Who gets to redistribute the proceeds from that tax?
The US spends an enormous amount of money at the federal level on four year colleges and universities while spending a pittance on vocational/technical schools, far less than peers like Germany or Japan. Why? I would argue it's because the halls of government have been captured by college graduates who value four year degrees and pooh-pooh vocational training. How does any increase in tax rates handle that?
I'm not making a point about good education policy. I'm making a point about how the people in power in government take tax revenues and then divert it back to their own special interest groups rather than the population at large, especially the needy.
So you increase tax revenues. So what? What difference does it make if the government decides to send most of that money to Harvard and Microsoft rather than spending it on the bottom 20%?
You are making a giant leap by arguing that a land value tax leads to lower prices. What precisely is the magic that keeps rents down in the face of other factors like competition for housing that has driven rents in places like SF into the stratosphere? And you know that the age old argument is that any tax on the cost of doing business will just be passed on to the consumer, right?
But it's there, we just have to get at it, and at some point it will run out. Land is the same. A swamp in the woods might as well not exist as far as current development is concerned, it might as well not exist. But if you do the work and conditions are changed, then presto! you have more land.
So is it fixed, like the total quantity of gold in the Earths crust, or not?
If the price of land goes up, companies like mine go improve areas that were not worth improving before, taking land that was not able to be developed at other prices, just like less accessible gold deposits will become worthwhile at a certain price. That hard-to-get gold is now worth getting. It existed before, it simply wasn't on the market, the same as the swamp. Gold under ground is the same as the swamp: it exists, there is a fixed amount, and it will only come into the market at certain prices.
Why would kids fear being expelled when they can just go home and sleep in and play video games.? You have to have a pretty long time horizon and be a pretty big rule follower to fear expulsion.
The kids who get expelled don't just disappear into the ether and become a non-problem for society, though. I imagine policies around expulsion have to weigh the benefits of expulsion to other students versus the increased risk that those expelled kids go on to lead a life of crime, which negatively affects us all.
This assumes that the kids and their parents respond to incentives and pressures the same way that you or I would.
But I would guess that a lot of disruptive kids either a) have some sort of disability that responds a lot better to support over punishment, or b) have shitty parents who do not really care that much about their child's academic success.
For an example of a), there's a kid in my life that I love very much, and he has pretty bad ADHD (plus probably some other issues), but is also smart and talented as hell. He frequently has to be sent home from school for disrupting the classroom. From experience, yelling and punishment and social norms have little to no effect on his behaviour. It's only patience and support (particularly from an Educational Assistant) that makes a difference, but schools are so underresourced.
He's little right now, but I worry a lot about what will happen to him when he gets older and consequences become more severe. And that's with two parents who are loving, involved, and have the means to invest a lot of time and money into trying to help him.
I think most kids want to be in school. This is elementary school that I'm talking about. I know its a different game in middle school and high school.
This is a very common suggestion, and I can never figure out if people know the law and are just wistfully longing for a different world, or do they actually think that they've got an idea that no one thought of or that schools just stubbornly won't implement what seems to be a very obvious solution.
So:
Students have a right to school, and the standard for expulsion (which only lasts a year) is very high. Schools get funding from students and thus expelling lots of students would kill the funding. Also, the students would be back in a year. Also also, these students are overwhelmingly black, and the federal government cuts Title I funding and also writes some sort of formal letter of disapproval which is fed speak for "Anyone who wants to can sue this school and easily win".
I mean, I'd love it if charter schools weren't for kids whose parents care but for kids who can't behave. It's foolish to think we'd want kids to not be in school screwing around. But if we made charter schools really unfun, and kids knew that they'd get kicked to the charter school permanently if they misbehaved, that's a penalty that might have teeth.
But this is all irrelevant because we *can't* do it under the current legal structure.
So the solution is to change the laws, which few people realize they're demanding.
You clearly either can't read or can't comprehend. It's not *my* answer. It's the answer mandated by our laws, and the laws were mostly enacted by either a supportive public or a court system. And I'm all in favor of changing things! What I'm not in favor of is ponderous fools knowing fuck all who yammer about what schools should do without understanding the massive array of federal, state, and legal decisions binding them.
Idiot, I'm a Trump voter and immigration restrictionist, so unless your understanding of "woke" is as gefuckt as your grasp of education law, you're making really stupid assumptions.
I'm explaining to you that the law needs to be changed, so your pontificating on what you see as unreasonable behavior by schools is actual federal and state law that you're just to ignorant to know about.
We tried a strict discipline program at my school. The final consequence was expulsion, which was almost impossible to do. But it wasn't like we wanted to expel a large number of kids. In a school of 500, there were about 5 that really needed to be somewhere else. The behavior of those 5 influenced another 20 kids. The kids who needed expelling were not black. As a matter of fact, the few white kids were disproportionately problematic.
I wanted to expel the kids who took up 20 to 30% of the teachers time and willfully disrupted learning.
I did all kinds of accommodations in the class. Happily. There are many things you can do for children that have problems...as long as it isn't their goal to disrupt the class.
My experience is that all elementary school age children in that type of situation are kept in school because it's the physically safest place for them. Suspension or expulsion comes up because there's no alternative to preserve the safety of other children.
We just moved into a lovely little mini-neighborhood just a few blocks south of downtown Saint Paul. It seems like a perfect place for a rich community to develop.
The problem is that it won’t be a multi-generational community because the public schools in Saint Paul are “pretty bad” compared to the rich (and white-dominated) burbs, so no one would move into this area without sending their kids to private school, and it’s not that kind of neighborhood.
If you remove outright racism from the picture but accept that this statement remains somewhat true, then my entire vision for making American education better boils down to “not that.”
Or to put it another way, a given student’s chance for educational success should not be school-dependent.
I think Freddie's argument here would be that these parent are mistaken. The "pretty bad" schools would do just as good or bad a job of educating these students as the "good" ones in the suburbs. It's all selection effects.
Personally, I'm deeply conflicted about this, as I think many parents are. Ultimately, I decided it was just to risky to stay in a "bad" school district when it came to my own children. Too risky that the "all selection effects" might be wrong.
In one sense, I don’t disagree, but I think it might be not a selection effect but a cohort effect. that is, if you’re around a bunch of high achievers, you are more likely to become a high achiever yourself. If you’re around a bunch of people with terrible social support, then you are less likely to reach your fullest potential.
So that’s kind of what I was getting at (admittedly obliquely) by “However we get there.” I can point at the problem to fix, which is more than some of these people our host describes can do. But I have a strong suspicion that the issue is fixing all the other things that causes the social breakdown. It’s not like Minnesota doesn’t know how to teach—an average school here is really pretty excellent. But we just don’t know how to fix the social problems that lead to schools being bad.
Meanwhile, like you I moved so I could send my daughter to a school with a strong academic cohort, and now that she’s graduating and off to do great things I get to move to where _I_ want to live, i.e. the city in a somewhat mixed-income area.
“ if you’re around a bunch of high achievers, you are more likely to become a high achiever yourself. If you’re around a bunch of people with terrible social support, then you are less likely to reach your fullest potential.”
I believe the data shows the opposite. If you’re surrounded by high achievers you think you’re (relatively) stupid and you aim lower in life. Big fish in a small pond is best.
I’m thinking of Bryan Caplan’s presumably data-driven point that the best way to improve your _relative_ educational performance is to move to a high-income area with a lot of other achievers; that is, it’s the cohort that seems to be doing the trick there.
But that might also clash with other data; this is not a view on which my priors are particularly strong.
The study they did comparing kids who were one point above the cutoff to get into NYC and Boston exam schools and those who were one point below and went to “regular inner city schools” shows no difference. The idea being the benefits of a better education are counteracted by being a little fish in a big pond.
Though it's not clear to me if this is true for people who are at the middle or top of the distribution for the selective schools.
In World #1, magnet schools don't matter, you just perform how you perform given your innate ability.
In World #2, magnet schools give an education that's appropriate for a different range of abilities than normal schools. Marginal students are not a great fit for the normal school (the teacher wastes their time covering stuff they already know) or the magnet school (the teacher wastes their time blowing past their current knowledge and they struggle to keep up).
In World #2, the more advanced students benefit from the magnet school, even though the marginal students don't.
We would see the results you discuss in both worlds, so how do we determine which world we're in?
You're correct to move to where your daughter would get a better education. Steve Jobs' adoptive parents moved when they adopted him so he'd get a better education. What if they hadn't?! Meanwhile, in education "all students" means trying to move students who struggle and who are without good home supports along to learn more.
If the bad schools are bad only in the sense that the average test scores are bad, this makes sense. But it seems like bad schools tend to be bad in lots of other ways--gang problems, lots of disruptive kids shutting down learning, not enough students to justify advanced classes, school culture that pushes against working hard for good grades, etc.
THere are lots of schools with low scoring students and yes, they have more discipline problems but by and large they are filled with kids who go by the rules, listen, work pretty hard, and do what the teacher says. They still have low scores.
Then there are the dystopian nightmares.
Majority Hispanic, Asian, and white high poverty schools have low scores and lots of kids with problems, but they are basically functional. If you're a bright kid, you'll get well educated. If you aren't a bright kid, you'll still have a sense of agency and purpose. Many majority black schools are likewise described thus. But...
Most dystopian nightmare schools are majority black urban schools filled with multi-generational poverty.
So the situation you describe is actually a pretty small segment of low scoring schools. Middle class and up parents don't see this distinction and avoid both. Teachers, on the other hand, don't mind teaching at low income schools but tend to avoid the dystopian nightmares.
"The "pretty bad" schools would do just as good or bad a job of educating these students as the "good" ones in the suburbs. It's all selection effects."
My suspicion is that it's a one way effect from school quality. I.e. great schools can't make students achieve beyond their natural ability, but poor schools can prevent them from reaching it.
Also, even if my kid will eventually do okay in life, I still don't want to send him to a school where he's going to be terrorized by thugs every day, or where nobody will bother teaching him anything but he can make it up on his own by reading the textbook and working the problems.
Smart kids generally do fine in even the most dystopian of hellholes, so leaving aside the thug terrorization, you don't hae to worry that no one will bother teaching him anything.
Really, it's amazing how little people know about the low end schools they decry.
I think this mostly traces back to the liberal bromide that we'll somehow solve inequality via education without actually changing the underlying socioeconomic structure of society, which is absurd on the face of it. If you handed every student in America a PhD in a STEM field, there'd be nowhere for most of them to go. There are only so many of those positions to go around, and no amount of schooling will change that. It's all pure neoliberal ideology, maybe with a human face, but neoliberal ideology just the same.
The better solution would be to change society so you could live a perfectly comfortable life just doing lower level jobs. I got a literature degree the first time around in college, and I never tire of pointing out that if college was less expensive and wages were higher it would be totally fine to just learn about things you liked and enjoyed. What a wonderful world that would be. Instead, with tuition and employment prospects being what they are, every single aspect of the education system is tailored towards making sure you have the best chances to get one of the dwindling number of high income positions available. Everyone loves talking about education reform, but you can't consider education on its own. It is absolutely a product of society on the whole and has all the same problems. Gyorgy Luckas had that whole thing about how the most defining aspect of the Marxist perspective was looking at society as a totality, on the whole. How all the different parts functioned as part of a larger system, and that's applicable here.
I think the "if you handed every student a PhD in a STEM field..." argument used to be true, when the US fairly easily dominate globally-competitive fields.
It's a bit more complicated now that we're competing (and losing, in some fields!) with countries in tech.
(Obviously if every american student literally got one it would break down, but at the margins that matter, it's no longer just a intra-US reds queen's race.)
Yes, but education is also the way to make sure all those people have the Right Views (just like their college-educated PMC betters). What good does it to improve the lot of the poor, when they keep on voting Republican?
It’s not really in human nature to be comfortable when others are more comfortable. What you’d have to do is completely eliminate rewards for competence, which has its own problems.
One can look around at society and see people who are highly intelligent and who have degrees from elite schools—so on paper the best of what the US can do in terms of education—but who have such a narrow “education” that they are actively making things worse. Rep. Elise Stefanik is to me the platonic form of such a person. Doesn’t know what she doesn’t know and has absolutely no ethical framework. If this is what Harvard is churning out these days, no thank you.
Maybe if we made education about more than getting through algebra as early as possible so as to cram more math into adolescent skulls we’d have people who have broader skill sets and more developed moral and ethical compasses. I don’t want to rehash the mostly discredited mush about “learning styles,” but kids who are good at building and manipulating physical objects but not so good at abstract problems have a lot to contribute to this world, even if their math scores are slightly below average.
I think the real problem with the Ivies is that they are churning out "Excellent Sheep", conformists with no capacity to think outside the box. Stefanik is evidence that you don't actually need to be all that smart to go to an elite school but at least she was able to buck the political doctrine that everyone else that goes to Harvard is slave to.
I agree with the conformist argument, but I'd say Ivies educate the shepherds, not the sheep. They're there to shape the ideology of the next generation of elite who espouse and protect the dominant ideology. Stefanik is a representative, but is notable because she rejected the ideology.
I think it’s more accurate to say the ivies are the cheese at the end of the rat maze. To get to Harvard cheese you have to run the maze faster than the other rats. A talent for rapid problem solving and high verbal fluency gets rewarded. Stefanik has the ratlike cunning to see that there were fewer female rats in the Republican maze so she went over the wall and into the maze that had fewer competitors.
Very smart and well educated people can end up with absolutely bizarre beliefs. Hopefully they're less likely to*, and hopefully they're more likely to at least have *interesting* bizarre beliefs.
* Smart well educated people are hopefully better at reaching accurate conclusions, but they're also more likely to diverge from the majority or traditional opinions. It's IMHO good to challenge those opinions, but if the logic of crowds or Chesterton's fence applies in a given case, then most of the iconoclasts are going to be wrong.
Thanks for the article on education and the stratification that exists. Reading this, however, makes clear that those who wrote so passionately about the state of education in past decades are unknown to newer generations. We could start with Upton Sinclair's "The Goosestep," followed by Jonanthan Kozol's several works, and those of John Holt. For those who want to understand even more about this topic, and the longstanding criticisms that have been written, you could do no worse than taking a look at these books and authors.
I often wonder how much would people care about education if we closed the achievement gap. I don’t think the public is concerned about low wages, necessarily. Poverty wages keep prices down. But we seem to expect education to solve the social problems associated with poverty: crime, family instability, disability, etc.
Unfortunately, education seems to be a terrible solution for those problems. At best, it occasionally helps a smart kid to escape.
Posts like this are why I am a paid subscriber. The Devil's Dictionary defines admiration as "our polite recognition of another's resemblance to ourselves." Here, Freddie deBoer is elegantly summarizing what I have been maintaining since I was a high school student in the early 1960s, and it has been astonishing to me that education and educational policy have tried to pretend that differences in educational achievement were to be explained by differences in expenditures, etc. The problem with current educational thinking and policy is that the system is now supposed to be able to educate everyone, something it has never done. Or, better yet, explain education as a soft drink that needs to be made appealing enough so that everyone will desire to drink it, and then all our problems will be solved. This simply is not happening. But the system keeps spouting more of the same nonsense.
I've thought about this same concept often, but how it plays out in the workforce, versus in school.
One of my frustrations has always been that you can start with five new hires, with similar job experience, and give them the same training, the same tasks, the same pay, and the same opportunities, and inevitably some will do a really good job, some will do an average job, and some will do a poor job. You can put a lot of effort into helping the poor performers improve, even at the expense of ignoring the average and good workers, and often (most of the time?) you just can't help them. And it's not your fault.
As Freddy says, there are many external factors that contribute to performance that you as an employer have no control over. To pretend that you can ignore these factors is not helpful to anyone.
It seems like the relevant question for education policy here is whether those poor performers are just people with less innate ability, or whether they're people who missed out on some fundamental learning in school and that's why they fail now.
By analogy, on a basketball team, some kids will be better than others due to innate advantages in height or athleticism, others will be better because they're in better shape, and others will be better because they've played basketball enough to know how to dribble and shoot and box people out for rebounds and set picks and such. You can bring some of the kids on the bottom up by getting them to run a lot so they get into better shape, and others you can help by getting them to practice dribbling and shooting and such, but you can't do much with education/coaching about the disadvantages of the 5'4" guy trying to play basketball with a bunch of six-footers.
I think there's a marginal zone in the middle of people who would do well if you use the right teaching methods, and poorly otherwise. The smart kids will probably do well whatever you throw at them, and the really poor performers would be best served by what Freddie asked in The Cult of Smart: how can we make a world that works for less smart people? Because nothing else is going to do it.
On the margins though, including phonics in your reading instruction is going to help more kids to read than a "whole language" approach. Not 100% of kids, and not all at the same age, but still significantly more than otherwise.
I agree fully that the point should be improving the material conditions of people's lives regardless of educational outcomes. To go beyond that, I'll take a stab at defining one component of "educational success" for the 21st century by way of analogy to the (often platitudinous) idea that mass literacy is a prerequisite for a democratic society. I think we should aim our target at the idea of "mass numeracy." Our problems are very complex, and some facility with the quantitative methods used to get a grip on them is the only way to make sure we're not delegating all decision-making power to a bunch of economists who unjustly monopolize the technocratic jargon used to justify the priorities of capital.
Alan Kay likes to point out that, back when Roman numerals were still used, you basically had to be a mathematical genius to multiply numbers, but the switchover to Arabic/Indian numerals made the operation elementary enough to be taught in primary school ("point of view is worth 80 IQ points"). For me, it doesn't matter as much if you have to be a one-in-a-million genius to invent something like decimal notation, as long as there's social infrastructure in place that allows for many people throughout society to benefit from the power of the new idea. I personally think that there's an inherent tension between building that infrastructure and a highly competitive ranking process designed to sort and reward the "best and the brightest" with prestige and membership in exclusive professions or clubs. If mass numeracy is the goal, we can't lock knowledge in the ivory tower.
Freddie writes: "The top 10% of the world’s electrical engineers are compensated extremely well. If that top 10% were taken by the Rapture tomorrow, the next 10% would get the compensation that went to the now-disappeared 10%."
This is something of a pointless quibble, and I'm sure Freddie knows it, but because technically correct is the best kind of correct, I think that statement is partially true and partially not.
The best 10% of the world's electrical engineers are more productive than the next 10% - on average, they solve problems better and faster, their documentation is better, and they otherwise are better at things we want electrical engineers to do. So if we Raptured them, and replaced them with new, less good engineers, the new top 10% wouldn't be as productive, and wouldn't get paid as much for two reasons. (1) Generally, a firm's maximum payment to an employee is going to be capped at the employee's expected productivity - if you're paying an employee more than they produce, you're usually better off letting them go and hiring someone you can pay less. (2) Because there's less total stuff in the world now that the former top 10% has been replaced by a bunch of new engineers from school, there is less to pay everyone, including the new top 10%.
Freddie's essential point that making everyone smarter wouldn't reduce income equality in a capitalist system is completely right. But it would make all of us better off materially, by increasing the amount and quality of goods and services and the amount of leisure we consume. But again, that doesn't take anything away from Freddie's point. :)
I had the same thought, though I agree with the overall message of Freddie’s post.
It’s something like the O-ring theory of economic development. If you repeatedly cut out the top decile of talent in a certain field, eventually it will no longer be worth investing in said field.
This is a better way of thinking about the nonprofit, academic, and government world - where the number and of positions and their compensation is essentially decided on a top-down basis with little or no connection to the work done. It may even have been a good way of thinking about factory work when the limiting factor was access to capital. But it totally breaks down with something like tech. Competent execution there creates demand for itself.
The perspective on ed. data provides an excellent and clarifying tonic. But it’s a kind of strategic and philosophical overview and doesn’t zoom-in much. We need it but schooling per se requires a strong tactical game, and that’s a major weakness in the very places where low scores are a persistent problem. Does poverty correlate with relatively low scores? Don’t pat yourself on the back for recognizing something that’s old news. As pointed out, absolute performance has actually improved; but so it has elsewhere, thus progress seems elusive. I am two months from retiring after teaching for 35 years. I spent 22 of them in some of the poorest neighborhoods in LA. I don’t deserve a medal and was no one’s white savior. I did cross paths with a lot of great people doing good, effective work. But problems with the starting line-up of faculty and administrators, their game plans and play calling are stumbling blocks in many places where problems are magnified by the issues attendant to inner city education. The same crew might be fine elsewhere but don’t have quite enough game to gain and hold the toughest ground. My experience may be far from typical. But I’m not as hopeful for relative improvement as I once was.
I'm curious what problems you see with the "starting line-up of faculty and administrators, their game plans..." What grade/subject are you talking about. Long ago I worked in a low socioeconomic school in Sacramento and I'd like to hear more about your experiences.
"The problem with American students is not a problem with the median student, who could certainly do better but does pretty good. (They do very badly relative to the amount that we pay, but since past a certain point there is no relationship between school expenditures and student performance, it’s not like we should expect more for our money.) "
This is turn raises the question of why we spend as much as we do, if, beyond a certain point, more money results in drastically diminishing returns.
And I'm not a libertarian or a tax protester or whatever.
The two huge reasons we spend a lot are special ed and immigration. Special ed kids cost on average twice as much as non-sped, but that's an average. Think about how much one high school kid in a specialized wheelchair (paid for out of school funds) who needs diapers changed, has two paras, comes to school on a special bus with additional aides, has an IQ of 40, and goes to "school" until 21 instead of 18, as well as summer school every year because basically, school is just institutionalized care that we offload onto k-12. THat's easily $100K/year. Per kid. For 15 years.
The costs are nearly as high for blind, deaf, and wheelchair bound kids with normal intelligence, but at least there they are getting the education paid for. THen you have the special ed kids with "soft" disabilities who get a dedicated counsellor, a study hall, and increase our teacher student ration to no good effect.
Immigration: Immigrant kids who don't speak any English are put into special classes, and they are often small classes, and also increasing the teacher-student ratio.
Other things that cost money: Failing kids in a class and either offering summer school or skewing the balance of courses so that you need to offer extra classes of, say, algebra for the kids who have failed it which reduces your ability to offer more advanced classes. Or you do offer them, increasing your section count and thus again, costing more money.
These are huge chunks of the budget that no one thinks of. And while it may or may not waste time to teach algebra to a kid with a 90 IQ, it *definitely* wastes millions if not billions a year to offer normal k-12 school to severely mentally and physicaly disabled kids and offer small classes to high school immigrant students who have 3rd grade skills and no interest in speaking english (a solid subset of immigrant kids) or study halls to kids with executive function or adhd.
In the school district I worked for the immigrant kids were not put into special classes. The teachers were required to have certification in teaching English as a second language. There wasn't anything magic, just good basic teaching as far as I was concerned.
The immigrant kids were great. Their families valued education.
It was the kids from generational crime and poverty that were tough.
Maybe our differences come from a high school perspective versus an elementary perspective.
The immigrant kids I worked with over time revitalized the neighborhood with businesses.
"In the school district I worked for the immigrant kids were not put into special classes. "
If the immigrant kids weren't put into special ELL classes then your school wasn't following the law, so figure you just don't know you are talking about.
"The immigrant kids were great. Their families valued education."
Oh, fucking stop with the valorizing. Immigrant families are just like American families. Some are great. But there are any number of families in which the parents are shocked that the kids have to go to school. What do you mean, school? They need to work to help pay off the debt we took on to get here. Or they will watch the kids while we work. Or whatever.
"The immigrant kids I worked with over time revitalized the neighborhood with businesses."
Not without incurring huge costs in education and health care. this is well documented. And they sure as shit weren't hiring locals.
It's nice to know that you're so all-knowing and intelligent. Omnipotent, you are! I'm glad to know that's you're an expert in all ESL programs, at all times. Congratulations! I bow down to your superior intellect.
However, I stand by what I said, because that was my experience. You can dismiss what I say because it doesn't fit with what you want to believe.
At least I don't have to descend into unwarranted profanity and insults.
Can you provide some numbers on these categories as a fraction of education spending? They're pretty big claims. I ask in the spirit of Freddie's empirical argument .
Besides, if you don't already know that special ed and ELL are major education expenses, you shouldn't really be demanding information and participating in an education discussion.
Minor quibble: I think if the bottom moves closer to the median, the mean (but not the median) will move. The great advantage of using medians over means is the median is the middle of the distribution, not the expected value. So if you bring the bottom 20% up to just a tiny bit below the median, the median stays the same, but the mean (average) rises significantly. Which is why focusing on the median can be helpful sometimes (and sometimes we care about the mean and sometimes we care about the shape of the distribution, etc.)
Broader comment: perhaps success ought to be defined in a way that allows people opportunities to do lots of different things and helping them figure out which of those things enables them to have a good life. Not everyone wants to be (fill in the blank) and making a society where people can have good lives in a wide range of occupations, some requiring lots of formal education and some requiring experience in other ways to be successful would be a good goal. School is just one way to get to good outcomes; it's probably a significant part of most paths but the amount of schooling and the patterns of schooling we have now are likely not optimal for many people and we need more different pathways for people to good lives.
No, that’s misunderstanding Freddie’s point, which is that you can’t move the bottom, ie teach those kids better, without also moving the median kids up at the same time.
Not how I read it, but a better reading - I'm not sure it is true, however, as teaching interventions need not be universally deployed (and probably shouldn't be - we need a variety of methods to reach the wide variety of kids). Teaching to the bottom 20% probably requires different methods than teaching to the middle.
Who gets to redistribute the proceeds from that tax?
The US spends an enormous amount of money at the federal level on four year colleges and universities while spending a pittance on vocational/technical schools, far less than peers like Germany or Japan. Why? I would argue it's because the halls of government have been captured by college graduates who value four year degrees and pooh-pooh vocational training. How does any increase in tax rates handle that?
I'm not making a point about good education policy. I'm making a point about how the people in power in government take tax revenues and then divert it back to their own special interest groups rather than the population at large, especially the needy.
So you increase tax revenues. So what? What difference does it make if the government decides to send most of that money to Harvard and Microsoft rather than spending it on the bottom 20%?
You are making a giant leap by arguing that a land value tax leads to lower prices. What precisely is the magic that keeps rents down in the face of other factors like competition for housing that has driven rents in places like SF into the stratosphere? And you know that the age old argument is that any tax on the cost of doing business will just be passed on to the consumer, right?
The supply of gold is fixed too. The supply of iron is fixed. The supply of water is fixed.
So what?
But it's there, we just have to get at it, and at some point it will run out. Land is the same. A swamp in the woods might as well not exist as far as current development is concerned, it might as well not exist. But if you do the work and conditions are changed, then presto! you have more land.
So is it fixed, like the total quantity of gold in the Earths crust, or not?
If the price of land goes up, companies like mine go improve areas that were not worth improving before, taking land that was not able to be developed at other prices, just like less accessible gold deposits will become worthwhile at a certain price. That hard-to-get gold is now worth getting. It existed before, it simply wasn't on the market, the same as the swamp. Gold under ground is the same as the swamp: it exists, there is a fixed amount, and it will only come into the market at certain prices.
Why would kids fear being expelled when they can just go home and sleep in and play video games.? You have to have a pretty long time horizon and be a pretty big rule follower to fear expulsion.
The kids who get expelled don't just disappear into the ether and become a non-problem for society, though. I imagine policies around expulsion have to weigh the benefits of expulsion to other students versus the increased risk that those expelled kids go on to lead a life of crime, which negatively affects us all.
This assumes that the kids and their parents respond to incentives and pressures the same way that you or I would.
But I would guess that a lot of disruptive kids either a) have some sort of disability that responds a lot better to support over punishment, or b) have shitty parents who do not really care that much about their child's academic success.
For an example of a), there's a kid in my life that I love very much, and he has pretty bad ADHD (plus probably some other issues), but is also smart and talented as hell. He frequently has to be sent home from school for disrupting the classroom. From experience, yelling and punishment and social norms have little to no effect on his behaviour. It's only patience and support (particularly from an Educational Assistant) that makes a difference, but schools are so underresourced.
He's little right now, but I worry a lot about what will happen to him when he gets older and consequences become more severe. And that's with two parents who are loving, involved, and have the means to invest a lot of time and money into trying to help him.
At least they won't be bothering the kids that actually want to learn.
I think most kids want to be in school. This is elementary school that I'm talking about. I know its a different game in middle school and high school.
That would get boring for most of them. All the social interaction is at the school.
This is a very common suggestion, and I can never figure out if people know the law and are just wistfully longing for a different world, or do they actually think that they've got an idea that no one thought of or that schools just stubbornly won't implement what seems to be a very obvious solution.
So:
Students have a right to school, and the standard for expulsion (which only lasts a year) is very high. Schools get funding from students and thus expelling lots of students would kill the funding. Also, the students would be back in a year. Also also, these students are overwhelmingly black, and the federal government cuts Title I funding and also writes some sort of formal letter of disapproval which is fed speak for "Anyone who wants to can sue this school and easily win".
I mean, I'd love it if charter schools weren't for kids whose parents care but for kids who can't behave. It's foolish to think we'd want kids to not be in school screwing around. But if we made charter schools really unfun, and kids knew that they'd get kicked to the charter school permanently if they misbehaved, that's a penalty that might have teeth.
But this is all irrelevant because we *can't* do it under the current legal structure.
So the solution is to change the laws, which few people realize they're demanding.
You clearly either can't read or can't comprehend. It's not *my* answer. It's the answer mandated by our laws, and the laws were mostly enacted by either a supportive public or a court system. And I'm all in favor of changing things! What I'm not in favor of is ponderous fools knowing fuck all who yammer about what schools should do without understanding the massive array of federal, state, and legal decisions binding them.
Idiot, I'm a Trump voter and immigration restrictionist, so unless your understanding of "woke" is as gefuckt as your grasp of education law, you're making really stupid assumptions.
I'm explaining to you that the law needs to be changed, so your pontificating on what you see as unreasonable behavior by schools is actual federal and state law that you're just to ignorant to know about.
We tried a strict discipline program at my school. The final consequence was expulsion, which was almost impossible to do. But it wasn't like we wanted to expel a large number of kids. In a school of 500, there were about 5 that really needed to be somewhere else. The behavior of those 5 influenced another 20 kids. The kids who needed expelling were not black. As a matter of fact, the few white kids were disproportionately problematic.
I wanted to expel the kids who took up 20 to 30% of the teachers time and willfully disrupted learning.
I did all kinds of accommodations in the class. Happily. There are many things you can do for children that have problems...as long as it isn't their goal to disrupt the class.
My experience is that all elementary school age children in that type of situation are kept in school because it's the physically safest place for them. Suspension or expulsion comes up because there's no alternative to preserve the safety of other children.
We just moved into a lovely little mini-neighborhood just a few blocks south of downtown Saint Paul. It seems like a perfect place for a rich community to develop.
The problem is that it won’t be a multi-generational community because the public schools in Saint Paul are “pretty bad” compared to the rich (and white-dominated) burbs, so no one would move into this area without sending their kids to private school, and it’s not that kind of neighborhood.
If you remove outright racism from the picture but accept that this statement remains somewhat true, then my entire vision for making American education better boils down to “not that.”
Or to put it another way, a given student’s chance for educational success should not be school-dependent.
However one gets there.
I think Freddie's argument here would be that these parent are mistaken. The "pretty bad" schools would do just as good or bad a job of educating these students as the "good" ones in the suburbs. It's all selection effects.
Personally, I'm deeply conflicted about this, as I think many parents are. Ultimately, I decided it was just to risky to stay in a "bad" school district when it came to my own children. Too risky that the "all selection effects" might be wrong.
In one sense, I don’t disagree, but I think it might be not a selection effect but a cohort effect. that is, if you’re around a bunch of high achievers, you are more likely to become a high achiever yourself. If you’re around a bunch of people with terrible social support, then you are less likely to reach your fullest potential.
So that’s kind of what I was getting at (admittedly obliquely) by “However we get there.” I can point at the problem to fix, which is more than some of these people our host describes can do. But I have a strong suspicion that the issue is fixing all the other things that causes the social breakdown. It’s not like Minnesota doesn’t know how to teach—an average school here is really pretty excellent. But we just don’t know how to fix the social problems that lead to schools being bad.
Meanwhile, like you I moved so I could send my daughter to a school with a strong academic cohort, and now that she’s graduating and off to do great things I get to move to where _I_ want to live, i.e. the city in a somewhat mixed-income area.
“ if you’re around a bunch of high achievers, you are more likely to become a high achiever yourself. If you’re around a bunch of people with terrible social support, then you are less likely to reach your fullest potential.”
I believe the data shows the opposite. If you’re surrounded by high achievers you think you’re (relatively) stupid and you aim lower in life. Big fish in a small pond is best.
I’m thinking of Bryan Caplan’s presumably data-driven point that the best way to improve your _relative_ educational performance is to move to a high-income area with a lot of other achievers; that is, it’s the cohort that seems to be doing the trick there.
But that might also clash with other data; this is not a view on which my priors are particularly strong.
The study they did comparing kids who were one point above the cutoff to get into NYC and Boston exam schools and those who were one point below and went to “regular inner city schools” shows no difference. The idea being the benefits of a better education are counteracted by being a little fish in a big pond.
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w17264/w17264.pdf
Though it's not clear to me if this is true for people who are at the middle or top of the distribution for the selective schools.
In World #1, magnet schools don't matter, you just perform how you perform given your innate ability.
In World #2, magnet schools give an education that's appropriate for a different range of abilities than normal schools. Marginal students are not a great fit for the normal school (the teacher wastes their time covering stuff they already know) or the magnet school (the teacher wastes their time blowing past their current knowledge and they struggle to keep up).
In World #2, the more advanced students benefit from the magnet school, even though the marginal students don't.
We would see the results you discuss in both worlds, so how do we determine which world we're in?
A good rule of thumb is Bryan Caplan doesn't use data to do anything but lie.
lol that’s why I described my priors as “lightly held.”
By that logic, that one NYC high school that specializes in science ought to be full of future losers.
They did a study! Kids who just miss the cutoff to get into the exam schools do just as well as kids who just make it into the exam schools.
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w17264/w17264.pdf
Fine, but I'm not sure whether that really supports your point.
There’s truth to both. I think what AJ means is “peer effects” rather than “cohort effects.”
You're correct to move to where your daughter would get a better education. Steve Jobs' adoptive parents moved when they adopted him so he'd get a better education. What if they hadn't?! Meanwhile, in education "all students" means trying to move students who struggle and who are without good home supports along to learn more.
If the bad schools are bad only in the sense that the average test scores are bad, this makes sense. But it seems like bad schools tend to be bad in lots of other ways--gang problems, lots of disruptive kids shutting down learning, not enough students to justify advanced classes, school culture that pushes against working hard for good grades, etc.
Not always.
THere are lots of schools with low scoring students and yes, they have more discipline problems but by and large they are filled with kids who go by the rules, listen, work pretty hard, and do what the teacher says. They still have low scores.
Then there are the dystopian nightmares.
Majority Hispanic, Asian, and white high poverty schools have low scores and lots of kids with problems, but they are basically functional. If you're a bright kid, you'll get well educated. If you aren't a bright kid, you'll still have a sense of agency and purpose. Many majority black schools are likewise described thus. But...
Most dystopian nightmare schools are majority black urban schools filled with multi-generational poverty.
So the situation you describe is actually a pretty small segment of low scoring schools. Middle class and up parents don't see this distinction and avoid both. Teachers, on the other hand, don't mind teaching at low income schools but tend to avoid the dystopian nightmares.
Yeah and half the teachers at the dystopian schools are subs, I think. And the students have moved schools four times in a year
"The "pretty bad" schools would do just as good or bad a job of educating these students as the "good" ones in the suburbs. It's all selection effects."
My suspicion is that it's a one way effect from school quality. I.e. great schools can't make students achieve beyond their natural ability, but poor schools can prevent them from reaching it.
Not really. Even dystopian hellholes manage to find their bright kids and help them. And there just aren't that many there.
Also, even if my kid will eventually do okay in life, I still don't want to send him to a school where he's going to be terrorized by thugs every day, or where nobody will bother teaching him anything but he can make it up on his own by reading the textbook and working the problems.
Smart kids generally do fine in even the most dystopian of hellholes, so leaving aside the thug terrorization, you don't hae to worry that no one will bother teaching him anything.
Really, it's amazing how little people know about the low end schools they decry.
I think this mostly traces back to the liberal bromide that we'll somehow solve inequality via education without actually changing the underlying socioeconomic structure of society, which is absurd on the face of it. If you handed every student in America a PhD in a STEM field, there'd be nowhere for most of them to go. There are only so many of those positions to go around, and no amount of schooling will change that. It's all pure neoliberal ideology, maybe with a human face, but neoliberal ideology just the same.
The better solution would be to change society so you could live a perfectly comfortable life just doing lower level jobs. I got a literature degree the first time around in college, and I never tire of pointing out that if college was less expensive and wages were higher it would be totally fine to just learn about things you liked and enjoyed. What a wonderful world that would be. Instead, with tuition and employment prospects being what they are, every single aspect of the education system is tailored towards making sure you have the best chances to get one of the dwindling number of high income positions available. Everyone loves talking about education reform, but you can't consider education on its own. It is absolutely a product of society on the whole and has all the same problems. Gyorgy Luckas had that whole thing about how the most defining aspect of the Marxist perspective was looking at society as a totality, on the whole. How all the different parts functioned as part of a larger system, and that's applicable here.
I think the "if you handed every student a PhD in a STEM field..." argument used to be true, when the US fairly easily dominate globally-competitive fields.
It's a bit more complicated now that we're competing (and losing, in some fields!) with countries in tech.
(Obviously if every american student literally got one it would break down, but at the margins that matter, it's no longer just a intra-US reds queen's race.)
Yes, but education is also the way to make sure all those people have the Right Views (just like their college-educated PMC betters). What good does it to improve the lot of the poor, when they keep on voting Republican?
It’s not really in human nature to be comfortable when others are more comfortable. What you’d have to do is completely eliminate rewards for competence, which has its own problems.
What a brilliant and informative column.
One can look around at society and see people who are highly intelligent and who have degrees from elite schools—so on paper the best of what the US can do in terms of education—but who have such a narrow “education” that they are actively making things worse. Rep. Elise Stefanik is to me the platonic form of such a person. Doesn’t know what she doesn’t know and has absolutely no ethical framework. If this is what Harvard is churning out these days, no thank you.
Maybe if we made education about more than getting through algebra as early as possible so as to cram more math into adolescent skulls we’d have people who have broader skill sets and more developed moral and ethical compasses. I don’t want to rehash the mostly discredited mush about “learning styles,” but kids who are good at building and manipulating physical objects but not so good at abstract problems have a lot to contribute to this world, even if their math scores are slightly below average.
Sounds like the classic idea of a liberal arts education.
With a healthy dose of building and tinkering classes.
I think the real problem with the Ivies is that they are churning out "Excellent Sheep", conformists with no capacity to think outside the box. Stefanik is evidence that you don't actually need to be all that smart to go to an elite school but at least she was able to buck the political doctrine that everyone else that goes to Harvard is slave to.
Yes, only to move into another world of conformists with no capacity to think outside the box?
Like I said, you don't actually need to be all that smart to go to an elite college. Unless it's someplace like Caltech.
I agree with the conformist argument, but I'd say Ivies educate the shepherds, not the sheep. They're there to shape the ideology of the next generation of elite who espouse and protect the dominant ideology. Stefanik is a representative, but is notable because she rejected the ideology.
The shepherds are there to herd other shepherds though. Wokism is there to maintain orthodoxy among the elite class as compared to the hoi polloi.
I think it’s more accurate to say the ivies are the cheese at the end of the rat maze. To get to Harvard cheese you have to run the maze faster than the other rats. A talent for rapid problem solving and high verbal fluency gets rewarded. Stefanik has the ratlike cunning to see that there were fewer female rats in the Republican maze so she went over the wall and into the maze that had fewer competitors.
What happens when you leave the Ivy? How is your life different from the non-Ivy? What doors are open to you?
Very smart and well educated people can end up with absolutely bizarre beliefs. Hopefully they're less likely to*, and hopefully they're more likely to at least have *interesting* bizarre beliefs.
* Smart well educated people are hopefully better at reaching accurate conclusions, but they're also more likely to diverge from the majority or traditional opinions. It's IMHO good to challenge those opinions, but if the logic of crowds or Chesterton's fence applies in a given case, then most of the iconoclasts are going to be wrong.
Thanks for the article on education and the stratification that exists. Reading this, however, makes clear that those who wrote so passionately about the state of education in past decades are unknown to newer generations. We could start with Upton Sinclair's "The Goosestep," followed by Jonanthan Kozol's several works, and those of John Holt. For those who want to understand even more about this topic, and the longstanding criticisms that have been written, you could do no worse than taking a look at these books and authors.
I often wonder how much would people care about education if we closed the achievement gap. I don’t think the public is concerned about low wages, necessarily. Poverty wages keep prices down. But we seem to expect education to solve the social problems associated with poverty: crime, family instability, disability, etc.
Unfortunately, education seems to be a terrible solution for those problems. At best, it occasionally helps a smart kid to escape.
We already know they would care less. No one gives a fuck about high poverty whites and asians.
Posts like this are why I am a paid subscriber. The Devil's Dictionary defines admiration as "our polite recognition of another's resemblance to ourselves." Here, Freddie deBoer is elegantly summarizing what I have been maintaining since I was a high school student in the early 1960s, and it has been astonishing to me that education and educational policy have tried to pretend that differences in educational achievement were to be explained by differences in expenditures, etc. The problem with current educational thinking and policy is that the system is now supposed to be able to educate everyone, something it has never done. Or, better yet, explain education as a soft drink that needs to be made appealing enough so that everyone will desire to drink it, and then all our problems will be solved. This simply is not happening. But the system keeps spouting more of the same nonsense.
This is why I subscribe. Excellent piece.
I've thought about this same concept often, but how it plays out in the workforce, versus in school.
One of my frustrations has always been that you can start with five new hires, with similar job experience, and give them the same training, the same tasks, the same pay, and the same opportunities, and inevitably some will do a really good job, some will do an average job, and some will do a poor job. You can put a lot of effort into helping the poor performers improve, even at the expense of ignoring the average and good workers, and often (most of the time?) you just can't help them. And it's not your fault.
As Freddy says, there are many external factors that contribute to performance that you as an employer have no control over. To pretend that you can ignore these factors is not helpful to anyone.
It seems like the relevant question for education policy here is whether those poor performers are just people with less innate ability, or whether they're people who missed out on some fundamental learning in school and that's why they fail now.
By analogy, on a basketball team, some kids will be better than others due to innate advantages in height or athleticism, others will be better because they're in better shape, and others will be better because they've played basketball enough to know how to dribble and shoot and box people out for rebounds and set picks and such. You can bring some of the kids on the bottom up by getting them to run a lot so they get into better shape, and others you can help by getting them to practice dribbling and shooting and such, but you can't do much with education/coaching about the disadvantages of the 5'4" guy trying to play basketball with a bunch of six-footers.
The former.
I think there's a marginal zone in the middle of people who would do well if you use the right teaching methods, and poorly otherwise. The smart kids will probably do well whatever you throw at them, and the really poor performers would be best served by what Freddie asked in The Cult of Smart: how can we make a world that works for less smart people? Because nothing else is going to do it.
On the margins though, including phonics in your reading instruction is going to help more kids to read than a "whole language" approach. Not 100% of kids, and not all at the same age, but still significantly more than otherwise.
I agree fully that the point should be improving the material conditions of people's lives regardless of educational outcomes. To go beyond that, I'll take a stab at defining one component of "educational success" for the 21st century by way of analogy to the (often platitudinous) idea that mass literacy is a prerequisite for a democratic society. I think we should aim our target at the idea of "mass numeracy." Our problems are very complex, and some facility with the quantitative methods used to get a grip on them is the only way to make sure we're not delegating all decision-making power to a bunch of economists who unjustly monopolize the technocratic jargon used to justify the priorities of capital.
Alan Kay likes to point out that, back when Roman numerals were still used, you basically had to be a mathematical genius to multiply numbers, but the switchover to Arabic/Indian numerals made the operation elementary enough to be taught in primary school ("point of view is worth 80 IQ points"). For me, it doesn't matter as much if you have to be a one-in-a-million genius to invent something like decimal notation, as long as there's social infrastructure in place that allows for many people throughout society to benefit from the power of the new idea. I personally think that there's an inherent tension between building that infrastructure and a highly competitive ranking process designed to sort and reward the "best and the brightest" with prestige and membership in exclusive professions or clubs. If mass numeracy is the goal, we can't lock knowledge in the ivory tower.
Freddie writes: "The top 10% of the world’s electrical engineers are compensated extremely well. If that top 10% were taken by the Rapture tomorrow, the next 10% would get the compensation that went to the now-disappeared 10%."
This is something of a pointless quibble, and I'm sure Freddie knows it, but because technically correct is the best kind of correct, I think that statement is partially true and partially not.
The best 10% of the world's electrical engineers are more productive than the next 10% - on average, they solve problems better and faster, their documentation is better, and they otherwise are better at things we want electrical engineers to do. So if we Raptured them, and replaced them with new, less good engineers, the new top 10% wouldn't be as productive, and wouldn't get paid as much for two reasons. (1) Generally, a firm's maximum payment to an employee is going to be capped at the employee's expected productivity - if you're paying an employee more than they produce, you're usually better off letting them go and hiring someone you can pay less. (2) Because there's less total stuff in the world now that the former top 10% has been replaced by a bunch of new engineers from school, there is less to pay everyone, including the new top 10%.
Freddie's essential point that making everyone smarter wouldn't reduce income equality in a capitalist system is completely right. But it would make all of us better off materially, by increasing the amount and quality of goods and services and the amount of leisure we consume. But again, that doesn't take anything away from Freddie's point. :)
I had the same thought, though I agree with the overall message of Freddie’s post.
It’s something like the O-ring theory of economic development. If you repeatedly cut out the top decile of talent in a certain field, eventually it will no longer be worth investing in said field.
This is a better way of thinking about the nonprofit, academic, and government world - where the number and of positions and their compensation is essentially decided on a top-down basis with little or no connection to the work done. It may even have been a good way of thinking about factory work when the limiting factor was access to capital. But it totally breaks down with something like tech. Competent execution there creates demand for itself.
The perspective on ed. data provides an excellent and clarifying tonic. But it’s a kind of strategic and philosophical overview and doesn’t zoom-in much. We need it but schooling per se requires a strong tactical game, and that’s a major weakness in the very places where low scores are a persistent problem. Does poverty correlate with relatively low scores? Don’t pat yourself on the back for recognizing something that’s old news. As pointed out, absolute performance has actually improved; but so it has elsewhere, thus progress seems elusive. I am two months from retiring after teaching for 35 years. I spent 22 of them in some of the poorest neighborhoods in LA. I don’t deserve a medal and was no one’s white savior. I did cross paths with a lot of great people doing good, effective work. But problems with the starting line-up of faculty and administrators, their game plans and play calling are stumbling blocks in many places where problems are magnified by the issues attendant to inner city education. The same crew might be fine elsewhere but don’t have quite enough game to gain and hold the toughest ground. My experience may be far from typical. But I’m not as hopeful for relative improvement as I once was.
I'm curious what problems you see with the "starting line-up of faculty and administrators, their game plans..." What grade/subject are you talking about. Long ago I worked in a low socioeconomic school in Sacramento and I'd like to hear more about your experiences.
"The problem with American students is not a problem with the median student, who could certainly do better but does pretty good. (They do very badly relative to the amount that we pay, but since past a certain point there is no relationship between school expenditures and student performance, it’s not like we should expect more for our money.) "
This is turn raises the question of why we spend as much as we do, if, beyond a certain point, more money results in drastically diminishing returns.
And I'm not a libertarian or a tax protester or whatever.
The two huge reasons we spend a lot are special ed and immigration. Special ed kids cost on average twice as much as non-sped, but that's an average. Think about how much one high school kid in a specialized wheelchair (paid for out of school funds) who needs diapers changed, has two paras, comes to school on a special bus with additional aides, has an IQ of 40, and goes to "school" until 21 instead of 18, as well as summer school every year because basically, school is just institutionalized care that we offload onto k-12. THat's easily $100K/year. Per kid. For 15 years.
The costs are nearly as high for blind, deaf, and wheelchair bound kids with normal intelligence, but at least there they are getting the education paid for. THen you have the special ed kids with "soft" disabilities who get a dedicated counsellor, a study hall, and increase our teacher student ration to no good effect.
Immigration: Immigrant kids who don't speak any English are put into special classes, and they are often small classes, and also increasing the teacher-student ratio.
Other things that cost money: Failing kids in a class and either offering summer school or skewing the balance of courses so that you need to offer extra classes of, say, algebra for the kids who have failed it which reduces your ability to offer more advanced classes. Or you do offer them, increasing your section count and thus again, costing more money.
These are huge chunks of the budget that no one thinks of. And while it may or may not waste time to teach algebra to a kid with a 90 IQ, it *definitely* wastes millions if not billions a year to offer normal k-12 school to severely mentally and physicaly disabled kids and offer small classes to high school immigrant students who have 3rd grade skills and no interest in speaking english (a solid subset of immigrant kids) or study halls to kids with executive function or adhd.
In the school district I worked for the immigrant kids were not put into special classes. The teachers were required to have certification in teaching English as a second language. There wasn't anything magic, just good basic teaching as far as I was concerned.
The immigrant kids were great. Their families valued education.
It was the kids from generational crime and poverty that were tough.
Maybe our differences come from a high school perspective versus an elementary perspective.
The immigrant kids I worked with over time revitalized the neighborhood with businesses.
"In the school district I worked for the immigrant kids were not put into special classes. "
If the immigrant kids weren't put into special ELL classes then your school wasn't following the law, so figure you just don't know you are talking about.
"The immigrant kids were great. Their families valued education."
Oh, fucking stop with the valorizing. Immigrant families are just like American families. Some are great. But there are any number of families in which the parents are shocked that the kids have to go to school. What do you mean, school? They need to work to help pay off the debt we took on to get here. Or they will watch the kids while we work. Or whatever.
"The immigrant kids I worked with over time revitalized the neighborhood with businesses."
Not without incurring huge costs in education and health care. this is well documented. And they sure as shit weren't hiring locals.
It's nice to know that you're so all-knowing and intelligent. Omnipotent, you are! I'm glad to know that's you're an expert in all ESL programs, at all times. Congratulations! I bow down to your superior intellect.
However, I stand by what I said, because that was my experience. You can dismiss what I say because it doesn't fit with what you want to believe.
At least I don't have to descend into unwarranted profanity and insults.
Can you provide some numbers on these categories as a fraction of education spending? They're pretty big claims. I ask in the spirit of Freddie's empirical argument .
I didn't see this before. Sped costs are well documented. We go out of our way to hide the costs of educating immigrants.
OK, so you have none.
Sure I do. Just wrote about it.
Besides, if you don't already know that special ed and ELL are major education expenses, you shouldn't really be demanding information and participating in an education discussion.
These are *exactly* the questions we should all be asking ourselves and each other. Great article.
1) What are our goals for our education system -- broadly?
2) What are our goals for various different specific levels of capability among our students?
3) How do we measure our progress effectively? (Hint: if we define 1 and 2 well, 3 either becomes obvious, or reveals that 1 and 2 are unachievable.)
Great post and very thought-provoking.
Minor quibble: I think if the bottom moves closer to the median, the mean (but not the median) will move. The great advantage of using medians over means is the median is the middle of the distribution, not the expected value. So if you bring the bottom 20% up to just a tiny bit below the median, the median stays the same, but the mean (average) rises significantly. Which is why focusing on the median can be helpful sometimes (and sometimes we care about the mean and sometimes we care about the shape of the distribution, etc.)
Broader comment: perhaps success ought to be defined in a way that allows people opportunities to do lots of different things and helping them figure out which of those things enables them to have a good life. Not everyone wants to be (fill in the blank) and making a society where people can have good lives in a wide range of occupations, some requiring lots of formal education and some requiring experience in other ways to be successful would be a good goal. School is just one way to get to good outcomes; it's probably a significant part of most paths but the amount of schooling and the patterns of schooling we have now are likely not optimal for many people and we need more different pathways for people to good lives.
No, that’s misunderstanding Freddie’s point, which is that you can’t move the bottom, ie teach those kids better, without also moving the median kids up at the same time.
Not how I read it, but a better reading - I'm not sure it is true, however, as teaching interventions need not be universally deployed (and probably shouldn't be - we need a variety of methods to reach the wide variety of kids). Teaching to the bottom 20% probably requires different methods than teaching to the middle.