it is ultimately affordable if school districts play the cards right. But LAUSD is very large - 2nd biggest enrollment nationally- and can probably serve as a leading indicator. It has also been plagued by very expensive litigation and settlements for a variety of reasons (many of the biggest related to administrative malfeasance in child abuse cases) over a long period - decades now. I can’t cite any specific document or quote about de-emphasizing voc. ed. but doubt there would be much hard evidence like that anyway unless one were to unearth transcripts of board members or superintendents speaking candidly in executive session. But actions speak louder than words and telegraph strategic priorities clearly enough. They may realize that more new-&-improved CTE is desirable and affordable. What I mentioned previously are the excuses they would likely employ so they can throw money at other things instead. The objection to it that it was historically used to sideline black and brown students would also certainly be included, despite the fact that it is no longer the substantial issue it once was. But would any of them dust-off A Nation at Risk, which came out in 1983? I seriously doubt it. I worked closely as a mentor teacher with a woman who is now a board member. She’s smart, well read and has a law degree from UCLA. But any influence it may have on her is almost certainly indirect at most. She may have heard of it but it came out the year before she was born.
This was an excellent piece. You obviously have a real world (and historical) understanding of the problems endemic in education today. I read this and think how can you get this guy, and people like him involved in the education system, at the right places and positions, to address problems without just throwing money at them?
Freddie - I think it would be smart to combine your areas of expertise on education and interventions, and help folks disentangle two ideas 1) increased funding or fancy new education interventions don't meaningfully improve your child's academic performance, and 2) yes, many American schools are wildly mis-managed or are modeled on delusional ideals, and there are good reasons to address both of those things, but it might not influence your child's academic performance.
I think parents should be forgiven for thinking that obvious education mismanagement adversely affects their children's learning. And parents can see mismanagement everywhere. Ask any parent or teacher about the school experience, you'll get a long laundry list of insane administrative decisions that they just have to accommodate. Or with new initiatives, every year the spending goes up or a new program is announced, with promises for better outcomes, and every year there are no returns. Parents conclude that the administration is ineffective due to persistence with these illogical ideas and bad policies. Who could blame them for asking for more from schools?
Do we know whether the increase in funding is spent on the traditional scope of academic learning or whether it's being spent on trying to address social problems? Food and clothes, yes, but also a 1:1 aid for a kid who can't regulate because they aren't cared for at home and just watch violent tv all day?
No. One to one aides are for kids who will never, ever live outside an institution once they hit 21, which is how long public schools have to pay for them. They are kids who can't walk and require very expensive wheel chairs and regular diaper changes and "summer school" and yes, a lot of the expenses are due to special ed mandates.
that's not how 1:1s are used where I am. Most classes have 1-2 kids with a 1:1. It's our solution to extremely poorly behaved kids (maybe disabled, maybe just unmet needs at home) who do things like bite, destroy classrooms, shout and run around during class, etc.
That is indeed how 1:1s are used. The students who are poorly behaved have a sped classification or there's no money for paras.
The question is how the money is being spent. Because teachers sure aren't getting decent pay.
In rural areas like where I live, a teacher's pay isn't bad. I'm sure it's terrible in places like SF and NY where the cost of living is so high, but in a lot of places a teacher's salary is fine. It also depends on what state you live in and what sort of funding they have for schools.
Which teachers, where?
What is the correlation between academic achievement and family structure?
Google "correlation between academic achievement and family structure". Plenty of good stuff there.
Correlation isn’t causation of course.
For the average person who still believes the funding thesis, I wonder if a big part of it is people not updating their knowledge over decades. If you're 40+, you may vaguely remember hearing that school funding is important anytime between 1990-2010, then just didn't read about it again. It's similar to people who when they hear "energy efficiency" or "water efficiency," they think about bad 90's low-flow toilets or older ugly fluorescent lights and don't realize that there have been decades of technological improvement.
That doesn't excuse the NYT though for not researching the topic enough before publishing.
"We live in a reality where New York annually spends the most on school funding per pupil while barely outperforming Utah, which spends the least; where the United States, a very rich country, spends around eight times as much per pupil as Vietnam, a very poor country, and yet is essentially at parity in international educational comparisons; where the United Kingdom spends dramatically more on education than South Korea but does dramatically worse."
Apologies if you have addressed this elsewhere, but what do you believe accounts for Vietnam & South Korea's educational performance? 100% cultural differences?
Have you ever written about what is actually taught about American history class vs. what liberals claim is taught? I keep hearing these claims that high school history class basically doesn't mention the Native Americans and slavery is glossed over and they give this whitewashed version of American history etc., but somehow I learned all of this stuff in a public high school 20+ years ago. I also work in education and all this stuff is very obviously covered in history textbooks. It's this really bizarre situation where around 2020 people kept posting about things like the Tulsa massacre or the Chinese exclusion act with this "they don't want you to know this but.." type attitude and somehow I learned about all this stuff in A.P U.S history.
AP is different. You probably had a better textbook at least, if not a better teacher.
There wasn’t such a push 20 years ago to remove the darker parts of US history from the curriculum. There was a window of about 30 years where schools (outside of the South, at least) stopped teaching the Lost Cause version of the Civil War but before there was this concerted whitewashing effort. In the South, they generally continue to teach some version of the Lost Cause. I didn’t hear of the Tulsa massacre until about ten years ago, and I went to a decent high school in the late 90s and took AP, but it was in the south. We learned the civil war was about fucking tariffs, too.