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Shua's avatar

So these are the start of the posts that have finally got me to subscribe Freddie. Sorry for taking so long to get around to it. That and I really appreciate the weekly digest posts you put at the end of the week and linking to interview and podcasts that you have participated in. Substacks and podcasts are pretty much 90% of my go-to for information nowadays.

To give some background I was a budget analyst for the State of Maryland during the 2010s and had Education under my purview at some point. Maryland during differing years led the nation in things like graduation rates and students taking A.P. classes. What was interesting about Maryland, is that it has a city like Baltimore under its purview, where poverty is abound in certain districts which included classrooms that didn't have enough textbooks for students or even heating that worked properly during winter. It is also the state with Bethesda, whose students were among the wealthiest in the nation and whose parents worked mostly for the US Government, foreign embassies and students whose parents were researchers and doctors at NIH. Their schools had enough textbooks and heat in winter.

In Baltimore, I remember local administration could get pretty bad with corruption. Look at how many Baltimore mayors and city leaders are currently in jail, went to jail or are under investigation in the past decades. That is not a positive view for local administration of education funds or outcomes to help students. In my mind at the time, I was definitely for a national standards and more control of education from DOE partly because of this... and also the Flying Spaghetti Monster mania happening in the mid 2000s because some local board Kansas was trying to teach creationism in schools. So I applauded having standards like Common Core at the time. After reading Freddie and other education like-minded folks, I have changed my mind on this.

I remember Common Core being debated at this time in Maryland. So Common Core from what I remember during the monthly State Board meetings and legislative hearings...didn't really get a robust push back in any real sort of way. Most of the grumbling from citizens during public discussion came from "Crank Tea-party types" that were easily dismissed by the technocratic elites heading the State Board. There was also some grumbling from teachers that all they were doing was wasting lots of time teaching students to teach the test.

Which turned out to be true, lots of school administration folks pushed heavily for teachers to spend weeks teaching students how to succeed on the state tests. Why this was? Well, school funding was tied to how well schools did on these tests, graduation rates and if students went on to college. Whether students were ready to get on to college or even graduate high school kinda gets pushed to the side of the perverse incentive for school administration folks to get Mo Money.

Also, federal funding from DOE was threatened to not give money to states who didn't adopt these standards. Sort of like how states changed their drinking age to 21 because of pressures of trying to get federal highway funding.

Even with all these pressures from above, I can't really remember a single time someone tried to say that there is no correlation between quality standards and higher student achievement. I can rant about this for a while but, just like Baseball, Education has become quantitatively sexy to those in charge. I fucking hate it and what it has done, but technocrats like their numbers so I do not foresee this changing anytime soon. And these same elites in charge will do everything they can to fudge numbers, lower standards, and push students out of the way for the money. Anyway I'll write later in the week about where I think money for schools does lots of good. School construction funding (GREAT!)

Innovation or any Ed-tech grants (GARBAGE!)

One last thing, I don't know if you have written about this Freddie but Maryland just applauded this year that "The administration is thrilled we can finally state that, as of today, every public high school in Maryland has either an assigned school resource officer or coverage coordinated with local law enforcement. " I'd be happy to see you write about whether having police officers in every school is a good thing.

Have a good Monday!

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Midge's avatar

"A more radical proposal might include assigning school board seats to people who opt-in to a lottery which chooses the board. Provisions could be made to ensure that the composition of the lottery is reasonably representative of the appropriate municipality. These board members could be strictly term limited to a single term of two or four years. It might seem dramatic to assign seats of such importance randomly, but then again this is precisely what we do for juries, which is rightly seen as a sacred and important duty."

I've had family (misguidedly, IMO) run against the local caucus in school board elections. Predictably, they got nowhere — worse than nowhere, in a sense, since the caucus ran a moderately-successful rumor campaign damaging their and their loved ones' reputations. You've mentioned charter-school lotteries leave room for shenanigans. How would school-board lotteries avoid shenanigans in lotteries? My family's experience may not be common (or perhaps it is) but does make it hard to trust that lotteries wouldn't be rigged in favor of local insiders.

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