Check out this chart:
Isn’t it clear that spending more money is not going to fix education? or perhaps better, isn’t it clear that spending more money has not fixed education?
So we should spend less money or something? What’s your point exactly?
And if more money doesn’t help, why are all the good schools well-funded ones in good neighborhoods?
I believe school performance is largely due to genetics and family income. Poor schools perform poorly on average because their students are poor, regardless of teacher salaries or budget.
If you want to increase educational success, reduce poverty. This would also have the effect of reducing crime, disease, depression, obesity, malnutrition, drug use, gang violence, discrimination, teenage pregnancy and… poverty. Win-win, really.
Has anybody tried, instead of inflating dead-weight administrators salaries, paying students to go to school, or their parents to take them?
Under the same timeframe as that chart, HS completion has gone from 55 to 87% of the population. So while HS kids aren’t necessarily getting better educations, a lot more of them are getting educated. Also the kids that are now graduating that wouldn’t have in 1970 are generally drawn from disadvantaged households, so the fact that outcomes have stayed even while the school system has absorbed a huge number of kids who, all things being even, should’ve dragged down aggregate scores. The fact that aggregate scores have in fact increased is something of an under-reported victory of US education, IMHO.
Also, its kinda dishonest to put the NEAP scores on the same axis as percent change in resources. Your not going to double kids scores on a standardized tests, and if you did, its not really clear what that would mean? That they’re “twice as good” at math? (indeed, since scores have an upper bound, in most places you literally can’t “double” the average score).
NAEP scores have indeed improved since 1970, both in terms of absolute scores across all ethnicities and in terms and in closing the gap between whites and blacks/hispanics.
My position is that there should be as complete a separation between school and state as we have between church and state. People should buy education just like we buy everything else.
genetics? seriously? explain please.
and poverty is not the cause of bad education in this country. There are so many opportunities today for people. Poverty is not an excuse.
so poverty causes all these things??? I rather think poverty is the effect of all these things, not the cause.
So you take a poor kid and make it impossible to get an education at all.
That is one of the most assholish and mind numbingly fucked up idea I’ve ever heard.
Excellent point.
I was going to make this point too. There’s a ceiling for testing scores that is not there for the other stuff being plotted; this is a disingenuous presentation.
Also a great point.
My first position is that whenever a conservative says anything, don’t trust and verify. So I’d like to see the data too.
What should happen if a family can’t afford an elementary education for their children?
The problem isn’t really how much the poor make, it’s that the culture most poor people are in value “hard work” (i.e. work that brings in money) over “book learning.” It’s not really a bad position to take when you are living hand to mouth. The problem is that if you are poor and you manage to grow beyond poor, a lot of that “hard work” mentality comes with it. After spending any amount of time concentrating on the short term, it becomes hard to begin focusing on the long term. Even if you know and believe that you should.
You have to sit and retrain ingrained behaviors. Worse is that any mistakes along the way make it very easy to slide back to where you came from.
I see. And how much should people pay? Just for daycare (no schoolin’) people can pay upwards of $200 a week, depending on where they live. So every working family in America has to suddenly pay that. Great. Really.
Do you have ANY concept how much of a fucked up idea that is in a country where every adult has a voice? If you haven’t been given the background education to understand basic economics, how to balance a check book, or the difference between a lease, a mortgage, or a payment plan, how do you expect to elect people who can do the same?
As a nation we are already struggling with people who don’t grasp those ideas that go and vote sleaze into office. Now you want to make 80% of the voters more ignorant by default so that the clueless/downright sleaze get a greater say in our political process. Really?
We feed that family to wolves. Obviously.
Some people are naturally better than others. Every human trait varies, and most are passed on through genes. Are you a blank slate proponent? Regardless, we can’t change genes, so you have to focus on the stuff we can change, like income disparity.
List them. Malnourished kids from the ghetto whose parents are abusive alcoholics don’t really have a lot of opportunities. Silver spoon heiresses do. There are a lot of shades in between those extremes. Like every human trait, it varies.
The problem is that poverty perpetuates itself. Most of those things are both causes and effects of poverty. This is a problem that will take multiple generations and cultural change to fix, but the way to start is to stop patching symptoms, like throwing money at schools and police and social workers, and to fix they cause, by throwing money at poor people.
Actually, all of these things are required to fix poverty, too. You need an appreciable police presence to dampen the potential of criminal activity (my mention of hard work above didn’t preclude illegal activity). You need schools to educate them so you break the cycle of ignorance. You need social workers to help identify those that are poor for reasons beyond their control (Addiction, mental illness, etc) and to help combat them.
Then you also need to raise the poor up out of their impoverished state at the same time. We keep the poor in their place in this country by sporadically focusing on one or two things. Oh, crimes’ up. Fund more police. Oh, a bunch of alcoholic fathers are beating their families like it’s 1950. Fund more social workers. Oh, their schools get bad marks. Throw money at education.
The place we always fail is at trying to finance their elevation. The assistance we give to the poor is less than sustenance level, which helps keep them where they are. We also yank the assistance we give them when they reach a point where they might break even. Worse, we punish the entire class of poor citizens for the chicanery of a few. You’ll hear a news story about someone gaming the system in two separate states on a border town, and benefits will fall over time based on the number of stories like this. Why help, after all, if they are ALL thieves?
There are plenty of countries that have no, or extremely limited, public education.
These countries don’t tend to be economic powerhouses. Education is strongly tied to improved health, as well as improved economic output. Anything that limits access to education is going to have a strong negative impact on a nation.
I don’t remember buying any firefighters this week.
I think we should spend a little bit more money on teaching people to understand charts.
But what I’m getting from that diagram is that sometime around 1975 or 1980, we actually started paying teachers living wages. When I started my first job after college around that time, I was earning more than my parent who had been teaching for almost 20 years at the time.
So… Given that teaching (that is, actual proper teaching, by people who actually know how to do it in any reasonable metric) is a high-skills job that requires years of training and that effectively everyone needs an education, how do you expect the market to react? What would the free market generally do with a good or service which has incredibly high demand but low supply, available only from highly qualified individuals?
The answer, for anyone with even the slightest understand of market forces, is that prices would be very high. Now, do you agree with the statement that democracy is contingent on the understanding of the citizens to function? I hope so, it’s pretty fundamental - people who are incapable of voting in an informed manner are not people who should be determining who holds some of the most powerful offices in the world. Now how educated do you think most people would get without any basic education? What percentage of Americans do you think could afford private schooling? How would we rectify this gap?
Private schooling is completely unfeasible, and dismantling public education is utterly unethical. Look at the countries across the world that don’t have a public education system. It’s quite telling that almost all of them are third-world countries. Every country with the wherewithal to have a decent centralized government has put education in a position of prominence. I wonder why.
I recently looked at the NIMSS scores for North Carolina, and I took away a few interesting things:
- Contrary to public opinion, the US scores significantly above average among industrialized nations on this test (average is 500, the US is something like 540). We’re not in the upper tier, but we’re solidly above-average.
- Contrary to public opinion, NC scores slightly above the national average (we’re like 550 or something).
- And the most interesting thing was when they broke the stats down according to percentage of kdis on free/reduced lunch at a school. There were literally no schools with fewer than 10% of kids at this level. But when you looked at schools where there were 10-24% of students living in low-income situations, scores shot up to be comparable with the very upper tiers, in the neighborhood of Japan’s scores (very slightly above, actually).
Number three is most interesting to me. There’s a lot missing, of course: there’s the issue of causation versus correlation, and there’s the question of low-income rates in the nations we’re being compared to, as well as how the social safety net works in those countries, as well as the percentage of kids in those countries in private schools (the US has a tremendous number of kids in private schools compared to the rest of the industrialized world, and those kids tend to be the ones with the most involved parents, and those kids don’t get tested by NIMSS), as well as who exactly gets tested (China is notorious for gaming the system by administering the test only to kids at the best schools, for example), as well as other factors.
But when I talk about how the real solution to our educational ills is to attack poverty head-on, this is the kind of thing I’m talking about. We ROCK at educating middle-class and upper-class kids. Where we struggle is at educating low-income kids.
The only ting that is clear from that chart is that there are lies, damned lies, and statistics and people who can manipulate statistics can make all sorts of claims to the unwary.
Let’s see a similar chart for automobile performance in the real world.
Let’s see a similar chart for health costs vs public health.
For that matter, let’s see where your blogger got his numbers and break them down by location, student age, family income, and a host of other factors.
As a polemic, this fails. As a serious debate, it does not even get out of the starting gate.
Obviously we need a major reform of our public education system.
Resistance to accountability measures from teachers’ unions as well as the inherently foolish notion that simply spending more money will solve the problem are the major roadblocks to fixing it.
Instead of reforming a truly broken system–education–the Democrats fell on their sword to reform a system that was serving the majority of Americans to a satisfactory degree.