How to fix inner city education?

[december]

*Originally posted by wring *
Interesting, isn’t it that the self avowed ‘expert statistician’, offers up only anecdotal and op-ed pieces as evidence?

wring, yesterday I posted a link to a site with dozens and dozens of statistical studies of vouchers and quite a bit of other factual material. Your comment makes it appear that you haven’t read any of it. Maybe the process was too complicated, so let’s simplify things…

Try taking the small plastic gizmo attached to your computer by a wire. Move it so as to align the image with the underlined link on the screen and press the left button. OK?

as in “many people in schools aren’t smart” and evidenced by the most outrageous examples of zero tolerance policies (which in general are often mandated by legislatures and not by the schools).

wring, your parenthetical remark demonstrates the urgent need for vouchers. Since outrageous behavior by the schools “in general are often mandated by legislatures,” it follows that the schools lacks the authority to fix ptoblem. Isn’t this a good reason to move students of the public school system?

**I submit that there is ample evidence at this time that december has a personal agenda.

However, once again, to offer up as ‘evidence’ of the claim ‘most people in schools aren’t smart’ that web site demonstrates an incredible lack of understanding of the common usage of the word ‘evidence’. Even if we take each and every example listed there as ‘proof’ that the persons involved weren’t ‘smart’, there certainly isn’t sufficient numbers there to justify the statement “many people in schools aren’t smart”.**

wring, you have set yourself up as an expert on my evidence and whether it’s ample or not. I’m still a bit confused about how much proof is enough, in your view.

Could you clarify your POV by explaining why your evidence (that I have some personal agenda) is “ample.”

[Maeglin]

Reviewing your 4 bullet points, you seem to be saying that a parent is not well-equipped to choose her child’s school because there are complex aspects to the decision. Having raised children, I had argued that the parent IS pretty well equipped to make these decisions.

Be careful to attribute to me only what I actually said. I never argued that parents are inequipped to make good educational decisions for their children and that the state is. Parents make excellent decisions all the time: public or private school, to skip or not to skip, special education, college, etc.

I am arguing that the idea of measuring school efficienty on the same kind of utility continuum that one would measure another commodity is extremely problematic. Whereas parents might be able to make sound decisions given a relatively limited selection, it seems ludicrous to me that anyone would be able to choose between numerous schools effectively once they were opened up to full-scale competition. The very idea of a school’s quality is so subjective, nebulous, and hinges on an enormous degree of self-congratulating propaganda. You cannot simply subject students to a benchmark test like an auto or a new computer. Since mobility is a pernicious influence on education, I have argued that the very act of moving kids around negates the potential benefit of school improvement.

Maeglin I actually agreed with your POV in 1970 when my first child entered school. And, some schools and educators were a lot better than others. I have learned from experience that parental involvement is crucial when making good educational choices for one’s child. In fact schools have sometimes stood in the way of the decision that was best for my child

Profit-oriented schools are no less likely to stand in the way of decisions that are best for your child, either. So what, you would just pull your child out again and move on? This hardly seems to be an ideal solution.

I graduated from a public high school in 1996 in New York. The suburbs, sure, but it was hardly Scarsdale, Chappaqua, or Rye. So believe me, I know how it goes.

Wrath

No one has ever “lost”, whatever that means. That we might have failed to convince the anti’s that it’s a great idea, true, but we have always been successful at advocating vouchers.

How? Other than relying on traditional market dogma, have you or other voucher advocates presented even one iota of evidence which would indicate that vouchers even have a chance of working? Or even presented sufficient argumentation that would give any of the anti-voucher advocates a moment of pause?

I am young. I have no children. I would also prefer to limit the government’s involvement in the lives of individuals on general principle. I can say, as sincerely as possible, that I really do not have an axe to grind on this issue. All of the evidence, in my opinion, indicates that vouchers are a very, very bad idea.

And that vouchers, or any great idea, have been defeated by referendums mean nothing to those of us who believe in our hearts that the idea not only has merit, but that will change this country for the better. We just suck at convincing the uninformed.

The uninformed? Well, Wrath, inform us. Show us the proof. Defeat my arguments. I challenge you.

As far as not being discouraged that your ideas have been rejected everywhere, I leave you with an Arabic proverb.

If one man calls you a jackass, ignore him.
If ten men call you a jackass, you’d better start looking at your ears.

MR

[Kimstu]

december replied to me: *“But [these economic concepts] do apply to the ability and likelihood of unaided markets’ actually succeeding in providing superior schools, which is what I’ve been talking about.”

Sorry, I don’t understand. I explained what each concept meant why each of them don’t apply to this situation. Can you explain or demonstrate how each of them does apply? *

Sure (at least for the first two: failures of associated markets are, I consider, also a form of market failure in education, but off the top of my head I can’t think of an example of their application specifically to the problems of inner-city education). Here’s the deal: The basic principle of the classic free market, as you know, is the law of supply and demand, where the free action of producer competition and consumer choice combine to set the “fair market value” of a good or service. That value’s considered “fair” because if it’s too low to make it worth the producer’s while to provide the good, s/he will stop producing it, so supply will go down and the price will go up, whereas if it’s exorbitantly high, other producers will come in and undercut it, causing supply to go up and the price to come down. Similarly, if the price is higher than the real worth of the good to the consumer, s/he will just do without it: demand will go down and drive down the price. If the price is lower than the value consumers set on it, on the other hand, more consumers come in and drive up demand and therefore price. Assuming I didn’t mix up any of my ups and downs, that’s the standard economic model (thank you Prof. Burns from Microecon 101! :)).

Unfortunately, there are conditions that can throw a monkey wrench into this smoothly operating system, the so-called “market failures”. For example, externalities, where significant parts of the benefits or costs aren’t captured by the consumers or producers, respectively. Quality education for all has a huge number of positive externalities, such as the long-term benefits to society in a more valuable and better-trained labor force, crime reduction, increased consumption power, a more informed and active electorate, etc. etc. etc.: I’m sure nobody here needs convincing that high education levels are good for a society. However, education consumers, whether they be parents comparing tuition prices or taxpayers figuring the local cost-per-student, don’t pay all of what those benefits are really worth, because they don’t think of themselves as directly capturing those benefits. This drives down the perceived fair market value, making it much harder for the free market to supply quality education at a price consumers are willing to pay.

Similarly, systematic undervaluation causes people to underestimate the worth even of the benefits that they do capture: for example, look at the stories and data provided by people on this board concerning parents who don’t care about their kids’ education (not to mention the many taxpayers who are more concerned about cutting their own taxes than about supporting schools), even though it would benefit them directly; and the students themselves who don’t realize that schooling will be more valuable to them in the long run than the chance to work for the Cadillac-driving drug dealer. Such people systematically undervalue the benefits of education, and this also drives down the perceived fair market value.

So: is the free market likely to be successful in providing a high-quality private education product to poor students with vouchers? Well, let’s look at some rough numbers. (I ran through these a few years ago in response to a university colleague of mine who suggested that we start a private school; though I thought the mission sounded exciting, the finances looked awfully discouraging.) Let’s say that you’re hoping to start a new for-profit (or even nonprofit) private school to serve some of the kids in a school choice program. As a good free-marketeer, you’re not coming in with handouts from donors or grants: you mean to pay your costs strictly out of the price you charge for your services. But the most that a poor school district is likely to be willing or able to spend on vouchers is, as we see from the data on voucher experiments, about $5000 per pupil per year (Bush’s proposed voucher plan provided even less), and these impoverished families are not going to be paying much additional tuition out of pocket. But you’ve got about a hundred kids who want to enroll (a pretty good-sized catch for a school startup; the private high school I attended had even fewer, and it was older and better established), so that’s $500,000 a year for you to run your school on for starters.

Say you hire five teachers (not an excessive number for keeping a hundred kids of various ages learning and disciplined throughout the school day). Remember, this is quality education, so you need to provide a salary and benefits package that will attract good candidates: $50,000 per year in all is not overgenerous. Boom, right there you’ve eaten up half of your half-million just on teacher salaries. You still have to rent a building that can house a school for a hundred kids (no way you can afford to buy one), provide furnishings, equipment, supplies, textbooks, maintenance, salaries for administrative, clerical, and janitorial staff (maybe only one of each, but that’s still a pretty big chunk of your dwindling budget), insurance, security, and a modest advertising budget. Playground facilities? Special ed? School lunches? Drama, art, music instruction? Field trips? Laboratories and computers? Dream on! Do you see any possible way that you’re going to be able to pay for even the most basic good-quality education—never mind profits!—out of tuition vouchers? If you run the corresponding numbers for a school of, say, a thousand students, does it look much better?

Do you begin to see why most successful private schools rely heavily on endowments, alumni donations, and other sources of income outside of tuition? Do you see why the large numbers of middle-class and upper-class parents who would be willing to spend several thousand dollars a year on private-school tuition haven’t generated a vigorous new market in high-quality for-profit private education? The trouble is that commercial markets simply don’t do a very good job of providing good-quality basic education at a price that consumers are willing to pay and that also covers producers’ costs, because there are significant market failures involved in education. That’s why I maintain that voucher advocates are incorrect in claiming that “routine economic theory” provides adequate justification for their high expectations of voucher systems.

What might we expect to see instead? Exactly the sort of thing we do see from sources like Mahaloth’s story and the LA Times article I cited on the Milwaukee program. While some students do get a better education from private schools with tuition vouchers, some private schools end up struggling with the same problems that the public schools had, and some for-profit ed companies like Edison just take the money and provide a lousy product. (While Edison has done much better in managing other public schools than with the one Mahaloth describes, its claims of outperforming public-run schools have been strongly challenged; recently by a University of Western Michigan study which found, according to this AASA article,)

In 23 [achievement] trends measured, Edison students were making smaller gains on criterion-referenced tests than comparison groups.

In 21 of 49 trends, Edison students’ gains or changes in test results were similar to comparison groups’.

In five of 49 trends, Edison students made larger gains than comparison groups.

While it is true that Edison students often start out lagging behind national norms and district averages, the researchers said, they progress at rates comparable to students in other district schools.

Moreover, in the several years since its founding by Chris Whittle, Edison still hasn’t gotten out of the red; further evidence that replacing troubled poor schools with high-quality ones is not by its nature a money-making venture.

*But, you must admit that there have been a number of favorable results [in voucher programs]. *

Well, of course. There have also been a number of favorable results in many inner-city public schools too; it isn’t accurate to paint either system as either a perfect success or a total failure. What we need in order to have confidence in voucher programs, though, is not just “a number” of favorable results, nor even Wrath’s “belief in our hearts” that they’re a good idea; it’s unambiguous evidence that publicly-funded privatized education works significantly better for poor students as a whole than current efforts. It’s the lack of that evidence that is making so many parents and taxpayers dubious (as Maeglin points out) about vouchers.

*I can’t refute your statistics [on hungry people], yet I wonder: Where are they? *

Well, part of the problem may be that you seem to be interpreting “hungry” as “starving”, whereas I specifically pointed out in an earlier post that “Bangladesh/Somalia-style starvation isn’t a serious problem” in this country. But you don’t have to be starving to be suffering from hunger: even missing a few meals a week can be bad for your health, especially for children. And it certainly serves as an indicator for the amount of extra income many poor people would have available to spend on “luxuries” like tuition.

So once again, I join with the large number of other posters on this thread who feel that privatized education for the poor is likely to be at best a band-aid which will really succeed only for the small percentage of students and parents who are already dedicated to the idea of improved education. As many others have pointed out, fixing education for the rest of the inner-city poor means ameliorating the systemic problems of the inner cities themselves. Contrary to december’s (unsupported) assertions, I don’t believe that that is an impossible goal, nor that everything that can be tried has been tried, nor that the only experiments now being proposed are repetitions of previous failures. So since the OP claimed to be interested in exploring all sorts of different solutions, not just vouchers, for my next post I’ll discuss one or two other ideas that I think look most promising.

[Wrath]

Bravo, Maeglin. Yes, many geniuses are often highly criticized for their ideas by little minds.

The very fact that I am not alone in advocating vouchers means we have been successful at advocating them. That doesn’t mean we’ve been successful in coming up with proof neccessary for you to become an advocate. And my remark about the uninformed was referring to the voters of mass referenda, not the intelligencia here on SDMBs.

I’ll admit that much of the proof for me lies in the idea of the Free Market and it’s time honored abiltiy to meet the needs of all, balancing costing and pricing by supply and demand. But I recognize that my feelings are not the basis for radical policy change, and such ideas are far too radical for the general populace, like, for instance, the decriminalization of drugs.

It’s not the voucher system itself, but privatized free market education that I espouse. Vouchers are a means to that end. If at some future point I am able to conjure the proof you seek, I’ll post it. For now, I have neither the time nor the interest in convicing anyone who prefers to levy insults at the opposition, of anything.

[Maeglin]

Yes, many geniuses are often highly criticized for their ideas by little minds.

Naturally. Creators of avant-garde art, novel theories of science, and challenging works of literature. Van Gogh. Einstein. Joyce.

Arrayed against these creators and geniuses, we have the following:

I’ll admit that much of the proof for me lies in the idea of the Free Market and it’s time honored abiltiy to meet the needs of all, balancing costing and pricing by supply and demand.

People criticized the three above titans for all sorts of reasons. Many of them were surely small-minded, while many were surely quite well-informed and brilliant. But I can say this with some confidence: none were criticized because they substituted dogmatism for proof when they could not refute the arguments of the opposition.

For now, I have neither the time nor the interest in convicing anyone who prefers to levy insults at the opposition, of anything.

I have only levied arguments, not insults. I await your return salvo.

[december]

Kimstu – what a pleasure to have the debate back on an intellectual plane. Your economic analysis makes sense to me, except for the comments I interpolate:

*Originally posted by Kimstu *
…Here’s the deal: The basic principle of the classic free market, as you know, is the law of supply and demand…

I agree with you regarding commodities. However, when these principles are extended to products and services, one also finds that supply and demand results in continual innovation and improvement. E.g. consider how private industry and competition have created ever more powerful and less expensive electronics. On the other hand, the monopolistic, government-run air traffic control system still uses vacuum tubes. I support vouchers because of the improvement I beleive they will engender.

**As many others have pointed out, fixing education for the rest of the inner-city poor means ameliorating the systemic problems of the inner cities themselves. Contrary to december’s (unsupported) assertions, I don’t believe that is an impossible goal, nor that everything that can be tried has been tried, nor that the only experiments now being proposed are repetitions of previous failures. So since the OP claimed to be interested in exploring all sorts of different solutions, not just vouchers, for my next post I’ll discuss one or two other ideas that I think look most promising. **

“Unsupported”? I think not. Actual experience provides support for my pessimism. The Great Society program has been failing for 35 years at a cost of $trillions, and things seem to be getting worse in many respects. In the 1970’s, we called the Viet Nam war “unwinnable” after only 10 years of failure.

What has been instilled into me from childhood was that education and hard work was how one rose from poverty. Dan Rather has a new book that makes the same point. It seems backwards to tolerate horrible inner-city education, hoping that we will miraculously see an end to poverty, and then we can start improving education. (In my cynical opinion, this view is promulgated by people who make a living out of fighting poverty, who would be out of work if poverty were actually conquered.)

As far as fixing education goes, I am pessimistic, because the reins of power are held by organizations that don’t care if it works or not. Unions are for the benefit of teachers. The education establishment is for the benefit of their own theories and power. Legislatures are about getting votes, which means delivering for their interest groups. None of them is committed to effective education. In fact, they have other goals that will take priority when they conflict with changes needed for educational improvement.

By comparison, a private school can be totally committed to quality education. E.g., Black Pine Circle, which my daughter attended, was set up partly for the benefit of the son of the owners. They ran it for the sole purpose of educating the students. They hired only teachers who fit their model. It worked.

[wring]

wring, yesterday I posted a link to a site with dozens and dozens of statistical studies of vouchers and quite a bit of other factual material. Your comment makes it appear that you haven’t read any of it. Maybe the process was too complicated, so let’s simplify things…

Try taking the small plastic gizmo attached to your computer by a wire. Move it so as to align the image with the underlined link on the screen and press the left button. OK?

Rude to Kimstu, rude to me, shrug. Guess when you have no evidence, rudeness is all that’s left.

After three different debates where we’ve asked for data to support your statements, the best you’ve done is in this thread. Here, you’ve come up with links to a book by a columnist, personal anecdotal stories that you experienced and/or remember, and one link to a cite that is devoted to schools vouchers. It’s this last that you refer to as “dozens and dozens of statistical studies” etc. Well, I’ve checked it out to a degree (admittedly haven’t linked up to all links, but did do the one marked “research” figuring that would be the most logical place to put “dozens and dozens of studies”. )

Result? Well, so far, we’ve got additional pages of opinions from the school voucher folk, which make references to ‘study after study’ without naming or linking them. There’s even a page named “anecdotes”. there’s a link to a statement given to congress by someone commissioned by the Brookings Institute, which again makes references to the phrase ‘studies and studies’ but doesn’t name them, a link to a study which attempted to conclude that private schools were more integrated than public schools, based on their new definition of integration assesing the racial characteristics of “who sat near whom in the lunchroom” so far, I’ve yet to see a single piece of empirical data. Perhaps it’s hidden on this site under something other than ‘research’? But, then again, for them to include a category of ‘anecdotal’ stories in their category of ‘research’ gives me pause.

and once again, december ignores the thrust of an argument in order to attempt to avoid having to admit that once again, he made a statement that is not supported by facts. So, when I queried him about the “many people in schools aren’t smart”, asking for backup, he metaphoically ‘waves his hands’ frantically trying to distract ‘hey, looky over here at this instead.’ You made the statement. Back it up.

(and, no, the issue of legislators mandating idiotic zero tolerance stuff is not an argument for school vouchers, since all schools are still covered by state laws - or they are in my neck of the woods )

as for evidence, I’ve listed it over and over.
These are things that may or may not be interesting, but are not ‘evidence’ : anecdotal stories about how you or I or Fred in the corner had this experience or that; Opinion pieces by columnists. The name and author/price of a book some one wrote.

These things are evidence, subject to analyzation: empirical studies (hopefully including the methodology, time frame, results, who did the study) News stories about events (if the issue is ‘did this happen’, or what were the facts in this case or that case)

These things might be or include evidence: web sites with information, data. One needs to take into account the source - if the source has a point to prove in the first place. For example, the “Federal Bureau of Investigations” report on the number and demographics of hate crime would be assumed to be providing data w/o a specific agenda, whereas “hatecrimesarestupid.org” would have a ways to go to be considered unbiased.

I suggest that instead of limiting your research to books and ideologists who agree with your stance, you look for source data.

[Mahaloth]

For starters, we should keep ninnies like a couple of you guys away from inner-city schools…

[Medea_s_Child]

Not at all!

I think ninnies like a couple of these guys need to actually visit a few inner city schools and chat with the educators and students there. Perspective, a clue, call it what you will.

[december]

A newpaper column by Thomas Sowell suggests that it would be better for more students NOT to stay in school.

Jackson Toby argues that too many students are finding nothing but frustration and resentment at being trapped for hours every day in high schools that are boring and meaningless to them. This argument was made in the 1960s by the late and great Edward Banfield in his classic book, “The Unheavenly City.” Moreover, he had hard facts to back up what he said. Studies indicated that it was not dropping out that led youngsters into delinquency and crime but staying in school after they had lost all interest in it and lost all respect for it.

see http://www.accessatlanta.com/partners/ajc/epaper/editions/today/opinion_b340cb9b032f90d60057.html

[Kimstu]

Hello again, fellow education fans! Thought I’d forgotten all about this thread? Noway. Last ups, I said I’d post about some ideas I’d seen for inner-city remediation that I thought looked more promising than the voucher plans december was talking about. The basic problem with vouchers as a solution, according to the sources I’ve read and mentioned here, seems to be that in an enterprise like education, simply letting the government fund market solutions is not enough. I described some of the ways that education doesn’t really follow the classic economic model, and december responded:

I agree with you regarding commodities. However, when these principles are extended to products and services, one also finds that supply and demand results in continual innovation and improvement. E.g. consider how private industry and competition have created ever more powerful and less expensive electronics. On the other hand, the monopolistic, government-run air traffic control system still uses vacuum tubes. I support vouchers because of the improvement I beleive they will engender.

In other words, you think that even though at present the market may not be able to provide high-quality education product for poor children at the prices we’re willing to spend, it will eventually come up with ingenious new ways to create that product that will bring the costs down. But I think the big flaw in your reasoning here is that “innovation and improvement” succeed at bringing down costs of production only when those costs are intrinsically elastic. The thing about education, though, as my little private-school thought experiment suggests, is that far and away the largest part of its cost is people: thoughtful, interested, caring people who really influence and encourage kids to learn. And the cost of people is highly inelastic. It’s very unlikely that any amount of “innovation and improvement” will enable the education market to provide good teachers at, say, one-tenth their current price, or (equivalently) find a way for one teacher to teach a classroom of a hundred kids as well and thoroughly as a classroom of ten. If entrepreneurial innovation really could drastically lower the cost of good education, I bet we would have seen a lot of price cutting in private schools before now.

As an aside, I’m afraid your electronics analogy isn’t very solid either: government-funded research has indeed produced lots of good innovations in IT. The reason that the air traffic control system in particular is such a dinosaur is not just that it’s run by the government (although cumbersome federal procurement regulations do add to the hassle). But in addition, it’s a huge system, a vast labyrinth of equipment and procedures that is constantly in use (and increasingly strained as the volume of air traffic keeps going up). When you have a huge system that you’re constantly very dependent on, there is strong pressure just to keep the thing operational rather than risk losing functionality while you try to put in a new system. And this holds true for huge systems run by businesses too, as many people found out to their dismay in the late '90s when they needed to get the damn things Y2K-compliant. There are lots of inefficient decades-old dinosaurs out there, and by no means all of them are run by the government. (And in an ironic twist, according to this report, when the FAA did decide in the 1980’s to modernize the air traffic control system, it hired a private company to build the replacement system. After several years, the replacement had to be dumped in 1993 because it was so late and so far over budget. So much for the automatic superiority of private industry! If you’re really upset about vacuum tubes in the FAA computers, you should be blaming IBM for screwing up the replacement. :))

So the inelasticity of costs is one problem I see with attempting to solve education woes by having the government fund market solutions. In fact, in many ways our inner-city problems, including education, are the result of having the government fund market solutions. Remember, cities haven’t always been terrible places to live; there have always been poor people in them, but there have always been poor people in most places. What has turned inner cities into largely unrelieved conglomerations of poor people is chiefly the surge of urban/suburban growth following the nationwide spread of the automobile.

Cities funded the expansion of services like sewage and electricity into new developments, and continued to provide the urban jobs, businesses, and low-wage employees that supported the new suburban lifestyles of upper- and middle-class commuters—who were now paying lower taxes in their new municipalities instead of in the cities themselves. The poor people couldn’t afford to move to the suburbs (and minorities in particular were often strongly discouraged from moving into the new communities), so they stayed in the cities. Decline in urban population and in the average income of urban residents weakened the urban tax base, and revenues declined still further when the new suburban communities became populous and prosperous enough to support their own shopping, office centers, places of amusement, etc. Many urban businesses closed, further reducing the income and job opportunities for poor city dwellers (especially in cases where low support for public transit in the new suburbs made it impossible for them to “reverse-commute” to new employers).

In short, the chief reason that cities across the nation became poor (and minority) is that so many of the non-poor (and white) people left. The market drove the boom in suburban living, but it was government subsidy that in many ways made it possible for so many people. We now have large communities that are heavily segregated by income. And I simply don’t see that it’s going to be possible for the poorest communities to afford something as intrinsically expensive as quality education via market forces alone. We have to get the poor and the non-poor into the same communities again, one way or another (or in more ways than one).

Gotta leave now, but for my next post: David Rusk.

[december]

*Originally posted by Kimstu *
**

In other words, you think that even though at present the market may not be able to provide high-quality education product for poor children at the prices we’re willing to spend, it will eventually come up with ingenious new ways to create that product that will bring the costs down. But I think the big flaw in your reasoning here is that “innovation and improvement” succeed at bringing down costs of production only when those costs are intrinsically elastic. The thing about education, though, as my little private-school thought experiment suggests, is that far and away the largest part of its cost is people: thoughtful, interested, caring people who really influence and encourage kids to learn. And the cost of people is highly inelastic. It’s very unlikely that any amount of “innovation and improvement” will enable the education market to provide good teachers at, say, one-tenth their current price, or (equivalently) find a way for one teacher to teach a classroom of a hundred kids as well and thoroughly as a classroom of ten. If entrepreneurial innovation really could drastically lower the cost of good education, I bet we would have seen a lot of price cutting in private schools before now.**

Kimstu – thanks for your thoughtful post. I have several points in response.

1. Value of competitionYou’re probably right that the electronics analogy wasn’t well chosen. It’s not so much that education needs ingenious new methods; first and foremost, it needs to stop using stupid methods. A private school would fail if it used ineffective approaches. That’s why I want to see competition.

Consider an example near and dear to my heart – math education. I think I’ve mentioned how my daughter got messed up by a “New Math” approach being misused in Berkeley, CA in 1973. Fortunately my wife and I are both mathematicians, so we saw to it that she learned her math.

A couple of years ago the NY Times had an article about some poeple in Cambridge, Mass. complaining about their public school math approach. One person quoted was a Harvard math professor name Wilfred Schmidt. Wilfred was the smartest person in my Berkeley graduate math student cohort. If Wilfred says the methods are ridiculous, then they are ridiculous. But, they continue to be used!

Here’s a link to a relevant site http://www.mathematicallycorrect.com/

*This web site is devoted to the concerns raised by parents and scientists about the invasion of our schools by the New-New Math and the need to restore basic skills to math education.

“Mathematically Correct is the informal, nationwide organization that fights the Establishment on behalf of sanity and quality in math education.” – David Gelernter, NY Post*

2. CostKimstu’s theoretical analysis of costs was interesting. However, in the real world, NYC inner city parochial school per-student spending is about half of what it is at public schools. And the parochial schools get better results, according to a recent study. Furthermore, the public school cost doesn’t include all the money wasted by state and federal education departments, who promote these stupid approaches.

3. Seeking Success I have a book called No excuses – Lessons from 21 High-Performing, High-Poverty Schools. by Samuel Casey Carter copywrite 2000. It was published by the Heritage Foundation. The book suggests how to teach effectively, based on what has worked at these 21 successful public and private schools. If this thread continues, I’ll share some of their observations.

The point I want to make now, is that this idea of learning from effective schools seems odd. The book wasn’t widely publicized, nor can I think of other similar books. The many suggestions on this thread don’t include that idea.

By comparison, there are dozens of business books on the theme of mimicking the alleged key elements of successful companies. The failure of the education establishment to focus on what actually works suggests to me that they aren’t primarily interested in improved edudation. Based on my reading, there are lots of ideas that have been effective. But, unless the people in power are committed, first and last, to teaching the children, they aren’t going to seek the best methods.

In short, I think competition is the only way to get the attention of those controlling the education of our children. Furthermore, the successes of parochial schools and at the 21 schools in this book say that effective inner city education is possible today.

[Kimstu]

december: *1. Value of competition. […] It’s not so much that education needs ingenious new methods; first and foremost, it needs to stop using stupid methods. A private school would fail if it used ineffective approaches. That’s why I want to see competition. *

But as I’ve been saying all along, recommending “competition” as the solution presupposes that it’s easy to provide high-quality private education at competitive prices—prices as low as or lower than what taxpayers are now willing to pay. I think that my estimates indicate that that’s not easy to do.

Consider an example near and dear to my heart – math education. I think I’ve mentioned how my daughter got messed up by a “New Math” approach being misused in Berkeley, CA in 1973.

Sorry to hear it, but that just points up another aspect of the complex, protean nature of education that makes it so difficult to evaluate effectively: what works for one student often doesn’t work for another. I also learned “New Math” in the early 70’s and did just fine with it: went on to major in mathematics in college and become a university teacher in a related field. Many other people I know also did well with the “New Math.” Though I agree that many of the current “conceptual” approaches to math are problematic for many students, the older methods weren’t universally successful either. Success in education is just not as simple as throwing out all the “stupid” approaches and going back to the way you remember learning in school, because dammit, if it worked for you then it must have been the right way!

If Wilfred says the methods are ridiculous, then they are ridiculous.

Um, you do realize that the opinion of one other unknown person, even if he’s someone you personally respect, isn’t a substitute for actual evidence?

*This web site is devoted to the concerns raised by parents and scientists about the invasion of our schools by the New-New Math and the need to restore basic skills to math education. *

I personally happen to agree with some, not all, of their concerns. But I see no convincing evidence that adopting massive taxpayer funding of private schools is a necessary, or for that matter sufficient, condition for addressing those concerns successfully. If what you’re saying is “We want more problem-solving and algorithmic skills in school math classes!”, I tend to agree with you. If what you’re saying is “In order to get them, we need to give taxpayer funding to private schools!”, I don’t.

2. Cost. […] However, in the real world, NYC inner city parochial school per-student spending is about half of what it is at public schools. And the parochial schools get better results, according to a recent study.

Ah, but as I said before, this is meaningless unless we know where the parochial schools are getting their savings from. Public schools have to spend lots of money on the special-ed and other special-needs kids, as well as the most disruptive and worst-performing kids, that parochial schools are free to reject. Naturally, when you can pick and choose the problems you’re going to work on, you can solve them better for less money! If you provide cites of actual studies that go into the relevant details here, we may be able to figure out what its real significance is.

*3. Seeking Success. I have a book called No excuses – Lessons from 21 High-Performing, High-Poverty Schools. by Samuel Casey Carter copywrite 2000. It was published by the Heritage Foundation. The book suggests how to teach effectively, based on what has worked at these 21 successful public and private schools. If this thread continues, I’ll share some of their observations.

The point I want to make now, is that this idea of learning from effective schools seems odd.*

? To whom does it seem odd? Not to me: I’ve seen dozens of case studies of successful schools, and I bet most other professional educators have too. Here’s a report from the North Central Regional Educational Laboratory about successful strategies from schools and school boards across the country.

By comparison, there are dozens of business books on the theme of mimicking the alleged key elements of successful companies. The failure of the education establishment to focus on what actually works suggests to me that they aren’t primarily interested in improved edudation.

As I say, I think that lack of interest is mostly illusion or ignorance on your part. There are innumerable people involved in education who are passionately interested in identifying and imitating “what actually works,” and who in many cases have succeeded with it. Admittedly, there are many huge problems, especially in dealing with the most disadvantaged students. But I think your diagnosis of the chief problem—that the education establishment is just lazy and stupid and inefficient and if we just didn’t have to deal with them, the problems would be easily solved—is way oversimplistic and ill-informed.

(And I’m not sure you can really judge the effectiveness or sincerity of improvement efforts based on the number of popular self-help books available. Sure, “The Secrets of Successful Business!” books are a dime a dozen, but businesses still fail all over the place. Even many of the temporarily successful firms that star in “The Secrets of Successful Business!” books go downhill shortly thereafter. Such works are generally just management-theory snake oil, and I don’t think they should be our model for genuine school reform.

I really don’t think we want schools starting up and going under at the frenetic rate that commercial businesses do: as somebody else on this thread (Maeglin?) pointed out, an important aspect of successful schooling is continuity and community. It may be “competitive” for schools to get into price wars, downsize massively to cut costs, lure away each other’s best teachers, run competitors into the ground, and go through boom-and-bust cycles, but it’s probably not the best thing for your children’s education.)

[december]

Originally posted by Kimstu *
**
But as I’ve been saying all along, recommending “competition” as the solution presupposes that it’s easy to provide high-quality private education at competitive prices—prices as low as or lower than what taxpayers are now willing to pay. I think that my estimates indicate that that’s not easy to do.*

1. I don’t say it’s "easy’ I say it’s feasible.

2. You seem to be saying that your hypothetical budget carries more weight than actual results.

**what works for one student often doesn’t work for another. **

Obviously true, but this point can’t be used as an excuse. Some methods are much more effective than others. Depts.
of Ed. are foisting bad methods onto public schools and we have to make them stop.

**I also learned “New Math” in the early 70’s and did just fine with it…Success in education is just not as simple as throwing out all the “stupid” approaches and going back to the way you remember learning in school, because dammit, if it worked for you then it must have been the right way! **

The issue isn’t really new math; it’s the use teaching approaches that don’t work. More generally, it’s an education establshment that’s organized to promote novel methods rather than effective ones.

**Um, you do realize that the opinion of one other unknown person, even if he’s someone you personally respect, isn’t a substitute for actual evidence? **

You could look up Harvard Math Professor Wilfred Schmidt in a search engine. I have no doubt that he’s a celebrity in the math world by now.

But I see no convincing evidence that adopting massive taxpayer funding of private schools is a necessary, or for that matter sufficient, condition for addressing those concerns successfully. If what you’re saying is “We want more problem-solving and algorithmic skills in school math classes!”, I tend to agree with you. If what you’re saying is “In order to get them, we need to give taxpayer funding to private schools!”, I don’t.

I’m frustrated because we’re moving backwards. I’m a heck of a math teacher. My wife’s a prof in a related field. Thirty years ago we could see that some of the teaching methods used were ridiculous. Two or three years ago the Times reported similar problems in Cambridge. But, people like Wilfred, and my wife and me have little or no power. At best, if Wilfred’s organization spends enormous amounts of effort, maybe they can get one course changed in one school.

Kimstu, if you agree that there are fundamental problems with the way some public education is run, then what would you do to get the people in power motivated to fix the problems?

Ah, but as I said before, this [better results at half the cost] is meaningless unless we know where the parochial schools are getting their savings from. Public schools have to spend lots of money on the special-ed and other special-needs kids, as well as the most disruptive and worst-performing kids, that parochial schools are free to reject. Naturally, when you can pick and choose the problems you’re going to work on, you can solve them better for less money! If you provide cites of actual studies that go into the relevant details here, we may be able to figure out what its real significance is.

Kimstu, you can call this meaningless, if you’re looking for excuses for the status quo. I call it hopeful, because I think that significant improvement is possible.

Your discussion of disruptive kids also sounds like an excuse. Why do public schools have to tolerate disruptive kids? That didn’t happen when I was educated in the Bronx 50 years ago, and we got a decent eduation despite low spending and large class size. What would it take for the powers-that-be to allow schools the freedom to be effective?
Since you think that special-needs kids and disruptive kids are big impediments to public school education, do you back politicians who want relax school requirements for these groups?

The public vs. parochial school results I quoted were reported in the Times within the last few months. If I find a cite, I’ll provide it.

** To whom does [copying successful examples] seem odd?**

Thanks for the cite.

The idea of copying success seems odd to posters on this thread. Re-read the comments. You won’t find a post based on this suggestion.

It seems odd politically. E.g., the current bi-partisan education bill includes a sharp increase in funding for bi-lingual education, which has been shown to be a horrible failure. There is resistance to teaching more reading readiness in Head Start, even though it has worked in other pre-schools.

**But I think your diagnosis of the chief problem—that the education establishment is just lazy and stupid and inefficient and if we just didn’t have to deal with them, the problems would be easily solved—is way oversimplistic and ill-informed. **

The main problem isn’t that they’re lazy and stupid and inefficient – it’s that good education isn’t their goal.

I’ve been in management for a long time. My goal is sales and profit. If I get good results without lots of new programs, I’ve done my job, and vice versa. When losses got too high, I was fired.

But, Professors of Education or Ed. Dept administrators aren’t judged on the overall success of education. If they were, they’d have all been fired. They’re judged on developing and promoting their indivual projects and on number of publications. And, the union leaders are judged on getting wages and benefits for their members.

**(And I’m not sure you can really judge the effectiveness or sincerity of improvement efforts based on the number of popular self-help books available. Sure, “The Secrets of Successful Business!” books are a dime a dozen, but businesses still fail all over the place. Even many of the temporarily successful firms that star in “The Secrets of Successful Business!” books go downhill shortly thereafter. Such works are generally just management-theory snake oil, and I don’t think they should be our model for genuine school reform. **

I tend to agree that these books aren’t all they claim to be, but that’s not my point. The point is that business-women want sales and profit, first and last, but successful education is just one of many goals for the education establishment.

**I really don’t think we want schools starting up and going under at the frenetic rate that commercial businesses do: as somebody else on this thread.(Maeglin?) pointed out, an important aspect of successful schooling is continuity and community. It may be “competitive” for schools to get into price wars, downsize massively to cut costs, lure away each other’s best teachers, run competitors into the ground, and go through boom-and-bust cycles, but it’s probably not the best thing for your children’s education.) **

I wouldn’t disagree with you IF the schools were succeeding. for each and every student. However, I busted up my daughter’s continuity by moving her to private school for two years, and that was the best thing for her. Shouldn’t poor people have the same opportunity for their children?

[december]

Excellent article. see http://www.capitalismmagazine.com/2001/may/har_anti_intellectual.htm

Diane Ravitch research professor at New York University and holds the Brown Chair in Education Studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC and is author of the book Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms.

There was a fundamental anti-intellectualism in the IQ testing movement, in the industrial education movement, the vocational education movement, and the child-centered movement. There were so many different movements, but the movements were always saying: “Why do you care so much about teaching all this dreary old stuff? The children should just be free to explore whatever they want to explore and to learn only what is immediately useful.” …

What my book is about is a series of almost professional scandals, if you will, in which people ran lemming-like toward some panacea, throwing away effective instructional methods, throwing away good curricula, and tracking children into dead-end curricula because it was the thing to do.

[Liberal]

Okay, so Fretful Porpentine wins this debate, right? I mean his excellent observation has gone unchallenged and unnoticed, kinda like the kids that education politicians fight over.

[Kimstu]

december: 2. You seem to be saying that your hypothetical budget carries more weight than actual results.

Nope, because we haven’t seen actual results clearly indicating that it is feasible to provide high-quality education via competing private schools to the entire spectrum of poor and disadvantaged students for the price that taxpayers are willing or able to spend on their education. The actual results that we have seen that even come close to that situation, such as those from the Milwaukee voucher program, are very mixed. As the L.A. Times article I cited above pointed out, a number of private schools now accepting voucher students are having to struggle with the same problems that the public schools struggle with regarding the same students, and in many cases failing in the same ways.

*You could look up Harvard Math Professor Wilfred Schmidt in a search engine. I have no doubt that he’s a celebrity in the math world by now. *

I believe you. My point wasn’t that Schmidt’s not sufficiently famous to be entitled to his opinion; it was that one person’s assertion that certain teaching methods are “ridiculous” is not the same thing as quantitative evidence that the methods don’t work. To take a similar example, the assertion of famous Princeton professor John DiIulio that juvenile crime is bound to skyrocket due to the onslaught of a new breed of child “superpredators” is not the same thing as actual evidence about current levels and types of juvenile crime.

*Kimstu, if you agree that there are fundamental problems with the way some public education is run, then what would you do to get the people in power motivated to fix the problems? *

Why, just what I’ve been trying to emphasize in this thread since my first post to it: push for reintegration of our economically segregated communities via the ways I started to talk about a couple posts ago, before we went back to dancing around the vouchers issue. If we ever get off this subject and I get a chance to go back to talking about that, I’ll be happy to go into more detail. As I’ve pointed out before, your OP made it clear from the very beginning that the performance of students in the 75th and 90th percentiles has improved in recent years, while that of students in the 10th percentile has declined. To me, this says very clearly that it’s not just dumb educational fads that are the problem (although those certainly exist, and always have), it’s the lack of resources (social as well as financial) in the inner-city communities.

*Since you think that special-needs kids and disruptive kids are big impediments to public school education, do you back politicians who want relax school requirements for these groups? *

You mean, not requiring them to attend school or “dumbing down” their educational requirements? No, I don’t.

The public vs. parochial school results I quoted were reported in the Times within the last few months. If I find a cite, I’ll provide it.

Thank you. I’m disappointed that my explanation of why we need detailed evidence about how parochial schools cut their costs, before we can assert that their results prove “success is possible”, still seems to you like searching for excuses. I hope that if you’re able to provide that detailed evidence, the subsequent discussion will make these issues clearer.

*The idea of copying success seems odd to posters on this thread. Re-read the comments. You won’t find a post based on this suggestion. *

To be fair, just because people get caught up in a discussion about one proposed solution to a problem doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily ignorant of other possible solutions or find them “odd”. You and I, I’m afraid, have been rather dominating this thread from a very early stage with our argument about vouchers, so I can’t really criticize other posters for not bringing up this or any one of a huge number of other possible education reform strategies.

It seems odd politically. E.g., the current bi-partisan education bill includes a sharp increase in funding for bi-lingual education, which has been shown to be a horrible failure.

Hmm, that’s a pretty sweeping statement. Can you provide hard evidence that definitively shows that the whole concept of “bilingual education” has indeed “been shown to be a horrible failure”? I’ve read some detailed discussions of the issue which acknowledge the problems with it, but which also make a pretty convincing case for its merits. This 1995 report from the Department of Education talks about a lot of aspects of bilingual education, including the problems involved in it (see Chapter 4, “Challenges in Design and Implementation”). But I know of no reliable factual evidence that simply condemns the whole approach as a “horrible failure”, and I think you should provide some if you’re going to stand by your assertion.

There is resistance to teaching more reading readiness in Head Start, even though it has worked in other pre-schools.

Again, could I have a cite for that, along with evidence that those other pre-schools do indeed serve comparable populations to those of Head Start programs and thus are an appropriate model for them? I found a Brookings Institue report which is quite enthusiastic about Head Start but nonetheless acknowledges right up front that “Head Start may have focused too heavily on social supports at the expense of language and literacy training”, which doesn’t sound like “resistance” to me.

But, Professors of Education or Ed. Dept administrators aren’t judged on the overall success of education. If they were, they’d have all been fired.

Even after making those test-score gains in the higher percentiles that you talked about in your first post? Seems a bit unfair to penalize them for succeeding, doesn’t it? See, this just emphasizes my earlier point, that “success” in education is a huge and complicated concept even for a small student population—heck, even for an individual student—and talking about the “overall success of education” as a basis for evaluating individuals’ performance is pretty much meaningless.

However, I busted up my daughter’s continuity by moving her to private school for two years, and that was the best thing for her. Shouldn’t poor people have the same opportunity for their children?

The trouble is that I don’t think the solution you propose will actually give those people the “same opportunity”. The really beneficial “opportunity” your daughter had, it seems, was that of being placed in an educational niche that fit her particular needs by involved, stable, caring, highly-educated, affluent parents who could afford to pay for high-quality private education in a community of similar students. That, I bet, is the opportunity that enabled your daughter to attain her academic success. Giving poor children school vouchers is not the same thing as giving them that same opportunity.

As for the Ravitch book: as I said, there’s no question that education has and always has had educational fads that come and go and do no good. But it seems to me that the conclusions, and even the very title, of her book undermine your whole position in this debate. If dumb educational fads like I.Q. testing and all the rest have been afflicting our schooling for as long as a century, during which time most poor children (according to you) got a decent education, then it would seem that some other factors are needed to account for the especially severe problems poor students have been having recently. And my vote for the most influential factor, as I’ve said before, goes to the disintegration of the economically diverse communities in the inner cities.

You know, I notice that almost every paragraph in this post has an “as I said before” or “as I pointed out” in it—a sure sign that a debate has reached the point where it’s just rehashing previously stated convictions. So don’t be offended if from now on I don’t respond to your responses unless they contain actual new data to discuss; it’s not that I’m no longer interested in the question, it’s just that I’d rather spend the time discussing the ideas of David Rusk I mentioned earlier about reintegrating economic communities.

[Furb]

Years ago a survey of some 450,000 students from all kinds of schools arrived at a conclusion that it didn’t matter what the students had for teachers, educational materials, or “plant” [meaning buildings, desks, etc.], the good students would and the poor students wouldn’t. It’s a conclusion I happen to agree with from ten years of of teaching adult ed. What’s true for adults also works for children.

Had a professor remark about a fellow student that “If you built a wall around him, he would still get the information.”

The word “teach” should be taken from the language. All a teacher can do is their best job of “exposing” the student to the the information. If the student can’t or won’t learn it, the most dazzling of instructors won’t be able to give 'em a “brain transfusion.”

Teachers rate low pay because they can’t “teach.”

We seem more aware of the problem because it gets more “air time” today than ever before. Remember half the students are below average intelligence, and we all remember what Forrest Gump’s mother had to do to get her below 80 IQ student into school. Back then, the “learning impaired” were not allowed to enter school, and dropouts went to work.

Bill Cosby once said, he went into the Navy out of high school because the dropouts had all the jobs.

Today, we seem to think that nobody is below average intelligence, so we try the government solution to any problem of pouring money and people on the problem until the problem gives up. It ain’t gonna work. Now never, not nohow!

“A” students are those that teach the teacher something about the teacher’s subject that the teacher didn’t know. When was the last time any of us did that?

[december]

Originally posted by Kimstu *
** Can you provide hard evidence that definitively shows that the whole concept of “bilingual education” has indeed “been shown to be a horrible failure”? I’ve read some detailed discussions of the issue which acknowledge the problems with it, but which also make a pretty convincing case for its merits. This 1995 report from the Department of Education talks about a lot of aspects of bilingual education, including the problems involved in it (see Chapter 4, “Challenges in Design and Implementation”). But I know of no reliable factual evidence that simply condemns the whole approach as a “horrible failure”, and I think you should provide some if you’re going to stand by your assertion.*

If we want to debate bi-lingual education, we should start a new thread. As the son of an immigrant, I have a very emotional reaction, since this program deters immigrants from learning English. My grandmother never learned English, and her life was incredibly constricted.

That the Dept. of Education is still promoting a “concept” even though all actual practice has been dreadfully counter-productive, shows why DoE should be abolished.

More generally, it supports the criticism that “education experts” are motivated by theory, rather than reality.

If dumb educational fads like I.Q. testing and all the rest have been afflicting our schooling for as long as a century, during which time most poor children (according to you) got a decent education, then it would seem that some other factors are needed to account for the especially severe problems poor students have been having recently. And my vote for the most influential factor, as I’ve said before, goes to the disintegration of the economically diverse communities in the inner cities.

Good point. Other possible factors might be

1. Greater strength of the teachers’ unions, state and federal depts. of educ. and university education departments, which have been destructive IMHO.

2. The importance of education is greater than ever, due to advances in technology.

** So don’t be offended if from now on I don’t respond to your responses unless they contain actual new data to discuss; it’s not that I’m no longer interested in the question, it’s just that I’d rather spend the time discussing the ideas of David Rusk I mentioned earlier about reintegrating economic communities. **

I agree. We’ve beaten vouchers to death.

[Weird_AL_Einstein]

It seems this thread has turned into a debate about vouchers. Not that there’s anything wrong with that-I have a pretty strong opinion about them myself-but I was hoping to take this opportunity to suggest two non-voucher-related ideas.

One of them is pretty far out there, but I think it is a good one. The other one is fairly conventional, and is, or ought to be, uncontroversial.

The conventional one is this: pay teachers according to their abilities, not seniority. Merit pay, in other words.

The “crazy” idea is this: pay the students themselves to learn. For example, you would say to a hypothetical fourth grader, read this book and pass a test on it, and you will get X dollars.

We are already spending vast amounts of money on education. Would it not be worthwile to spend a part of that money to see that the students themselves are motivated?

I can expand on both these ideas as well as possible problems with them, but first I would like to hear what others have to say.

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