I love your comment. What I didn’t realize is that googling won’t bring up story I read in New Scientist magazine, the first time I heard of Pareto. He apparently came up with his theory watching peas grow in his garden, noticing that 20% grew faster and fuller than the rest under same conditions of light, soil, etc.
"The value of a college diploma is derived from its scarcity relative to the number of jobs that call for one; if you flood the job market with degrees, the value of those degrees will necessarily decline. (Contrast with labor unions, which grow more powerful the more people join them.) "
The obvious strategy, then, is to form a union of college grads.
Oh wait, isn't that the Democratic Party now?
I'd note too that while for sure, the normal distribution is a real thing, you run the risk of arguing yourself into hereditarian Hanania territory with it.
(Of course, I don't believe every kid needs to go to college. I'd love to see an inflorescence of non-scammy trade schools.)
Flinching away very strongly from hereditarian stuff is, I think, a major impetus for the sand-heading around the consequences of distribution and relative vs. absolute ability. That doesn't require going all HBD race science or whatever. But given the paltry returns on investment and perennial everything-bagel failure to set clear priorities, I think there's still a lot of value in identifying Red Queen Races. The pit of bad money neither needs to be dug deeper nor have good money thrown in after it, to mix metaphors. Plus the whole backlash against e.g. dismantling tracking and advanced courses For Equity(tm) that's actively harmful to the political fortunes of the "United College Grads".
There is only so much carrying capacity to the economy that the trades can support. The dilemma of the contemporary American economy is that there are just too many damn workforce participants. The correct, fair, just response (as it is to other ills of our society) is to end mass immigration. A relative scarcity of workers will COMPEL management/capital to raise wages and improve working conditions. They will have no other options, that is if they want the work to get done, and they will want to get the work done, because there is still the potential of great profit at the end of the day. Mass migration is a vector of class warfare wielded by capital/management, aimed at the working class.
"in the United States in the 21st century, schools are the proverbial hammer; reformers assume that policy cannot fix families, parenting, or environmental/societal factors and so must believe that school policy changes are the only way forward."
Until I started reading your stuff on education, the thought that we were asking schools to do too much never really crossed my mind. I used to be very critical of public schools (even though I graduated from public schools) because I thought they just weren't doing their job correctly.
Now I am finally figuring out that our expectation of what any school can do (not just public schools) with a random student is unrealistic, and if we want to try to fix all of these other things, we can't expect to do it through the education system.
Back in The Bad Old Days, for better or for worse, it was not assumed that School Is For Everyone. Nor was it assumed that Schooling = Intelligence or Schooling = Competence or even Schooling = Qualfication.
Abraham Lincoln had something like a grand total of six weeks of formal education throughout his lifetime, and yet he was no slouch as a reader, writer, thinker or speaker. In fact, he was a rather successful lawyer, before bcoming Abraham Lincoln.
I have students who, no matter what I do for them, will never achieve academic progress. Many of these students lack a home, or suffer from abuse or neglect. A students life exists outside the classroom and learning occurs in a context, and yet we hold schools accountable for everything in a student’s reality
Add in point 4. "No, Virginia, there is no magic bullet, no educational practice, no vademecum or cureall, that will make most people or most kids suddenly smarter than average."
The next step is removing the dogma of "just spend more bro" from the discourse. The US is comparable or better than our peer nations in both per pupil spending as well as total GDP spending. But this information is almost never brought up and people assume more money = better results.
If all that were needed were to throw money at the problem, the DC public schools would be tossing off young geniuses and Nobel Prize winning teens like a popcorn machine set to "berzerk!"
One of the liberal slogans I find most frustrating is "spend more money on schools so we can spend less money on prisons." First of all, more spending doesn't get better results, as noted. Second, having done a lot of volunteer work in prisons, *most* of the kids who are going to end up in prison care nothing for school and aren't among those who might marginally benefit from more spending.
I absolutely agree that that notion that we just try to hammer away social ills by effectively delegating the task to teenagers doing their homework is insane. It reeks of the same sort of personal delegation we have seen and gradually grown wise to with personal carbon footprints and the like, and we're right to be suspicious.
I will offer one slight wrinkle re: pedagogical intervention. As you say, offering the best possible educational tools to everyone scoots the distribution right and still leaves some at the top, but it does reliably *narrow* the distribution too. In your comparison to weightlifting above, sure, there will be people who can pick up something vastly heavier than you- but a tremendous fraction of that gap between your performance and theirs is that they are training hard and you are not. That might not matter if the sole purpose is to win a contest that you perhaps never could, but if there are benefits to actually being strong, then it does.
If education actually has to do with social virtuous, positive externality things like creating competent electorates and workforces, then we still clearly want to do our best by everyone in a way that even a moderate connection to the misery of a modern school day suggests we are not.
No doubt- so? There remains a long way to go- one educator to another, surely we can acknowledge that the lived experience of most students is closer to Kafkaesque storage than it is to what anyone actually does when they want to develop a skill or passion.
The amount of times I was told "you don't need to know that for the test" after asking what I assumed was an interesting question in class really ground me down. And this was at a good British private school. God knows how much worse it would have been in the state sector.
The worst possible answer to the best possible question. You aren’t alone- another wrinkle in this sort of hard-nosed, grades=ability=destiny rationale, which, yes, is not without some common sense points, is that a perfectly well documented educational failure mode is some subset of demonstrably talented people being, effectively, bored out of high performance. Grades in the end measure something like ‘compliance’- which isn’t nothing! That can include something like ‘work ethic’ and your ability to comply with your teacher’s directive to learn a particular skill. But I find that’s a framing that makes it clear why some patently able people suffer, as you did, for doing what you’re ostensibly there to do.
I mean for what it's worth I was able to play the game, and did get good grades, because I was mature enough to understand that a lot of what we did was essentially an exercise in jumping through hoops. But not everyone is able to grok that at the age of 14-15.
Parsing this out to general life achievement, doesn't this completely wreck the Conservative ideal of work hard = better life?
If focusing on the lower achievers also moves the goalposts for higher achievers, and the "ability" distribution tends to stay the same regardless of input, then wouldn't it NOT really matter how hard someone works if they are on the lower end?
If a system is proven to have winners and losers, regardless of all manner of trying to boost the losers, then how does that jive with the very American notion that anyone can achieve great things, no matter who they are? Won't there always be losers, no matter how hard someone tries?
Hmm, that's probably closer to the reality of it. Hard work could likely get one to move from middle class to upper-middle class or lower-upper class without it running counter to the stats too much.
Of course, that would also mean that there would need to be some downward movement from the upper class as well. Perhaps lazy rich kids squandering their parents wealth for instance.
All of this sort has this shadowy mercantilism-esque quality to it - like there is only so much 'good life' to go around. A zero-sum game. If that's true that's quite depressing for humanity, as it means there would always have to be a lower class.
I wonder if this still rings true with the relative size of each 'ability' class. For instance does it matter if the middling strata is huge or narrow, do the top and bottom need to be similar is size, or can it be skewed far one way or the other in reality?
Yes. In my 15 years of parenting, the one rule I hope has sunk in with my kids is: "Always show up, especially when you don't want to. That puts you ahead of 80% of your competition."
This is, in my opinion, the greatest argument for wealth redistribution and I believe it to be true.
Qualities that confer a better life, like intelligence and motivation, are not equal among all people from birth. Society rewards these qualities, and to a large degree, you don't choose whether you have them. So many people are condemned at birth to the lower rung of society.
But the conservative counter argument is that sure, some people are in the top 10% of intrinsic motivation, and you'll never be successful like them if you're in the bottom 30%, but by making it a prized value you can get people to perform above their 'natural' state. If you tell people you can be more successful by trying harder, some people will, and they'll do better than if you had told them from birth that they couldn't try any harder than they wanted to and were just born that way. I believe this is true also.
It's hard to thread the needle on the messaging here, but I think society has been trying.
The problem with conservatives, at least the current batch of them, is that they’ve got the Nietzschean thing going on - too much of their base are either scammers or the unwilling-to-admit-they’ve-been-scammed. It’s why they go after institutions like the CFPB that try to prevent people from taking advantage of those who aren’t going to understand things like compound interest and can’t read, for example, payday loan contracts.
Liberals may buy into a harmful tabula rasa narrative when it comes to education, but at least we’re for softening the edges of “caveat emptor.”
Best hope the metric of success by the CFPB (an institution I’d never heard of before the recent brouhaha) is growth in the volume of payday loans - since that is the case.
If the CF-whatever (some acronyms are just no bueno) may be justified, in part, because it prevents people from getting payday loans, by educating them about it - then we should be celebrating the fact that it’s been successful. To me, “successful” for this particular aim which you brought up, would be for the volume of payday loans to go down.
One thing the CFPB did is make banks do less shitty stuff when processing daily credits and debits. Used to they would engineer it to make you overdraft (by processing daily debits before daily credits), now they can’t do that. Also credit card statements have to have some kind of plain English “this is how long it will take to pay off paying the minimum” statement now.
The CFPB has basically been all good, and anyone who is against it should be immediately suspect.
These things seem like good, one-off things that might have been legislated or simply mandated by the FDIC, which should have no more interest in banks using shady tactics than does the consumer.
I didn’t mean it personally, though I do think every time a conservative complains about taxes we should create a new federal agency.
Seriously though, the reason Congress created agencies in the first place is because legislating one-offs is generally infeasible with the filibuster and the need to prioritize. Is this bad? Sure. Is there a real path to fixing it? Not without other tradeoffs.
The big question is whether or not it's possible to live comfortably if you are not intellectually gifted. For example, is it possible to earn a decent living working a factory job?
It certainly was in the past. But then offshoring ushered in a new age where free trade improved the national economy but did so in an unequal fashion: white collar workers saw their fortunes soar while displaced factory workers experienced severe economic dislocation while their towns withered away.
But that's opening up an entirely separate can of worms.
If hard work and devotion to duty = better life, African market women would be the richest people on the planet, and the gulfie tyrants would be begging on street corners.
In Vance's _Hillbilly Elegy_ he specifically discusses individuals who refuse to work, who flit from job to job without ever committing, who are constantly looking for the easy way out.
The big conservative meme regarding poverty is the Ben Shapiro three step plan.
1) Graduate high school
2) Get a job
3) Don't have children before marriage
People that follow those three steps end overwhelmingly end up in the middle class. They may not earn $400k a year as the head of pediatric neurology at a major hospital, but they earn enough to be comfortable.
More than that I would say that just because a lot of your life is not under your direct control that doesn't mean that individuals have zero agency. Yes, people get hit by buses or develop cancer. But that doesn't mean that humans are just slaves to fate and the fact that most of the people who follow those three rules make it is a testament to that.
You're always going to have lazy grifters on the prowl, I don't think anyone here is talking about them...they don't deserve a 'good life'.
But I think the #2 part of that is not nearly as solid as it once was. Adjusted for inflation, most wages have been either flat or declining since the 80's. This is not news, and is one of the reasons college admissions have stayed so high. Even with #1 and #3, simply being a hard worker doesn't get nearly what it used to a half century ago. And I'm not talking 6 figures either, the middle class ($80K median household income) can't even afford to buy their own home anymore.
Even with flat wages the standard of living in the US is still pretty good. As John Stossel pointed out even the poor in this country typically have electronic items such as smartphones and game consoles.
The problem with college as a pathway to higher wages is that iirc something like 50% of college grads were still substantially underemployed a decade after graduation. Slowly but surely that information has been leaking out and it seems to me that there's a vibe shift going on wrt college expectations for Gen Z.
So far as housing goes one of my dinner buddies has a theory that inflation over the last couple of decades was deceptively low because it was being funneled into market segments like housing and higher education. If I was in charge I'd stop subsidizing both and see what the market did.
So we should be just fine with the U.S. rich getting obscenely richer and an ever widening wealth gap because our poor are pretty darn good compared to those poor souls in Sudan?
Working in the developing world—west Africa, rural China, etc.—helped me appreciate that "book smart" isn't just not the only type of smart, but it may not matter that much outside a social context. I met plenty of incredibly sharp people who barely had any formal education and could barely read that were ridiculously intelligent and could easily solve problems or keep up with any philosophical/logical discussions.
It isn't to say that they WOULD NOT have been great academically. Some of them probably would have been. But the conceit of our society is that school is what helped make kids into smart people.
Our species obviously survived and dominated the world without formal education—and when it's not there, you definitely can see why. Academics are not value-less, but some of the "higher education" effects are likely more selection (as you're arguing) than impact of higher education.
I'm personally still in the camp, "Everyone should go to college" (and grumble about it because the "we should send people to trade school" people are usually people who did 4-year degrees or more), but more from the "traditional" liberal arts perspective of getting a further grounding in a lot of topics, not for better jobs and certainly not with the cost of ruinous amounts of money.
This ignores the reality that a lot of people have no desire to continue their schooling after the age of 18, or even after the age of 16. Why should somebody whose ambitions lie with making money in a trade like plumbing or car repair be forced to forego getting a start on their careers for an endeavor like schooling that bores them to tears?
Why have mandatory schooling at all? Technically we could just have child labor that never goes to school for those who aren’t interested. A lot of 7-year olds I know would probably opt out, given the choice. I know that’s an extreme/overstatement of what you’re saying and there’s other considerations like what we (somewhat arbitrarily) consider a conscious adult or not, but it’s to illustrate the logic.
In general, the public policy reason has been to increase human capital and also give people a good foundation. If our system was better in K-12 (it has never been awesome, even since the founding of the republic), I’d agree.
As it stands, it wouldn’t really be bad to have plumbers also have strong core curriculums in liberal arts, math, and science. Even if they never utilize it, I'd still say it's a worthwhile investment, and it could (and has, historically) helped tech transitions and adaptation. That also assumes that we aren't talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt though.
Why not keep people in school until they're 30? Or 40?
I would suggest taking a look at places like Germany where the education system starts routing people in their early teens. People who seem to have an interest in a career as a car mechanic, for example, would probably benefit from a shift in emphasis from academics to classes like shop or vocational education. Then by the time they're 18 they're ready to apprentice somewhere.
As for tech adaptation pretty much much everyone has a smartphone these days regardless of educational level.
That’s an implementation/curriculum question. On a base principle level, I don’t think we actually disagree.
Like I said, I personally have my own biases on what should or shouldn’t be in an education. Basic science and statistics should be in there. If we actually did a good job in K-12 (which the US never has, especially with its patchwork state-by-state), and yes, like Germany, sure. Early specialization (like much of Europe, not just Germany) is supported by stronger early fundamentals. We have neither. Our history has been to have colleges be a finishing school (yes, for white male landowners, but still), and it’s hard to shift.
I would note countries in Western Europe, such as Germany, started tracking/routing kids into university or vocational tracks starting as early as age 10 and graduate people in the vocational track at age 16. Yes, fundamental are important but do you really need 12 years to impart them?
As is observed elsewhere, any tracking system would route most black kids and close to half of Hispanic kids to the lowest track and until you find a way to deal with the lawsuits that would kick off, it's kind of pointless to pretend we just choose not to do it because we're all just not as smart as you are.
Oh, please. We do an excellent job in K-12 because we, unlike Germany, attempt to educate all kids. Choosing to track is a policy decision, and *not* choosing to track doesn't mean we do a bad job.
"A place where I most often get pushback to my philosophy, in Alan’s terms above, is “any pedagogical strategy, practice, or method that improves the performance of the worst students will also improve the performance of the best students”; a lot of people tell me that we could in fact create interventions that would only help the poor performers. I would respond by saying that, first, I don’t even know what that would look like and I’m skeptical such a thing could exist. "
Here's one: rubbish Whole Language reading instruction and replace it with phonics. Whole Language widened the distribution by badly handicapping those who aren't gifted readers. Meanwhile, the gifted readers were going to figure it out no matter how bad the pedagogy.
Returning to phonics will improve the reading skills of less-gifted readers, while the top of the distribution will remain unchanged.
I highly recommend the three-episode "Sold a Story" podcast.
And no, returning to phonics will do vanishingly little to improve reading skills and won't bring up the bottom much. Most schools already do some form of phonics, and for all the wailing about 3-cuing, the fact is that if all kids decoded perfectly their cognitive ability would limit their ability to build vocabulary.
"Resistance to these two points is pervasive because we collectively participate in a “cult of smart” that overvalues academic performance vis-à-vis other human excellences. That is, because we value “intelligence” as a unique excellence, necessary to our approval, we cannot admit that some people simply aren’t smart. (By contrast, we have no trouble admitting that some people can’t run very fast or lift heavy weights, because those traits are not intrinsic to social approval.)"
This is a profoundly important point that is a ubiquitous problem that feeds much of our social and political divides as there is rampant intellectual dishonesty within the upper class left community to fight to prevent the admission of basic human difference other that the fake physical appearance and societal bias claims they make... because admitting the former destroys their entire non-profit and political power and money-making scheme that is necessary as they have been over-educated and there are not enough jobs for them otherwise.
"(Contrast with labor unions, which grow more powerful the more people join them.)"
Except more powerful labor unions raise wages and destroy jobs as companies cannot compete globally and thus labor union membership declines.
Its not just higher ed that's going to change, once Trump finishes gutting the department of education you are going to have state-by-state mandates on how publication education is funded and who has access to it. I'm not an expert on any of this, so I can't really guess how that is going to go, but it wouldn't be intuitively surprising to me if the end result was the end of guaranteed primary-through-secondary education in some parts of the United States.
The vast majority of public education is not funded by the feds. I don't think we're at any risk of kids not being able to go through high school if they choose.
You may know more about this than me. I hope your right. Based on what I looked up, "vast majority" is probably fair, but it elides how strapped a lot of these places are anyway. Currently it looks like Federal funds are about 17% of all school funding, but its unevenly distributed according to poverty, so places its closer to 23%. If a large school district with a lot of poor students loses nearly a quarter of its funding, that's going to have some pretty deleterious effects, I imagine. But maybe it doesn't go as far as school closures. And I mean, its not like the money itself will go away, it will just be given back to the states. And if the states then decide they want to funnel it all into private schools well...
I guess the end result probably looks more like this town three counties away from where I went to high school, that was infamous because like, in the late seventies and early eighties the schools were still completely segregated. Not officially, but the rich families, who were all white, conspired to have all the state funding diverted to their private religious schools and the poor black families were stuck going to a school that was falling apart.
Property taxes are generally supplemented by state revenues and Title I evens out a lot. There are lots of states that don't use property taxes at all and you won't find any difference in outcomes or "segregation" based on that factor.
The Department of Education wasn't created until 1980. By some metrics, (like basic literacy), public schools did better before it was created. What if the Department itself just went away and the funds currently used to maintain its bureaucracy were simply parceled out among the states by population?
We probably don't have to wonder, we'll just see. Based on my understanding, the main two things the DOE is responsible for are 1) ensuring that a minimum standard of education is given to everyone regardless of race, gender or disability. I had an older sister once who was told by her teachers she should drop out of school because she was retarded. Turns out she had dyslexia. That's the sort of thing the department of education polices. Without it, probably some states will uphold a measure of protection for these groups, but a lot of states (conservative ones) will be happy to see people with learning disabilities or cognitive impairments sitting at home, because that forces the parents to deal with any associated financial burden as opposed to the state, and because it generally fits in with their social Darwinist worldview.
Also, the DOE pays for a lot, a lot, a lot, of education research. This I DO know a little more about. Unlike pharmaceutical research this isn't a field where private corporations particularly care or see room to make a big profit, so its still mostly academics asking for grants. So basically any US research into how kids learn, what age they are learning the most, how to help them learn better, this is all stuff that gets paid for by the Federal government. And that's not something you can replace with block grants on a state-by-state basis. Theoretically the department that review and funds those grants could be shunted into the department of labor statistics or whatever, but my guess is that Donald Trump and the Republicans don't really care about education research any more than they care about any other kind of government-funded research. And that's a shame, because that's definitely a good investment of taxpayer money, IMO.
But like I said. We'll see. the new head of the Dept. of Education announced that she sees it as her job to help Trump disband it, so assuming everything goes as plans we will know exactly what the DOE was doing approximately ten years from now, when its way too late to do anything about it.
Because the DoE is unrelated to the laws controlling the funding it distributes. So doing away with the DoE won't do away with the laws. The money spending will just go to another department.
I’ve been surprised how many districts in my state are going to 4-day weeks. That would have been unthinkable at one time - women needed to be free of their children during the day. Covid broke that, I guess.
And then, judging from teacher-related Reddit threads, the kids broke the teachers, the kids in conjunction with the administrators.
The district spokespeople have as much as said, we can’t get people to spend the day in these conditions without a perk like Friday off.
If public school erodes, I predict it will be because of a shortage of teachers. Which I realize makes no sense given the burgeoning population.
Maybe there are some jobs only Americans will do.
Or maybe this problem - teacher retention - is unique to my state.
Teacher retention is a problem everywhere! People seem to think it is about salaries. It is in some places where the pay is abysmal, but turnover and attrition are problems even in highly-paid blue states. The job is very difficult because there is very little flexibility during the school year - you can't easily take afternoons off to go to the doctor or pick up your own kids, etc. For someone with a masters degree, an email job is much easier even if the pay and benefits are worse. There is also a lot of disrespect from students, parents and administrators that grinds people down.
Or universal vouchers, same deal. Florida has already given up on education, where else will the next generation of Maga voters be hatched from..????🤪🤬🤮
What do you mean by functionally illiterate? I would very much disagree with you. At the very least, American lives are very text focused now as everyone reads multiple text messages per day. Not to mention social media. Can the average person read a college-level philosophy text, or a complicated legal contract, and comprehend it? Without serious effort, probably not. But can the average person read Harry Potter and comprehend it? Surely almost all high school graduates can at this point, and I would say that passes the bar of “literate.”
Of course, this would improve with better phonics instruction, and this is really obvious low-hanging fruit to be picked, even though it probably won’t materially affect self-sorting into percentile bands.
This article touches on it briefly but not like his others. Home life is simply a huge factor in academic performance. There's nothing the government and/or schools can do to fix that problem. I think an uncomfortably high number of kids grow up in such unstable environments that is hard to know what their natural ability is or what the end result would be. Like a talented athlete who is sitting on the bench and never gets to play.
The other side is grade inflation which I think is another problem. The charge has been levied at elite colleges but I see it in high schools. If everybody gets an A on the test and everybody gets a 4.0, then something is wrong. Either the tests are not hard enough or the grades being given are not reflective of the knowledge of the subject at hand. When I was in school, you really could not half ass your way to a 4.0. You had to be smart and put in the work. Now those grades are handed out to seemingly everybody.
It absolutely is. As I said in my comment above, if a student had a bad home life, or has parents who do not put emphasis on academics, then that will absolutely seep into academic performance
Not a given. If that were true, then there'd be lots of evidence showing that smart poor kids did worse than less intelligent rich kids. In fact, it shows the opposite, even now, and does so on every other comparison points as well. IQ trumps everything.
I say that as someone who works a lot with kids in the 90 IQ range and am committed to getting kids to be motivated and use the brains they have. Lots of them have committed parents. Lots of smart kids don't. Just doesn't matter.
Sure, there's the occasional kid whose dysfunctional family life screws them up, but only at the Dickensian level of abuse. And even then, smart kids do better.
Every student of mine whose parents show up to parent/teacher night has at least a 3.2 GPA. I have almost no reason to talk to them other than to compliment their kid.
The students who are failing? Their parents never show up.
One of my favorite Heinlein novels features a balkanized North America where the nation of California has decided, in its extreme commitment to equality and fairness, to award everyone a college diploma.
The protagonist says she can't see how it does any harm.
Of course, if the credential of a 4-year degree became meaningless, the only value to college education would become the extent to which it actually makes you a better or more capable person ... which was the point.
This push to try to get every kid to go to college, even when the mediocre students - the ones who otherwise wouldn't have gone - aren't really going to learn enough to be worth 4 years and ridiculous money, is just an extremely self-serious way to try to achieve Heinlein's satirical end state.
Totally agree on most of this. My concern isn't college. It's that 70% of eighth graders can not read at grade level. I don't believe 70% of kids can't learn to read
The 'nation's report card' reading and math scores for 4th and 8th graders, reported every two years, had been declining steadily since at least 2012. They certainly took a notable further dip with COVID (in 2020 4th graders were in kindergarten, just learning to read if at all, and 8th graders were in 4th grade, with at least three grades of reading instruction behind them). But COVID cannot fully track what's happening in 2024 -- even states like FL that reopened schools quickly showed a further decline in reading scores in 2024 compared to 2022, and some big cities, where schools stayed closed, actually showed improved math scores (overall, math scores held steady or improved compared to 2022). Year 2020 fourth graders didn't forget how to read for four years. A survey accompanying the report card reported that too many kids simple don't read for fun anymore, and too many aren't attending classes even though their schools have been open for years now.
If you're arguing that US education has been circling the drain for years but that Covid kicked things into overdrive I am not going to disagree with you.
Also, no real world phenomenon exists that doesn't have outliers. The overall trend however is clear.
"...too many aren't attending classes even though their schools have been open for years now."
No, it was publicized by the opinion side of the media. The reporting side of the media made it clear that the "lockdowns" were what the majority of parents in any district wanted.
And yes, attendance is worse, but that's because the same parents who kept their kids home have kids who like being home now.
We shouldn't have closed the schools in March. But when the legislatures in every state suspended the attendance laws for a year, the results were baked in--it was up to parents whether or not schools opened and even when they opened, it was up to every parent whether to send their kids or not.
"No, it was publicized by the opinion side of the media. The reporting side of the media made it clear that the "lockdowns" were what the majority of parents in any district wanted."
There's no such thing. Montana public schools reopened in May of 2020, right after the initial wave of infections. Florida and allied states in the south rapidly decided that they were done with lockdowns while more liberal states like California and Illinois clung to theirs.
Again, there's no such thing as "legislatures in every state". There's 50 different individual laboratories and in some of those states where teachers unions had more power the lockdowns were longer and the results were worse.
Literally every word of your post is wrong. Schools stayed in remote based on parental preference, and for reasons unknown parental prefernce was driven by race.
"Florida and allied states in the south rapidly decided that they were done with lockdowns"
Wrong. Every single southern state gave parents a choice. 30% of Florida students were in remote for the entire year, including 75 and 80% of students in Broward County and Miami Dade. Palm Beach County went from 60% remote at beginning of 2020-21 school year to over 30% at end of year. Result: Florida's NAEP scores weren't all that, and the state actually lost more points than mostly homebound California did in the subsequent test. So your claim that lockdowns made results worse is not in fact the case. Researchers agree that some portion of the drop is due to remote ed, but in the vast majority of states remote ed was a district decision driven by parent majority.
What DeSantis and Abbott did (but no other state that I'm aware of) was say that all parents could choose. Every other state (including the rest of the southern states you valorize) left it up to the districts whether to offer inperson or not. And the districts asked parents and decided based on that. BUT every governor committed that students who wanted remote could stay in their local school and be remote regardless of what the majority wanted.
This led to a major power imbalance, and it's why you always heard from angry parents who wanted schools open. These parents were the minority in their district but with the exception of Florida and Texas they couldn't insist on in person instruction. But regardless of majority decisions in their district, parents who wanted remote could stay in remote all year. So check out all the cities in those southern states you think "opened" and you'll learn that they were in remote all year, because cities are majority non-white.
Unions had no say. New York, which has very strong unions, had schools open as early as December because white parents are the power players especially in NYC. So even though white kids are only 12% of NYC schools, over 50% of the students in school were white. DC, which has very weak unions, didn't open schools until February or March because white parents are irrelevant there. California has very strong unions, but so does Vermont, and Vermont schools were never closed.
In every case except one--Chicago--when schools left remote, teachers went back to work without complaint. And in Chicago they only were able to delay it 2 weeks.
And what the fuck are you talking about? Of course there are legislatures in every state. And in every state, attendance laws were completely suspended for the 2020-21 school year, otherwise every state would have been in violation of federal law. And every governor in every state guaranteed parents the right to remain in remote. The only governor who went back on this was Abbott, forcing kids who were absent too much to come back. DeSantis tried to start the second semester 100% back in school but was shouted down.
Again, Chicago is illustrative here. In 2021, the teachers refused to go back. Lightfoot could have just shut down access and forced them back, but she couldn't because most of the parents wanted remote and they'd have been furious. In 2022, teachers refused to go back but this time, Lightfoot was dealing with the re-established attendance laws, along with strict legal guidelines for when remote could be instituted. The guidelines hadn't been met, so Lightfoot, knowing again that most of her parnets wanted remote, nonetheless shut down access to the online system because otherwise she would have lost school funding.
Unions didn't oppose those laws in any state.
Again, you're just ignorant. Parental majority drove school decisions. Randi Wiengarten is a Dem hack whose salary is paid by teacher dues, but she had fuckall to do with anything. And don't cite the CDC nonsense to me. If the CDC wanted to get teacher approval, they'd have gone to the larger union. Besides, governors ignored CDC all they wanted. Parents drove their decisions, too.
Well, if that's your concern then relax, because that stat is nonsense and if the stat isn't bad enough you then translate "not reading at grade level" to "can't learn to read".
Begging everyone to Google Vilfredo Pareto. You’re welcome, sweet peas.
20% of the people that follow your advice will read 80% of the Wikipedia article
right????🤣
I love your comment. What I didn’t realize is that googling won’t bring up story I read in New Scientist magazine, the first time I heard of Pareto. He apparently came up with his theory watching peas grow in his garden, noticing that 20% grew faster and fuller than the rest under same conditions of light, soil, etc.
"The value of a college diploma is derived from its scarcity relative to the number of jobs that call for one; if you flood the job market with degrees, the value of those degrees will necessarily decline. (Contrast with labor unions, which grow more powerful the more people join them.) "
The obvious strategy, then, is to form a union of college grads.
Oh wait, isn't that the Democratic Party now?
I'd note too that while for sure, the normal distribution is a real thing, you run the risk of arguing yourself into hereditarian Hanania territory with it.
(Of course, I don't believe every kid needs to go to college. I'd love to see an inflorescence of non-scammy trade schools.)
I mean, a big chunk of IQ probably is genetic. DeBoer agrees with that.
Hah, I guess the Dems could be a union of college grads but they forgot how to unionize somehow!
Flinching away very strongly from hereditarian stuff is, I think, a major impetus for the sand-heading around the consequences of distribution and relative vs. absolute ability. That doesn't require going all HBD race science or whatever. But given the paltry returns on investment and perennial everything-bagel failure to set clear priorities, I think there's still a lot of value in identifying Red Queen Races. The pit of bad money neither needs to be dug deeper nor have good money thrown in after it, to mix metaphors. Plus the whole backlash against e.g. dismantling tracking and advanced courses For Equity(tm) that's actively harmful to the political fortunes of the "United College Grads".
There is only so much carrying capacity to the economy that the trades can support. The dilemma of the contemporary American economy is that there are just too many damn workforce participants. The correct, fair, just response (as it is to other ills of our society) is to end mass immigration. A relative scarcity of workers will COMPEL management/capital to raise wages and improve working conditions. They will have no other options, that is if they want the work to get done, and they will want to get the work done, because there is still the potential of great profit at the end of the day. Mass migration is a vector of class warfare wielded by capital/management, aimed at the working class.
"in the United States in the 21st century, schools are the proverbial hammer; reformers assume that policy cannot fix families, parenting, or environmental/societal factors and so must believe that school policy changes are the only way forward."
Until I started reading your stuff on education, the thought that we were asking schools to do too much never really crossed my mind. I used to be very critical of public schools (even though I graduated from public schools) because I thought they just weren't doing their job correctly.
Now I am finally figuring out that our expectation of what any school can do (not just public schools) with a random student is unrealistic, and if we want to try to fix all of these other things, we can't expect to do it through the education system.
Back in The Bad Old Days, for better or for worse, it was not assumed that School Is For Everyone. Nor was it assumed that Schooling = Intelligence or Schooling = Competence or even Schooling = Qualfication.
Abraham Lincoln had something like a grand total of six weeks of formal education throughout his lifetime, and yet he was no slouch as a reader, writer, thinker or speaker. In fact, he was a rather successful lawyer, before bcoming Abraham Lincoln.
And he was far from the only one at that time.
I have students who, no matter what I do for them, will never achieve academic progress. Many of these students lack a home, or suffer from abuse or neglect. A students life exists outside the classroom and learning occurs in a context, and yet we hold schools accountable for everything in a student’s reality
Add in point 4. "No, Virginia, there is no magic bullet, no educational practice, no vademecum or cureall, that will make most people or most kids suddenly smarter than average."
The next step is removing the dogma of "just spend more bro" from the discourse. The US is comparable or better than our peer nations in both per pupil spending as well as total GDP spending. But this information is almost never brought up and people assume more money = better results.
If all that were needed were to throw money at the problem, the DC public schools would be tossing off young geniuses and Nobel Prize winning teens like a popcorn machine set to "berzerk!"
One of the liberal slogans I find most frustrating is "spend more money on schools so we can spend less money on prisons." First of all, more spending doesn't get better results, as noted. Second, having done a lot of volunteer work in prisons, *most* of the kids who are going to end up in prison care nothing for school and aren't among those who might marginally benefit from more spending.
I absolutely agree that that notion that we just try to hammer away social ills by effectively delegating the task to teenagers doing their homework is insane. It reeks of the same sort of personal delegation we have seen and gradually grown wise to with personal carbon footprints and the like, and we're right to be suspicious.
I will offer one slight wrinkle re: pedagogical intervention. As you say, offering the best possible educational tools to everyone scoots the distribution right and still leaves some at the top, but it does reliably *narrow* the distribution too. In your comparison to weightlifting above, sure, there will be people who can pick up something vastly heavier than you- but a tremendous fraction of that gap between your performance and theirs is that they are training hard and you are not. That might not matter if the sole purpose is to win a contest that you perhaps never could, but if there are benefits to actually being strong, then it does.
If education actually has to do with social virtuous, positive externality things like creating competent electorates and workforces, then we still clearly want to do our best by everyone in a way that even a moderate connection to the misery of a modern school day suggests we are not.
Oh, please. The modern school day is not miserable.
The 19th century school day was by any standard far more unhappy.
No doubt- so? There remains a long way to go- one educator to another, surely we can acknowledge that the lived experience of most students is closer to Kafkaesque storage than it is to what anyone actually does when they want to develop a skill or passion.
The amount of times I was told "you don't need to know that for the test" after asking what I assumed was an interesting question in class really ground me down. And this was at a good British private school. God knows how much worse it would have been in the state sector.
The worst possible answer to the best possible question. You aren’t alone- another wrinkle in this sort of hard-nosed, grades=ability=destiny rationale, which, yes, is not without some common sense points, is that a perfectly well documented educational failure mode is some subset of demonstrably talented people being, effectively, bored out of high performance. Grades in the end measure something like ‘compliance’- which isn’t nothing! That can include something like ‘work ethic’ and your ability to comply with your teacher’s directive to learn a particular skill. But I find that’s a framing that makes it clear why some patently able people suffer, as you did, for doing what you’re ostensibly there to do.
I mean for what it's worth I was able to play the game, and did get good grades, because I was mature enough to understand that a lot of what we did was essentially an exercise in jumping through hoops. But not everyone is able to grok that at the age of 14-15.
Absolutely not. I don't acknowledge that at all. And the data doesn't back you up.
The data? About how kids feel about school? Sure it does: https://news.yale.edu/2020/01/30/national-survey-students-feelings-about-high-school-are-mostly-negative
And note that includes experience sampling, which is considerably more reliable than surveys.
Wow, tired, stressed, and bored is Kafkaesque storage?
Parsing this out to general life achievement, doesn't this completely wreck the Conservative ideal of work hard = better life?
If focusing on the lower achievers also moves the goalposts for higher achievers, and the "ability" distribution tends to stay the same regardless of input, then wouldn't it NOT really matter how hard someone works if they are on the lower end?
If a system is proven to have winners and losers, regardless of all manner of trying to boost the losers, then how does that jive with the very American notion that anyone can achieve great things, no matter who they are? Won't there always be losers, no matter how hard someone tries?
Well those that work hard do better than those who don't within their band of ability
Hmm, that's probably closer to the reality of it. Hard work could likely get one to move from middle class to upper-middle class or lower-upper class without it running counter to the stats too much.
Of course, that would also mean that there would need to be some downward movement from the upper class as well. Perhaps lazy rich kids squandering their parents wealth for instance.
All of this sort has this shadowy mercantilism-esque quality to it - like there is only so much 'good life' to go around. A zero-sum game. If that's true that's quite depressing for humanity, as it means there would always have to be a lower class.
I wonder if this still rings true with the relative size of each 'ability' class. For instance does it matter if the middling strata is huge or narrow, do the top and bottom need to be similar is size, or can it be skewed far one way or the other in reality?
Yes. In my 15 years of parenting, the one rule I hope has sunk in with my kids is: "Always show up, especially when you don't want to. That puts you ahead of 80% of your competition."
This is, in my opinion, the greatest argument for wealth redistribution and I believe it to be true.
Qualities that confer a better life, like intelligence and motivation, are not equal among all people from birth. Society rewards these qualities, and to a large degree, you don't choose whether you have them. So many people are condemned at birth to the lower rung of society.
But the conservative counter argument is that sure, some people are in the top 10% of intrinsic motivation, and you'll never be successful like them if you're in the bottom 30%, but by making it a prized value you can get people to perform above their 'natural' state. If you tell people you can be more successful by trying harder, some people will, and they'll do better than if you had told them from birth that they couldn't try any harder than they wanted to and were just born that way. I believe this is true also.
It's hard to thread the needle on the messaging here, but I think society has been trying.
The problem with conservatives, at least the current batch of them, is that they’ve got the Nietzschean thing going on - too much of their base are either scammers or the unwilling-to-admit-they’ve-been-scammed. It’s why they go after institutions like the CFPB that try to prevent people from taking advantage of those who aren’t going to understand things like compound interest and can’t read, for example, payday loan contracts.
Liberals may buy into a harmful tabula rasa narrative when it comes to education, but at least we’re for softening the edges of “caveat emptor.”
Not only can the average frustrated American chump not read a payday loan contract, even if he could, it's not like he can negotiate a better deal.
"Take it or leave it!"
Best hope the metric of success by the CFPB (an institution I’d never heard of before the recent brouhaha) is growth in the volume of payday loans - since that is the case.
What do you mean?
If the CF-whatever (some acronyms are just no bueno) may be justified, in part, because it prevents people from getting payday loans, by educating them about it - then we should be celebrating the fact that it’s been successful. To me, “successful” for this particular aim which you brought up, would be for the volume of payday loans to go down.
They are not.
Meh, the CFPB was defanged during Trump 1, and then there was a bunch of inflation.
One of the funny things is that before there were payday loans, there were pawn shops. And before that, loan sharks.
There is always a need for quick cash, no matter if you are well educated or not.
One thing the CFPB did is make banks do less shitty stuff when processing daily credits and debits. Used to they would engineer it to make you overdraft (by processing daily debits before daily credits), now they can’t do that. Also credit card statements have to have some kind of plain English “this is how long it will take to pay off paying the minimum” statement now.
The CFPB has basically been all good, and anyone who is against it should be immediately suspect.
These things seem like good, one-off things that might have been legislated or simply mandated by the FDIC, which should have no more interest in banks using shady tactics than does the consumer.
But I love being immediately suspect.
I didn’t mean it personally, though I do think every time a conservative complains about taxes we should create a new federal agency.
Seriously though, the reason Congress created agencies in the first place is because legislating one-offs is generally infeasible with the filibuster and the need to prioritize. Is this bad? Sure. Is there a real path to fixing it? Not without other tradeoffs.
The big question is whether or not it's possible to live comfortably if you are not intellectually gifted. For example, is it possible to earn a decent living working a factory job?
It certainly was in the past. But then offshoring ushered in a new age where free trade improved the national economy but did so in an unequal fashion: white collar workers saw their fortunes soar while displaced factory workers experienced severe economic dislocation while their towns withered away.
But that's opening up an entirely separate can of worms.
I think my position on all of this genuinely indicts both sides of the American spectrum, but everybody thinks that about themselves
Well, I am in the 1%, and tomcats are not, as a rule, known for their relentless work ethic.
Except when it comes to brawling and catching rodents, right?
Axtually, queens tend to be better mousers.
If hard work and devotion to duty = better life, African market women would be the richest people on the planet, and the gulfie tyrants would be begging on street corners.
The question is: hard work at what, exactly?
And that is the rub.
In Vance's _Hillbilly Elegy_ he specifically discusses individuals who refuse to work, who flit from job to job without ever committing, who are constantly looking for the easy way out.
The big conservative meme regarding poverty is the Ben Shapiro three step plan.
1) Graduate high school
2) Get a job
3) Don't have children before marriage
People that follow those three steps end overwhelmingly end up in the middle class. They may not earn $400k a year as the head of pediatric neurology at a major hospital, but they earn enough to be comfortable.
If they can stay out of debt, this largely works.
More than that I would say that just because a lot of your life is not under your direct control that doesn't mean that individuals have zero agency. Yes, people get hit by buses or develop cancer. But that doesn't mean that humans are just slaves to fate and the fact that most of the people who follow those three rules make it is a testament to that.
You're always going to have lazy grifters on the prowl, I don't think anyone here is talking about them...they don't deserve a 'good life'.
But I think the #2 part of that is not nearly as solid as it once was. Adjusted for inflation, most wages have been either flat or declining since the 80's. This is not news, and is one of the reasons college admissions have stayed so high. Even with #1 and #3, simply being a hard worker doesn't get nearly what it used to a half century ago. And I'm not talking 6 figures either, the middle class ($80K median household income) can't even afford to buy their own home anymore.
Even with flat wages the standard of living in the US is still pretty good. As John Stossel pointed out even the poor in this country typically have electronic items such as smartphones and game consoles.
The problem with college as a pathway to higher wages is that iirc something like 50% of college grads were still substantially underemployed a decade after graduation. Slowly but surely that information has been leaking out and it seems to me that there's a vibe shift going on wrt college expectations for Gen Z.
So far as housing goes one of my dinner buddies has a theory that inflation over the last couple of decades was deceptively low because it was being funneled into market segments like housing and higher education. If I was in charge I'd stop subsidizing both and see what the market did.
So we should be just fine with the U.S. rich getting obscenely richer and an ever widening wealth gap because our poor are pretty darn good compared to those poor souls in Sudan?
That only makes sense as a joke line.
This is nonsense. If it were true, any coke addicted whore could marry her pimp and they'd be fine.
Cargo cult thinking.
I think smart people are no less prey than others, to the idea that they can get something for nothing - that working too hard is for chumps.
Smart people fall for worse scams, like graduate degrees!
Working in the developing world—west Africa, rural China, etc.—helped me appreciate that "book smart" isn't just not the only type of smart, but it may not matter that much outside a social context. I met plenty of incredibly sharp people who barely had any formal education and could barely read that were ridiculously intelligent and could easily solve problems or keep up with any philosophical/logical discussions.
It isn't to say that they WOULD NOT have been great academically. Some of them probably would have been. But the conceit of our society is that school is what helped make kids into smart people.
Our species obviously survived and dominated the world without formal education—and when it's not there, you definitely can see why. Academics are not value-less, but some of the "higher education" effects are likely more selection (as you're arguing) than impact of higher education.
I'm personally still in the camp, "Everyone should go to college" (and grumble about it because the "we should send people to trade school" people are usually people who did 4-year degrees or more), but more from the "traditional" liberal arts perspective of getting a further grounding in a lot of topics, not for better jobs and certainly not with the cost of ruinous amounts of money.
The writer of _Excellent Sheep_ tells a story about how the most literate person he ever met was a plumber who never went to college.
Re: everyone going to college.
This ignores the reality that a lot of people have no desire to continue their schooling after the age of 18, or even after the age of 16. Why should somebody whose ambitions lie with making money in a trade like plumbing or car repair be forced to forego getting a start on their careers for an endeavor like schooling that bores them to tears?
Why have mandatory schooling at all? Technically we could just have child labor that never goes to school for those who aren’t interested. A lot of 7-year olds I know would probably opt out, given the choice. I know that’s an extreme/overstatement of what you’re saying and there’s other considerations like what we (somewhat arbitrarily) consider a conscious adult or not, but it’s to illustrate the logic.
In general, the public policy reason has been to increase human capital and also give people a good foundation. If our system was better in K-12 (it has never been awesome, even since the founding of the republic), I’d agree.
As it stands, it wouldn’t really be bad to have plumbers also have strong core curriculums in liberal arts, math, and science. Even if they never utilize it, I'd still say it's a worthwhile investment, and it could (and has, historically) helped tech transitions and adaptation. That also assumes that we aren't talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt though.
"Why have mandatory schooling at all?"
Why not keep people in school until they're 30? Or 40?
I would suggest taking a look at places like Germany where the education system starts routing people in their early teens. People who seem to have an interest in a career as a car mechanic, for example, would probably benefit from a shift in emphasis from academics to classes like shop or vocational education. Then by the time they're 18 they're ready to apprentice somewhere.
As for tech adaptation pretty much much everyone has a smartphone these days regardless of educational level.
That’s an implementation/curriculum question. On a base principle level, I don’t think we actually disagree.
Like I said, I personally have my own biases on what should or shouldn’t be in an education. Basic science and statistics should be in there. If we actually did a good job in K-12 (which the US never has, especially with its patchwork state-by-state), and yes, like Germany, sure. Early specialization (like much of Europe, not just Germany) is supported by stronger early fundamentals. We have neither. Our history has been to have colleges be a finishing school (yes, for white male landowners, but still), and it’s hard to shift.
I would note countries in Western Europe, such as Germany, started tracking/routing kids into university or vocational tracks starting as early as age 10 and graduate people in the vocational track at age 16. Yes, fundamental are important but do you really need 12 years to impart them?
As is observed elsewhere, any tracking system would route most black kids and close to half of Hispanic kids to the lowest track and until you find a way to deal with the lawsuits that would kick off, it's kind of pointless to pretend we just choose not to do it because we're all just not as smart as you are.
Oh, please. We do an excellent job in K-12 because we, unlike Germany, attempt to educate all kids. Choosing to track is a policy decision, and *not* choosing to track doesn't mean we do a bad job.
"A place where I most often get pushback to my philosophy, in Alan’s terms above, is “any pedagogical strategy, practice, or method that improves the performance of the worst students will also improve the performance of the best students”; a lot of people tell me that we could in fact create interventions that would only help the poor performers. I would respond by saying that, first, I don’t even know what that would look like and I’m skeptical such a thing could exist. "
Here's one: rubbish Whole Language reading instruction and replace it with phonics. Whole Language widened the distribution by badly handicapping those who aren't gifted readers. Meanwhile, the gifted readers were going to figure it out no matter how bad the pedagogy.
Returning to phonics will improve the reading skills of less-gifted readers, while the top of the distribution will remain unchanged.
I highly recommend the three-episode "Sold a Story" podcast.
Yeah, Emily's sure selling a story.
And no, returning to phonics will do vanishingly little to improve reading skills and won't bring up the bottom much. Most schools already do some form of phonics, and for all the wailing about 3-cuing, the fact is that if all kids decoded perfectly their cognitive ability would limit their ability to build vocabulary.
"Resistance to these two points is pervasive because we collectively participate in a “cult of smart” that overvalues academic performance vis-à-vis other human excellences. That is, because we value “intelligence” as a unique excellence, necessary to our approval, we cannot admit that some people simply aren’t smart. (By contrast, we have no trouble admitting that some people can’t run very fast or lift heavy weights, because those traits are not intrinsic to social approval.)"
This is a profoundly important point that is a ubiquitous problem that feeds much of our social and political divides as there is rampant intellectual dishonesty within the upper class left community to fight to prevent the admission of basic human difference other that the fake physical appearance and societal bias claims they make... because admitting the former destroys their entire non-profit and political power and money-making scheme that is necessary as they have been over-educated and there are not enough jobs for them otherwise.
"(Contrast with labor unions, which grow more powerful the more people join them.)"
Except more powerful labor unions raise wages and destroy jobs as companies cannot compete globally and thus labor union membership declines.
Its not just higher ed that's going to change, once Trump finishes gutting the department of education you are going to have state-by-state mandates on how publication education is funded and who has access to it. I'm not an expert on any of this, so I can't really guess how that is going to go, but it wouldn't be intuitively surprising to me if the end result was the end of guaranteed primary-through-secondary education in some parts of the United States.
The vast majority of public education is not funded by the feds. I don't think we're at any risk of kids not being able to go through high school if they choose.
You may know more about this than me. I hope your right. Based on what I looked up, "vast majority" is probably fair, but it elides how strapped a lot of these places are anyway. Currently it looks like Federal funds are about 17% of all school funding, but its unevenly distributed according to poverty, so places its closer to 23%. If a large school district with a lot of poor students loses nearly a quarter of its funding, that's going to have some pretty deleterious effects, I imagine. But maybe it doesn't go as far as school closures. And I mean, its not like the money itself will go away, it will just be given back to the states. And if the states then decide they want to funnel it all into private schools well...
I guess the end result probably looks more like this town three counties away from where I went to high school, that was infamous because like, in the late seventies and early eighties the schools were still completely segregated. Not officially, but the rich families, who were all white, conspired to have all the state funding diverted to their private religious schools and the poor black families were stuck going to a school that was falling apart.
Schools are segregated because the model of funding education with local property taxes is widespread. That's the real issue.
Property taxes are generally supplemented by state revenues and Title I evens out a lot. There are lots of states that don't use property taxes at all and you won't find any difference in outcomes or "segregation" based on that factor.
I thought most public education was paid for from property taxes?
Correct me if I am wrong.
I think it’s both. Property taxes plus federal per-pupil funding that attempts to spend more in poorer districts
I thought that was what State Boards of Equalization were supposed to accomplish?
I’m not familiar with that term, as I’ve never lived in a state that had something called that
It may go by various names.
Not for a while. Very few states fund even primarily from property taxes.
The Department of Education wasn't created until 1980. By some metrics, (like basic literacy), public schools did better before it was created. What if the Department itself just went away and the funds currently used to maintain its bureaucracy were simply parceled out among the states by population?
We probably don't have to wonder, we'll just see. Based on my understanding, the main two things the DOE is responsible for are 1) ensuring that a minimum standard of education is given to everyone regardless of race, gender or disability. I had an older sister once who was told by her teachers she should drop out of school because she was retarded. Turns out she had dyslexia. That's the sort of thing the department of education polices. Without it, probably some states will uphold a measure of protection for these groups, but a lot of states (conservative ones) will be happy to see people with learning disabilities or cognitive impairments sitting at home, because that forces the parents to deal with any associated financial burden as opposed to the state, and because it generally fits in with their social Darwinist worldview.
Also, the DOE pays for a lot, a lot, a lot, of education research. This I DO know a little more about. Unlike pharmaceutical research this isn't a field where private corporations particularly care or see room to make a big profit, so its still mostly academics asking for grants. So basically any US research into how kids learn, what age they are learning the most, how to help them learn better, this is all stuff that gets paid for by the Federal government. And that's not something you can replace with block grants on a state-by-state basis. Theoretically the department that review and funds those grants could be shunted into the department of labor statistics or whatever, but my guess is that Donald Trump and the Republicans don't really care about education research any more than they care about any other kind of government-funded research. And that's a shame, because that's definitely a good investment of taxpayer money, IMO.
But like I said. We'll see. the new head of the Dept. of Education announced that she sees it as her job to help Trump disband it, so assuming everything goes as plans we will know exactly what the DOE was doing approximately ten years from now, when its way too late to do anything about it.
I think we're gonna see... but it won't be good.... right????
Because the DoE is unrelated to the laws controlling the funding it distributes. So doing away with the DoE won't do away with the laws. The money spending will just go to another department.
I’ve been surprised how many districts in my state are going to 4-day weeks. That would have been unthinkable at one time - women needed to be free of their children during the day. Covid broke that, I guess.
And then, judging from teacher-related Reddit threads, the kids broke the teachers, the kids in conjunction with the administrators.
The district spokespeople have as much as said, we can’t get people to spend the day in these conditions without a perk like Friday off.
If public school erodes, I predict it will be because of a shortage of teachers. Which I realize makes no sense given the burgeoning population.
Maybe there are some jobs only Americans will do.
Or maybe this problem - teacher retention - is unique to my state.
Teacher retention is a problem everywhere! People seem to think it is about salaries. It is in some places where the pay is abysmal, but turnover and attrition are problems even in highly-paid blue states. The job is very difficult because there is very little flexibility during the school year - you can't easily take afternoons off to go to the doctor or pick up your own kids, etc. For someone with a masters degree, an email job is much easier even if the pay and benefits are worse. There is also a lot of disrespect from students, parents and administrators that grinds people down.
Or universal vouchers, same deal. Florida has already given up on education, where else will the next generation of Maga voters be hatched from..????🤪🤬🤮
As of 2022, approximately 79% of U.S. adults have adequate literacy skills at PIAAC level 2 or above.
Around 43 million U.S. adults, or 21%, struggle with basic literacy tasks.
54% of adults read below the sixth-grade level, indicating significant reading challenges.
The economic cost of low literacy in the U.S. is estimated at $2.2 trillion annually due to productivity losses.
One-third of adults with low literacy are unemployed, highlighting barriers to employment.
A 1% rise in literacy scores can lead to a 2.5% increase in labor productivity and 1.5% increase in GDP.
43% of adults with the lowest literacy skills live in poverty, perpetuating socio-economic challenges.
In terms of gender, literacy rates are 99% for both men and women, with minimal score differences.
Historically, illiteracy in the U.S. dropped from 20% in 1870 to 0.6% by 1979, yet functional illiteracy remains an issue.
The U.S. ranked 13th out of 79 countries in literacy, emphasizing the need for continued educational efforts..
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No way. I'd say 79% of American adults are functionally illiterate.
What do you mean by functionally illiterate? I would very much disagree with you. At the very least, American lives are very text focused now as everyone reads multiple text messages per day. Not to mention social media. Can the average person read a college-level philosophy text, or a complicated legal contract, and comprehend it? Without serious effort, probably not. But can the average person read Harry Potter and comprehend it? Surely almost all high school graduates can at this point, and I would say that passes the bar of “literate.”
Of course, this would improve with better phonics instruction, and this is really obvious low-hanging fruit to be picked, even though it probably won’t materially affect self-sorting into percentile bands.
"As of 2022, approximately 79% of U.S. adults have adequate literacy skills at PIAAC level 2 or above.
Around 43 million U.S. adults, or 21%, struggle with basic literacy tasks.
54% of adults read below the sixth-grade level, indicating significant reading challenges."
Honestly, who would believe such nonsense?
This article touches on it briefly but not like his others. Home life is simply a huge factor in academic performance. There's nothing the government and/or schools can do to fix that problem. I think an uncomfortably high number of kids grow up in such unstable environments that is hard to know what their natural ability is or what the end result would be. Like a talented athlete who is sitting on the bench and never gets to play.
The other side is grade inflation which I think is another problem. The charge has been levied at elite colleges but I see it in high schools. If everybody gets an A on the test and everybody gets a 4.0, then something is wrong. Either the tests are not hard enough or the grades being given are not reflective of the knowledge of the subject at hand. When I was in school, you really could not half ass your way to a 4.0. You had to be smart and put in the work. Now those grades are handed out to seemingly everybody.
"Home life is simply a huge factor in academic performance."
No, it's not.
Oh? Elaborate
If home life were a factor in academic performance adoption studies would have very different results.
It absolutely is. As I said in my comment above, if a student had a bad home life, or has parents who do not put emphasis on academics, then that will absolutely seep into academic performance
Not a given. If that were true, then there'd be lots of evidence showing that smart poor kids did worse than less intelligent rich kids. In fact, it shows the opposite, even now, and does so on every other comparison points as well. IQ trumps everything.
I say that as someone who works a lot with kids in the 90 IQ range and am committed to getting kids to be motivated and use the brains they have. Lots of them have committed parents. Lots of smart kids don't. Just doesn't matter.
Sure, there's the occasional kid whose dysfunctional family life screws them up, but only at the Dickensian level of abuse. And even then, smart kids do better.
Every student of mine whose parents show up to parent/teacher night has at least a 3.2 GPA. I have almost no reason to talk to them other than to compliment their kid.
The students who are failing? Their parents never show up.
Do with that what you will 🤷♂️
GPA's a worthless indicator. And I don't fail kids. Much easier to get them to learn something.
One of my favorite Heinlein novels features a balkanized North America where the nation of California has decided, in its extreme commitment to equality and fairness, to award everyone a college diploma.
The protagonist says she can't see how it does any harm.
Of course, if the credential of a 4-year degree became meaningless, the only value to college education would become the extent to which it actually makes you a better or more capable person ... which was the point.
This push to try to get every kid to go to college, even when the mediocre students - the ones who otherwise wouldn't have gone - aren't really going to learn enough to be worth 4 years and ridiculous money, is just an extremely self-serious way to try to achieve Heinlein's satirical end state.
Also Vonnegut had a very similar premise in his novel "Harrison Bergson".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron
No, he didn't. Vonnegut saw Diane Glampers as the hero, not Harrison.
And it's Bergeron.
Totally agree on most of this. My concern isn't college. It's that 70% of eighth graders can not read at grade level. I don't believe 70% of kids can't learn to read
Covid disruptions. American education wasn't great before, but now? Jesus Christ.
You think Covid made 4th graders forget how to read?
The Covid lockdowns? Yup. This has been well publicized in the mainstream media.
The 'nation's report card' reading and math scores for 4th and 8th graders, reported every two years, had been declining steadily since at least 2012. They certainly took a notable further dip with COVID (in 2020 4th graders were in kindergarten, just learning to read if at all, and 8th graders were in 4th grade, with at least three grades of reading instruction behind them). But COVID cannot fully track what's happening in 2024 -- even states like FL that reopened schools quickly showed a further decline in reading scores in 2024 compared to 2022, and some big cities, where schools stayed closed, actually showed improved math scores (overall, math scores held steady or improved compared to 2022). Year 2020 fourth graders didn't forget how to read for four years. A survey accompanying the report card reported that too many kids simple don't read for fun anymore, and too many aren't attending classes even though their schools have been open for years now.
If you're arguing that US education has been circling the drain for years but that Covid kicked things into overdrive I am not going to disagree with you.
Also, no real world phenomenon exists that doesn't have outliers. The overall trend however is clear.
"...too many aren't attending classes even though their schools have been open for years now."
Look at rates for truancy before and after Covid.
No, it was publicized by the opinion side of the media. The reporting side of the media made it clear that the "lockdowns" were what the majority of parents in any district wanted.
And yes, attendance is worse, but that's because the same parents who kept their kids home have kids who like being home now.
We shouldn't have closed the schools in March. But when the legislatures in every state suspended the attendance laws for a year, the results were baked in--it was up to parents whether or not schools opened and even when they opened, it was up to every parent whether to send their kids or not.
"Lockdowns". Please.
"No, it was publicized by the opinion side of the media. The reporting side of the media made it clear that the "lockdowns" were what the majority of parents in any district wanted."
There's no such thing. Montana public schools reopened in May of 2020, right after the initial wave of infections. Florida and allied states in the south rapidly decided that they were done with lockdowns while more liberal states like California and Illinois clung to theirs.
Again, there's no such thing as "legislatures in every state". There's 50 different individual laboratories and in some of those states where teachers unions had more power the lockdowns were longer and the results were worse.
Literally every word of your post is wrong. Schools stayed in remote based on parental preference, and for reasons unknown parental prefernce was driven by race.
"Florida and allied states in the south rapidly decided that they were done with lockdowns"
Wrong. Every single southern state gave parents a choice. 30% of Florida students were in remote for the entire year, including 75 and 80% of students in Broward County and Miami Dade. Palm Beach County went from 60% remote at beginning of 2020-21 school year to over 30% at end of year. Result: Florida's NAEP scores weren't all that, and the state actually lost more points than mostly homebound California did in the subsequent test. So your claim that lockdowns made results worse is not in fact the case. Researchers agree that some portion of the drop is due to remote ed, but in the vast majority of states remote ed was a district decision driven by parent majority.
What DeSantis and Abbott did (but no other state that I'm aware of) was say that all parents could choose. Every other state (including the rest of the southern states you valorize) left it up to the districts whether to offer inperson or not. And the districts asked parents and decided based on that. BUT every governor committed that students who wanted remote could stay in their local school and be remote regardless of what the majority wanted.
This led to a major power imbalance, and it's why you always heard from angry parents who wanted schools open. These parents were the minority in their district but with the exception of Florida and Texas they couldn't insist on in person instruction. But regardless of majority decisions in their district, parents who wanted remote could stay in remote all year. So check out all the cities in those southern states you think "opened" and you'll learn that they were in remote all year, because cities are majority non-white.
Unions had no say. New York, which has very strong unions, had schools open as early as December because white parents are the power players especially in NYC. So even though white kids are only 12% of NYC schools, over 50% of the students in school were white. DC, which has very weak unions, didn't open schools until February or March because white parents are irrelevant there. California has very strong unions, but so does Vermont, and Vermont schools were never closed.
In every case except one--Chicago--when schools left remote, teachers went back to work without complaint. And in Chicago they only were able to delay it 2 weeks.
And what the fuck are you talking about? Of course there are legislatures in every state. And in every state, attendance laws were completely suspended for the 2020-21 school year, otherwise every state would have been in violation of federal law. And every governor in every state guaranteed parents the right to remain in remote. The only governor who went back on this was Abbott, forcing kids who were absent too much to come back. DeSantis tried to start the second semester 100% back in school but was shouted down.
Again, Chicago is illustrative here. In 2021, the teachers refused to go back. Lightfoot could have just shut down access and forced them back, but she couldn't because most of the parents wanted remote and they'd have been furious. In 2022, teachers refused to go back but this time, Lightfoot was dealing with the re-established attendance laws, along with strict legal guidelines for when remote could be instituted. The guidelines hadn't been met, so Lightfoot, knowing again that most of her parnets wanted remote, nonetheless shut down access to the online system because otherwise she would have lost school funding.
Unions didn't oppose those laws in any state.
Again, you're just ignorant. Parental majority drove school decisions. Randi Wiengarten is a Dem hack whose salary is paid by teacher dues, but she had fuckall to do with anything. And don't cite the CDC nonsense to me. If the CDC wanted to get teacher approval, they'd have gone to the larger union. Besides, governors ignored CDC all they wanted. Parents drove their decisions, too.
Well, if that's your concern then relax, because that stat is nonsense and if the stat isn't bad enough you then translate "not reading at grade level" to "can't learn to read".
I agree with the majority of Freddie's thinking here, but, teaching to the bottom often ends up boring the top~