Not necessarily. Your scenario assumes a textbook competitive market in education, where there are oodles of suppliers all competing for the customer’s dollar and therefore innovating their way to a better product.
Education, especially universal general elementary and secondary education, tends not to work quite that way.
In the first place, there are big externalities: a lot of the value of education is gained indirectly by employers and communities, etc., rather than directly by parents, so the product is overall worth more than you can expect parents to pay for it.
In the second place, there tend to be non-negligible entry and exit barriers in the market: it’s a lot of work to get a viable school set up, and if it fails, it’s a lot of work to dismantle it.
In the third place, there’s a sort of “adverse selection” effect, in which the families of problem or handicapped kids who need a lot of expensive school resources are more likely to seek well-equipped (and hence expensive) schools than the “easy” kids who can do fine on the shoestring budget of a cheaper school. And therefore, there’s pressure on schools to avoid taking the “difficult” kids, who thus end up being underserved.
For-profit schools have not been doing significantly better than public ones in serving underachieving student bodies, AFAIK, and in some cases they’re doing worse. And they’re subject to market forces that in the worst cases can be quite disruptive:
The assumption, rather slickly included in xtisme’s posts (most likely not deliberately, but more as a rhetorical device), that profitability entails superior results. It doesn’t. Results simply have to be close to (hopefully better, but not necessarily) than the results of public schools. For example, academic results could be far worse as compared to public schools, just so long as the parents paying believe they are getting better results.
Not picking on you (or anyone, actually), but it’s really disturbing to me–and I’m not even a parent–to talk of students as products. It’s kinda bugging me out.
I can understand that, but I really didn’t mean to imply that the “product” a school would be offering was the students themselves. Rather, it’s the curriculum, resources, etc., that they would provide for the students. (Actually, in this interpretation the teachers are more of a “product” than the students are.)
OK then. It was actually xtisme’s line, to which you were responding:
that set me off. Sorry, xtisme – I don’t think you meant it that way, but it plays into what LHoD is saying. It seems rather important to me that one doesn’t lose sight of the fact that profit or no, ultimately we’re talking about the effects on students. As bad as “education as money-sink” may be, euphemizing students as manufactured objects is worse.
I attended public school up until seventh grade, and private school after that. It was a Christian school which had rock-bottom academic standards. No science, no higher mathematics (I never even took algebra) no literature . . . in short, little education beyond the scriptures. I’m sure my principal would be proud that I can still recite large portions of the Book of Matthew by heart, but it didn’t do me much good in the real world.
Many parents thought it was an excellent school because it matched thier religious beliefs. My parents believed the principal when she told them that the graduates were highly sought-after by colleges, which was a complete fabrication, unless you count the local Bible College. I was told when I applied to our local branch campus of the public university that according to my state, I had been a drop-out since seventh grade and would have to take a GED before they’d even consider my application.
In my opinion, this is what happens when you give the community control over education. There are five such schools in my town, all unaccredited, but very popular. Either the parents don’t bother to check what will happen after graduation, or they believe a line of bull like mine did. Either way, their kids end up unable to attend a real college.
xtisme, no, I don’t think private firms would make better schools, thereby making their profits. I think they would cut corners, require SOPs for teachers and students, and teach by rote in order to attain concrete goals, teaching memorization instead of critical thinking skills), to name a few. Any time you introduce a middle man, there is more expense and less efficiency.
Did you check the site that debunked many attacks on the public schools? IT shows how statistics are manipulated to make schools look worse than they are.
One that often gets left out is that when comparing American high school students’ scores to those of European schools, what usually is not mentioned is that many European schools split off into academic and trade schools after “junior high” level or earlier. Our scores are compared to their academic school scores, the trade school students, who did not do as well in the academic level, are not tested. Finland is an example.
English schools seem to be much more complicated, with a non-unified system where schools compete against each other.
In Germany, the decision seems to be made early on as to whether the child will pursue academic or vocational goals.
[This comparison seems to me to be analogous to the gas price comparisons last year. The newscasters would say, “Think we’ve got it rough? Look how much they pay for gasoline in Europe!” Of course, they left out the part that the difference in gas prices is the taxes they pay to support social security, education, highways, etc., depending on the country, whereas the money we were paying was mostly going to windfall profits for the oil companies.]
:eek: Holy crap, Lissa (um, no pun intended, honest). No math and science? Basically just literacy and scripture? Cripes, it’s a Christian madrassa movement. I didn’t even realize it was possible to attend an unaccredited school for five years in the US without having the truant officer come after you. How did you manage to make up for such an incomplete formal education? Did you just take the GED and go to college?
Well, not every child is exactly the same, but if a child comes from a home where they are not read to, not stimulated intellectually, and education is not a priority in the home, those children are probably not going to do as well as children who come from homes where there is reading and attention paid to early education.
I think that programs like Headstart were meant to even some of those odds, because poverty and the first kind of homes I mentioned seemed to correlate.
Here in St. Cloud, Minnesota, Early Childhood Education has been an option for about thirty years. Unfortunately, it seems that fewer kids from lower economic range families attend, possibly because of time constraints with working parents, financial concerns (some scholarships are available), and not knowing about the programs.
I thought when he made that statement, he was referring to teachers and administrators who had lowered expectations of kids because of their race, not parents.
A teacher friend of mine is always telling me about parents (plenty of them white) whose combination of insecurity and anti-elitism make them suspicious of their kids getting ‘too much’ learning. This is what I thought Lissa was talking about.
One important thing to tease out, I think, is that the consumer of the product (the child, and indirectly society at large) is not the purchaser of the product, IF we go to a private system. A private system is going to mean that , even more so than is currently the case, children whose parents are academically motivated and involved with their children are going to get a better education than those children whose parents are negligent, anti-intellectual, or just plain apathetic.
Sure, that’s somewhat the case now. But it can be ameliorated: a kid with apathetic parents can still go to a public school, and if society takes sufficient interest in the public school, that kid will still get a good education despite her parents. If education is in private hands, there’s no way we can make sure that kid gets a good education: through no fault of her own, she’s very likely to end up at a craptacular school and get a craptacular education.
Privatization of schools thereby takes away our ability to improve education for kids with bad parents. I don’t know whether that’s a worse problem than the problems presented by public schools, but it’s certainly a problem to consider: it visits the sins of the parents on the children in a manner that I find unacceptable.
I fail to see anything in her comments that might be construed as racism in any form. Having observed a lot of rural white students, I don’t see anything in those statements that seems out of line. Though I’m brown…so maybe I’m a reverse racist. shrug
Not everyone can be above average. While we can do our best to make sure everyone is self-sufficient and has the tools to support themselves in a productive career, saying that all children, regardless of family structure, income, education, and will to succeed have an equal shot at a being rocket scientist is naive at best, counter-productive at worst.
I do find it funny that most of us can agree on the basic infrastructure necessary to run a good school- modern, or at least well kept facilities, qualified staff, and small class sizes. These are fixtures in virtually every successful school that I could name. And yet, when these are mentioned in relation to a lot of these ‘failing schools’-many of whom have few or none of these features- all I hear is that money won’t solve the problem. I think that any reform we do has to start with equitable funding. And even then, it’s only a start. From what I’ve seen, parental education and attitudes about it are the deciding factor in whether a child succeeds or fails.
That would seem to indicate the educational establishment needs to do more to help those kids. We can start doing this by finding the kids who need more help. Perhaps we could use testing to find these groups of children.
Of course that will upset some who think the problem is with the child, not with the system.
This whole argument makes me laugh- good schools, bad schools, fixing schools, tearing them down, building anew, etc.
There is exactly one factor that will predict how good or bad a school is- the family income of the kids that go to it.
As long as schools are funded grossly inequally by property taxes, such that one school can have school sponcered field trips to Hollywood as a homecoming activity (the school one mile north from me) or such that the schools can’t afford even basic infrastructure like school busses or fixing broken windows instead of boarding over them (the school one mile south from me) we will always see the same exact patterns, no matter how often we knock down or rearrange or whatever.
And fair funding is just the tip of the iceberg. When a community’s mothers are working three jobs thanks to welfare reform and their father’s are in jail thanks to mandatory minimum sentancing drug laws, their schools are going to fail. When a community can’t decide how to best educate their immigrant population because a bunch of people who have never taught a class or seen an immigrant decided to pass a law, the schools are going to fail. When a community can’t police it’s streets (my neighborhood- which encompasses just a few blocks has had two murders, a handful or armed robberies and near daily muggings in the recent weeks. After the last guy got shot in the face for asking for his green card back from a robber, we’ve managed to get a grand total of one beat cop assigned to our area. There used to be around the clock patrolling but funding got cut) the schools are going to fail. When someone’s parents can’t get healthcare for their physical or psychiatric problems, the schools are going to fail.
Our schools are like a canary in coal mine. They reflect all of the malignancies in our society. In order to fix them, we need to fix a lot of thing. If the point that you start helping is when the kid walks in to a classroom, it’s too late.
This isn’t an easy problem. Up to this point, we’ve decided that it’s not worth trying to fix. I hope we do try sometime in the future.
Very good post. But I think it’s important to mention that the amount of “soft money” that is spent can’t be reigned in in any way, even if public school funding were equalized. In the town I grew up in, parents would hire tutors and advisors to help their kids. People with means with never allow their kids to be deprived of advantages in the interest of “fairness”.
I think there is only one way we can expect failing schools to keep up with good ones - they need to work harder, longer and smarter. They need to be in class on Saturday, they need to be in school till 5, and they need to make good use of that time. One way to do this relatively cheaply is to develop a nation wide open course ware education program available on the internet. Like MIT has done. Hire qualified teachers from around the world to teach a lesson that can be accessed online. This way, the kid in Newark, NJ can see exactly what a kid in Princeton, NJ is learning. Pay the teachers for their time, and have them available for questions students have. This way, kids can supplement what they learn in school, and they won’t have to suffer for having bad teachers. Additionally, they can save on books, and divert that money to maintaining fast internet access, and a local server to house all the videos. Watching the videos should be mandatory for all kids in under-preforming areas.
Second, set up programs that expose kids to successful people in the real world. I think one reason people fail to succeed is because they don’t see responsible behavior modeled to them on a regular basis. I’m thinking something like Saturday classes taught by professional people on a rotating basis. I many people like to teach, but don’t want to be teachers. I know many people who would volunteer a couple hours a few times a year to teach what they know. You could have chemists teaching chemistry, etc.
Third, all school should have full time graders/assistants that help teachers grade objective assignments. There is no reason teacher should spent countless hours grading multiple choice tests, or simple math problems. Especially in high school. That time can be better spent mentoring students, and figuring out how to become a more effective teacher. You could also attract more competent teachers if they knew they wouldn’t have so much paper work.
Next, schools need to do more stuff in house, and not wasting money. They shouldn’t be buying computers from Mac and Dell, they should be buying parts and teaching kids to put them together. They shouldn’t be spending money on consultants and advisors, and new uniforms.
Then, there needs to be a more effective safety net for kids who aren’t up to snuff. Now public schools have no effective ways of dealing with rotten apples. We need to face that fact that some kids need to be “left behind” for the sake of the other students. That’s not to say that they shouldn’t be educated, but that they need to given some options that have a reasonable chance of success. Vocational schools are a good example of this.
Lastly, you need to pay teachers more in bad areas, and after they’ve received tenure (which should be happen after 6-10 years, not 3/4). I don’t think this will completely fix the system, but it’s a good start.
It has absolutely nothing to do with race. It does, however, seem to be more prevelent among families with a low income.
There are problems with both. I’m certainly not claiming our system is perfect, but even a perfect system will have failing kids simply because some of them are uninterested in education. I think that emphasis on vocational training might help alleviate some of that.
But there’s no way to make a one-size-fits all system which will be right for all kids. You cannot individualize education in a nationally standardized system. The correct thing to do would be to evaluate every child as to where their strengths lie and build an individualized educational program around them, but such a system would be massively expensive.
Schools like that are protected under religious freedom. (It protects the Amish, too.) They had to comply with a few state laws to be recognized as a school-- they had to have a set number of school days, for example, and some sort of phys ed, which was accomplished by compulsory basketball for boys and compulsory cheerleading for girls. I wasn’t truant, but I don’t have a state-recognized highschool diploma.
When I went there, there was no state standardized testing, but after I graduated, I heard they were forced to start having students take the Ninth Grade Proficiency Test. They vowed to fight it, and they had a team of lawyers working on lawsuits the last I heard. I dunno what the eventual outcome was.
I’m a voracious reader and always have been, which was actively encouraged by my parents. They also took me to a lot of museums and we travelled extensively. I’m completely self-educated, for what it’s worth. I never did go to college, but fortunately, my chosen career is one in which experience matters more than education.
I’ve always been a firm believer that schools should be funded by income tax, not property tax. It puts an unfair burden on property owners. Though I know that every American has a vested interest in an education youth, I’ve always had a kernel of resentment that parents who live in apartments can band together to vote in a property tax increase which falls on the shoulders of people like me who don’t even have kids.
During the last levy debate, Hubby spoke up at a meeting and suggested that the income tax might be fairer because then everybody would have to support the schools, not just those who own buisinesses or homes. One of the school board members looked at him like he was crazy. “Well, *that *would never pass!” he said.
Well, all 50 states are failing teacher qualification.
Interesting question: What would happen if every state told the Feds to fuck off? Sure, they could withhold funding, but for how long? Not more than 18 months or so max, because I’m certain the states in rebellion would throw out any Representative who supported a Federal crackdown and replace them with someone reasonable. Is a grass-roots revolution possible here?