That story has nothing to do with any innate failing of the public education system, and pretending it does is extremely dishonest. It’s an issue with the collective bargaining agreement/union contract in place for New York public schools.
There are a whole set of assumptions underlying that statements. Assumptions that we know to be false. The free market does not necessarily always reach a pareto optimal result.
Are you sure the free market correctly prices the coal miner’s labor without the intervention of his union? Or is the union part of the free market?
Are you sure the free market correctly valued homes in 2007? Or would we have been better off without the Countrywides and Americorps of the world?
Are you sure that the free market always distributes education and health care most efficeintly? Or is there some value to educating all children, even poor children who cannot afford to pay for their own education?
Oh so there are market failures and the free market needs regulating. If the government is regulating the free market, then it isn’t really free any more is it? It is a government regulated market.
The free market would never educate the poor child of average intellect. Government can fix it by collecting taxes and spending it on a public school system that WILL educate that poor child of average intelligence.
Whoa, can you cite the history that shows that the free market is almost always ALMOST ALWAYS better than the government?
I am not going to defend the result of overpowered teachers unions. I am not the one speaking in absolutes. I am advocating charter schools but not vouchers (unless the private school takes the voucher as full payment and without discrimination).
I do. I don’t see why we can’t allow some free market forces to be introduced but I don’t know if I want to have the public education system be fully subjected to free market forces.
I can point to a bunch of public schools that are head and shoulders above almost any private school that cost about the same per pupil, look at most suburbs and almost every magnet school.
The private schools in the DC area all have entrance requirements, they have personality tests, IQ tests, and all sorts of other tests for the privelege of paying 30K/year to send your kid to their school and then they ask you for donations on top of that. Many Catholic schools survive on cheap labor, strict discipline and expelling all the troublemakers.
And why won’t a charter program fix that?
Really? 700 teachers at $70k (avg), along with the costs to maintain a rubber room, isn’t a burden on the taxpayers? What about the inability of non-union teachers to teach in a unionized environment? What about the inability of the state to force the termination of bad teachers? These things are all innate in the public education system. Of course, solving these problems is not the magic bullet, but solving these issues at least alleviates some of the problem. What exactly, then, is an innate failing of the public education system?
If New York was an aberration and the public education system was radically different elsewhere, you might have a point. But you don’t. The problems in New York are replicated in cities across the country, and in fact are replicated in other public sector union jobs (similar ‘rubber rooms’ can be found in several police forces, for example).
The fact is, the combination of labor unions and government is toxic. In the private sector, union excesses are at least somewhat controlled by the laws of the marketplace - GM workers were forced to take wage rollbacks or face watching their company go down the drain along with their jobs.
But when the government is the employer, unions run rampant. California is broke and will be issuing IOU’s next week for its bills, and STILL finds it impossible to cut union payrolls. The public sector continues to bloat because the bureaucracy has to fill in around non-performing employees who cannot be fired.
In the current recession, almost all job losses are coming from non-union and non-government jobs. Governments in particular have rationalized actually growing their budgets when everyone else is being forced by reality to cut back.
This is the environment public schools exist in. The incentives are all out of whack, the money is going to the wrong places, decisions about educational choices for children take a back seat to political expediency and union featherbedding. Getting a problem child out of a classroom becomes a political football instead of being determined by the overall health of the classroom. Risk avoidant administrators impose zero-tolerance policies and sweep problems under the rug.
All of this is due to the perverted incentives that exist in a system that is funded by taxpayers and controlled by labor unions. Over the last 30 years, the amount of funding that has gone into education has skyrocketed. This hasn’t improved student scores one bit. "Education Reform’ always winds up being twisted into, “Teachers need more money.” So funding is increased, and the money winds up being absorbed by administration or wasted on foolish projects that do nothing exxcept bring money home to the districts of those who voted for them.
The public education system doesn’t need tweaking - it needs to be torn down and rebuilt from the ground up. It’s a colossal disaster. Children got better educations 100 years ago from 19 year old girls in one-room schoolhouses.
Unfortunately, radical reform will never happen. This is because the NEA is the single most powerful lobbying group in Washington, and it exerts iron control over the political system - especially within the Democratic party.
Sam Stone, you’d have some shred of a point if parents weren’t allowed to pull their kids out of public school and put them into private school without the vouchers. But they can. So you don’t have a shred of a point - the private education industry is trucking along just fine.
And what would the effects of vouchers be, regarding the free market? Putting aside the issues of fraud and leeching money from the public school system and ignoring economies of scale and the like. Well, one thing they won’t do is make the education market a speck freer than it already was, because you can already pay to be in a private school, and because there will still be some form of public school provided. So there will be no improvement there.
No, this isn’t about making the market more efficient. It’s about making it more cost-effective to send your kids to public school if you can already afford to. It’s a tax break for sending your kids to a private school, paid for by draining the resources of the public school. And since it’s likely that disadvantaged families will be unable to pay the difference between the voucher amount and the private school tuition, this is nothing but an plan to throw disadvantaged families’ kids under the bus by draining the resources from the schools they attend while helping wealthy people save a little cash.
Maybe it’s just because I’m not rich; but I don’t see what interest the government has in going along with this plan.
I didn’t say that, did I? I said it does a better job than government. Would you like to show me the government programs that have come anywhere close to a pareto optimal result?
Of course a union is part of the free market, so long as it isn’t given special powers by the government. Collective bargaining is a completely valid mechanism in market transactions.
Ah yes, it was all the free market’s fault. It couldn’t have anything to do with the market-distorting effect of the home interest deduction or other government home-ownership incentives and tax breaks, or the effect of the Fed holding interest rates artificially low, or the effect of Fanny and Freddie driving down eligibility requirements for home loans, or the moral hazard aspect of knowing the government will bail you out if you go bankrupt. It couldn’t have anything to do with the Community Reinvestment Act, which put pressure on lenders to accept bad risks, or any of the other numerous government interventions into the market. It’s all just the market’s fault.
The thing is, the market has adjusted. CEOs lost their jobs all over the place. Credit has tightened up. But how did government pay the price for its misdeeds? Barney Frank and Chris Dodd are two of the biggest villians of this entire mess, and they suffered not one whit. Fannie and Freddie are going strong, and getting more money. The market gets the blame, the government gets a free ride or even increases in power. So what’s new?
There is a difference between efficient allocation of resources and social outcome. Markets do not guarantee social outcomes. The free market does not guarantee you a job, or guarantee that you’ll make as much as your neighbor. It doesn’t guarantee that your kid will get as good an education as Barack Obama’s. This is not an argument for government takeover of an industry - it may be an argument for social assistance or other forms of government equalization.
If the poor can’t afford good shoes, is that a justification for nationalizing shoe production? Can we admit that the free market probably does a better job of making shoes than the government can, while still accepting that perhaps there’s a need to figure out how to get better shoes to poor people?
Not all markets suffer from such failures. You’re trying to distort what I said. I said IF you can identify a market failure, then MAYBE there is a justification for government involvement, if you can come up with a credible plan that does not make the problem worse. If you can’t identify the market failure, you have no justification for government involvement, because the market has demonstrated itself to be a better method of allocation than has government and therefore should be the default mechanism we turn to.
Really? How did all those poor children of average intellect get educated in the 1800’s and early 1900’s?
My grandmother was dirt poor, and had an average intellect. Do you know how she got educated? In a one-room school, taught by a young girl with a one or two year teaching certificate. Paid for privately, by a coalition of families.
Or, government could fix it by allowing education to be private, and providing refundable tax credits to poor families. Or perhaps property taxes that now go to the public school system could be spent through open competition by private schools, who would then have an incentive to cut costs and provide the best education possible in order to win next year’s contract.
Or perhaps we’d find more innovative ways to teach children. Home schooling seems to be doing just fine - home schooled children take internet classes, work on projects designed by private companies, etc. For socialization, they attend various camps and join sports leagues and special interest clubs. Perhaps in a fully private education system we’d see more such hybrid school systems crop up - small facilities where ten to twenty kids show up and get taught by internet classes and rotating guest lecturers. Perhaps if more children were taught this way, we’d see other market innovations, such as commercial entities that specialize in certain subjects and do a very good job (like a company that does science teaching, and puts all their effort into that one aspect).
But we’ll never know so long as real innovation and market forces are stifled by the heavy hand of government and the teacher’s unions.
My cite is the world economy. It should be self-evident that markets are preferable to government action whenever possible.
aye, and selling your kidney is still more ethical that coercing people (essentially enslaving) to give money to someone else. One is an action of purposeful evil, the other is an act of negligence. I feel for that person who is selling his kidney and if he was my neighbor I would help him out freely of my own will. (i do donate to charity, Ill have to find one that helps people who are considering selling their kidney for food) To equate your story above with active coercion is not possible and should not be done.
I apologize if you thought I was implying that any of you wanted a totalitarian state, I assume that all people who the political views because they believe it is best for all people. I hold this view until they prove otherwise. My point was we know what happens when a government gets too much power. Also if a government seems to be gaining more and more power throughout time (like the American government seems to have) it does begin to get scary. While I currently believe that we have a well meaning president who will not use power to his own ends I do not believe that that trend will continue indefinitely. I do not like the power over all these things (especially education) to be handled from a top down manner. IT seems to me if the internet has taught is anything it is that a bottom up organization is possible in the digital age.
AI do not see the point in the rest of your second paragraphs. But essentially people should be careful in what they invest there money in.
I believe that we need very good justification before we coerce someone. I do not believe we have that justification when it comes to education. I realize that people do not seem to understand this, and I believe it is due to presuppositions about the purpose of government. I do believe that people may be better off if they questioned there presuppositions concerning government. The purpose of government is not supply all my needs, the purpose of government is to protect my life, liberty and property from harm by someone elses coercive action.
I just wanted to float an idea.
Most top-tiered colleges give out need based scholarships, which means that if you can afford to pay $15,000, then you pay $15,000 and the college picks up the rest of the tuition (yes, I am aware that it would be the government and not the schools themselves paying the bill, but the same idea applies).
This would level the gap between middle-class and poor families, cost whys, applying for vouchers
Also, this wouldn’t cause a flood of students out of the public education system. If 30 kids who need voucher assistance applied to a private school and were accepted, that would mean that 30 other kids wouldn’t be accepted and would either have to find another private school or attend public.
I feel like as a whole, private schools offer a better education than public schools. I also acknowledge that there are many public schools that provide outstanding educations, but the fact of the matter is that that is not the case for all.
So, if a student is at a public school that offers a below average education, but can’t afford to move to another school district, why not offer him the assistance he needs to attend a academically superior private school?
I just LOVE how people rant and rave about how corrupt and ineffient government programs are, as if “private” programs don’t have any corruption and ineffiencies.
The reason why government education is so crappy is b/c it’s “one size fits all” It’s basicly designed for that Mythical Average Student. There’s nothing for gifted kids or special ed kids. Anyone who doesn’t fit the typical suburban middle class average learner, is basicly shit on. (trust me…I know. I was both gifted AND special needs) Why not have a bunch of different types of schools designed for all sorts of learners, operating under all sorts of “learning theories?”
And for those of you who are talking about special ed kids…I have to say that I think more special needs kids should have the option of attending a school specificly for their disabilites. Most teachers have NO clue how to teach a kid with special needs…and if the kid doesn’t respond to the minimal training mainstream teachers get, we get lumped in with the " Ummmmm who’s President Obama?" dumbasses who are just in the resource room/sped b/c it’s a wastebasket…(and yeah, I’m bitter…why do you ask?)
So, pulling kids out of a public school hurts the school because it depletes the school of the funding attached to the kid. Thus, the economy of scale is lessened. Well, following this logic, the more students in a school the better. And we should strive to have humungous schools. Except, big schools don’t outperform smaller schools. This “economy of scale argument” is correct only to a point. If you’re talking about extremely small schools, yes it helps the school to reach a certain size where they can justify the costs of gymnasiums, good libraries, etc. But there is a point at which more size is not only a good thing, but a bad thing. I would think that a principal, teach, parent of a student in a poor inner-city school with crowded classrooms and a dismal student/teacher ratio would view it as a good thing if kids left. They could concentrate more on the kids that are there.
It wouldn’t be as bad if it worked like that, but the problem is that the way the funding works, at least in this district is stuff is budgeted for 38 kids in a class. If, after the third Friday after each semester, a school doesn’t have that many students, the school looses money. Like every other business that has an unexpected shortfall of cash, most of the money is already spent. The books are bought, and the building has pretty fixed costs. The only place to cut is staff. Most schools try not to cut teachers. They cut security or lunch room ladies or an assistant principal but usually some teachers are gone. The guidance councilor quickly issues new schedules for half the students and the next morning the classrooms are jammed. Rinse and repeat for second semester. It can get really ugly if the councilor is one of the ones cut.
We know what keeps kids in school when there is no respect for education at home. It isn’t a big secret. It is a connection with an adult in the building. It can be a coach, a shop teacher, a math teacher, or a bus driver. It doesn’t really matter. We have seen successes with programs that teach opera, Shakespeare, Chess, and math. There have been successes with football, baseball, it doesn’t even matter, those programs have all led to better test scores. The fewer adults there are to catch them, the more likely they are to drop out or not care about shchool. It doesn’t have to be done in public schools, but, at least around here, none of the charters can afford to run anything extra. Extra can mean in this case, a library, or transportation for the students.
Sam Stone’s belief upthread that the 19 year old in her one room school did a better job of educating students is silly. She never taught past 8th grade and students could leave with no consequences in 3rd grade. Those who wanted more went to boarding schools elsewhere. She was not expected to teach handicapped kids or kids of a different race. She taught reading, math and social studies and perhaps a catechism or two. She did not teach sex ed, computers, or another language. She was not expected to make a kid that didn’t want to come to school pass his tests at the threat of her job. She was allowed to whip kids who were out of line. She was not expected to socialize the kids, they were supposed to come to school with that installed. She wasn’t allowed to marry, date, or dye her hair. The world was different.
There are programs that work, but they tend to be small and not replicable because they are teacher led things like the opera program. The charter schools are not working any better than the other public schools, we now have data and testing that proves that. Most of the choice schools don’t have to test in this district so they can claim whatever the hell they want to claim. The catholic schools that do test have gone down in scores since they had to let everyone in to get public money, so they are doing about the same as regular public school. but their teachers make less money and are less likely to have certification in what they teach.
Don’t you see how your post actually reinforces my points? Under a private system where schools have to compete for students, they will no longer teach for your Mythical Average Student - there will be specialization within schools. One school might tout their strong science curriculum and labs; another might be known for the strength of its professors and philosophy classes. It won’t be perfect, but it will undoubtedly be much better than the current system.
Yes, the public school system is “corrupt” in many places in the US, but it’s not the corruption that bothers me so much, because as you rightly assert, the private sector can be corrupt. It is the massive inefficiencies that bother, and would be at least significantly reduced, if not outright eliminated, in a private sector.
It doesn’t necessarily. If there are ten fewer students, they have to by ten fewer books, etc. Every time 38 kids leave the school, that’s one less teacher that’s needed to teach those 38 kids. It seems that you’re arguing that that should NOT happen. That school should have $X, regardless of whether they have Y students or Y minus 38.
I’m not the one saying the privcate sector is almosts always better than goernment. if I said the government is almost always better than the private sector then I would have the burden but I didn’t, I only have to prove that the government is sometimes better than the free market.
What special power is the UAW or the Teacher’s Union endowed with? In fact teacher’s unions in many jurisdictions are stripped of powers available to unions generally (many of them can’t strike, which is kind of a big thing).
Which we have had for decades but didn’t cause any problems until recently when laissez faire policies became de rigeur in DC.
For example? The Clinton home ownership tax break that replaced the rollover provisions preceding it happened way before home prices started to get out of control.
Done by Greenspan one of the largest proponents of Ayn Randianism and the “free market” (which makes you wonder what free marekters really believe in).
Once again these institutions have been around for decades and there hasn’t been a problem until recent unregulated free market “innovations”
And this “knowledge” was there bfore the market melted down?
You mean the program from 30 or 40 years ago? That is the thing that caused the meltdown over the last couple of years?
Nope just mostly the marke’s fault (aided by Alan Greenspan and a laissez faire government that was depserate to prove their economic theories were correct.
The were two major causes of the crash. Low interests rates, securitization and private mortgage companies. Don’t blame Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, blame Countrywide and Americorp. Don’t blame the Community Redevelopment Act, blame investment banks that repackaged and sold mortgages in a way that divorced lending from underwriting. The list goes on, you are trying to deflect blame from the free market and Alan Greenspan where it really belongs to things like Fannie Mae and the CRA.
With that said, Alan Greenspan was a de facto government actor but I would point out that a federal reserve system is necessary to the function of a complex financial system and I am pretty sure that every banker will tell you the same thing.
My point is that sometimes market efficiency has to be tempered by social equity.
I have not read ANYONE saying that eh government is better at everything than the private sector. This is especially true of consumer goods but it is not so true with public goods.
OK then without goernment intervention, we would not have free public education. that is a desirable social outcome that the market will not provide.
A lot of them didn’t get educated and a lot of them had local school boards.
Yeah and Catholic charities does a lot of things the market doesn’t provide eiether but where was the profit motive in coalition of families? Did every poor child (or even the majority of poor children have the same set up?
I am OK with that. What I have a problem with is subsidizing a $25K high school tuition by extracting 8K from the public school system. If pricate companies can provide an education for the same $8K and not hit up the nparents for subsidies, etc AND take all comers without any entrance requirements (i.e. operate under the same rules as public schools), then I would be totally for that, in fact I have spoken about the DC charter system favorably several times in this thread.
Or perhaps we’d find more innovative ways to teach children. Home schooling seems to be doing just fine - home schooled children take internet classes, work on projects designed by private companies, etc. For socialization, they attend various camps and join sports leagues and special interest clubs. Perhaps in a fully private education system we’d see more such hybrid school systems crop up - small facilities where ten to twenty kids show up and get taught by internet classes and rotating guest lecturers. Perhaps if more children were taught this way, we’d see other market innovations, such as commercial entities that specialize in certain subjects and do a very good job (like a company that does science teaching, and puts all their effort into that one aspect).
But we’ll never know so long as real innovation and market forces are stifled by the heavy hand of government and the teacher’s unions.
My cite is the world economy. It should be self-evident that markets are preferable to government action whenever possible.
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I would cite the current recession and the Great Depression. Both the result of laissez faire.
And which poster has implied that the purpose of government is to supply all your needs. We as a nation have a big government ebcause we WANT a big government. We WANT public education, we WANT medicare, we WANT a big military, we WANT social security, but a segment of the population just doesn’t want to pay for it or they want an a la carte country. They want to keep all the stuff they like about America and ditch the rest. Its like loving your wife’s cooking but hating to feed her.
DC has a scholarship program that does exactly that. It has income limits.
Absolutely ridiculous. Government interference in the financial markets was heavy. Government was right in the thick of the very issues that directly caused the meltdown. Some of the least-regulated financial markets actually turned out to be the least affected. The government controlled the macroeconomic environment that caused capital to move to riskier investments. Government stamped its seal of approval on financial derivatives and in fact helped champion them through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Fannie Mae was instrumental in aiding banks to monetize their mortgage debt and package and sell it. Powerful regulators in charge of financial committees issued statements to the public that all was well, the markets were sound, and gave words of encouragement to people seeking to buy houses they couldn’t afford.
But yes, let’s ignore all that and just blame the ‘free market’. In the meantime, Barney Frank is once again calling for a loosening of mortgage credit as we speak.
Oh? That’s a good one.
Please explain to me how the current recession, and the Great Depression, were caused by voluntary transactions consummated between two consenting parties.
Starting…now. Go ahead. I anxiously await your reply.
To me, what we have now is almost the worst possible situation. Schools are funded mainly through property taxes at the city or county level, so poor areas which have the greatest need have the least resources to draw from. Within school districts, most schools are tied to a specific geographical area so kids with the greatest needs are clustered together. In those types of schools the parents with the most resources are able to send their kids to private schools which further concentrates kids with the greatest needs.
It is absolutely criminal that parents are told what schools their kids can attend. There is virtually no other place in our society where you have so little choice; can you imagine being told what store you can shop in, what parks you can visit, what doctor you can see, or what church you can attend?
Then you have the situation where college students majoring in education have some of the lowest test scores. You’d like to pay great teachers more, but the teachers’ union fights merit pay and want to protect incompetent teachers who currently have jobs. Meanwhile, mind numbing administrative rules drive the good teachers out in frustration.
I don’t care if the solution is public or private, but we need to blow up the entire educational system and start over from scratch. Let’s have our smartest students become teachers and pay them salaries comparable to what they’d get as lawyers or engineers. Let’s use para-professionals and volunteers to perform routine tasks like taking attendance and grading exams. Let’s open all schools to students regardless of where they live and create a more equitable system of finacing schools (such as federal income taxes).
I swear to god I don’t know who I hate more: conservatives who want to cut taxes, liberals who want to restrict choice, education reformers who push dubious theories such as whole language, or the unions who want to protect teachers at the expense of students.