One thing that strikes me about the arguments I've been having with voucher opponents is just how little they seem to understand how markets work. Markets don't work because they get it right the first time; they succeed because if at first they don't succeed, they try, try again.
A public school, by and large, cannot fail. If it screws up, no matter how badly, we will continue pouring money into it. This is particularly true because most of the employees of most systems can't fail either. They can be atrocious at their jobs, but provided that they are not actually molesting the students, it's nearly impossible to get rid of them.
Failure, to put it bluntly, works. Failure is nature's way of telling you "Hey, that doesn't work!" The American economy is vastly strengthened by the fact that companies are allowed to fail--and also by the fact that our crazy culture encourages us to try things that don't work.
In the first few iterations, this often looks inferior to a centralized system. Look, the critics say, they sat down and planned it all! Compare that to our messy, fragmented market where half the stuff doesn't work!
It can take a decade or more before the cracks in the planning appear. The planners, it turns out, didn't foresee that the world would change, and now the giant, planned system can't cope. One no longer hears so many complaints about how American cell services suck compared to Europe--not since their 3G debacle. I am fairly optimistic that in ten years, the current whinging about America's high-speed internet networks will be quieted when the decentralized model produces some unforeseen improvement.
At a conference last year, I saw an incredibly compelling presentation from the guy who does usability for Treo. He talked about design philosophy, and showed slides of a project he does where he goes into various institutions, divides people into groups, gives them spaghetti and some tape, and asks them to build the tallest self-supporting structure they can. The worst-performing group, you'll be unsurprised to hear, was MBA students; they spend all their time arguing about who will be boss. Engineers do okay. But the best performing group? Kindergarten students.
The students don't plan anything. They just try stuff, and if it doesn't work, they try something else. The presenter's argument was that if you want to do something quickly, and well, you need to have a lot of failure. Failure is the quickest way to learn.
But the way public schools are set up, they can't really fail--and so they don't succeed at the hardest task we've given them. The schools are not set up to learn; they're set up to follow the rules, and to serve their customer base, who are not in the case of poor schools the parents, but the various people who work for the system.
Ezra wrote a post criticizing my position on vouchers because there are, you know, really serious experts who care about education, and have all these awesome plans, and why the hell would we listen to some ideological libertarian whack job who just worships the market? I'd argue that first, all those plans suffer the fatal flaw of having to assume away all the poisonous interactions between the various constituents that have so far doomed school reform; second, they suffer the fatal flaw that the educational experts never fail either, because they just claim their plans weren't tried; and third, that serious planning may not be the right way to go about this. The right way may be to let a lot of people try stuff to see what works . . . and let a lot of other people copy what works because they're afraid of losing their jobs. While it's true that I think vouchers are good even if they just let a few kids exit an awful system, I also think it's true that they are the best shot we have at improving the system.
One reason scientists use fruit flies in genetic experiments is their generations are very short. You see an outcome quickly by our time. How many iterations of just trying stuff for k-12 until something works can society handle?
Also, it is my experience that if you kill off the public sector you eventually end up with a much more expensive but private version of the same thing with the power of political contributions available to keep it entrenched. And the public sector rarely, if ever, returns. Although I do not attribute this attitude to you, the killing off of the public sector is a feature, not a bug to many in this discussion. Government as a direct $ spigot to private enterprise is pretty much the ultimate capitalist wet dream.
MM: Unfortunately, while your argument is lucid, you have probably cited the exact reason why your opponents in the voucher realm want nothing to do with them: they're risky.
Central to all propositions for greater amounts of government centrality is the element of being risk-averse. Universal health care, daycare subsidies, public schools, and various other related topics you have raised objections to over the past few weeks -- all of them supported foremost by persons who wish, regardless of whatever other propositions they also inject, to reduce the element of risk.
The public schools, no matter how badly some of them fail, nonetheless exist, have guaranteed funding at present, and have doors open to all takers. They consequently provide a safe harbor for other risk-averse entities, like teachers' unions.
You're not likely to win arguments with parties who have decided that risk mitigation trumps all other factors, by pointing out that your preferred solution injects an element of risk. You simply have to find other, less ideological people who are willing to try it and then prove that it works in practice. This still won't convince the dedicated naysayers, but they'll eventually die off without winning new converts if your idea develops a proven track record.
We don't pour money into failing schools, we "increase our investment in our children's future."
Meg, I agree with some of this, but what you choose not to see, and I have no idea whether its willful blindness or just obtuseness, is that every argument you make for vouchers can similarly be made against vouchers.
Markets don't work because they get it right the first time; they succeed because if at first they don't succeed, they try, try again.
I get that. I just don't understand why the ONLY way to try again is vouchers. I and my other "voucher opponents" (although I hate that term, I'm not an opponent, I just don't like the idea of throwing the baby out with the bathwater which seems to be the position you're taking) have probably listed a dozen ways over the past several days on changes we could make to the system, none of which involve outsourcing children’s education to private institutions which limited or no oversight. Yes, yes, I know you HATE oversight but I must say, every time we DON’T have government oversight things seem to go all FUBAR. In the meantime we’ve made recommendations for changes within the system and for the most part you've ignored them.
A public school, by and large, cannot fail. If it screws up, no matter how badly, we will continue pouring money into it.
Except that many of them have failed, which is why we are having this conversation. Ergo, that statement is false.
The schools have failed in some dramatic ways. And so we need to go in and fix them, as well as we can in as many ways as we can. And one of the things we can TRY is vouchers, sure. But not vouchers with an amorphous concept. Will there be regulation, if so how much and whom will oversee it? Who will pay for that? Will it come out of the money that would have normally gone into the vouchers? Are we going to require that students get certain scores on certain tests? What tests? Who will develop and oversee these tests? Will the private schools be required to follow NCLB? What teacher standards will we require? These are but a handful of the completely unanswered, totally ignored issues which come up when discussing vouchers.
And what about all of the other things we can try too? What about things we can try that has proven to work other places? Your argument seems to be that vouchers are the ONLY fix. They must be done on a massive scale. When the FAIL MISSERABLY then we can try other stuff. My argument is that vouchers are one possible fix. I don't want to put all my eggs in the voucher basket because if we FAIL in that capacity we FAIL so dramatically that it could be irreversible. We have now completely dismantled a system that doesn’t work slightly less badly than the system we now have in place.
I know you believe in the free market and the invisible hand. I know you have faith in it. I’m Agnostic. I don’t have faith in anything. The Market doesn’t solve everything and I don’t understand how this is supposed to be solved by people making a profit.
All I'm saying is that you continue to make a less than compelling argument.
Holy God you are so condescending in nearly all your posts!
It's nice of Ms. Jane Galt to finally get around to being honest about her support for vouchers. It's not about a raging desire to make certain that poor children are accorded all of the advantages in life accorded to rich children. It's because public schools are public, and markets are magic. QED.
OK, that's probably unfair. I understand that you're a libertarianish person who believes the private sector should be running nearly everything and the role of the government should be limited in most cases to redistributing money directly into the hands of the people who need assistance. That's a broadly defensible philosophy. Few people are likely to argue the opposite position-- that central planning is always more efficient than market competition. Because it obviously isn't. But your argument simply isn't compelling to anyone who doesn't share your ideological opposition to public services.
Since you never attended a public school, and appear to hold some fantastically elitist views toward them, I'm not sure what I could say that would disabuse you of your notion that such schools "serve their customer base, who are not in the case of poor schools the parents, but the various people who work for the system." The people who work for the system are arguably too bureaucratized and insulated from the results of their work, but they are never the "customers." In successful public school systems parents play a large role, through PTA meetings, teacher conferences, and keeping abreast of their children's educational needs. The lack of parental involvement is one of the big, flashing warning signs that a public school is going downhill. And no matter how hard you try, you can't blame that problem on unions or solve it with vouchers.
Yes, yes, I know you HATE oversight but I must say, every time we DON’T have government oversight things seem to go all FUBAR.
Kate: With respect, this is a bit silly. Things don't "go all FUBAR" when it comes to, say, portable federal post-secondary education dollars that are spent by student loan recipients going to college. We The People, acting through our representatives, have come up with regulations we deem necessary to insure that such money is not wasted. Why wouldn't we be able to do the same when the benefit recipients are 15 instead of 22, and why couldn't such regulations work? And who, exactly, is claiming that a voucher system -- which, after all, uses taxpayer money -- would not involve "oversight?"
The fact is, there are no arguments against making public K-12 dollars portable that are grounded in technical feasibility. There are simply too many examples of various government programs where the benefits are portable, and where non-governmental actors supply the good or service. In fact, that's the way nearly all government benefits programs are structured. The arguments against making education dollars portable are entirely grounded in politics, not technical feasibility.
Ezra wrote a post criticizing my position on vouchers because there are, you know, really serious experts who care about education, and have all these awesome plans...
Disdain for area expertise is unappealing. No one expects a generalist blogger to know more about education than people who study it for a living, but it is reasonable to expect that you read what they write, take it into account, and respect it. What you've written here is just denunciation of pointy-headed intellectuals.
I'd argue that first, all those plans suffer the fatal flaw of having to assume away all the poisonous interactions between the various constituents that have so far doomed school reform; second, they suffer the fatal flaw that the educational experts never fail either, because they just claim their plans weren't tried; and third, that serious planning may not be the right way to go about this. The right way may be to let a lot of people try stuff to see what works . . .
"A lot of people" have "tried stuff to see what works." Your arguments on this issue should be based on the evidence of all that experience. They should not be based on the rigid application of a simplistic ideological principle to an area which you don't know very much about. That is precisely the kind of thinking that leads to collectivization of agriculture and similar disasters. The hazy conviction that one need only apply market principles and "a thousand flowers will bloom" has Maoist overtones for a reason.
That's compairing apples and oranges Jasper.
1) It is not mandated that people go to college. Therefore you have a very different market share of who is going to college vs. elementary and secondary schools.
2) There are various state and federal regulations which all accredited post secondary education facilities have to abide by, especially if they want to be able to receive federal dollars.
3) Much of the federal dollars we're talking about are Student loans as opposed to, say, pell grants. Student loans are not the government's money, it's really the students. Big difference.
Kate:
It is not mandated that people go to college. Therefore you have a very different market share of who is going to college vs. elementary and secondary schools.
And your evidence that "mandated" services are non-amenable to governmental oversight is?
There are various state and federal regulations which all accredited post secondary education facilities have to abide by, especially if they want to be able to receive federal dollars.
And your evidence that no such regulations exist for K-12 schools, and that addititional regulations couldn't be formulated is?
Much of the federal dollars we're talking about are Student loans as opposed to, say, pell grants. Student loans are not the government's money, it's really the students. Big difference.
Grants are indeed "government money." Federally-subsidized loans are indeed subsidized by "government money." Government money, is, um, government money. No difference. It all comes from taxpayer, and, as such, is subject to whatever regulations We The People feel like imposing.
Like I said, objections to injecting competition into public K-12 are entirely political/ideological in nature. They certainly have nothing to do with technical feasibility.
1. Schools are NOT centralized in the US. In fact, the US school system is remarkably decentralized. Even on the state level schools are mostly run by local communities with higher levels of gov't only kicking in some matching funds. Endless claims to the contrary, neither Washington nor state capitals run the schools.
2. Why are schools not failing? I'm quite serious here. On the scale of the entire US, the US population is highly educated and highly productive. Decade after decade of crying over 'failing public school' how can Megan account for the odd fact that our population educated mostly by public schools seems to be doing quite well? Yes I know it's easy to produce various metrics like test scores but no one really goes to school to score well on a test, they go to have a better life. Test scores can only be, at best, a proxy for a good school.
3. Many of the areas where schools are horrible...like DC...the local gov't seems pretty horrible. DC, for example, also has a bad reputation for police, trash pick up and even snow plowing. Is the solution vouchers for all these services to help those 'trapped' residents or is the cause perhaps that these areas are suffering from more general social dysfunctions. Perhaps the better answer would be along the lines of the Earned Income Tax Credit. Working families could use the money for private schools OR they could use the money to escape to a better place with nicer schools and everything else!
4. I've raised this issue several times before so I'll be brief with it now. Schools are provided by taxpayers to kids. Taxpayers, not parents, therefore deserve a say in what they are and what they do. This is almost certainly why vouchers seem to only be supported by people for other people. With all the Red States out there why is it that none of them has ever simply abolished local control of education and introduced a state-wide universal voucher? You're telling me the teacher's union is really all that powerful everywhere?
Maybe the fact is taxpayers want to have schools define their local community. They want, for example, kids off the streets during business hours. They want to have some common beliefs and values indoctrinated. With vouchers you give 100% of the control to parents and 0% to taxpayers BUT the problem is that's fine if parents are footing the bill but vouchers are explicitly about taxpayers footing the bill.
Megan asked why we don't do this with medical care. I would speculate that it is because medical care is a personal benefit with very little social spillover. Yes it's nicer if your neighbor two blocks away is healthy but aside from an outbreak of plague your primary interest in medical care is for you and your immediate family/friends. Perhaps schools are more like local police, parks, and roads. They have a direct benefit for those who use them but they also serve as a benefit to everyone else in town hence everyone else wants a say....they don't want to have to pay taxes so everyone gets a voucher to choose a country club or gym of their choice.
5. Here's a new argument; synergy. Take a peek at this interesting observation from http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/citydesk/index.php/2007/10/18/a-week-of-whuppings/ as quoted by the Economist blog:
Nice post.
Hmm. The central-planning mindset assumes that you already know everything you'll ever need to. So planning is provably idiotic to begin with, and it also appeals particularly strongly to people with a particularly childish kind of arrogance and aversion to reality.
In software development, my field, we learn this lesson regularly: Past a certain fairly low threshold, the more detailed a design is before you start implementing it, the more nearly certain it is to be a) unimplementable, and b) unsuited to its purpose if you ever do manage to get it out the door. Not to mention c) it'll turn out to do something nobody wants anyhow.
Anything really good will have been designed iteratively, starting with something simple and proceeding by experience, and with critical initial assumptions casually discarded at any time.
If you fully understand the problem you're solving before you start coding, you're basically doomed.
Kate:
You write that "many [public schools] have failed". Not in the sense Meg means. By "fail", she means "cease to exist". What she's talking about is the fact that markets tend to divert resources away from entities which produce nothing that anybody wants, or which produce something people do want but at a price nobody's willing to pay.
Boonton: Could you give us a little more detail on that?
The reason why we need vouchers is because parents with kids are forced to pay some of their money for public schools. Thus, if they want to send their kids to private school, they have a reduced ability to do so. Vouchers should be available for AT LEAST the amount of school tax paid by parents who want to send their kids to private school. I pay $2,000 in tax to the local school district. That's $2,000 less that I have to pay tuition at a private school.
I went to private schools when I was a kid. They had minimal government oversight but did a very good job educating me. Kids who failed out of my school went to local public schools and got straight A's without having to work very hard.
My kids are currently going to public schools. We currently have our oldest in a program for gifted kids but we're not overly impressed... last year, she was in a class full of gifted kids. This year, they decided to mix the gifted kids in with the rest of the kids, so the teacher has to juggle multiple levels.
My wife teaches at a public school. She works very hard to make sure her kids get the best education she can give them. She takes it personally when a kid fails. And yet, she is not particularly rewarded for this. When her district gave out merit bonuses, she got a modest one but another teacher who she knows is a dud (she gets kids he taught and they are consistently behind) got a bigger bonus. She taught summer school one year and was told that her kids WOULD pass summer school and be promoted. She was not permitted to fail any of the kids in her class.
I am not for elminating public schools completely. A voucher system would help parents who value education get their kids to a better school. Children of parents who don't care or don't value education aren't going to do well at any school. Leave them in public schools where they can get a minimal education.
I'm not impressed by a lot of the innovation in education. I realize that all the education majors need topics for their papers, but we really need to focus on teaching kids to read, write, and do math. Some basic civics and history would help, too. Public schools try out different methods all the time. Unfortunately, when they try out a method, teachers are required by law to use the methods, in some cases. If a method isn't working, word has to get back up the bureaucracy to effect change. While Texas has many different school districts, many of the education standards are set by the state government.
As far as private v. public, the market does a pretty good job of delivering outstanding computer technology, better and better quality cars, bedding technology (air beds, water beds, high-tech foam beds), tasty beverages, etc... all without government oversight and planning. My grocery store manages to keep the shelves stocked and the checkout lines reasonable without any government planning or support. Why, my own company manages to deliver high-tech oilfield equipment for a profit (equipment that must work properly or customers can lose people and huge amounts of money as well as cause environmental disasters) with very little government support, planning, or oversight. You might be surprised what markets facilitate every day...
EI
Jasper, quickly:
There is a huge difference in how people use a Grant vs. a Loan.
Allow me to give two hypotheticals:
Scenario 1:
Federal Gov't: Jasper, we would like to give you $1,000 for educational purposes. You never have to repay it.
Jasper: Oh Goody! Now I can take that Naked, Underwater, Basket-weaving Yoga class I've always wanted to take. WHEEEEEE!
Scenario 2:
Federal Gov't: Jasper, we would like to give you $1,000 for educational purposes. You will need to replay it over the course of 5 years, at a variable interest rate (currently 4%, but possibly as high as 10%). You can not declare bankcruptsy to get out of it and we will sell your debt to a private group which will hit you with HUGE penalties if you default.
Jasper: Okay, I'm going to take Accounting for Idiots so that I can get a marketable skill and pay back the money the government is lending to me.
See the difference?
Boonton:
Decade after decade of crying over 'failing public school' how can Megan account for the odd fact that our population educated mostly by public schools seems to be doing quite well?
I think the argument here is about whether we're doing our best, not whether the education sector as a whole "is failing." Nobody disputes the fact that the United States remains a very rich, very productive society.
Still, the education sector clearly is failing for a non-trivial segment of the population. I don't think anybody should remain relaxed about, for instance, the deterioration of American social mobility and increasing income and wealth stratification. Although economic liberals like me tend to want more spending on social protections, and a more progressive tax code (I want both these things), I certainly don't kid myself that money alone is the answer. Education clearly is pretty important, and how we spend the money is equally vital. Again, are we getting optimal results? I for one think not. And to my mind, the only huge-in-scale "sea change" likely to yield substantive results is to change to a model where we fund students instead of funding schools. Everything else, it seems to me, is nibbling at the edges.
Markets are lovely things, but businesses in a competitive market succeed or fail by maximizing value for shareholders, not by maximizing value for customers, and certainly not by maximizing value for society as a whole.
Private schools benefit, substantially, from a de facto system of separate-but-unequal segregation. Developmentally disabled children, behavior problems, and school lunch programs can be offloaded onto the public schools who are required by law to accommodate people. Private schools "win" the competition because they play by looser rules... they can select their own customers and reduce their marginal costs by offloading most of the difficult cases onto the government. That's a special sort of "competition" that should be familiar to anyone familiar with the US health insurance industry.
Naturally, in both cases a proponent of markets can look at the results and see the virtues of competition compared to the inefficiencies of government. Viewed from a different angle, though, the competitors are using the government as a crutch and begging for handouts to boot.
And here's where the health care analogy breaks down-- the US doesn't have a National Health Service. Private hospitals are equipped to handle the very worst medical emergencies and chronic health problems you can throw at them. We don't need to build a public hospital system from scratch to make sure everyone has access to health care. We just need to make sure the money gets to the people in need.
But we already have public school systems. Most private schools are not equipped to handle a large influx of disadvantaged students. And though Megan has tried to laugh off this criticism with paeans to the can-do spirit of capitalism, we aren't talking about capitalism. We're talking about contracting public sector work to a group of cash-strapped nonprofits with limited resources who will, in practice, only accommodate a small percentage of public school students. So, in reality, we're talking about preserving a system of segregation, allowing a few extra people to be on the advantaged side, and leaving the disadvantaged side a little bit poorer.
It certainly seems to me that it would be of greater benefit to put public funds toward reforming the public schools from the inside, encouraging more choices for parents and students within the system, and creating a less ghettoized environment for the children who can't exit the system. To the extent that teachers' unions sometimes oppose such reforms, criticism is well justified and political pressure is useful. But there are many private scholarships for poor children to attend private schools, and I think most of the money spent lobbying for vouchers would be better spent on such scholarships.
Boonton,
So the solution for functional residents of disfunctional communities with disfunctional taxpayers and disfunctional schools really is to just move to a functional community with functional taxpayers and functional schools; and, thus, to make your old home in the disfunctional community with the disfunctional taxpayers and the disfunctional schools available to disfunctional parents, so that their disfunctional children will not feel stressed by a requirement to become functional, even if only marginally.
Who knew?
We're talking about contracting public sector work to a group of cash-strapped nonprofits with limited resources who will, in practice, only accommodate a small percentage of public school students.
Complete nonsense. Plenty of private schools have the capacity to increase enrollment. Plenty of public schools have the capacity to increase enrollment. And the country is awash in office space, so there's certainly nothing in the way of substantive barriers that would prevent groups of educators from opening up new schools.
Capacity restraints would be an issue only if we were talking about an increase in the school age population. But that's not what we're talking about. What we are talking about is making that which is not portable portable.
LaFollette,
businesses in a competitive market succeed or fail by maximizing value for shareholders, not by maximizing value for customers,
If your customers can go get a better value elsewhere, many of them will usually do just that, and the shareholders will get screwed. Consider Detroit. If you think there is in principle a conflict between pleasing the customers, and keeping their business, I'm not quite sure what to say.
...and certainly not by maximizing value for society as a whole.
The customers, in the aggregate, are society as a whole. You, in the aggregate, are not. If it's their aggregate opinion versus yours, I'm more comfortable putting my money on them.
Viewed from a different angle, though, the competitors are using the government as a crutch and begging for handouts to boot.
No. If all schools were for profit and were allowed to choose their customers, and nobody could make a profit by attempting to educate morons and headcases, nobody would attempt to educate morons and headcases. If the public school system did not exist, private schools would not be required by some heretofore unsuspected law of physics to step in and try to educate everybody. The public school system is not a feature of the space-time continuum itself.
Personally, I don't mind some of my taxes getting spent trying to help those who appear to be beyond help, but I see no reason to do it at the cost of letting kids with real potential fall between the cracks.
Plenty of private schools have the capacity to increase enrollment.
Plenty don't. And way to miss the point. Capacity to increase enrollment is only part of the challenge. There's also admissions standards, capacity to serve the disabled, ability to provide remedial coursework, ability to provide free lunches and after-school care, busing, and plenty of other practical issues.
"If you think there is in principle a conflict between pleasing the customers, and keeping their business, I'm not quite sure what to say."
It's not a conflict in principle. But it IS a distinction with practical consequences. If you think it benefits consumers for businesses to offshore their customer support to Bangalore in order to buy naming rights at the local football stadium, I'm not quite sure what to say.
"The customers, in the aggregate, are society as a whole."
I must have missed the part where I purchased a fleet of semi trailers, got some pesticides for use on my farm, became a smoker, and sired children who demanded to attend a Hannah Montana concert. If you genuinely believe that the relationship between a government and a taxpayer who doesn't use a public service is the same as the relationship between a business and a person who doesn't buy its product, I'm not quite sure what to say.
"If all schools were for profit and were allowed to choose their customers, and nobody could make a profit by attempting to educate morons and headcases, nobody would attempt to educate morons and headcases."
I hear that in Libertarian Utopia, those "morons and headcases" will also disappear through a crack in the space-time continuum and never hassle you for spare change.
LaFollette Progressive,
In the process of capacity becoming an issue for private schools, sufficient unused public school facilities would become available to meet the need. That unused public school capacity would have the capacity to serve the disabled. Communities would still provide busing for the students of the community; and, could still provide other services. You are looking for excuses to perpetuate a failing system, not solutions to the problem.
Lead, follow, or get out of the way.
Kate says: Scenario 2:
Federal Gov't: Jasper, we would like to give you $1,000 for educational purposes. You will need to replay it over the course of 5 years, at a variable interest rate (currently 4%, but possibly as high as 10%). You can not declare bankcruptsy to get out of it and we will sell your debt to a private group which will hit you with HUGE penalties if you default.
Jasper: Okay, I'm going to take Accounting for Idiots so that I can get a marketable skill and pay back the money the government is lending to me.
See the difference?
In reality it might be:
Jasper: Okay, I'm going to take Gender Studies because someone is willing to fund my degree, and I'll get a job after graduation!
5 years later...
Jasper: I can't pay my student loans, because there is no job market for BGS degrees!
Just because it's a loan, it doesn't magically endow the students wisdom.
RE: "'If you think there is in principle a conflict between pleasing the customers, and keeping their business, I'm not quite sure what to say.'
It's not a conflict in principle. But it IS a distinction with practical consequences. If you think it benefits consumers for businesses to offshore their customer support to Bangalore in order to buy naming rights at the local football stadium, I'm not quite sure what to say. "
It benefits consumers when costs are reduced because you generally get lower consumer prices when consumer costs are lower. Buying the naming rights to the stadium is a separate action from deciding to offshore support, but it can benefit consumers as well. Its a form of promotion, effectively advertising. In this case it doesn't advertise the details of the product (which can more directly benefit consumers), but it builds up a brand name. Why does building up a brand name benefit consumers? Because the brand name is valuable to the company, and if they generally provide horrible products to their consumers they lose the brand name. The consumers can look to a brand they know. If their experiences with it are good than they can with at least a modest amount of reliability (certainly more than picking some company at random) get another good experience from going to the same company. And if they have regularly had really food service from a company than they can save time on calculating who do buy from next time.
Some thoughts:
1. Complex markets fail on a regular basis. Megan can use children as her analogy; I'll use California's attempted deregulation of the electricity market.
2. Markets require information to function. Since a key problem with public schools currently is unengaged parents, how am I as a taxpayer getting any assurance that a significant percentage of students will not be, in fact, worse off?
3. In a time of increasing religious radicalism, I'm uncomfortable with vouchers going to fundamentalist schools. Should taxpayers really have to support schools that teach that violence against nonbelievers is acceptable?
Megan McArdle, your voucher arguments remain extremely unconvincing. You continue to completely ignore the fact that the main difference between "good" and "bad" schools is the quality of the student body. This means the best way for a school to succeed is to carefully choose its students. This is in fact how private colleges compete, they attempt to attract as many smart rich kids as possible. Harvard for example is notoriously bad at actually teaching but succeeds by attracting the top students. I don't see why you think this system should be extended to younger children.
James B. Shearer,
I am quite sympathetic to your view of the major cause of the failure of some public schools- it is my view as well- however, I am a bit puzzled by your response. If the problem with the failing schools is the overabundance of problem students, then should we not attempt to save the non-problem students? Vouchers are not the only possible answer to this problem, but something different than what we are doing now seems to be a moral imperative to me. There are a lot of desperate, poor parents in inner cities that want some other option for their children. What would you propose, if not vouchers and choice to opt out?
Lafollette Progressive,
Any business that does not cater to its customers as it's primary action is a business that is doomed to fail. This is the real feature of a free market- the customer rules.
James,
>If the problem with the failing schools is the overabundance of problem students, then should we not attempt to save the non-problem students?
Private hospitals are equipped to handle the very worst medical emergencies and chronic health problems you can throw at them. We don't need to build a public hospital system from scratch to make sure everyone has access to health care.
It is my experience that emergency rooms tend to be part of the public sector for the obvious reason: they are very big money losers. The Parklands and the Ben Taubs are the facilities truly able to handle anything.
My background is public sector health care finance, eg. Medicaid and local programs. I have worked in both the public and private sector. This is an area that has been rife with privatization efforts for a long time.
The Texas Department of Human Services maintained a very large development stuff (including me) until the '90s when it took steps to contract as much of the work out as possible. In the mid-90's I participated on a privatization proposal for the Texas human services system that was ultimately scuttled my the Clinton administration. The team I participated on included the finest technology company on the planet. Their staff told me that privatizing the TDHS facilities managment was going to cost pretty much double with little, if any, improvement in quality. It can be tough to swallow sometimes, but the best bang for the buck is always a well run public sector organization. The trick is getting that to happen, but it does happen.
FWIW, the Texas system automation redesign was farmed out in 2001 (TIERS) and remains implenmented in only 3 counties of the 254. The system was privatized in 2004 with a significant effort applied to creating call centers and fixing the software. This project was dissolved last year. I understand portions of the automation will be re-bid this next year. Privatization is not a guarantee of success. Being public sector is not necessarily an indicator of inefficiency or a lack of innovation.
One thing that strikes me about the arguments I've been having with voucher opponents is just how little they seem to understand how markets work.
Another thing that strikes me is how little knowledge anyone shows about the scholarly literature on vouchers. It's not that they disagree with the studies supporting vouchers; it's that they don't even seem to be aware that such studies exist.
"Your arguments on this issue should be based on the evidence of all that experience. They should not be based on the rigid application of a simplistic ideological principle to an area which you don't know very much about. That is precisely the kind of thinking that leads to collectivization of agriculture and similar disasters. The hazy conviction that one need only apply market principles and "a thousand flowers will bloom" has Maoist overtones for a reason."
Yes, but she's giving an actual mechanism by which a thousand flowers shall bloom, not just taking it on faith. That markets generally do a good job has been shown by experience, that experience being that for the vast majority of U.S. history, government has not directly run businesses (preferring light and judicious regulation), with happy results all around. Her post is just giving one reason why governments don't run things generally.
Look at this another way: Nobody knows whether a new innovation will work. Actually, much of the time, only its initial creators and, perhaps, a few other adventurous folks think it will. This is for good reason; for every Edison out there, there are hundreds of crackpots inventing perpetual motion devices and non-functional aphrodisiacs. Private industry tends to be good at ferreting out good innovations because it allows those adventurous folks to try out the new ideas at their own expense. If the idea works, then other, less-adventurous individuals start using it. If it doesn't, it falls into the trash heap of civilization, ne'er to be seen again. And though the adventurous ones lost their money, it was theirs to lose, and they knew the risks.
The problem with government running an industry is that it leaves no method for the adventurous folks to band together and try things out; the only new ideas that are tried are the ones that at least a majority (since we're a democracy) think will work. And there are precious few new ideas that are obviously correct, even to experts, which means that a government-run industy will be generally lacking in innovation, except for noncontroversial tweaks here and there. This is why I think far-reaching change is impossible without such a voucher program. (Of course, private schools try new things now; but introducing an idea into a new environment always carries some amount of risk, so my point still applies as to why public schools tend not to change. Plus, as noted, current private schools serve a very different portion of the population than public ones).
By the way, I don't think Megan's disrespecting the experts when she mocks central planning-- she's just saying that they, too, inevitably make mistakes, and a private system is the best way to correct those mistakes.
LaFollette Progressive writes:
"Developmentally disabled children, behavior problems, and school lunch programs can be offloaded onto the public schools who are required by law to accommodate people. Private schools 'win' the competition because they play by looser rules... they can select their own customers and reduce their marginal costs by offloading most of the difficult cases onto the government."
The part about developmentally disabled children is almost precisely backwards. Here's an interesting quotation:
"As of 2005, more than 88,000 disabled students nationwide were educated in private settings at taxpayer expense, an increase of 34 percent over a decade, according to the National School Boards Association.
"Often school districts acknowledge that they cannot provide an adequate education, and willingly pay for private tuition."
(Often, but not always: sometimes the parents have to sue.)
In other words, severely learning-disabled students are already eligible for vouchers in most states, because the private schools can and do handle cases the public schools can't or won't.
Kevin,
Very true. That is what Law School is for.
I'm OK with voucher-based approaches, but I don't think you're going to get the diversity of approaches that Megan's implying in this post. There's only so much innovation that can occur when you have a fixed pool of textbooks, a limited set of curriculum designs, and a whole bunch of teachers that have all been trained the same way.
If you want a truly diverse set of solutions, so that you get a meaningful pool of successful programs and ones that fail, you're going to have to change more than the administrative framework around the various schools. And that's all that vouchers are going to do.
LaFollette Progressive:
Capacity to increase enrollment is only part of the challenge. There's also admissions standards...
What about admission standards?
...capacity to serve the disabled...
Again, what about this? Allowing portability in educational funding in general certainly doesn't mean the state wouldn't be required to insure access for all children -- no matter their particular circumstances. Surely the law requires this. Just how would allowing public funds to follow students -- instead of requiring the opposite as we do now -- render the public sector incapable of looking out for the needs of disabled children? I see no connection whatsoever.
...ability to provide remedial coursework
Ditto my last response. Must a school be operated by the government, and must a student be assigned to a school (rather than choose it himself) in order for "remedial coursework" to be provided? You're really grasping here.
...ability to provide free lunches...
Um, give them lunch money.
...and after-school care, busing, and plenty of other practical issues.
Certainly "after school care" and buses and "plenty of other practical issues" can be provided for whether or not the schools in question are owned and operated by the government, and whether or not the students attending said schools had a say in whether or not to be there.
As I've stated before, objections to injecting competition into public K-12 are entirely political or ideological in nature. They certainly have nothing to do with technical feasibility or efficaciousness.
Yancey Ward, I don't think society is losing much by failing to give the small number of average students attending bad schools a better education. So I don't see the point of expending a lot of effort trying to improve their education, there are many things which would have a better cost benefit ratio. Also I suspect the concern of many voucher advocates for these children is insincere, they are just a convenient club to beat the teachers union with.
A partial reply to Francis:
1. Complex markets fail on a regular basis. Megan can use children as her analogy; I'll use California's attempted deregulation of the electricity market.
It has been quite some time since I have seen this anti-market myth pop up. No one who is familiar with the details of California's reregulation of the electricity market would confuse it with deregulation. Yes, some aspects of the market were deregulated, but other aspects of the market were still heavily regulated. Blaming it on "deregulation" was just the legislators and regulators trying to cover their asses (they tend to get much more free press than private companies, making it easier to spin things) - years of poor government management had the electricity industry in CA headed for disaster for a long time.
Since a key problem with public schools currently is unengaged parents, how am I as a taxpayer getting any assurance that a significant percentage of students will not be, in fact, worse off?
The number one, biggest problem with public administration of schooling is the incentive structure - revenue doesn't come from the customer (students and parents), so rather than respond to the wants and needs of the customer, it responds to the wants of the most organized interest group - the teacher's unions. Other problems, such as unengaged parents, are massively exacerbated by this incentive problem.
Indeed the problem of unengaged parents is due, no doubt in some part at least, to the current system. The costs of influencing the outcome for their children are high, either move to a better district, or spend all your time raising hell trying to change a huge entrenched system (and likely having little impact). With vouchers, it is quite clearly impressed upon parents that they have the responsibility that goes with choice; and more importantly, since they have power over the money, any degree to which they become engaged will have a stronger impact.
So basically by lowering the cost of engagement (though the power of relatively lower cost choice) and increasing the returns to engagement (through the school's incentive to appeal to the customer), vouchers would tend to increase the amount of engagement we would see.
The RadicalModerate:
I'm OK with voucher-based approaches, but I don't think you're going to get the diversity of approaches that Megan's implying in this post. There's only so much innovation that can occur when you have a fixed pool of textbooks...
The "pool of textbooks" isn't fixed. New texts are authored frequently.
...a limited set of curriculum designs...
The set you refer to is only limited by imagination and effort. Even if this were a major issue, what's your evidence that the status quo model (no choice, government monopoly) would produce more or better curriculum designs than a system characterized by choice and competition? Surely the latter would be better at innovation in general.
...and a whole bunch of teachers that have all been trained the same way...
All the more reason to allow new service providers to enter the market and invigorate it with innovative ideas, different approaches, and new blood.
I sympathize with the point I think you're trying to make. One constantly hears about various new concepts and strategies for educating children that show promise. But they never seem to be adopted on a wide-scale basis. The challenge seems to be in forcing the schools to try them out, and to innovate. But how do we go about doing this? It seems to me our failure lies in the lack of leverage. There is simply no lever that insures new ideas and different approaches are tried out in a constant attempt to improve quality, because the consequences for failure are minimal. Providers of public education must be made to face the possibility -- just like a lawyer or a doctor or a software company or a private high school -- that they can fail -- that they can go out of business -- by losing their customers.
The education of our children is too important a task not to be given the benefits that accompany competition.
James B. Shearer:
Yancey Ward, I don't think society is losing much by failing to give the small number of average students attending bad schools a better education.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is about all you need to know with respect to the rationale supporting the status quo.
A response to the RadicalModerate
I don't think you're going to get the diversity of approaches that Megan's implying in this post. There's only so much innovation that can occur when you have a fixed pool of textbooks, a limited set of curriculum designs, and a whole bunch of teachers that have all been trained the same way.
If you want a truly diverse set of solutions, so that you get a meaningful pool of successful programs and ones that fail, you're going to have to change more than the administrative framework around the various schools. And that's all that vouchers are going to do.
While I agree that things wouldn't be radically different anytime soon, I'm sure that many things would improve down the line. I suspect that parents' general bias towards the status quo would encourage a large degree of conservatism, so I agree that we probably wouldn't see large initial variation. Likely, innovation would occur with schools trying new things one class at a time, instead of overhauling the entire education process.
But I do think there would be much more vigorous market for textbooks, curricula, and teaching methods - right now there is just little incentive to innovate.
Under a private system, the market for measurement and evaluation would flourish to meet the demands of now empowered parents. Just as the current market-based evaluation services (such as the SAT, GRE, LSAT etc...) are much more effective than the public school measures (GPA being practically useless), I imagine that the even more effective measurement and evaluation services that spring up in a market system would further drive innovation in the areas mentioned, that innovation being easier to measure.
James,
Well, at least you can be commended for giving an honest answer to my question, even if it leaves me nearly speechless.
Maybe liberals would like vouchers better if they were pitched as "single-payer education"?
I support vouchers. One thing, however, that seems to be left out of the educational reform debate is the role that parents and families play in the education of children.
In my own family's experience, we had lived in a low-performing district for about 8 years and now live in a high-performing "elite" district for about 5 years.
I have observed that many children in the low-performing district were able to obtain excellent educations and scored in the highest percentiles on standardized tests even as the majority of their classmates failed.
I have also observed many children in the "elite" district do not receive a good education despite tremendous resources directed their way.
The common thread that allows some students to do well in poor districts and other students to do poorly in elite districts is parents. Do parents value education? Do they work with their children to make certain that homework is completed and understood? Do they communicate with teachers and work cooperatively with them?
I would note that the poor performing district that my children attended actually spent more per student than the "elite" district that they now attend.
I doubt that any educational reform will truly succeed in providing a superior education for children who come from families that do not place a high value on education.
I don't think society is losing much by failing to give the small number of average students attending bad schools a better education. So I don't see the point of expending a lot of effort trying to improve their education, there are many things which would have a better cost benefit ratio.
An unasked question behind this debate is, "is it worth spending additional effort to improve the American educational system, and if so, how much?" If you believe, as Mr. Shearer does, that schools are fine as they are, then this whole debate is going to seem pretty silly. But I would assume that he thinks that any other solution, such as increasing school funding, is similarly unnecessary.
If you believe the educational system is not performing as it should, and that it's worth the effort to fix the system, what is the definition of a working system? Is it one in which individual outcomes are maximized, or one in which group outcomes are maximized?
Also I suspect the concern of many voucher advocates for these children is insincere, they are just a convenient club to beat the teachers union with.
Another thing that strikes me about voucher opponents is how often they resort to unsubstantiated ad hominem arguments.
Clint Bolick is one of the longest-running advocates of vouchers; he has litigated many voucher cases, and was head of the Alliance for School Choice. Several years ago, I saw him speak briefly at a private gathering of libertarians. There were no outsiders around, no cameras, etc., and there was no reason for Bolick to be putting on an act. If there was ever an occasion where he could have let down a facade and said, "Hey, we're really sticking it to those unions!," that would have been it. Instead, he spoke of the joy he felt in talking to inner-city poor black families that felt like they finally had a chance to put their kid in a decent school. As Bolick spoke, he visibly teared up.
I don't think there's any good faith basis for suggesting that Bolick's concern for inner-city kids is an act, meant to cover up irrational hatred of unions. To the contrary, if Bolick has resentment towards inner-city teachers' unions, it is caused by his heartfelt and sincere concern (however misguided you might think that concern is) for the inner-city parents and kids themselves.
The same is true for most voucher advocates. I suggest dropping the ad hominems.
Another thing that strikes me about voucher opponents is how often they resort to unsubstantiated ad hominem arguments.
And mind reading.
See, what I don't get is, I say "I don't believe it's practically possible for all of these of new private schools that will replace public schools to be profitable." And my opponents say "Ah, but they will be shielded from those problems by the vouchers."
But you can't have it both ways. You can't say that the free market is going to fix education (and, again, the mechanism through which this is going to happen eludes me), but at the same time say that the schools won't fail and close because they'll be shielded by government intervention.
Another thing that strikes me about voucher opponents is how often they resort to unsubstantiated ad hominem arguments.
But this, of course, is also a fallacy, as you are making a genetic argument.
Freddie -- it's rather obviously not a genetic fallacy to point out that someone is making an ad hominem argument. Where did you get that idea?
Look.
One of the more schizophrenic aspects of the pro-voucher argument is that it suggest that public schools fail because there is no accountability for public school teachers due to the power of the teacher's unions. And yet at the same time, we are to believe that one of the fundamental advantages of the private model is that it is free of the red tape and bureaucracy that choke innovation and prevent change. I don't understand how there is at once too much accountability and not enough in public schools.
Writ large, that question of accountability is one of the fundamental issues I have with enacting vouchers as public policy. There is far too much uncertainty and ambiguity within the concepts behind private school academic advantage, and far too little oversight and actual accountability built into the system.
I've talked at length here before about the degree to which selection error distorts our concepts of public vs. private achievement. I don't want to bore you, so I'll just say that the massive differences in the populations of private and public schools make a meaningful comparison between their performance nearly impossible.
Additionally, I remain fundamentally confused about how, precisely, the change to publicly funded, privately run schools is supposed to fix education. There have been dozens of posts, here and elsewhere, and hundreds and hundreds of comments, and yet I still have not heard a cogent explanation of what process or mechanism voucher proponents think are going to cause this change. Not vague talk about statism and bureaucracy, not vague notions about free market superiority, not platitudes about any change being good change. I'm talking about real, defined methodologies that would improve education for impoverished inner city children. I'm talking about concrete quantifiable, verifiable improvements that can be assessed empirically.
That is another concern. The very thing that is supposedly the great advantage of private schools, the lack of government oversight and red tape, is precisely the mechanism we would use to verify if this new voucher system was actually working. It's become clear to me that most of the people around here advocating vouchers have never actually worked in private schools. The kind of accountability that people talk about when they support No Child Left Behind-- many of them the same people who advocate waivers-- is notably absent. That's the point. The supposed advantage is the lack of oversight. You're advocating that we make a massive change in our educational policy and yet denying us the tools to assess the efficacy of that change.
Into this stew of selection error, massive unsupportable assumptions, vague mechanisms and lack of oversight, then, we are asked to devote massive public resources and the education of our children. Well, I'm sorry. But sanctimonious pieties and vague generalizations are not sound bases for public policy. You have to do better than "any change is good change."
I find this funny:
You simply have to find other, less ideological people who are willing to try it and then prove that it works in practice. This still won't convince the dedicated naysayers, but they'll eventually die off without winning new converts if your idea develops a proven track record.
How, precisely, are you going to "prove that it works in practice"? Private schools have developed an entire educational culture around denying parents the ability to do that. Voucher proponents advocate a system but can tell specifically how it is going to work, and built into the system is the denial of independent methods of verifying that it works. Thanks. But no thanks.
Freddie -- it's rather obviously not a genetic fallacy to point out that someone is making an ad hominem argument. Where did you get that idea?
It is a genetic fallacy, if you are saying that the argument endorsed by a person who makes ad hominems is illegitimate because he makes ad hominems. His argument can stand or fall on its own merits. It seemed to me that you were saying "Voucher opponents seem to make a lot of ad hominems, therefore their arguments against vouchers must be illegitimate." If that's not what you were saying, I apologize.
Also, you know, there's the fact that MegArdle did nothing but call people hypocrites for like a week straight. And charges of hypocrisy, even when accurate, are not logically compelling.
Frances:
"1. Complex markets fail on a regular basis. Megan can use children as her analogy; I'll use California's attempted deregulation of the electricity market."
That was not deregulation; it was one of the most idiotic attempts to micro-manage a complex market by the state that one could imagine. Forbidding distributors to also be generators; Tightly regulating retail prices, while letting costs of generation float, and finally, and most idiotically, putting a state run market in the middle of the process and forbidding distributors from using their purchasing power to negotiate long-term contracts. Truly a scheme to make a bureaucrat's heart beat faster.
"2. Markets require information to function. Since a key problem with public schools currently is unengaged parents, how am I as a taxpayer getting any assurance that a significant percentage of students will not be, in fact, worse off?"
I fail to see the mechanism here. Unengaged parents will still be unengaged. But those who are engaged will have the means to do something.
"3. In a time of increasing religious radicalism, I'm uncomfortable with vouchers going to fundamentalist schools. Should taxpayers really have to support schools that teach that violence against nonbelievers is acceptable?"
This is a pretty poor straw man. Taxpayers are today supporting schools that teach a number of things that are offensive to me, and worse, fail to teach many essential things, such as history, science (as opposed to the sappy psuedo-enviromentalism that passes for science in all too many public schools).
Yes, vouchers will help fund some schools that are poor, and some whose teachings I would abhor. But the present system is a failure. The time to try something new is long overdue. Just continuing to pour more and more money into a failed system is not progress.
One of the more schizophrenic aspects of the pro-voucher argument is that it suggest that public schools fail because there is no accountability for public school teachers due to the power of the teacher's unions. And yet at the same time, we are to believe that one of the fundamental advantages of the private model is that it is free of the red tape and bureaucracy that choke innovation and prevent change. I don't understand how there is at once too much accountability and not enough in public schools.
Why are you equating "red tape" and "accountability"? No voucher proponent says that there is "too much accountability" in public schools, not in the sense that you are claiming here.
Here's how the argument would run:
Teachers' union contracts are often so loaded up with red tape that the public schools miss out on hiring good teachers (see, e.g., http://www.tntp.org/ourresearch/documents/TNTPAnalysis-Chicago.pdf ). Alternatively, union contracts sometimes have provisions that keep principals from retaining good teachers or that make it nearly impossible to fire a bad teacher. See, e.g., http://www.manhattan-institute.org/pdf/cr_06.pdf Indeed, to the extent that this occurs, red tape is displacing accountability on the teachers' part. If private schools are able to avoid this red tape, they will be better able to hold teachers accountable for their performance and to hire and maintain a good teaching staff.
Now, I'm not saying that I agree or disagree with that argument; I don't know enough about that particular area of the literature (to be sure, no one else that has commented here or on other blogs shows any sign of such knowledge either). Nonetheless, that's what the argument is, and it's simply wrong to suggest that voucher proponents are accusing public schools of having too much "accountability."
By the way, does the "Remember personal info?" box ever work for anyone else?
Freddie:
Apology accepted. I wasn't saying that voucher opponents are wrong because they make ad hominems. I think they're wrong for other reasons. I was just commenting on the fact that they often seem to use ad hominems that are not only logically invalid, but are factually incorrect as well.Vouchers are a payment mechanism. They are not a solution to inadequate educational system, per se. They do not guarantee innovation. They do not guarantee success of any sort. Innovation is not exclusive to private enterprise. And the costs of failure almost always falls on the taxpayer, not the private enterprise. Legal representation, campaign contributions and lobbyists are without a doubt areas where the capabilities of private enterprise far exceed those of the public sector. These insulate the private vendor from the true consequences of failure.
Big corporations are not particularly adventurous. They do not have to be. They do very little speculative development on their own nickel. They are perfectly happy to speculate on someone else' nickel. For example, large software firms do not undertake the speculative development of a state human service system. What actually happens is a state puts out an RFI, listens to a bunch of speculation, then puts out an RFP that targets their favorite. If the end result is successful (and often even if not)the vendor will get to do it again. Succeed or fail the vendor typically gets paid. That is the sad fact of very large projects.
Ask anyone associated with Deloitte, IBM, Accenture: is it worth your corporate R&D cash to speculate on developing an inner city school system for 6k per pupil per year and play by the same rules as the public system? They will laugh at you.
What you do get is a large number of small players who might be sincere or have another agenda. Other agendas might include getting their homeschooling or their religious education subsidized. Or it might be a financial scam. Even if sincere, the financial and programmatic aspects are daunting. A large public school system is a complex and challenging enterprise and I seriously question the competence (and/or sincerity) of many of the players in this arena.
And it is my experience that the price of failure will largely fall on the public's wallet, not that of the educational vendor.
I am all for experimentation. I actually have no problem with including vouchers in that experimentation. Superficially, the role of vouchers in this process seems to be to compel the public system into changing by applying financial pressure by siphoning off dollars and giving it to the competition. If the original problem is lack of funding in the public school system this will make it worse.
PaulD,
For the most part, I agree. Voucher proponents often obscure a hard truth: no amount of money or effort, in our society, is going to educate a child from a family that simply does not value education or discipline.
The reason that inner city schools fail is that they don't have the critical mass of engaged students/parents that is required to run a successful school- this is the prime reason that suburban schools are largely successful (though, not as good as they could be) in comparison to the schools in the urban environment. The question is, how do you create the requisite critical mass of good students? There are two approaches, either of which I would be willing to support: (1) give vouchers to the parents, and allow them to use the vouchers at any school they wish, while, at the same time, leaving these schools free to admit or reject any student they wish; (2) allow public schools to bar problem students, or to segregate them in special schools away from the good students. I think solution (1) is the more likely to work and be politically pragmatic.
I consider it immoral to allow the status quo of today for some of the inner city schools- you are condemning some students and their families to the educational lowest common denominator.
I've been following the continuing argument for, what, weeks now..? I'm still not convinced by either position, but the arguments to try vouchers in a case like DC, specifically, seems strong simply because we need to try something new, even if that 'something new' only spurs the public school system to do better.
What I still don't understand is the argument that we don't need to worry because our educational establishment is fine (which I find highly dubious). Hmmm. Even if that were true, does that guarantee success tomorrow? Should we be satisfied with the status quo while the rest of the world continues to improve?
I find my son's current school district to be outstanding, but it's filled with high-earning and caring parents in a village with a lot of high dollar homes and a great tax base. It's the reason I live here.
On the other hand, I went to terrible public schools where the parents cared little and despite graduating #5 in my class and taking every advanced course offered, I struggled in the first year of a mediocre public university. The school system had no lack of resources, but it lacked any sense of innovation or forward-thinking.
Yes, the public school can do well, but when they don't we should focus our ability to innovate and set the bar for the rest of the world. What's wrong with a desire to be the best? I've read the arguments about how some children will just never be good students. Fine, then how about a public school (or a private school with voucher-wielding students) that teaches them a vocational skill leading to something other than Mickey Ds? Should we take a look at European school systems that help students prepare for life outside of school that sometimes doesn't include a university education?
I'm willing to admit that vouchers are no panacea, but I'm not willing to admit that the current system is the best we can do.
Megan's paean to the private enterprise system isn't meant to deify capitalism, but it is absolutely targeted at those who would restrain innovation simply because it isn't government-run.
What I still don't understand is the argument that we don't need to worry because our educational establishment is fine (which I find highly dubious). Hmmm. Even if that were true, does that guarantee success tomorrow? Should we be satisfied with the status quo while the rest of the world continues to improve?
It's so dubious, in fact, that no one is making it. At all. Please take your straw man and play somewhere else.
Freddie - Time will tell whether you're right, but I'm not putting my money on the status quo..see: "globalization".
So, what's the deal? Why are you so invested in the status quo?
Freddie,
There were two commenters above who basically argued that the system as is is OK. That is certainly greater than no one. Many others basically argue that the structure of the system is basically OK, but just needs more money. So, there are a lot of people who argue against structural change- to point this out is not a strawman argument.
Michael W. wrote:
"I've been following the continuing argument for, what, weeks now..? I'm still not convinced by either position, but the arguments to try vouchers in a case like DC, specifically, seems strong simply because we need to try something new, even if that 'something new' only spurs the public school system to do better.
What I still don't understand is the argument that we don't need to worry because our educational establishment is fine (which I find highly dubious). Hmmm. Even if that were true, does that guarantee success tomorrow? Should we be satisfied with the status quo while the rest of the world continues to improve?"
To which Freddie replied: "It's so dubious, in fact, that no one is making it. At all. Please take your straw man and play somewhere else."
Very interesting. Especially since Freddie was writing this about ten days ago:
"160 posts, and yet no evidence contained within to prove the claim that this whole venture is founded on-- the notion that American public school is failing. McArdle provides no evidence to prove that; no one ever does, beyond "everyone knows...." Everyone is wrong. Here is the truth: American public education is not in crisis. If you adjust for the fact that the vast majority of the industrialized world does not include special ed students with regular ed students, like the US does, the United States has decidedly average public education. I'm going to say that again: the United States has an average public education system. It is not in crisis. It is not collapsing. It is not falling apart. And among the hundreds of people posting here, no one has seriously tried to prove they are. Which is a failing of intellectual maturity of a pretty amazing order."
Posted by Freddie | October 25, 2007 12:15 PM
Speaking of a failing of intellectual maturity of a pretty amazing order Freddie, why don't you take your smugness and dishonesty and go play somewhere else.
No. If this is the way you want to go, you get what the marginal cost is to educate your child in the classroom. You get $500.
I might also point out that since the public schools are almost entirely funded locally by property taxes, people who don't pay property taxes are getting free public schooling. No money for them. If that's the way you want to play it.
Two more points: I still have not seen any evidence presented by the pro-voucher people that show that private schools are better because they are private. Over on Matt's blog, someone who hadn't been clued in said that private schools are better because they get to choose who to enroll, and if there are any discipline problems the offender can be kicked out forthwith. More generally, no one, absolutely no one, has shown what these better teaching methods are that only private schools can employ. We get the usual PowerPoint buzz about 'innovation', but no hard facts on what those innovations actually are.
Look, I've taught at both public and private schools(math), and what we did in either environment was pretty much the same: "Class, today we are going to talk about factoring polynomials, section 5.8 in your book. The first thing you need to do is count the terms. If you have only one, you are done. If you have more than one, _always_ find the GCF and factor it out first . . ."
Anyone of you good pro-voucher people care to point out how, exactly, the private schools do it differently, and better?
Finally, there has still been no evidence presented that private school outcomes are superior to public schools. Last week I tried to post the exact data, but they got bounced back to Megan who didn't see fit to post any of it. The short story is that the outcomes differ by less than five percent upon leaving the K-12 system. And that is the raw data. That is, this is before there was any controlling for differences in the composition of the student body, ie, cherrypicking.
Yes, spare me, it is no doubt true that some schools and some school systems are dysfunctional. But we already know why, and vouchers aren't going to help the general student in those situations. This is by no means an indictment of the entire public school system.
But this is a multiply flawed way to look at education. (1) What about the kid who, by attending the school, causes the principal to decide to hire an extra teacher for $50,000? Pretty hefty marginal cost there. (2) I've never heard of anyone who thinks that the cost of education should be measured only by marginal cost. The buildings, administrators, teachers, janitors, etc. -- whether in a public or private school -- all have to be paid for, and that money has to come from somewhere. If society makes a commitment to help poor people pay for their kids' education, there's no reason to exclude those fixed costs.
That's not true. I don't want to include too many links here (because posts with too many links often take too much time to show up or may not show up at all, because of the spam filter). Nonetheless, you should check out:(1) Derek Neal, "The Effect of Catholic Secondary Schooling on Educational Attainment."
(2) Derek Neal and Jeffrey Grogger, "Further Evidence on the Effects of Catholic Secondary Schooling." (Finding: "Results from the National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS) data for 1988–94 are in large measure consistent with results presented in previous studies that employed the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), 1979, and the High School and Beyond (HSB) Survey of the sophomore class of 1980. The data imply that urban students generally, and urban minorities in particular, enjoy attainment gains from Catholic schooling.").
(3) James S. Coleman and Thomas Hoffer, "Public and Private High Schools: The Impact of Communities" (a book).
Again, as with the previous thread, I do not have either the time or the obligation to type out by hand all of their findings. Suffice it to say that they find achievement gains from Catholic schools, especially for minority students. Please take the time to use Google or even go to a library if you'd like to explore this issue further.
To be sure, their findings are not the last word. There are other studies (none of which you have cited, of course) that challenge or try to explain away their results. Still, it's simply not true to say, as you do, that there has been "no evidence" presented. (The Derek Neal papers were linked in a post on my blog, which in turn was linked in my comment at 10:27 p.m. on Nov. 2; check out that blog post for much more evidence on vouchers.)
Scent of Violets,
Even if you rent, you pay property tax to a large extent. From where do you think landlords get the money to pay the tax?
And even if private schools performed no better academically, the fact that most of them perform the job more cheaply is all that is required to outperform public schools. For the most part, they enjoy greatly lowered costs in management and overhead as compared to public education departments.
Sigh. Stuart, I've seen your reasoning skills on display elsewhere. Are you now telling me you also don't know what marginal cost is?
Oh, I'll happily admit that in most locations it's not as low as $500. But $2,000? Let's see those numbers showing that the marginal cost is $2,000. And no, dividing what is spent in a school disrict by the number of students is not marginal cost, and no, anyone who wants to use this type of accounting is not serious, and deserves to be bounced, hard . . . by the libertarian set.
Yancey, you don't get to define away the notion of 'propery tax'. Landlords pay property tax. Leasors do not. Nor have you provided any figures at all to show that the marginal cost of educating a child in a private setting is lower than the marginal cost of educating a child in a public one.
In case anyone doesn't get it yet, I am, to put it politely, somewhat steamed at these dishonest accounting practices.
One more time: what the cost to the parent is of educating their child in a private school is an apples-and-oranges comparison to what is spent per child in a public school.
This isn't a hard concept. Anyone who doesn't get it at this point - to pull a Megan McCardle (tip o the hat) - really shouldn't be making comments be making comments on the subject.
Funny. I've looked at those, and they come to completely the opposite conclusions to what you say they do. But since I have neither the time nor the obligation to type out all of their findings, you'll simply have to take my word for it.
And another observation about poor reasoning skills. Let's assume that these Catholic schools do produce the outcomes, that despite what your own sources say, there is something to this.
Stuart, Catholic schools are not private schools. That is - wait for it - cherry picking. You know, I don't think you need more than basic reading comprehension skills to get the idea when someone says 'private schools' they don't mean 'just some private schools'.
Scentofviolets,
Then you don't get to claim that people who pay no direct property tax get a "free education". The burden of the property tax is certainly a factor in the cost of rent, don't you think?
And if the marginal cost for private education were really higher than public, then why does the public system cost more per student? Why don't economies of scale work for the much larger public system?
One of Derek Neal's papers is here: http://muse.jhu.edu/demo/brookings-wharton_papers_on_urban_affairs/v2000/2000.1grogger.pdf
Another relevant paper by David Figlio and Joe Stone is here: http://www.irp.wisc.edu/publications/dps/pdfs/dp114197.pdf
They find that while religious private schools are not superior for everyone, they are superior in certain areas:
What she's talking about is the fact that markets tend to divert resources away from entities which produce nothing that anybody wants, or which produce something people do want but at a price nobody's willing to pay.
Boonton: Could you give us a little more detail on that?
This is all very true. But markets are driven by people's own money. Just imagine, if my godson was given the Fed. Gov't's tax revenue the explosion in Xbox and PS2 games the market would create!
The reason why we need vouchers is because parents with kids are forced to pay some of their money for public schools. Thus, if they want to send their kids to private school, they have a reduced ability to do so. Vouchers should be available for AT LEAST the amount of school tax paid by parents who want to send their kids to private school. I pay $2,000 in tax to the local school district. That's $2,000 less that I have to pay tuition at a private school.
Yes, parents who have kids are forced to buy food for them too. This might carry some weight if schools were funded by a 'kid tax' but they aren't. Why does the parent get a $2K tax break because they want to buy private schooling but the guy who decides not to have a kid gets to pay $2K?
Still, the education sector clearly is failing for a non-trivial segment of the population. I don't think anybody should remain relaxed about, for instance, the deterioration of American social mobility and increasing income and wealth stratification.
True but that implies a limited solution now doesn't it? Does unemployment mean we should ditch capitalism for socialism????
So the solution for functional residents of disfunctional communities with disfunctional taxpayers and disfunctional schools really is to just move to a functional community with functional taxpayers and functional schools; .
Yes. Assuming you're a functional person how eager are you to set up shop in a dysfunctional community? Why should functional people in dysfunctional communities not seek to move into nicer places? What do you think we all are? Serfs tied to the land?
I've been following the continuing argument for, what, weeks now..? I'm still not convinced by either position, but the arguments to try vouchers in a case like DC, specifically, seems strong simply because we need to try something new, even if that 'something new' only spurs the public school system to do better.
From the article I've quoted it sounds like the DC system has something like vouchers going where parents can choose which public school they want to use. Sure it would be better if the money directly followed the students but somehow I doubt a school that gets ten times the students won't have a bigger voice when it comes time to divide the budget pie. Has this policy improved the system as a whole in DC?
What do you mean 'I don't get to claim'? This is not a he-said she-said sort of affair. Them's the facts, and for you to try to argue otherwise marks you as a kook at best, a just plain dishonest at worst(in my younger days these would have been reversed.)
I think what you really need to do is go have a chat with the poster who wants 'his' money back from the property taxes hed paid. In fact, what you need to do is tell him to just shut up until he can refrain from saying such things in public.
Sheesh. Next you'll be telling me that the landlord isn't really paying for his bread, milk, and coffee, it's the tenants.
As a side note, I think one of the most glaring and one of the most easily rectified problems libertarians as a group have is a complete unwillingness to police their own. When one of these people says something completely silly/indefensible, instead of slapping them down within the community, they have to endure that person as being a representative face of their movement.
_I_ did not make any claim one way or the other. _You_ and yours did. So support it. I swear, if you guys actually knew a syllogism from an implication you'd be dangerous. As it is . . .
Sigh. Stuart, reread your own studies that you have posted. Or are you shifting the goal-posts to where 'better' is now defined to be 'more likely to graduate' or 'more likely to attend college'? That's simply not kosher. Further, these two statements:
and:
Are the mark of a complete kook. Why should I care what you have to say when you can't even admit that comparing costs to spending isn't good accounting; that it hasn't been 'substantiated'? You seem to forget that _I_ don't have anything to prove. It's all going in the other direction. I know, I know, it's sweet work if you can get the other guy to try to disprove your assertions, that it's so much nicer to be in the position to give the thumbs up or down on whether the other person has presented a convincing case.
Guess what? You haven't been very convincing, to put it mildly.
And really Stuart, this "I can compare Catholic schools to public ones to prove that private schools are better" is just lunacy. I get the distinct impression you're bunkered down somewhere in a basement apartment when I read stuff like this.
Given your other lapses of logic on another thread, and given the way you're behaving here, I really don't see why I should take anything you say seriously.
Please stop playing games with words, SOV. Catholic schools are not public schools, which means they are in fact a subset of private schools. Perhaps it would have been clearer if SB had written 'non-public schools' instead of 'private schools', but I think the rest of us understand perfectly well what he meant.
And you do have something to prove SOV: you need to prove that you are not just a common troll who needs to be banned. The evidence is not quite conclusive, but so far signs point to troll.
Several questions I would have on Catholic schools:
1. What % of kids do they handle? What's the max%? If we are talking less than 10% the cost comparisons don't make much sense. I'm sure you can find some new cars under $10,000 that doesn't make every new car less than $10,000 nor does it make it possible to get everyone to spend less than $10K.
2. What's the true cost of Catholic schools? Tuition is not the same thing. If tuition is subsidized by donations, dedicated parents and Church members, tax exempt real estate etc. then all those thing won't suddenly increase if vouchers multiplied the student body by a factor of ten.
To use a health care analogy, Catholic schools look to me a bit like an HMO's co-payment. Because they almost always make the parents pay something they get the parents to 'buy in' to the school. This motivates a lot of positive behavior just as an HMO's co-payment deters people from using the doctor wastefully.
With a voucher you dodge that factor. The voucher is someone else's money so you're not really spending it out of your own pocket. Would the same quality be able to be preserved? It's interesting to note that even very expensive insurance plans keep the idea of some type of co-payment.
Yes, SOV, I can see this is turning into a repeat of our prior debate -- I cite a dozen studies; you cite absolutely nothing; you nonetheless claim, with ever-increasing levels of belligerence, that I'm the one who hasn't proved something or other. (Alternatively, you claim to be familiar with the literature, yet you betray no awareness even of the studies that support your position.) The reader can judge which disputant knows what he is talking about.
It seems like lunacy only because of your misreadings. What I actually said, in the comment to which you are responding, was more like this: "I can compare Catholic schools to inner-city public schools to demonstrate that Catholic schools are better, and that's a relevant comparison because Catholic schools are often the only alternative option."That's certainly not "lunacy," and you present no reason to think that it is. Note: I haven't claimed that all private schools in the country are superior. In fact, I have no doubt that in many smaller towns or suburbs, the public schools may well be far superior to whatever private schools may exist. What interests me, however, is promoting a better education in troubled inner-city populations, and in many of those inner cities (Cleveland, DC, etc.) the public schools are not doing a good job. And Catholic schools are quite relevant here; in the Supreme Court's school voucher case a few years back (Zelman v. Simmons-Harris), one of the main complaints about the voucher program in Cleveland was that about 95% of the students in the program went to Catholic schools.
You still haven't explained what it means to compare costs to spending, or who is supposedly doing this, or what is wrong with it. If you're going to throw out these cryptic charges of dishonesty, then yes, you do have something to prove.Dr. W. -- I vote for common troll. There's no sign that ScentofViolets is arguing in good faith. His modus operandi is to make undefended and unexplained assertions on his own behalf, and to refuse to provide any substantiation whatsoever when asked. At the same time, he will demand that everyone else come up with studies to support their positions. Then, when presented with these studies, he will either ignore or mischaracterize them while claiming that his "burden of proof" has not been satisfied.
ScentOfViolets,
I have to say it is quite amusing to see you rail against others as "kooks" when you are obviously nearly completely economically illiterate (as are most products of the public schooling system).
@ Property Tax incidence: It is basic Econ 101 that statutory incidence and actual incidence are often, if not almost always, far different from each other. If you want to live in the la-la land where tax burdens fall upon the groups named in tax law, that is fine. If you want to understand who actually ends up paying any particular tax, go pick up an introductory economics text.
@ empirical support for private schools:
Trying to establish empirically the difference between public schooling and a voucher system is pretty much impossible right now.
Comparing current public schools to current private schools doesn't work for several reasons:
-One of the main ones is that a large body of current private schools are mainly competing on the religion margin.
combined with:
-In most areas, the private school market isn't dense enough yet to have serious competition between private schools.
This means that the typical private school need only provide a level of quality at least as good as the public schools, while accommodating some religious preference. The best thing the data show now is that private schools can do at least as good as public schools for a fraction of the cost (this has been shown even correcting for peer effects).
In the language of the science that studies this area, you are looking at a partial equilibrium effect, and not the general equilibrium effect of a full-fledged voucher system.
At the end of the day, you can't rely on data to solve this argument (currently). That basically leaves theory and analogy. Theory strongly supports markets over government administration, and analogies between government administered programs versus markets also supports vouchers over public schooling.
@ market innovation:
More generally, no one, absolutely no one, has shown what these better teaching methods are that only private schools can employ. We get the usual PowerPoint buzz about 'innovation', but no hard facts on what those innovations actually are.
Again, in demanding a specific concrete example, you display massive ignorance of market processes as well as standards of evidence required for the debate.
Markets (as under vouchers) are superior in this respect exactly because it is not objectively clear to everyone beforehand what works best in which situations. Markets are evolutionary processes which discover and disseminate superior technology. If we all knew and could all agree on what innovations worked best, then we could (theoretically) implement them in the public schools (unless the teacher's unions opposed them). The point is that market-based system provides much stronger incentives to discover and adopt innovation - so the voucher defender does not need to come up with specific examples, as they know the institution is better. Sure, many of us have many ideas about what types of improvements would appear in the market, but that is irrelevant to the debate.
You ask for innovations that only private schools can employ. What about innovations that only private schools would employ? Such as some hypothetical innovation that improves educational outcomes, but reduces the number of teachers needed?
The current system, being dominated by the interests of the teacher's union, has a very strong incentive to oppose innovations that improve educational outcomes but harm the union. A voucher system would be dominated by the interests of parents and students, so regardless of the nature of any hypothetical example of innovation and change a person could come up with, you can't escape the incredibly strong presumption that innovation and change under a voucher system would much better serve the goal of education.
By your reasoning we should nationalize the computer technology industry unless defenders of the market can specifically tell you what the next generation of computer technology is going to be like, or what specific "innovations" will occur.
Boonton: True but that implies a limited solution now doesn't it? Does unemployment mean we should ditch capitalism for socialism????
Boonton: Injecting competition into the K-12 system via vouchers would, for the most part, be a limited solution. Opinion polls have consistently shown the vast majority of American families are satisfied with their own schools. I doubt a particularly large percentage of children would opt to change schools if we allowed them to do so. Again, a voucher system doesn't mean or imply dismantling the public education system. It simply means that schools will no longer be guaranteed a continual flow of new customers; they'll have to compete. Moreover, nothing in the voucher model prohibits the public schools from getting into the game, either. In other words, if Johnny's parents think it's time to get Johnny out of the abysmal public school he's been attending, it's quite possible their first choice might be another public school (and not a private one). I suspect that existing public schools in many cases would enjoy competitive advantages because of the quality of their facilities.
Of course, if the opinion polls are wrong, and large numbers or even majorities of consumers of public education opt to switch schools, that would mean that dissatisfaction with schools is higher than anybody thought, and that a less "limited" solution is justified.
Come to this, eh? Stamp your widdle feet and say I'm operating in bad faith because I won't 'support my statements while demanding others support theirs.' You're cracked. Let's see what I orignially wrote:
Now, being as I'm completely dishonest and all that, you doubtless can point exactly to where I said something that I failed to support, right?
What a maroon. No, get this through your obstinate head - YOU MAKE THE CLAIM, YOU SUPPORT IT. I know, I know, it sucks, you'd much rather be able to have the walk-off line "you're entirely unconvincing." No, you don't get it, that's my line. And you've done a pretty poor job of being convincing. When I say no on has offered any prove that private schools are better than public schools. and you say:
ScentOfViolets:
I still have not seen any evidence presented by the pro-voucher people that show that private schools are better because they are private.
Proponents of schools choice need not offer proof that "private schools are better than public schools" because the voucher model doesn't rely on the superiority of one over the other. We're simply saying that a) competition has a tendency to improve quality (it does) and that b) the education of our kids is such an important task it shouldn't be denied something as useful as competition. It may well be that, in a system that embraces the widespread use of competition via vouchers, the public schools could end up outperforming many private schools. Indeed, if fans of public schools are sufficiently confident in the superiority of public schools, then they have nothing to fear from a voucher system, because if they're right, the vast majority of public school students would opt to stay put.
This is all very true. But markets are driven by people's own money.
Boonton: markets are also driven by government money (or by the money that we give people so that it becomes their "own money."). We don't, after all, prohibit recipients of Social Security checks from spending that money at Target or Costco. We don't prohibit a Medicare recipient from getting a blood test at a privately-owned clinic. We don't prohibit a food stamp recipient from using the stamps at Kroger.
In fact, in the US as in most countries, government benefits programs almost always give benefits that are a) portable, and b) eligible to be spent at privately operated facilities.
Chuckle. Uh, let's just say I am . . . just a little past econ 101. You can stamp your widdle feet all you want, but this is nothing more than the arguement that corporations are 'double-taxed'. Simply not true. But now I'm confused; according to your argument, the landlord pays no property tax at all. So I guess it's his kids who are getting the free education.
Admit it. You know that by your own arguments, someone is getting a free ride. But rather than acknowledge this, and thus it's basic silliness for the libertarian, you want to keep the argument, because you think it has resonance with some people, but not have to acknowledge this defect. The mark of a kook.
You'd have been better served to admit that this is the case, but that the penalty deriving from the free riders is small in comparison with the people who actually do pay those taxes.
Uh, Jasper? How long have private schools been around? And there is still no data that shows that they are superior to public schools? (modulo because they are private)
And yes, you do need to offer proof. Get that through your thick head. I know that you wish the burden of proof were otherwise, but It Just Ain't So.
And, speaking of being in the position of trying to convince me that you're right, I think it would behoove you to drop the tone.
You need to be gracious, bright, charming, winning. Instead of abusive and haranguing. Ther's a reason people don't cotton to libertarians much, and it isn't just because of their ideas. I should also mention that at one point, while not exactly an official libertarian, I was extremely sympathetic to their views. Exposure to the real deal cures me of that. And if you can't muster the grace to convince someone who is sympathetic, nonskeptical, and willing to be convinced . . . don't you think somethings wrong with your tactics?
I have a proposal, which, if the libertarian is operating in good faith, should be willing to accept.
I teach at a public school. And I'm not happy with program. Further, to the extent that private schools outperform public ones, I'm sure we can all agree that one significant factor is the ability to select students, and the ability to expel troublemakers. So how about this:
Give the teachers the authority to expel the troublemakers, the cheats, and the lazy from their classrooms. Get the special needs kids out of the mainstream. Support the teachers 100% in their decisions (subject to a reasonable review; if they say a student has poor attendance and is in the D range, don't put pressure on them to upgrade that mark to a C. Hold The Parents Accountable for the grades of their children: it is not the teacher's responsibility to make sure the student does the homework or studies the material.
In short, something like what the private schools enjoy (or supposedly enjoy). This wouldn't be near the administrative hassle that vouchers are (AFAIKT) and we wouldn't be setting up an expensive alternate layer of beauracracy to make sure these funds are properly disbursed.
Are these oh-so-concerned-about-the-children libertarians with me? Or is it really all about getting money out of the public schools and into the private ones?
ScentOfViolets:
To quote someone who rarely says anything this wise: "You need to be gracious, bright, charming, winning. Instead of abusive and haranguing." The only one here with an attitude problem is you, and it's astonishing that you can't see that.
You might want to avoid putting questions like "Do you think I'm an idiot?" in the middle of comments where your own incompetence in block-quoting makes it very difficult to tell which parts are your words and which are quoted from others, especially when a previous comment botched in exactly the same way should have taught you to be more careful.
You might also want to avoid writing things like this:
"I know, I know, it sucks, you'd much rather be able to have the walk-off line 'you're entirely unconvincing.' No, you don't get it, that's my line."
Anyone here is allowed to find anyone else's arguments unconvincing. You don't make the rules, and no one here finds your arguments -- or your contemptuous avoidance of arguments -- convincing. Deal with it.
As for the substance of your argument, I see none. You haven't even managed to figure out how property taxes work. The fact is that if a municipality raises its property taxes, everyone, whether homeowner or renter, will pay more. The homeowners will pay more directly, the renters indirectly, because the landlords will pass on the increased rates to the tenants. Everyone on this thread except you knows that. And everyone else here knows that this has nothing whatsoever to do with 'double taxation' of corporate income.
No, Weevil, I'm not trying to persuade anyone at all; hence I do not have to be persuasive. Hence I do not need to be bright, witty, charming, and in particular, given the lack of civility and outright abuse offered up by your tribe, feel no particular need to be. You want people to treat you nicely? Then you need to treat other people nicely. Something that people McCardle in particular and libertarians in general just don't seem to get.
I might add that you, Weevil, have already demonstrated both your incivility and lack of competence. I feel absolutely no compunction in treating you like scheming delinquent.
But since libertarians don't got much, they have to claim you as kin, don't they?
I'm curious though. Just how many libertarians have the notion that other people have to prove something to them? That, in particular, vouchers should _not_ be instituted?
If there are any liberatarians who truly feel this way, I would suggest that maybe they ought to withdraw for a while and think things over.
I've said it before, I'm quite ready to say it again: me and mine have no obligation to prove anything to the pro-voucher crowd. The obligation runs the other way, and all the other way. I'm sorry, but that's just the way the world wags. Otherwise, we'd be in the position, of having to disprove, say, that the moon landings were faked . . . to the satisifaction of the person who has made the original assertion.
And really, asking someone to present data to prove that private schools are better than public ones because they are private, to demonstrate some actual specific techinique that shows private schools have a superior teaching method, to actually show that the marginal costs of educating a child in a private system is significantly lower . . . guys, these just aren't unreasonable demands.
That easily ten times the effort is going to argue otherwise rather than showing some good figures just underscores how weak the pro-voucher position really is.
ScentofViolets,
No, the landlord bears some of the burden of any increase, in reduced income from the rental property, but the tenant also faces higher rent eventually because of an increase- it is not possible to pass on all of the cost, but the landlord does pass on some to most of it. This is no different than the case of the payroll tax in which the employer is supposedly paying half, but this half makes up a portion of the total compensation paid to an employee- an increase in the payroll tax won't be passed on immediately, but in time, the employer will pass on almost all of it in the form of lower wages or lowered benefits. This really is Econ 101.
As for the costs of public vs private, these are the composite numbers for the year 2004: there were 5.2 million students in K-12 private education in the US and the cost was 0.3% of GDP, while there were 47 million in K-12 public schools and the cost was 3.4% of GDP. By my calculations, private schools educate 10% of the students for 8% of the resources expended. And they do this without economies of scale available to the public sector.
Apparently ScentOfViolets is too stupid to notice that the rest of us (well, except for LarryMoeEtc) are perfectly capable of arguing politely with each other, even when we vehemently disagree. Dozens of different people on both sides of the voucher issue have managed to differ politely, if sometimes heatedly. The argument only runs into the rhetorical gutter when SOV arrives and starts demanding respect while offering none and tossing inane arguments in all directions. Yet somehow she thinks we're the problem -- we being just about everyone else on this site. Incipient paranoia, or just general Beavitude and Buttholery?
Of course, someone "just a little past Econ 101" would know that 'equilibrium' in Economics is not necessarily the same thing as equilibrium in Physics, any more than a Palaeographer who refers to the 'descent' and 'taxonomy' of manuscripts is using those words in the same way a Biologist would. (Palaeographers know that a lonely manuscript needs a scribe to reproduce, not a manuscript of the opposite sex, and that a manuscript may have one, two, three, or more parents.) Someone with any sense at all would not write "You do realize I've taught physics at the college level, right?" when she has never mentioned that irrelevant (and possibly nonexistent) bit of her c.v. before.
She doesn't even seem to realize that she does have to be persuasive even if she is only making negative arguments, if she doesn't want to look like a stupid troll.
Scent of Violets:
How long have private schools been around?
Millennia.
And yes, you do need to offer proof.
Er, no, I do not need to "offer proof" that private schools are better than public schools because I'm not contending that private schools are better than public schools.
I think it's obvious that plenty of public schools perform admirably -- in some cases better than private schools. If I'm correct, then fans of public schools have nothing to worry about, because most consumers of public education will not opt to switch schools.
Moreover, nothing in the voucher model would prohibit a public school students from transferring to a different public school. I've never said private schools alone should be permitted to compete for new customers, and would indeed oppose any such restrictions on the ability of public schools to compete. The voucher model works much more powerfully and efficiently when all schools -- public and private alike -- possess the legal ability to win the business of new customers.
And, speaking of being in the position of trying to convince me that you're right, I think it would behoove you to drop the tone.
I'm not trying to convince you. You appear to be locked into your position. I'm just trying to further the inexorable movement toward more choice and competition with respect to public education. I don't need to convince everybody to accomplish this goal -- just small groups of "51%" little by little.
Scentofviolets,
You asked if libertarians would support allowing public school teachers more control over the composition of their classes. I have seen no libertarian argue against this, and I, myself, made such a proposal in an earlier comment, though I think such a proposal will run into severe legal problems (and has, I might note). If you want autonomy of this nature, it is not the right side of the political divide you have to convince, it is the left. If you don't believe me, just read some of the comments here and in the other blog entries.
So, Yancey, are you contending that the landlord does not pay for his groceries, his tenants do? This is just absurd. My employer is taxed, and that is reflected in the wages I am paid. If I pay a handyman to work around the house, the money which I have received is then taxed again. And when he uses that money to by food, clothes, gasoline, that money is taxed yet again. Triple taxation! Or more . . . As I said, absurd. But you find the argument appealing, so you won't let go of it.
And no, your calculations are bunk. Not only do you not source how these figures were arried at, you make no effort to separate out how much the cost of a private education is subsidized, nor how much of what is spent on a child in the public education goes towards subsidizing the education of others. Your 'analysis' is on a par with 'Bill Gates walks into a bar . . . '
Well then, Jasper, are we agreed then that no data has shown that private schools are better than public ones (modulo the privacy reason?)
So, how about you tell all the other libertarians to stop talking about how the public schools have failed, how the private ones are somehow better?
If you can do that, we might be a little closer to agreement.
Screeching and waxing indignant about something that Just Ain't So will not win you any converts, cf, the wingnut claims about the liberal 'war on Christmas'.
Right. The mere fact when it has come up for a public referendum it has been deafeted every single time is of no consequence. Just like liberatarians, who have been at five percent of the populace for, how long now?, are going to capture the govnernorship of a major state Real Soon Now.
And, just what is this position that I'm 'locked into'? Skepticism? It may be comforting to tell yourself that's the case, but the fact is, skepticism is the default mode of most people when presented with these libertarian ideas. We've had seven and more years wear libertarian policies have been enacted, and people are definitely _not_ happy with the outcome.
Not only that, but I've told you certain minimal facts you will have to show to convince me. No, if anyone is 'locked in', it's the libertarians.
But hey, turnabouts fair play. Just for the sake of argument, what would I have to demonstrate to show the nonviability of vouchers? Specificly. You can't tell me that I have to disprove a 'theory', for example.
Go ahead. I'm listening.
let's just say I am . . . just a little past econ 101
Well you obviously didn't learn it, as demonstrated by your clear ignorance of the difference between statutory and actual tax incidence.
But now I'm confused; according to your argument, the landlord pays no property tax at all.
Yes, you are confused, because my argument didn't imply the landlord pays no property tax.
So I guess it's his kids who are getting the free education.
Sure, if you assume that the landlord does not actually have a place where they live. I'm not sure why you would assume this.
Admit it. You know that by your own arguments, someone is getting a free ride.
Utopia is not an option. Never will all costs and benefits be completely internalized. Your argument based upon free riding is beside the point, and I wasn't addressing it, per se; merely pointing out your glaring ignorance of basic economics.
Parsing this, you are saying that if there is no detectable difference, it's because vouchers have not been implemented enough.
If you think definitive and meaningful comparisons (that inform the overall voucher vs. government administered schooling debate) can be made between what is a de facto nationally imposed longstanding institution and a few small voucher experiences, well you just don't understand markets or econometrics; and I'm sure no one is going to try to teach much of either to you here, myself included.
a) you seem to be implying tax funded religous indoctrination is okay with you
The public schooling system is rife with faith-based dogmatic indoctrination supported by taxes. The fact that it isn't associated with recognized religions makes little difference to me.
Taxes always end up funding views and beliefs that many taxpayers don't support. I don't see this as being relevant.
b) you claim to have studies, yet somehow have failed to post them. And you expect me to accept your say-so.
Maybe because their existence is completely beside the whole point of the argument I was making? You know, the one about how empirical studies in the current environment are almost worthless as to informing the overall debate?
Do you think I'm an idiot?
I'm beginning to, yes.
You do realize I've taught physics at the college level, right? Maybe you better put those buzz words away before you hurt yourself.
Lol, you do realize that I've taught both chemistry and economics at the college level, right?
Do please show me precisely how you justify your general equilibrium statements about a voucher regime vs. a state-administered regime from any partial equilibrium effects you may detect from a comparison of current private schools to current public schools.
Uh, the _facts_ are that government does some things better than private enterprise.
Uh, the _theory_ is that government does some things better than private enterprise. But even ignoring the fact that good governance is itself a public good, the public goods rationale for education fails in the case of education beyond a minimal level of literacy and numeracy; and the rationale for government administration is weaker yet, though by all means I'd love to hear your rationale.
Um, do you have any idea how long private schools have been around?
Um, can you read?
Do you have any idea how long a full-fledged national voucher system has been around?
you'd know that the burden of proof is on you.
Obviously you haven't studied much ethics or political science. It is quite usual in those fields to presume freedom, and put the burden of justification on those who would impose coercion on others or on society. In this case, one could very reasonably argue that the burden of proof is upon those who would force others to submit to state administered schooling rather than allowing them freedom of choice.
In light also of the ever-present status quo bias, one could also make a good normative argument that those defending the status quo should bear the burden of proof.
And I take it that since U.S. military interventionism around the world is the status quo, that we should presume it is justified?
Ah, try this as an analogy. I'm an investor, and I'm being approached by individuals who have an unsavory reputation and who are asking me for venture capital. When I ask for specifics, for hard data, I get the runaround: that 'theory' is good, that yes, the results are ambiguous, but some more money will clear that up, and that finally, in extremis, it is up to me, the venture captalist, to prove that their theories are wrong, not upon them to give a convincing demonstration that I'm not wasting my money.
Uh, would you give your money to these people?
Would I even have a choice if those people were the government? Or would they take my money and do it anyway? You know, like they do with public schooling.
Iow, Bill, you're a complete nutter, completely uninterested in being persuasive or even debate. You're just here to fling poo.
But thanks for proving my point.
More blatant projection from poo-flinging SOV, who still can't seem to understand why everyone else on both sides of the issue is capable of arguing politely with each other, and things only go to Hell when she (or MoeLarryEtc) shows up. What could the problem possibly be?
ScentofViolets,
Bunk? That sounds like an unsupported claim, does it not? Similar to some of the other ones you have been tossing around the last day or so.
However, the numbers can be found in the following links:
Link 1
Link 2
Link 3
As to your comments about the tax incidence, if you don't understand it, I will just have to accept your ignorance as an unchangeable fact.
Hopefully, the links won't get this eaten by the spam filter.
Aloha, All,
I have a question for people on all sides of the voucher issue. The State of Hawaii maintains the only State-wide school district in the US, and supports this institution through the State's general fund, which derives mostly from personal income taxes, corporate income taxes, and the State's general excise tax. Property taxes support County-level operations but not schools. In those States which maintain county-level or township-level school districts and which attribute a share of property tax to the support of schools, is this property tax restricted to --residential-- property taxes? Otherwise, seems to me, you would find some 400 student school district in Mississippi or Louisiana with 80% blue-collar minority enrollment and a per-pupil budget of $50,000/year, adjacent to a oil refinery or meat-packing plant.
Well, the original claim was that competition by many with risk of failure works. That implies non-public schools that won't be propped up by external subsidies (ie not monopolies)
But let me give you another non-voucher example of competition helping. I live in a fantastic school district in NJ. Unfortunately, the public schools here were slowly infiltrated by the "whole language/New Math" crowd, which has had a devastating effect on the middling students. A bunch of us formed a charter school which specifically disavows these methods. One gains entrance by lottery. The result has been more pressure to alter the public school curriculum. Scores are better across the board.
Without the competition, many of our students, particularly the less advanced sections, would still be engaged in creative spelling and problem-solving without calculation.
It is these harder to teach (and motivate) basic skills that public schools have trouble with.
An anecdote, but illustrative of the point which we should be arguing here.
Guys, "ScentofViolets" is clearly a troll. He's just trying to goad people into responding. Presenting links and evidence never has any effect on what SOV says, and it's not worth the effort.
Don't feed the troll . . . .
(Boomton): "I've raised this issue several times before so I'll be brief with it now. Schools are provided by taxpayers to kids. Taxpayers, not parents, therefore deserve a say in what they are and what they do."
Taxpayers certainly deserve a say, but why "not parents"? The largest cost of school is the opportunity cost to students of the time they spend in school. Parents contribute more, on average, than do taxpayers, on average. Further, "deserve" is emotioinal, but not factual. Inevitably, for each child, someone decides which institution shall receive the taxpayers' K-12 education subsidy and that child's time. From a welfare-economic point of view, the choice between a voucher system and a system which restricts parents' options for the use of the taxpayers' K-12 education subsidy depends on whether parents or system bureaucrats better represent citizens' interests.
(Boomton): "This is almost certainly why vouchers seem to only be supported by people for other people. With all the Red States out there why is it that none of them has ever simply abolished local control of education and introduced a state-wide universal voucher? You're telling me the teacher's union is really all that powerful everywhere?"
The NEA supports more political operatives than either major political party, and works, as well, through front groups like People for the American Way and Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. I suspect that public sector unions pay shills to represent their interests in newsgroups and other internet forums.
The generalization that "vouchers seem to only be supported by people for other people" is false. Support for vouchers is higher among parents than among the population at large, higher among blacks than among whites, and inversly correlated with income. Those whom the current system serves badly, badly want out.
(Boomton): "Maybe the fact is taxpayers want to have schools define their local community. They want, for example, kids off the streets during business hours."
Maybe 150 years of State-worshipful indoctrination has had its intended effect. In Hawaii, juvenile arrests for assault, drug promotion, and drug possession fall in summer. Arrests for property-related offenses fall in summer. Reported burglaries fall in summer. Juvenile hospitalizations for human-induced trauma fall in summer.
(Boomton): "They want to have some common beliefs and values indoctrinated. With vouchers you give 100% of the control to parents and 0% to taxpayers BUT the problem is that's fine if parents are footing the bill but vouchers are explicitly about taxpayers footing the bill."
Substitute "news media" for "school" in the above argument to see just how creepy this is.
Boonton: markets are also driven by government money (or by the money that we give people so that it becomes their "own money."). We don't, after all, prohibit recipients of Social Security checks from spending that money at Target or Costco. We don't prohibit a Medicare recipient from getting a blood test at a privately-owned clinic. We don't prohibit a food stamp recipient from using the stamps at Kroger.
True but sometimes taxpayers do not provide this type of freedom. Your community has public parks but you don't get a 'recreation voucher' you can use to join a country club or gym of your choice. You may have a subway system in your city but you don't get a 'transportation voucher' to buy your own car.
In fact, in the US as in most countries, government benefits programs almost always give benefits that are a) portable, and b) eligible to be spent at privately operated facilities.
Central gov't entitlement programs that is. Public schools are more like public parks. They are a community good and they impact everyone in the community hence the taxpayers of the community have a right to have a large say in how they are run...that say is what you toss away with vouchers.
Medicare is not quite like that. Whether the guy next door goes to a quack or goes to the best doctor in the world isn't of much concern to you unless he is going to get the plague from his choice and pass it onto you. Neighborhood schools, though, are more like the park. They impact even those who don't use them hence they are subject to local control.
Scent of Violets:
So, how about you tell all the other libertarians to stop talking about how the public schools have failed, how the private ones are somehow better?
No, need because few advocates of injecting competition into the public K-12 model allege that the public schools "have failed" en masse. What most of us are contending is that 1) competition would improve public education and, 2) public schools are failing for some of our children. Something obviously doesn't need to be failing to nonetheless need improvement. And anyway, why do you characterize the arguments in favor of school choice as libertarian arguments? The notion that we ought to spend $500 billion of public money making sure all children have access to education is hardly a libertarian concept, even if one does believe that a choice/competition model will deliver better results than the status quo.
The mere fact when it has come up for a public referendum it has been deafeted every single time is of no consequence.
School choice and competition have been adopted in a growing number of localities here and abroad, as the examples of San Francisco, Seattle, Cambridge, Washington D.C., Sweden, New Zealand Japan, Ontario, and The Netherlands demonstrate. Far from going away, the concept that competition can help improve public education is an idea whose time has come, and whose popularity is growing.
Boonton:
Your community has public parks but you don't get a 'recreation voucher' you can use to join a country club or gym of your choice.
Public parks actually provide a good comparison with school choice systems. We don't, after all, "assign" people to a particular public park based on their street address. They are free to go to whichever one they choose, just as they ought to be free when it comes to schools. And, since you mentioned health clubs, it's not inconceivable that a government -- as part of its effort to keep people healthy under a UHC scheme -- might decide to make health club memberships a benefit available to some recipients (private insurers do this, after all). Would you expect the government to get into the business of building, operating and managing healthclubs under such a scenario? Of course not, it would obviously be more efficient to allow people to choose the healthclub that works best for them.
Neighborhood schools...impact even those who don't use them hence they are subject to local control.
Indeed they do have such impacts. But the most "local" form of control is the level of the family unit. And at any rate, as has been argued now ad nauseum, simply making education dollars portable and forcing schools to compete -- which is all voucher advocates want -- hardly means that schools receiving voucher money can't be tightly regulated, or that public, locally controlled schools will disappear. They won't disappear. They'll simply no longer enjoy a monopoly.
Back to Megan's fundamental point:
Or, as P.J. O'Rourke put it: "Natural selection doesn't work on things that don't die."This point is profound, and is lost on people who value their control fantasies more than they value children's welfare.
Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle (Doubleday/Anchor, Natural History Library, p. 318-319)."What works?" is an empirical question which only an experiment (a competitive market) can answer. A state-operated monopoly school system is like an experiment with one treatment and no control, a retarded experimental design.
Markets work by accumulating incremental improvements.
(Boomton): "...taxpayers of the community have a right to have a large say in how they are run...that say is what you toss away with vouchers."
Inevitably, taxpayers act through agents. The issue then is: who better represents taxpayers' interests, parents or school district bureaucrats?
Er, I just told you why they were bunk:
Not hard to figure out. Do you mean to say that I haven't proven that you haven't shown how these figures were derived? Chuckle.
Once again we have a situation where the cites just don't say what the poster claims. I asked for a cite on how those figures were derived. Link 1 is just the number of students enrolled in public school from what looks like a reputable source. Link 3 is a source I am not familiar with, but in any case, it purports to give the percentage of GDP spent on private education. It is just a spreadsheet, and it doesn't explain how these results were calculated. You know, like what I asked for. Further, it doesn't seem to make a lot of sense; the percentage of GDP is all over the place from year to year for a lot of countries, the U.S. included. For example, the figures for Sweden are from year to year 0.00 0.41 0.57 0.62 NA 0.01 0.81. Huh? Absent some explanation of the calculations involved - you know, like what I specifically asked for - this makes no sense. Link number two is a ninety page pdf file. I'm not going to go through all of that to see if what you're claiming is actually, finally here, but note that none of the tables give what I asked for; instead, what we see are the breakdowns of various private school populations. Again, so what? It doesn't say anything about your claim about the relative populations and exependitures, let alone how the figures were derived.
In short, you did not provide any evidence for your claims at all, just links to tables that you are going to need to support your claim.
If I'm missing something, there, feel free to post it, but that's all I see.
Riiiight. You keep telling yourself that. Note, btw, that rather than try to support your claim with actual cites, rather than explain why - by the same logic - my example shows multiple taxations on the same money, you chose to be abusive. Just as Megan herself in the very first lines of her posts is often abusive and condescending.
You know, when I go on about libertarians acting like real jerks, when I complain that they do not bother to slap down the offending members in their own ranks, you'd think that the last thing you'd want to do would be to give me amunition.
In the face of all those accusations (there's a reason a _lot_ of people don't like libertarians), if it were me, I'd be sweet as pie, then ask where, precisely, in the exchange that I was found to be less than courteous.
But that's just me.
No, that is _not_ all they want, and that's why they're getting all of the well-deserved flack coming their way.
They want their vouchers to be funded from money the money used for public education - and want more than the marginal cost of educating their children to boot. They also want to spend money public money on sectarian education.
Not. On. My. Dime. As I've mentioned several times already, and I think maybe a few other have as well on various threads, I would not object to a voucher system, _provided_ that it did not come out of the money used to fund public schools, and _provided_ it was not used for sectarian education. If a Catholic school wants public money, fine. But it cannot spend that money on religious instruction.
More specifically, it is not allowed to juggle accounts and say that, well, yes, anyone enrolled here is required to undergo religious instruction, but were not using any public monies in teaching those classes. Uh uh. They either agree to enroll kids with the proviso that they not be required to learn Catholic dogma, or they get no public money.
If you can do that, I don't think you'd see nearly the opposition you're seeing now. Most people would still think your ideas are silly, but at least they wouldn't feel as if they're being forced to support them with their own hard earned dollars.
Poor ScentOfViolets is apparently unaware that many (perhaps most) Catholic schools already work that way. The one I taught at last year had many Protestant students and at least two Jews and one Mormon, not to mention the Buddhist exchange student. (We didn't require them to tell their religion, so there may have been more.) All students were required to take Old Testament and New Testament classes in 7th and 8th grades, but there was no proselytization in these classes, the Bible was taught as a text that should be familiar to anyone who wants to understand Western culture. Specifically Catholic religious instruction, telling students how to be good Catholics, was done on a purely voluntary basis -- voluntary for the parents, anyway, if not the children -- after school, one day a week, and only about a quarter or a third of the students (i.e. not even all the Catholics) went to it.
This is not at all unusual for Catholic schools. I've known at least three Muslims and two Baptist preachers who happily sent their kids to other Catholic schools. No doubt they would have preferred Muslim and Baptist schools, respectively, but those were either unavailable or out of their price range, and they preferred Catholic to public.
Once again, an objection to private schools is confidently offered that has no basis in reality.
They want their vouchers to be funded from money the money used for public education...
No, they want ideally all the money "used for public education" to be portable. Or, to put it another way, all students (as they are now) would be entitled to an education at the expense of taxpayers. It's just that they would no longer be forced to attend the school of someone else's choosing.
I would not object to a voucher system, _provided_ that it did not come out of the money used to fund public schools
I would certainly want any voucher system to include a healthy increase in overall public education funding to cover the added cost of formerly non-taxpayer supported students who "re-enter" the publicly supported system. Still, private school K-12 students only make up something like 10% of the total in this country, so we shouldn't be talking about an increase in funding that exceeds 10%. That should be feasible. Moreover, there are certain measures that could be taken to reduce even this modest cost increase.
More specifically, it is not allowed to juggle accounts and say that, well, yes, anyone enrolled here is required to undergo religious instruction
On this we'll have to agree to disagree. As long as my kid is not forced to go to a religious school, I care not a wit if my neighbor chooses the nice Buddhist or Presbyterian or Muslim or Zorasterian school down the street, provided said school(s) does a bang-up job teaching calculus and Shakespeare.
I could be wrong, but I get the impression a lot of opponents of school choice would rather see a kid get a bad education at public expense than see a kid get a great education at public expense if, horror of horrors, he also happens to pick up the finer points of Judaism or Greek Orthodoxy. Who cares? Why get so worked up about it, as long as one's own child is not forced to attend a religious school? I think there might be cause for worry if America were a nation characterized by two religions in a death match (like Shia vs. Sunni in Iraq). But in a country with every possible religious faith under the sun, I see the multiplicity of religious-based education as just part of the gorgeous cultural mosaic -- the tremendous, crazy, absurd, riotously colorful, over the top diversity -- that makes this country so strong. I think it might have been Richelieu who said, during an era that saw great bloodshed between the Catholic and Huguenot factions, that France could survive having lots of religions, it just couldn't survive having two. Well, fortunately America is nothing like 17th century France.
Regarding "ad hominem" attacks, I don't care a lot about these kids so find it hard to believe that anyone else does either. Particularly libertarians who in my experience generally don't appear to have any great concern for the problems of stupid poor people.
Yancey Ward:
... This is no different than the case of the payroll tax in which the employer is supposedly paying half, but this half makes up a portion of the total compensation paid to an employee- an increase in the payroll tax won't be passed on immediately, but in time, the employer will pass on almost all of it in the form of lower wages or lowered benefits. This really is Econ 101."
I don't believe this is true.
I doubt it. Let's review:
You've been insulting, petulant, condescending and you've glossed over or mangled several points (tax incidence for example). I see from above that you have a chip on you shoulder from a prior run-in with Stuart (who is hardly a libertarian in my experience), but you've provided substantial evidence that at least *one* voucher opponent is a great barking hypocrite. Your style practically trembles with vitriol.
and, btw, the point isn't that private schools are better "because they are private" (a difficult proposition to prove even if Buck's or Ward's data shows better results from private schools - causation vs. correlation being an issue), but that competition (between school districts, from parochial schools for parents who wish it, and, yes, from private schools) is likely to breed innovation in the districts most in need of some change.
James B. Shearer:
How could it not be true? When a corporation is deciding whether to hire someone at a salary of X dollars per year, do you really think they just budget X dollars per year, or do they budget the actual cost of salary + equipment (desk, PC, etc.) + health insurance + employer's contribution to Social Security + other stuff? If they don't do the latter, they'll go out of business very quickly. Everyone knows that a $50,000 / year employee actually costs an employer more like $80,000 / year, and Social Security is a substantial portion of the difference.
I don't know whether it's still possible -- it's been 30 years -- but I've known employers who offered to pay employees 30% or 40% more if they would work as private contractors, i.e. take care of their own health insurance and retirement contributions.
I don't think the current education system is ideal. For one thing it wastes a lot of money. I think it would be easier to save money than improve outcomes.
However I am not inclined to consider proposals for change from people who appear to have no idea why schools are "failing". I also think intellectual types have a bad tendency to believe that what is good for them in terms of education is good for everybody. Which leads them to favor inappropriate goals and criteria for success for the education system.
Oh, wait a minute, you don't support vouchers?
Sorry, JBS, I don't think someone who writes dismissively of "the problems of stupid poor people" or "the small number of average students attending bad schools" is a good judge of the subject of vouchers, or whether others care about poor kids or not.
Do you really think all the students in the worst schools are stupid? Or even most of them? I don't doubt that they are disproportionately less intelligent: after all, intelligence runs in families, and is strongly correlated with success, so parents who have earned enough money to buy big houses in suburbs with excellent school systems will no doubt have children who are more often than not above average in intelligence, while those parents whose low income leaves them stuck in run-down apartments in horrible school districts will no doubt have children who are more often than not below average. But 'more often than not' is not always.
I don't feel comfortable calling anyone 'stupid' unless he's in the bottom 10% of the population for intelligence (if then), and there's no way that all or most of the kids in even the worst public school qualifies. Probably 60% or 70% or even 80% are in the bottom half of the national population for brains, and it may well be that 15% or 20% are in the bottom 10% of the national population, but (a) 35th and 40th and 45th percentile kids are far from stupid and eminently teachable, and (b) that still leaves a lot of kids who are not just average or below average but above average. Should we really leave all of them, smart, not-so-smart, and average, in situations where the schools make them stupid by failing to teach them what they need to know?
Interesting . . . I linked to this post twice here (three times now), but still no voucher opponent seems to be aware of the 20 or so voucher studies that I cited in that post. Come on, guys -- I even cite four studies that you could be using to support your side! Show some initiative here.
Oh really? Let's scroll to the top and see who's guilty of incivility and who's not:
The very first sentence from one who has been frequently called abrasive and condescending.
Let's look at the next couple of posts:
And those are just from the first twenty or so posts, long before I showed up. So yes, I am a little bit hot under the collar about the way you folks carry on, and yes, I have a perfect right to be, and yes, your behaviour gives me every right to walk over you with hobnailed boots until you cease and desist.
Don't like it, do you? So why don't you stop? And why don't you call out others who are on your side, say, hey, your incivility is making us really unpopular?
Well, I think we know why.
'Nuff said.
Sigh. Let me demonstrate, specifically, why I say that Stuart's cites tend to, shall we say, be not as supportive as he thinks they are. Here's one such:
http://ceep.indiana.edu/projects/PDF/200602_Clev_Tech_Final.pdf
It seemed to be fairly legitimate, so I perused it and came up with these tidbits - and note, I repeat, that Stuart says this is a report that supports him.
From p. 166:
In fairness to Stuart, the does study goes on to note 'statistically significant' differences in three subcategories, but they do not appear until the students' sixth grade year(more on this in a bit.) And further, from page 167:
And just how different were these 'statistically significant' scores? From table 109 on page 169, we see that the score in science for the mean private student was 650; for the mean public student, 640. A difference of ten points, or far less than two percent. Further, we only know that it's 'statistically significant' at the p=0.05 level; there's no reason to suppose it's signicifcant at the p=0.025 level or lower, and in fact, no particular reason to suppose that the significance level they are using is the appropriate one, rather then the convenient one. This is especially telling in the light of the small sample size, N=197 for the private school students, N=343 for the public school students.
And this is before controlling for other significant factors like parental involvement!
Oh, and in the concluding paragraph on page 170?
So, to recap, in a study that Stuart says supports him, the report says that there is no significant statistical difference in the overall performance between the public and private school groups, and that while there are stastically significant differences in specific subject areas between the groups(in math, favoring the public school, in science and english, favoring the private), the differences are quite small, less than two percent, and there is no way to tell if this is because the students are enrolled in public vs private schools.
No, Stuart, I really do not think those cites say what you think they do.
Did you really think no one was going to read them, or, having read them, actually report on them, quote specific findings on specific pages? I don't know whether you were bluffing, or simply misread these reports to favor your preconceived notions. I'll go with the latter, for now, as this seems to be something of a pattern with you.
ScentOfViolets:
Did you really think no one else would follow the link and check your statements? Look at page 169. The difference between a 650 score and a 634-640 is anywhere from .7 to 1 GMEs (grade mean equivalents). In other words, for three subjects and two subsets of public school kids, the voucher kids are anywhere from .7 years to 1 year ahead of the ones who stayed in public school. That is a huge difference. They also say that for the three subjects tested the voucher kids are at the 37th to 41st percentile compared to the national population, while the public school kids are at the 22nd to 29th percentiles in the same subjects. Again, a huge difference, even if 41st percentile is still pretty low. Spending a few thousand dollars per kid-year to move the average kid up 12-15 percentile seems like a bargain to me.
Chuckle. I repeat, that is a ten point difference . . . out of 650. I also repeat that the authors themselves concluded there was no statistically significant difference overall, that public school kids outperformed their private counterparts in math, and that there was insufficient evidence to conclude that the differences were attributable to public vs private schooling.
But leave it to Weevil to presume that he knows more than the authors themselves about their own conclusions.
And - of course - no libertarian is going to chastise Weevil.
(James Shearer):...
This is a good point. School policy is typically designed by people who did well in high school, went to good colleges, did well in college, got accepted to grad school, earned Ed.D.s and Ph.D.s, and got faculty positions. These are people who are good at school. They have spent their entire lives in school. They imagine that the academic is the highest form of life on Earth and that everyone wants to be an academic. The goals they invite students to entertain and the incentives they offer are foreign to many normal children. You can't eat a transcript. There's a reason that "academic" has become a synonym for "irelevant".I was a teacher (secondary Math) for ten years in one of the worst school systems in the US, the Hawaii DOE. Currently I tutor. One of my clients, whom I tutored from third through sixth grade, audited a university Calc. I class in the summer after 6th grade, was homeschooled after 7th grade, took the GRE (Math) at 16 and started work on his Masters (Math) before he turned 17. Mr. Shearer observes correctly that not everyone wants to be an academic. He does not draw the reasonable conclusion. It does not take 12 years at $10,000 per year to teach a normal child to read and compute. Most vocational training occurs more effectively in a real-world setting. Einstein opposed compulsory attendance at school. Gandhi opposed compulsory attendance at school.
Cyrus McCormick never attennded school. Benjamin Franklin attended school for two years and then apprenticed. Edison was homeschooled and started work at 13. Hiram Maxim left school at 13 and apprenticed. The Wright brothers didn't complete high school. Robert Fitzroy entered the Admiralty school at 12, competed what the Admiralty considered a 36 month curriculum (math through calculus, Geography, History, languages, navigation, shiphandling, gunnery, fencing, etc.) in 20 months, and went to sea at 14. Samuel Colt went to sea at 16 and carved a wooden model of his revolver (he got the idea from the ship's wheel) while underweigh to Bombay. David Farragut joined the Navy at 9, went to sea at 11, and commanded his first ship at 15.
The cost of school includes the opportunity cost to students of the time they spend in school.
Dr. Weevil, regarding the incidence of payroll taxes, according to Econ 101 this will depend on the slopes of the supply and demand curves for labor. The demand curve for labor will in turn depend on the supply and demand curves for the product being manufactured. By varying the curves I expect you can construct examples in which payroll taxes are mostly paid by the employees (lower wages), the employer (lower profits) or the customers (higher prices).
It also matters what the payroll tax is being used for. Social security provides employees with an individual benefit and to the extent that they value that benefit they will accept lower wages.
Dr. Weevil:
"I don't feel comfortable calling anyone 'stupid' unless he's in the bottom 10% of the population for intelligence (if then), and there's no way that all or most of the kids in even the worst public school qualifies. Probably 60% or 70% or even 80% are in the bottom half of the national population for brains, and it may well be that 15% or 20% are in the bottom 10% of the national population, but (a) 35th and 40th and 45th percentile kids are far from stupid and eminently teachable, and (b) that still leaves a lot of kids who are not just average or below average but above average. Should we really leave all of them, smart, not-so-smart, and average, in situations where the schools make them stupid by failing to teach them what they need to know?"
I expect in the worst public schools the average IQ is around 70. Assuming SD is still 15 this means about 98% of the students would be below average (ie 100) in IQ. The bottom 10% corresponds to an IQ around 80. About 75% of the students would be below 80 or stupid by your definition.
Dr. Weevil:
"... They also say that for the three subjects tested the voucher kids are at the 37th to 41st percentile compared to the national population, while the public school kids are at the 22nd to 29th percentiles in the same subjects. Again, a huge difference, even if 41st percentile is still pretty low. Spending a few thousand dollars per kid-year to move the average kid up 12-15 percentile seems like a bargain to me."
Seems like a big waste of money to me. They are still below average so won't be able to compete for intellectually challenging jobs and most of the material taught in schools is pretty useless in non-academic careers.
Stuart's citation contextseems reasonable to me:
And he didn't say "Sigh." in mock weary condescension at any point.
Public parks actually provide a good comparison with school choice systems. We don't, after all, "assign" people to a particular public park based on their street address.
If a town only has one park you might as well.
They are free to go to whichever one they choose, just as they ought to be free when it comes to schools.
Which they are. If you don't like the free park in your town you are free to use your OWN money to join a club or gym.
And, since you mentioned health clubs, it's not inconceivable that a government -- as part of its effort to keep people healthy under a UHC scheme -- might decide to make health club memberships a benefit available to some recipients (private insurers do this, after all). Would you expect the government to get into the business of building, operating and managing healthclubs under such a scenario? Of course not, it would obviously be more efficient to allow people to choose the healthclub that works best for them.
Unlike public schools, medical care primarily benefits the person receiving it.
Indeed they do have such impacts. But the most "local" form of control is the level of the family unit. And at any rate, as has been argued now ad nauseum, simply making education dollars portable and forcing schools to compete -- which is all voucher advocates want -- hardly means that schools receiving voucher money can't be tightly regulated, or that public, locally controlled schools will disappear.
Errr yes it would unless you would say local communities have to tax themselves double...once to provide these vouchers and again to fund the local schools they want to define themselves. Indeed the most local form of control is the family unit but it's not 'local' for your family to reach into my family's checking account and turning around and telling me the 'problem' is that I have too much say in the matter.
What you miss with your 'portable' demand is that schools are local creatures. Not national ones or even state ones. To accomplish your idea we first must centralize education and abolish it locally. That would be a radical change that most people do not want and again since the taxpayers/voters are paying for it don't they get first say?
Inevitably, taxpayers act through agents. The issue then is: who better represents taxpayers' interests, parents or school district bureaucrats?
Good point. Too bad for voucherites local schools are pretty direct to the taxpayers. Many sleepy towns that agree on almost everything get torn up by the local school board elections. Of all things, the local school is probably the easiest for even a dozen or two dedicated voters to change.
So you're essentially saying the best way for taxpayers to get their voices heard is to abolish their vote but not their tax bill. Kind of like saying the best way for those paying social security taxes to be heard is to give up their votes and give them to people collecting social security.
I see a host of areas where the interests of parents and taxpayers can conflict. I cited the case of the DC system where school choice has essentially destroyed sports between the schools as the system seems to have divided itself into one camp of 'brain' schools and another of 'jock schools'. Grade inflation is of great benefit to parents but not taxpayers. Assorted political agendas funded are of interest to parents who want them but not taxpayers (voucherites insist that this will solve the "heather has to mommies" 'problem' yet the solution is to let people use your money to push whatever they want). How about a fundamental role of schools? Keep the little brats 'in storage' and off the streets during business hours? Don't expect to see anyone running for school board on that plank but it's certainly a big reason communities have schools!
No, they want ideally all the money "used for public education" to be portable. Or, to put it another way, all students (as they are now) would be entitled to an education at the expense of taxpayers. It's just that they would no longer be forced to attend the school of someone else's choosing.
In other words they want a new entitlement. They want the gov't to not only provide free public schools but to pay for any school they choose. If you join a private gym and never bother to use the local park you're not being denied use of anything nor is the gov't 'paying' any less for you.
Rather than seeking to abolish local control of eduction, nationalize it and then entitlementize it why don't you simply seek to expand things like the Earned Income Tax Credit and tax deduction for children? Then parents could use cash, not vouchers. If they want to hire the smart college kid next door as a tutor they could. If they want to move to a community with nicer schools they could. Or if they wanted to use it to pay for private school they could as well.
On this we'll have to agree to disagree. As long as my kid is not forced to go to a religious school, I care not a wit if my neighbor chooses the nice Buddhist or Presbyterian or Muslim or Zorasterian school down the street, provided said school(s) does a bang-up job teaching calculus and Shakespeare.
But this is where your rhetoric leads. If the voucher is $3,000 and the only schools in your neighborhood are of a religion you don't like then how are you not being 'forced' to send your kid there? Right now you're saying if your community has a public school and you can't afford a private one that's 'forcing' you...well its still forcing afterwards by your definition. Needless to say you can repeat this exercise for higher levels of vouchers until you get to a stupid amount. Maybe the market will provide online schools. OK, can you use the voucher to buy a computer and pay your cable bill? If so then it looks more like a cash grant which could be more efficiently done with something like the EITC. If not then again where's your sacred mantra of 'choice' going to lead? What if you don't like the idea of your kid being at home on the internet all day?
"I just don't understand why the ONLY way to try again is vouchers. "
If you can think of another way to bring true competition to the system, let's hear it.
Dr. Weevil, regarding the incidence of payroll taxes, according to Econ 101 this will depend on the slopes of the supply and demand curves for labor. The demand curve for labor will in turn depend on the supply and demand curves for the product being manufactured. By varying the curves I expect you can construct examples in which payroll taxes are mostly paid by the employees (lower wages), the employer (lower profits) or the customers (higher prices).
So this leads to the question of relative elasticities of supply and demand for labor. It is very clear that the supply of labor is almost always much more inelastic than the demand is (especially in the long term), as there are more substitutes available on the supply side (automation, scaling back on production, shifting capital to less labor-intensive production, or simply exiting the market and consuming instead of producing). So while it undoubtedly varies from industry to industry, there is a widespread acceptance that workers bear almost all of the burden. (as renters bear almost all of the cost of property taxation).
Another way to think of it: if a firm faces an increased cost of labor, but their competitors don't, then they have to take part of the hit in order to keep their workers. If all of their competitors face an increased cost of labor, they will tend to pass all of the costs on in the form of lower wages (or possibly higher prices, which would reduce output and employment, harming the workers and the consumers). For landlords, if all of your competitors face higher taxes, you aren't going to lose out by passing on the costs to renters, since all your competitors will do the same (and substitutes like owning a home are more expensive due to the taxes also).
It also matters what the payroll tax is being used for. Social security provides employees with an individual benefit and to the extent that they value that benefit they will accept lower wages.
The problem here is that since it is coercively imposed, the expectation is that the cost is greater than the benefit overall. If the benefit to the employee, say 10K, were greater than the cost to the employer, say 8K, then both parties are better off if the benefit is offered in exchange for, say 9K lower wages - so no coercive taxation is necessary where the benefits exceed the costs.
Taxation only matters where the cost of the benefit is greater than the value of the benefit, such as a 10K cost for an 8K benefit. Here the system forces employees to accept almost 10K lower wages (as per the likely elasticities) in exchange for something they value at 8K.
The more coercive programs like this that society enforces, the more wealth is destroyed and growth in living standards is hampered.
ScentofViolets --
I'm going to respond to you, because you have actually addressed the substance of one of my citations, and this time you're not quite as blatantly lying (as when you pretended that my cites on Catholic schools came to "completely the opposite" result, and then when that tack failed, pretended that they had concerned only graduation rates and college attendance, rather than including test scores).
Mindles is quite right -- I expressly included the Cleveland study as one of the many studies that are "sometimes ambiguous but often positive," and that show "modest" increases in test scores. This description was perfectly accurate. (I note that you picked the most ambiguous of the positive studies to discuss, but again, any consideration of any evidence is an improvement).
But it's you who are being misleading. There's a reason why standard deviations and percentiles exist, and if you really are a teacher of mathematics (as you have claimed), then it is deliberately dishonest (as Dr. W. pointed out) to keep referring to percentages of raw scores. What you're doing is exactly like dismissing the difference between a 7-foot-tall man and a 6-foot-tall man as a mere 16.7 percent difference, when in fact it's quite an enormous difference of four standard deviations.
For example, from pages 168-69 of the study:
So at least in some subjects, the voucher recipients were nearly a grade ahead of non-recipients. I happen to think this is nothing to sneeze at. Compare that to one of the most famous studies on desegregation, which found that the benefit of desegregation was somewhere between two and six weeks' worth of instruction. As I said in my post, you can dismiss results like those in Cleveland if you want, but you'd also have to dismiss just about every other educational intervention that's ever been tried.I also find the analysis of poverty in the Cleveland study to be quite interesting. For example, in fourth grade, voucher recipients in poverty had a science achievement level that was way behind non-poor non-recipients. By the sixth grade, the impoverished voucher students were at the same science achievement level as the non-poor students back in the public schools. See Figure 25.
For math achievement, as you point out, the public school non-poor students were on top by a small margin (see Figure 24), although -- as you do not point out -- the public school students in poverty did the worst.
For language achievement, however, even the impoverished voucher students by sixth grade were ahead of the non-poor public school students. See Figure 23.
It doesn't interest you at all to ask whether private schools are perhaps doing anything different to get poor kids to equal or even outperform their rich public school counterparts? You want to dismiss all of this with a wave of the hand and a "Not. On. My. Dime."?
Unlike public schools, medical care primarily benefits the person receiving it.
I wish I had more time to go into this, but this is not true. I have the feeling that this is one of those "facts" which gets repeated over and over so much (especially by teachers, surprise surprise) that people believe it without actually looking to see if it is true. (and I won't even go into Robin Hanson's oft-repeated findings about how medical care is mostly useless or harmful, and signaling and cognitive biases are what drives our expenditures).
There may be a good argument that basic literacy and numeracy are public goods, but beyond that the returns to education are overwhelmingly private.
In addition to this there is the fact that schooling is primarily a signaling phenomenon, the vast amount of resources spent in schooling have very little value in terms of consumption or increasing productivity. The large degree of signaling suggests of course that most schooling is a negative-sum situation, and thus that we might be better off taxing education rather than subsidizing it. Everyone who gets a high school diploma reduces the value of such a diploma for everyone else, everyone who gets a Bachelor's degree reduces the value of Bachelor's degrees and high school diplomas, everyone who gets a Master's degree reduces the value of every Bachelor's degree and high school diploma... negative externalities from the need to increase relative rank through institutions that provide very little increase in productivity (or consumption value for most).
Regarding my last post, one also has to keep in mind the huge opportunity cost of schooling as pointed out by previous posters.
(anon): "I just don't understand why the ONLY way to try again is vouchers."
(qrstuv): "If you can think of another way to bring true competition to the system, let's hear it."
The State of Alaska subsidizes homeschooling through government-operated correspondence schools. Until the authorities put an end to it, some parents used the taxpayers' homeschool subsidy to pay tuition to independent schools. Why this was a problem for anyone but the unions which represent school employees, I have no idea.
Then there's Parent Perormance Contracting.
MT seems to have eaten the single archive this post from our old site, but regarding 'failing to criticize':
I want to make it clear that I denounce outrageous comments by over-the-top bloggers.
Furthermore, I disapprove of those bloggers who fail to denounce outrageous comments by over-the-top bloggers who may otherwise share the political positions of those bloggers who fail to denounce...them.
I want to add that I deplore the lack of condemnation in the blogosphere of such bloggers who fail to denounce said outrageous comments.
I also find it regrettable that many bloggers are not deploring, disapproving and denouncing soon enough after, respectively, the lack of condemnation, failures to denounce and said outrageous comments.
I just want to make that perfectly clear.
P.S. More re-allocation of condemnation here. After all, lack of regret, deploring, disapproval or denunciation amounts to being objectively pro-outrageous, pro-lack of condemnation or pro-non-denunciation. And we can't have that.
Perhaps a '2X4 upside the head' is in order.
In case you aren't following: Outrageous comments -->denunciation, failure to denounce-->condemnation or disapproval, failure to condemn and disapproving-->deplore, failure to deplore-->regrettable. Hmm, is regret not strong enough?
Yep, that's right Stuart, ten points out of 650 makes for a whole years difference. Chuckle. So if I give a test to 25 students, and the average is 80%, with a low of 78 and a high of 82 out of one hundred questions, the students who answered two fewer questions correctly are failing? Your logic. I think you need to read up on how these scales work, and what they are really measuring.
Further, I can't say this enough, in a study that you said supports you (sound familiar?) the authors themselves say there is no overall statistical difference.
But of course, you know better than the authors, right? Just like in your -in your own words 'definitive' study it was 'proven' that black students are afraid of 'acting white' by getting good grades, and that's why they do so poorly. Uh, no. As I don't mind repeating in the slightest, if this hypothesis were true, then yes, you'd see exactly what you saw in your study. But seeing what you saw in your study in no way implies that the hypothesis is true. How many posts did it take before you finally saw that failure in logic? Did you ever admit that your study wasn't 'definitive' after all?
Stuart, I dismiss you because you apparently have difficulty with very simple logic concepts (maybe that's not fair; maybe if this was from an experiment whose results you didn't like, you'd have picked up on the logical absurdity immediately), because you post things that you say support you when then they do anything but, because you have a great deal of difficulty admitting you made a mistake when it's quite obvious that you have. (I might add that there is nothing wrong with making mistakes; I make several dozen every day in my job, and I have absolutely no problem, no difficulty, none, in owning up to them. It doesn't make me any less of a professional or good at my job.)
I certainly do not dismiss because of 'politics'. I'll repeat for about the hundredth time that I used to be sympathetic to libertarianism, that I am _not_ a liberal, etc. Accusing me of doing so makes as much sense as saying that I'm down on you because your black - It Just Ain't So.
Poor StenchOfVileness hasn't even figured out that "10 points out of 650" is a lie in two or three different ways. "out of" is a lie, because the highest possible score is obviously not 650: the voucher kids averaged 650, but are only 41st percentile and a year or more behind grade level by national standards, so there must be other kids somewhere scoring higher than 650. The assumption that the lowest possible score is zero is either ignorant or dishonest: we all know that the SAT gives those who take it 200 points per category just for signing their names, and the narrow range of scores reported on the linked site strongly suggests that this test also has scores that start much higher than zero. Finally, the statement that the difference is "10 points" is again an out-and-out lie: as I have already pointed out, the difference between voucher and public-school students is anywhere from 10 to 16 points in different subjects for different subsets of public school students.
In any case, Stinky can "dismiss" Stuart Buck and me and Mindles H. Dreck and everyone else on this thread all she wants. The fact is that we all dismiss her inane ravings. Or am I wrong? Is there anyone on this thread who finds Stinky's comments worth reading? (And I don't mean just that they've inspired a few eloquent rebuttals: that hardly justifies the waste of pixels.) Don't everyone speak up at once.
Boonton: But this is where your rhetoric leads. If the voucher is $3,000 and the only schools in your neighborhood are of a religion you don't like then how are you not being 'forced' to send your kid there?
No, in the case you outlined you would just send your kid to a government school.
Jasper's point can be sharpened. Even if the only alternative to a bad public school is a repulsive religious school, at least you have two choices, and can select the lesser of two evils. Surely two choices are better than one?
As I've already noted, I've known Muslims, Jews, Mormons, and children of Baptist preachers who went to Catholic schools. The parents presumably didn't think that was the ideal choice, but it was obviously the least of however many evils, or they wouldn't have picked it.
Bill Abbott:
"So this leads to the question of relative elasticities of supply and demand for labor. It is very clear that the supply of labor is almost always much more inelastic than the demand is (especially in the long term), as there are more substitutes available on the supply side (automation, scaling back on production, shifting capital to less labor-intensive production, or simply exiting the market and consuming instead of producing). So while it undoubtedly varies from industry to industry, there is a widespread acceptance that workers bear almost all of the burden. (as renters bear almost all of the cost of property taxation)."
Maybe but this is well beyond Econ 101.
And I doubt it is true for renters in areas where new rental buildings are not being built. Property taxes are a fixed cost and the rental supply curve is determined by variable cost. Until property taxes are increased to the point where renting is no longer the best use for the building the increase will come straight out of the owner's pocket in the form of a lower value for the property.
1. ScentofViolets is apparently accusing the study's authors of lying when they themselves say that the test score differences in language, science, and social studies amount to almost a year's worth of schooling. This is a remarkable assertion, and is provided without an ounce of support. Apparently, "chuckle" counts as a refutation? Who knew?
2. Similarly, ScentofViolets is misrepresenting things when he says that there is "no overall statistical significance" in the difference between voucher and public school students, and then leaves it at that. Yes, the authors say that about "overall" scores on page 166. They then immediately qualify it with this statement: "However, there are statistically significant differences . . . in three specific subject areas: language, science and social studies."
23. ScentofViolets continues to offer no explanation for why raw percentages of raw test scores would ever be superior to percentiles. (If he's really a math teacher, he would know better than this.)
I already explained Roland Fryer's study twice in that earlier thread ( http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/10/is_academia_serious_about_dive.php#comment-698823 and http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/10/is_academia_serious_about_dive.php#comment-7028694. For the second time, I find it fascinating that in some areas, the impoverished voucher students were equaling or even exceeding the rich public school students. ScentofViolets apparently doesn't care, but that doesn't mean no one else should.
5. [This is a bit of a distraction.] ScentofViolets is entirely off-base in this comment, and shows himself to be ignorant of how social science works:
). Even in that original thread, the whole "acting white" issue was ScentofViolets' way of causing a distraction so as to avoid addressing the evidence. The issue arose only because: 1) I presented several instances where academics have discriminated against conservatives; 2) ScentofViolets could not address any of the instances except for the "acting white" thesis, which he claimed had been "widely debunked" (hence implying that academic rejection of that thesis was purely merit-based); 3) I responded to his completely unsubstantiated assertion; and then 4) rather than writing a single word to substantiate his claim, ScentofViolets wanted to spend post after post complaining that one particular study I had cited hadn't risen to the level of a logical necessity (although that is never true of sociological studies).
I didn't think all of SOV's offense was justified prior to the "Stench of Vileness" name-calling. Jeez, Weevil. Now what?
But I keep forgetting I'm not the umpire/co-blogger here.
If I was, though, I'd be prompted to write about the "burden of proof", because it seems to me a functioning market places the burden of proof upon the players, and they thrive or fail thereon. The burden of proof would seem to always fall on anyone who supports a single provider model.
Sorry, Mindles, but I'm always polite to those who are polite to me, and even when people are systematically rude, I keep up the politeness for a few more messages, to see if they respond in kind. If 'ScentOfViolets' wants me to address her by her chosen pseudonym, she can address me by mine. She might want to knock off the lies, insults, non sequiturs, and other trolleries while she's at it. I don't think 'vile' is too strong a word for her behavior on this and other threads, and I do wish Megan would just ban her.
There may be a good argument that basic literacy and numeracy are public goods, but beyond that the returns to education are overwhelmingly private.
Not born out by economic behavior. Overwhelmingly local communities have fought to maintain control of the school system. Go ahead try to pin the blame on supposedly all powerful teachers unions but local communities also fight to keep the schools from being centralized under the state or federal gov't...something that would presumably make lobbying easier for teachers unions.
There may be a good argument that basic literacy and numeracy are public goods, but beyond that the returns to education are overwhelmingly private.
In addition to this there is the fact that schooling is primarily a signaling phenomenon, the vast amount of resources spent in schooling have very little value in terms of consumption or increasing productivity.
Unless communities are getting more out of the local school than simply trying to score economic benefits for the kids that go to them. Perhaps they are using the schools in the same way that communities use parks, street layout, zoning laws and more. They want to educate the young not only in economically beneficial things but also to shape their values and imprint the community on them. Hence they offer the schools for free just like the public parks are offered for free. Almost everyone will take them up on the offer, the few that don't are using their own money hence they are presumably more dedicated, ergo they are getting what they are paying for and they aren't really paying for competition.
The large degree of signaling suggests of course that most schooling is a negative-sum situation, and thus that we might be better off taxing education rather than subsidizing it. Everyone who gets a high school diploma reduces the value of such a diploma for everyone else, everyone who gets a Bachelor's degree reduces the value of Bachelor's degrees and high school diplomas, everyone who gets a Master's degree reduces the value of every Bachelor's degree and high school diploma... negative externalities from the need to increase relative rank through institutions that provide very little increase in productivity (or consumption value for most).
I suspect you're probably right in some respects but then why wouldn't the market reward companies that hire smart people with lower degrees for less money. They could strategically invest in training them only for the actual skills they directly need on the job. It can't all be some type of cultural tradition. After all, the 1980's & 90's proved that corporate America had no problem downsizing workers who had a lot of years on the job. Certainly if profits are there a company would hire MA's rather than Phd's and so on...
Jasper
No, in the case you outlined you would just send your kid to a government school.
But the complaint would remain as valid. If the voucher is $3K and the only schools in the community are a public school or a Baptist one I can still cry "no choice for me because I can't afford to spend any of my own money on a private school!".
Jasper's point can be sharpened. Even if the only alternative to a bad public school is a repulsive religious school, at least you have two choices, and can select the lesser of two evils. Surely two choices are better than one?
It's always better to be able to spend someone else's money. That's not exactly news. If you live in NYC but hate Central Park wouldn't it be nice to have a 'gym voucher'? Sure it would. Even if the voucher only paid for a crappy YMCA membership its still more of a choice. Do the taxpayers of NYC owe this to you? Certainly not!
But, I hear, the gov't MAKES you educate your kid. Well the gov't also requires you to care for your kid and that includes recreation and exercise. What if the only playground near you is horrible! Guess what, you're out of luck. Either participate in local politics to clean up your own community, move to a nicer community or shell out the $$ needed to care for your kid.
As I've already noted, I've known Muslims, Jews, Mormons, and children of Baptist preachers who went to Catholic schools. The parents presumably didn't think that was the ideal choice, but it was obviously the least of however many evils, or they wouldn't have picked it.
Indeed but welcome to economics. We almost always face some type of constraints.
The State of Alaska subsidizes homeschooling through government-operated correspondence schools. Until the authorities put an end to it, some parents used the taxpayers' homeschool subsidy to pay tuition to independent schools. Why this was a problem for anyone but the unions which represent school employees, I have no idea.
Here's an interesting question; Why?
1. Alaska's a pretty Republican state. You mean the teachers union is this powerful?
2. The teacher's union represents teachers but not principals, administrors, school board members and so on. Imagine a voucher-like system that basically said you must educate your kid but you must only use certified teachers. You'd have a system very much like Medicare....you can pay for a doctor but the AMA is the gatekeeper of who can call themselves a doctor. If the public system was such a great racket for unions wouldn't the AMA be pestering the gov't to open up huge public 'doctors centers' run by local and state government? Instead the AMA seems to love the idea that every doctor is his own small business and patients can choose as they please and have Medicare pick up the tab.
If teachers unions were really this powerful they would love to have broken the power of all those little school boards with their principals and activist parents groups.
Boonton:
If the voucher is $3K and the only schools in the community are a public school or a Baptist one I can still cry "no choice for me because I can't afford to spend any of my own money on a private school!"
I'm not sure I understand your point. Under the status quo, a family lacking private funds would have one option (public school). Under the scenario you propose they would now have two options. How is that harming them?
There may be a good argument that basic literacy and numeracy are public goods, but beyond that the returns to education are overwhelmingly private.
In addition to this there is the fact that schooling is primarily a signaling phenomenon, the vast amount of resources spent in schooling have very little value in terms of consumption or increasing productivity.
Here's a thought experiment:
Consider Central Park in NYC. Why does it exist? Certainly not for environmental reasons. Even the most fuzzy headed environmentalist must recognize that the money that could be raised by selling Central Park off to developers could buy a whole country worth of rainforest land elsewhere or pay for several million hybreds and plaster a huge number of homes with solar panels. Does it exist for recreation and exercise?
Well I don't doubt that many NYers are in poor shape. By that metric we could say Central Park is a failure. Also I don't doubt that if it was sold off and the money given out in the form of 'gym vouchers' the number of gyms in NYC would explode and you probably would see more people exercising and in better shape. Yet something seems wrong with that.
The fact is Central Park exists because the voters of NYC want it to exist. The price they pay, of course, is the opportunity cost of what could have been done with probably the most valuable real estate in the world. What are the benefits? No doubt some of them are economically measurable. A pad in Trump Tower would be worth less if suddenly the huge park was turned into yet more skyscrappers. Yet many of the values are probably intangible meaning that they aren't accruing directly to anyone but many feel its there. Hence the city chooses to keep central park.
Consider that maybe vouchers have failed to win voter approval because they are focusing on too narrow a field...the economic benefits to kids of education. Maybe, on a smaller scale, communities keep their public school because they want to for a host of reasons beyond the simple estimates of how much lifetime income for kids will go up with them. In fact, why would a community care about that? Since people move around a lot in the US it's more likely the citizens living in a town 30 years from now will have received their education somewhere else so its not really an investment on the town's part in that sense.
Again if you just want to focus on 'the kids' why not simply give parents cold hard cash? They then have the freedom to use that cash however they see fit including moving to a nicer community if they are in a really bad place. Think about it, if I were living in a really bad inner city I'd rather have $3000 cash so I could buy a car and maybe rent a place in a nice area rather than a $3000 voucher which says my kid will go to a nice school but have to live in a hell hole the other 15 hours out of the day.
I'm not sure I understand your point. Under the status quo, a family lacking private funds would have one option (public school). Under the scenario you propose they would now have two options. How is that harming them?
Of course it isn't harming them! It's not their money!
Boonton:
Of course it isn't harming them! It's not their money!
So what's your objection?
My objection is that its harming the taxpayers/voters who quite frankly want to keep a say in the education they pay for.
There seem to be two different objections above relating to stakeholding in the school system under an expansion of voucher programs:
1) The vouchers would not be large enough for many to actually choose a school, so it would be the (presumed plundered) public school or the subsidized (presumed, arguendo, religious) school. This, of course, ties neatly into the discussion about marginal vs. fixed cost as a base for vouchers.
2) The voucher gives control over the schools to the parents as opposed to the taxpayers.
The second objection strikes me as feature rather than bug. It doesn't mean parents have control over how much is spent, simply how, and this strikes me as less of a principal/agent problem than the current public school system. I gave an example earlier of the whole language nonsense that went on in our school district for years. Only the creation of a charter school forced changes in the curriculum (and is forcing them to look hard at the science curriculum now). I guess I'm one of those folks who believe that competition and alignment of interests will serve my interests, much like selling insurance with a high deductible.
The first is still an increase in choices and consumer signaling, so the critical question is whether the public school is damaged thus leaving the parent with the choice of religious or damaged schooling. Well, I suppose if the voucher is small enough, that is a possibility. Personally I might take religious. My kids pre-school was very religious (we are not, and are not from that faith), and we simply had fun with it.
It is true that making the voucher big enough to be meaningful may create overhead absorption problems for certain school districts. If that provokes some changes in dead-end school districts like Camden NJ (where half the average rate would buy a good private school) so much the better. Every choice in the system draws some balance between giving the kids in really bad districts a chance vs. trying to make it work for everyone.
As for using the money to move, I have a feeling cash would be more fungible than that. Furthermore, that would serve more to increase prices in good districts and would also have whatever effect on the remaining population that vouchers did.
(malcolm):...
(Boomton):...As I said, I don't know why, but yes, the NEA is that powerful.Collective bargaining may cover more employees than just teachers; in Hawaii, principals pay their dues or agency fees to the Hawaii Government Employees Association (I think this is a serious conflict of interest).
The problem for the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel is that, unlike medicine, there really is no useful expertise associated with teaching (that can be taught in Colleges of Education, anyway). The AMA can keep physicians' incomes high through occupational licensure, and the public will generally accept legally mandated credential requirements for physicians and surgeons, but it's just too easy to demonstrate that Colleges of Education add nothing to teacher competence. The lucrative public-sector cartel will fall apart as soon as State (government, generally) schools have real competition. College of Education enrolments will dive.
The second objection strikes me as feature rather than bug. It doesn't mean parents have control over how much is spent, simply how, and this strikes me as less of a principal/agent problem than the current public school system. I gave an example earlier of the whole language nonsense that went on in our school district for years. Only the creation of a charter school forced changes in the curriculum (and is forcing them to look hard at the science curriculum now).
Except it is a bug and not a feature. How is a 'whole language nonsense' fad in your local public school any different than say a, "no cops walking the street" fad in your local police or a "no basketball hoops in your local park"? Would vouchers prohibit whole language schools? Certainly not. You'd still have whole language in your community today with vouchers and YOU'D BE PAYING FOR IT! Unless, of course, you convinced every single parent to reject the idea.
The school exists as a free good to you just as the park and police do. To the extent that it falls short of what you want you have the option to try to effect change, pay to supplement the good or choose not to use the good at all.
What you are ignoring is the curious fact that public schools seem to exist as a community institution in most of America. In other words the taxpayers are buying more than just education for each kid. Therefore the benefit needs to be measured not just by trying to compute the value to each kid of any given public school but also the value the school gives to the people who have choosen to pay for it.
As for using the money to move, I have a feeling cash would be more fungible than that. Furthermore, that would serve more to increase prices in good districts and would also have whatever effect on the remaining population that vouchers did.
In other words keep the poor people where they are. Camden NJ is a pretty nasty place. Quite frankly I don't care if you make the schools there wonderful. Newark NJ has some very good schools but its still got a lot of problems and I wouldn't make anyone stay there against their will. If you want to help parents there then you should give them cash. Let them decide what their kids need more, a private school, a private tutor or a move to a better place or whatnot. If you don't trust them then what's the point of vouchers?
The problem for the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel is that, unlike medicine, there really is no useful expertise associated with teaching (that can be taught in Colleges of Education, anyway). The AMA can keep physicians' incomes high through occupational licensure, and the public will generally accept legally mandated credential requirements for physicians and surgeons, but it's just too easy to demonstrate that Colleges of Education add nothing to teacher competence.
The voucher would be the ticket. Obviously you need some limits on who can cash in this voucher otherwise you'd quickly get voucher rackets just as you today have 'student loan mills' that hoodwink unsuspecting people into taking out expensive college loans for substandard training.
You say the public will not accept licensure for teaching but they already do. If anything the trend is towards more barriers to entry with background checks and such all being eagerly lapped up. No doubt the unions could keep the entry barriers while getting rid of all that annoying local politics. Even in Mindless's community, I'm sure there's a good number of parents who liked the 'whole language' teacher. No doubt she could host kids in her basement, cash in their vouchers and never again have to deal with 'phonics nuts' at the school board meeting.
But that wasn't my point. My point was if public schools are such a great racket for teachers and their unions why isn't public doctoring an idea the AMA and doctors are demanding? As you say they already got the barriers to entry so why not?
Weird. I wouldn't actually propose to ban it if I could. A modest amount of competition from a Charter School seems to have reformed the curriculum, though. Why wouldn't vouchers? I'm equating the two, and there are surely differences, but the mechanism is similar. Besides, it might not have, but I'd still have the choice not to have my kids victimized by creative spelling and grammar (and some pretty weird ideas about experiment construction). Without moving!
I still don't understand what this is, other than a place to vote and meet, but it doesn't do anything for me. Maybe because I don't have any fantasies about banning curricula I don't like. How, exactly, is providing a voucher *making* anyone stay?Interesting argument. Does it carry over to healthcare? If you're saying relieve people of the property tax and let everyone decide how to spend the money - I'm all for it. But if you are redistributing taxpayer money - alignment of interests (in other words the money has to be used for the kids) is critical, hence vouchers or some other form of control. It seems like this argument of yours, if accepted, would support gutting the public school system altogether - why not spend the money on whatever the parents want?
Re: calling him "Mindless." Do you know where he got his pseudonym in the first place?
Re: "By the way, does the "Remember personal info?" box ever work for anyone else?"
Not for me. I have "Add Block Plus" installed, but I have it disabled for this site. I have Noscript installed but theatlantic.com is white listed.
I notice I have the option to allow or disallow 38.118.71.136, but I've left that disabled.
There's even a link! With a picture of me brandishing my "widdle shoe" as SOV would have it.
I just figure people are committing the same typo in reverse. Ah, the good old days. back when you were clerking, right Stuart?
Weird. I wouldn't actually propose to ban it if I could. A modest amount of competition from a Charter School seems to have reformed the curriculum, though. Why wouldn't vouchers? I'm equating the two, and there are surely differences, but the mechanism is similar.
Quite possible, but not paying for it is not the same as banning it. I'm not totally opposed to vouchers but I dislike them being pushed down as though they are some type of right and I dislike their skeptics being depicted as depriving children of anything.
Besides, it might not have, but I'd still have the choice not to have my kids victimized by creative spelling and grammar (and some pretty weird ideas about experiment construction). Without moving!
You always had that choice and still do.
Interesting argument. Does it carry over to healthcare? If you're saying relieve people of the property tax and let everyone decide how to spend the money - I'm all for it.
Last time I checked the earned income tax credit could be spent on anything, including healthcare. It is not funded by property tax, property tax is mostly determined at your local level so decide in your own community what relief you need and convince your fellow citizens to vote for it.
But if you are redistributing taxpayer money - alignment of interests (in other words the money has to be used for the kids) is critical, hence vouchers or some other form of control. It seems like this argument of yours, if accepted, would support gutting the public school system altogether - why not spend the money on whatever the parents want?
What seems to be pretty clear to me is that there's something else going on with public schools other than simply doing stuff for kids. If that's what it was all about and only about then local control would have ended a long time ago and the public schools would be administered thru the state or Federal gov't and yes vouchers or something like them probably would have been enacted.
That's not all they are about, though. It seems public schools are an element of the community which means more are benefitting from them than just the kids (and their parents) who go to them. Keep in mind here you are not designing a system from scratch. Voucherites often seem to be under the delusion that public schools are coming from state capitals or Washington DC when they are coming from local towns. To institute a real voucher program means taking over local rule and replacing it with vouchers. Yet local rule seems to be quite stubborn and not just because of teachers unions. Property tax is an endless argument in NJ and the easiest thing in the world seems to be to simply say "each student, $10,000 per year funded by sales/income tax...no more property tax 'cept for the local police, fire, and municiple building". No need to do vouchers, you could just give that to whatever public schools have kids. Many liberals would actually go along in a heartbeat since the cities are always saying property tax creates unequal schools since rich neighborhoods are able to generate a lot of revenue per kid.
Yet over and over again it doesn't happen. If anything, the movement seems to be to reinforce local rule rather than undermine it. Look at the No Child Left Behind Act, for example. It basically says local towns have to report honestly to parents how the schools are doing. In other words it reinfoces this idea that the schools are run locally. Ideas for national standards were essentially gutted.
I suspect parks are a good analogy here. If it was just about giving people a place to exercise and have fun you would get the job done with vouchers yet don't look for 'park vouchers' anywhere and it isn't because the park maintence workers union is second only to the NEA in policial power.
Yes indeed. Goodness, I can't believe it's been almost six years since your nickname arose.
My point about the difference between medical credentials and teaching credentials is that there is a lot more genuine expertise involved in medicine, so it doesn't add much to the cost of care to certify it, and it can save information costs for some State agency to do so. Medical skills are rare enough, or difficult enough to acquire, that doctors don't need to hide behind institutions to make a good living. There is next to nothing behind teachers' expertise beyond subject-area competence, ability to communicate, and compassion. The $400+ billion per year US K-12 school system provides artificially high incomes to swarms of out-of-classroom parasites (e.g., "Resource teachers", curriculum specialists, and Professors of Education). Even real instruction is fraud if students and/or parents wouldn't buy it without coercion, or if the skill involved could be acquired more cheaply.
Here's a thought experiment: Take two comparable school districts. Leave one unchanged (the control) and substitute an extra period of recess for "social studies" for the first 11 years in the other district (the treatment group). Let treatment group students know that their diploma will depend in part on a 12th grade exam in the form of multiple choice questions and essay-length book reviews of any six books (at least one from each category) from a 300-item Chinese menu of A: World History, B: European History, C: US History, D: Anthropology, Economics, Political Science, Psychology, and Sociology. Give them a study hall (no instruction) for one period per day in place of 12th grade Social Studies. Test students in both categories at age 25 to see how much they retain. My money would be on the treatment group.
Government is government. Why the distinction? And I restate my question - shall we then just have a cash subsidy for health insurance/healthcare instead of creating more federal insurance bureaucracy? Maybe you've already cast your vote in favor of this.
The requirement for public schools does not reside with my community, it resides with the state of NJ (and indirectly with the federal government via DOE directives). Actually, one could argue most of the education mandates in NJ come from its supreme court, and there's bugger-all my vote can do about it. And we still spend more than $15k to educate each kid in Camden NJ with abysmal results.
But you are right about this much - vouchers wouldn't pass in my town if we wrapped the ballot in $1000 bills. It's amazing how a bunch of highly privileged pharmaceutical execs, university professors and hedge fund managers are able to express that much solidarity with the public school system. Which goes to Megan's original point...
WE interrupt this thread to bring you important breaking news from my Bloomberg terminal. Giselle Bundchen is giving up on the dollar! Sell, sell..
My point about the difference between medical credentials and teaching credentials is that there is a lot more genuine expertise involved in medicine, so it doesn't add much to the cost of care to certify it, and it can save information costs for some State agency to do so. Medical skills are rare enough, or difficult enough to acquire, that doctors don't need to hide behind institutions to make a good living.
Yet the medical profession gets very antsy at even the slightest intrusion.
Take two comparable school districts.... Test students in both categories at age 25 to see how much they retain. My money would be on the treatment group.
Perhaps but so what? You know with the complaints about 'whole language' it would seem that another reason vouchers aren't taking off anywhere is too much experimentation. Do we really really need thousands of 'experiments'? It seems like there's 80% agreement on what things should be taught, maybe 15% variation in local cultures and 5% honest disagreement that is over-hyped by pundits looking for a 'culture war'.
Mindles
I do, yes. But how can vouchers simultaneously *force* people to move from Newark while not providing any additional choice? You seem to think they are all powerful or meaningless. Which is it?
No, no, again I'm not saying vouchers don't add choices to the parents plate. I'm saying the problem is vouchers are taking choices from the taxpayers plate and therein is the problem with an otherwise foolproof plan. The people you're taking the choices from really want to keep them to a large degree and since they are paying it's going to be their dollar that rules.
The requirement for public schools does not reside with my community, it resides with the state of NJ (and indirectly with the federal government via DOE directives).
Yes they also require you to feed your kid, healthcare, exercise, etc.
But you are right about this much - vouchers wouldn't pass in my town if we wrapped the ballot in $1000 bills. It's amazing how a bunch of highly privileged pharmaceutical execs, university professors and hedge fund managers are able to express that much solidarity with the public school system. Which goes to Megan's original point...
Solidarity with the public school? Sounds like solidarity with their own tax dollars. Don't believe me? Try getting the "park vouchers" to pass in your town, then tell me about the evil park workers union.
Do I have to read through all these comments to make the obvious point?
The purpose of public education in America isn't education. It's providing daycare for working parents and a jobs program for otherwise only marginally employable people - oh, and those people happen to form a solid voting bloc.
This is why you can't have a rational argument about applying market forces to education, any more than you can have a rational argument about the benefits of preschool, because again, that's not really about the benefits to the 3 and 4yos, but about freeing up one part of the workforce for their shifts at Walmart and channeling eough tax dollars to another part of the workforce so that they can pay off their student loans. Americans simply enjoy pretending this exercise in social control has something to do with education.
However, the schools vs. parks analogy doesn't work for me. Schools don't improve your view, education can be provided in a variety of locations, and parks consume a small amount of your tax dollars. The problem is that the teachers and bureaucrats are embedded in the community and their organizations have tremendous power at the state level. Parks employees enjoy none of these advantages.
So..I see neither an analogy nor a point here, other than indirectly impugning the proposition (which I haven't made) that vouchers get voted down solely because of teacher's unions.
I'm still scratching my head over the idea that non-parent taxpayer influence over schools constitutes "Choice" in any meaningful way. I see where you are headed- we have influence at the ballot box. We can, perhaps, effect building decisions (but not likely curriculum). I can do that under vouchers (although I wouldn't) through zoning rules, curriculum mandates, etc.
In my town its simply because my neighbors take democratic party positions reflexively (and often admit as much) and because the public school teachers bend their ears about it endlessly.
One of the reasons I can seem like a knee-jerk right-winger is I'm a knee-jerk conventional wisdom-opposer, and the conventional wisdom around me (since birth) is essentially whatever the New York Times says (except for my cousin the neo-marxist who finds them 'too zionist', and another cousin who is a socialist party officer).
that's not really about the benefits to the 3 and 4yos, but about freeing up one part of the workforce for their shifts at Walmart and channeling eough tax dollars to another part of the workforce so that they can pay off their student loans
I wouldn't put it this way but there's truth in that. Not only that, it isn't necessarily a bad thing.
In addition to raw education public schools also do things like:
1. Keep kids off the street
2. Put kids in 'storage' while they are young and immature. Let's face it, we don't have a wild west anymore and the frontier is long gone. Teenagers, educated well or not, will tend to get themselves in trouble and our society has little room for people to get in trouble anymore. In many ways schools are a type of preventative detention.
3. Social engineering - Kids are not the personal property of parents. People have an interest in not only seeing that they are educated but that society 'churns' a bit. In other words the classes mix together (to a degree). This keeps everyone down to earth.
Needless to say, no one is going to run for school board on that plank but I don't think it's totally unreasonable and I think the benefit of those things go beyond the actual kids.
Public schools, therefore, are an ingeneous way of accomplishing those goals without forcing anything on anyone. You have to educate your kids and the community prices the public school at $0. You are free to ignore all those goals of society above by, say, hiring your own private tutors but most people will take the free good.
It's not unlike public libraries. You can read books for free because the community would rather have bookreaders hanging around than, say, soccar hooligans. So reading books are free but there's no place to borrow clubs and Molotov cocktails for free.
Hmmm ... you mean I didn't write this:
Stuart, I get that you're not literate in scientific procedure, basic statistics, etc. Shrug. If you're interested, I'd suggest you enroll in some classes - you might like basic statistics and probability, and it's not that hard(frankly, I'm puzzled as to why you care what I think about these things; I certainly don't care about what you think, given that you simply don't know enough to have an opinion worth listening to.)
But why lie about what I had written? That just makes no sense.
Mindless, thanks for demonstrating why people don't think much of the habits of libertarians. After being rather nasty before actually checking the facts of the matter, and after having taken the trouble to point out just why I felt the way I did, you could have, at the least, tendered an apology; you know, taken some of that personal responsibility. You did neither, in fact, acted as if your shoot-from-the-cuff remarks were somehow amusing. And to top it off, you did not even remotely chastise other posters with the same energy when they were behaving extremely badly at a time I know you had to have seen it.
Shrug.
You know, when I say I used to be extremely sympathetic to libertarians and their ideas, you might actually consider the possibility that I was, in fact, extremely sympathetic to libertarians and their ideas, rather than acting as if I'm just trying to zoom you.
And when I tell you why, the hypocrisy, the bad behaviour, the refusal to take responsibility for mistakes, the tribablism, the clinging to bad scientific practices, you might actually consider that in fact, those were precisely the reasons why I quite the whole movement in disgust. The reasons, in fact, why vast swathes of the public are disgusted with them.
This 'you hate us because we're libertarians' schtick is well past is sell by date.
Yes, Scent, in your first post about the Cleveland study, you did briefly admit that voucher students were superior in "three subcategories." But you immediately and completely backtracked on that initial putative concession.
For example, when I pointed out that it's actually pretty impressive that voucher students are nearly a grade ahead in those three subcategories -- language, science, social studies -- you denied that it is impressive at all, preferring instead to accuse the study's authors of lying:
And then, in that same comment, you characterized the Cleveland study as follows: This is what I said -- and continue to say -- is a dishonest description of the Cleveland study. It's dishonest to deny that the voucher students were found to be nearly a grade ahead in three subjects, and to claim instead that the only relevant finding is "no overall statistical difference."I also note that it's classic trolling methodology that rather than defend or support your arguments, you start posting on a meta-level about how the commenters here are so unkind, and that's why they are unpopular, etc.
Stuart, you're flat-out lying. I am quoting exactly what you said:
This directly contradicts what you just posted:
Good God, man! Why is it so hard for you to admit you make mistakes? Now, why don't you be a good responsibility-taking liberatarian and just say "I was wrong." Trust me, it won't kill you.
Scent -- The comment to which I was responding did indeed "leave[] it at that" -- namely, by stating that the study found "no overall statistical difference," and by ridiculing the notion that the study found significant differences in three subjects.
I might add, for anyone who is remotely interested in the facts, that 'statistically significant at the p=0.05 level' does not mean what apparently Stuart and others think it means. I suggest that they actually take a course in introductory probability and statistics - it's really quite fun, and useful as well - to get an understanding of what people mean when making these statements, especially in a scientific context. But for those who can't do this just right now, here is a brief article that is well worth the read in that at least it clears up some misconceptions at to what 'statistical significance' means:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-value
If it will satisfy you: I was wrong to the extent that I implied that you had never, in any earlier comment, briefly acknowledged that the Cleveland voucher study found that voucher students were superior in three subjects. I was not wrong, however, in pointing out that your later comment was engaged in denialism as to that exact finding, preferring instead to claim that the study's authors didn't know what they were talking about (i.e., in having found that voucher recipients were nearly a grade ahead in those three subjects).
Now, when did you ever admit that you were incorrect about my cited studies on the benefits of Catholic schooling? You first claimed that the studies showed the "opposite" -- clearly wrong. You then insinuated that the studies were not about test scores, but only addressed graduation rates and college attendance -- also clearly wrong.
You're a piece of work, Stuart. Congratulations. You've made it abundantly clear that it is pointless in engaging you any further.
No, don't bother, I'll say it for you: must be because I'm 'liberally biased' or a 'Statist'. Something like that.
Scent -- no one is resting anything on p-values here. However, in light of your sneering at a voucher study based on eyeballing the raw test scores, and especially in light of your repeated inability to explain yourself, a review of this article might come in handy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percentile_rank
or perhaps this one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_deviation
If you know what those concepts are already, of course, then you were being dishonest (no wonder you don't use your real name) in sneering at the Cleveland percentile results (three times!) on the theory that 650 points is only a little bit higher than 640.
Ack, I'm falling for another classic troll technique. Spew out a bunch of posts that mischaracterize (or mostly ignore) the evidence; wait for any response that contains the most minor inaccuracy in describing any of the troll's many posts; then try to divert the whole thread into an attack on the minor misstatement.
Boomton argues that the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel's schools keep kids off the streets. So also would voucher-subsidized schools, unless your legislature repealed compulsory attendance statutes.
Boomton argues that compulsory attendance at a State-monopoly school system promotes social mixing. Empirical evidence indicates otherwise:...
a) Assignment by district segregates students by parents' income (and so, also, by race).
b) Jay Greene finds that students in State-monopoly schools are more likely to sit in racially segregated groups where seating is voluntary (in the school cafeteria) than are students in parochial schools.
c) Herman Brutsaert found higher mean test score performance AND a LOWER coefficient of regression (score, parent SES) in parochial schools than in State schools in Belgium.
State schools exacerbate segregation and inequality.
(Boomton): "I suspect parks are a good analogy here. If it was just about giving people a place to exercise and have fun you would get the job done with vouchers yet don't look for 'park vouchers' anywhere and it isn't because the park maintence workers union is second only to the NEA in policial power."
In Hawaii, the AFSCME represents State and County park workers. The AFSCME strenuously resists contracting-out maintenence work at State and County facilities.
The NEA and AFSCME coordinate lobbying activity through COPE.
I think you have lost the plot. I certainly don't owe you an apology. The quotations you cited were mild. It was just "they started it" and no substantiation of same, If I haven't held others to the same standard, that's not my obligation. I refer you again to my all-purpose failure to denounce disclaimer and insist that I am not "objectively pro-commenter abuse" in (allegedly) failing to police it evenhandedly.
And apparently this fabricated offense has something to do with the me being a libertarian (whatever your definition is). Over and over again.
You suggested Stuart take classes in statistics - Let me give you a response in your own tone: Sigh. why don't you try courses in reading comprehension, logic and manners. It's really quite easy - even for a kook. Screeching and waxing indignant about something that Just Ain't So will not win you any converts. What a Maroon. Chuckle.
There. How's that sit?
Yeah, Boomton, there's no obvious problems with people lying about their real goals.
Nope, nothing to see here, move on.
http://junkfoodscience.blogspot.com/2007/11/universal-child-care-are-our-children.html
Chuckle. The fact that you fail to denounce members of your own bizarre little tribe is just a coincidence, nothing to do with identity politics at all. Uh-huh.
Sigh. I have never said you under any obligation not to be as nasty or as hypocritical as you wish. I'm merely pointing out that you are indeed, being nasty and hypocritical . . . and that it's not me who is forcing you to be so.
But I have far better things than watch you fling feces, amusing as it as been, briefly.
Buh-bye.
You suggested Stuart take classes in statistics
I'm not sure what to do about that, Mindles. I did take an intro to statistics and econometrics class at Harvard, and I always thought I understood such issues as the difference between percentages and percentiles. But now I'm really worried. Maybe SOV's three posts above are right, and by definition there can't be a 12-15 point jump in percentile rank if there was only a 2 percent jump in raw scores (in the 600 range). Wow, I hate to think of all the things that I may have completely misinterpreted for all these years.
Anyway, I'd vote to ban SOV permanently. He shows all the signs of a classic troll, and nary a sign of a good faith debater.
-- Ignores 95% of the evidence that other people cite, even to the point of claiming that they have failed to cite anything. Check.
-- Tells demonstrable lies about the findings of cited studies. Check.
-- Makes errors so egregious that they have to be deliberate, apparently just to goad people into responding. Check.
-- Contends that everyone else is making assertions as to which they, and they alone, bear a "burden of proof," even while never even trying to explain, let alone support, his own assertions. Check.
-- Whenever his assertions are exposed as unsupported or ludicrous, immediately launches an attack on everyone else for not being polite enough, for supposedly misconstruing his position, for responding to his most recent comment rather than a contradictory earlier comment, etc., etc. Check.
-- Rampant use of insulting language. Check.
-- Pretends to be sincerely concerned about the popularity of the people whom he attacks [here, compounding the error by describing people as libertarians who are not libertarians]. Check.
--
Add incipient paranoia:
Repeatedly complain that Megan is censoring comments. When Megan devotes a whole post to explaining that she never does that without saying so, and that her spam filter sometimes eats them, do not even acknowledge the excuse, much less accept it. Go on complaining about lost comments as if Megan had never posted on the subject. (It happens to the best of us: I've had two comments disappear into the spam filter, never to be seen again, just on this thread.)
Right, forgot that one. I've had several comments myself that never showed up. That Megan, censoring us voucher supporters . . . .
Chuckle. Sigh. Sniff.
Move fast so you don't imagine the door hitting your pompous tush on the way out.
...he's gone? Shhh - he might still be outside.
OK. Let's exchange the secret libertarian handshake and sing the club song!
Roses are red and Scent of Violets is blue
Sigh. He's a paranoid genius and you started it.
Boomton argues that compulsory attendance at a State-monopoly school system promotes social mixing.
I doubt the vouchers would require that schools accepting them coordinate hours of operation and holidays.
a) Assignment by district segregates students by parents' income (and so, also, by race).
True, although most of the population is spread out enough that only one or two schools are reasonably close enough to travel too (people are willing to commute a lot further to work). The segregation then is limited to how much a community is segregated. Even in the richest or poorest communities, though, you will have some people who are poorer and some richer.
b) Jay Greene finds that students in State-monopoly schools are more likely to sit in racially segregated groups where seating is voluntary (in the school cafeteria) than are students in parochial schools.
Parochial schools benefit from a host of factors that I don't think can be replicated on the scale of the public school. One of the primary ones, I suspect, is parents spend their own money on parochial schools. Vouchers are not really the parents money so its not quite the same thing. An expanded EITC, on the other hand, would be.
c) Herman Brutsaert found higher mean test score performance AND a LOWER coefficient of regression (score, parent SES) in parochial schools than in State schools in Belgium.
So what?
In Hawaii, the AFSCME represents State and County park workers. The AFSCME strenuously resists contracting-out maintenence work at State and County facilities.
Somehow I doubt much of that lobbying is spent on fighting 'park vouchers'.
(malcolm): "Boomton argues that compulsory attendance at a State-monopoly school system promotes social mixing."
(Boomton): "I doubt the vouchers would require that schools accepting them coordinate hours of operation and holidays."
Sounds like the above was a response to:
(malcolm): "Boomton argues that the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel's schools keep kids off the streets. So also would voucher-subsidized schools, unless your legislature repealed compulsory attendance statutes" so I'll adress that. Boomton's response is not an objection to school vouchers but to either repeal of compulsory attendance statutes or to uncoordinated school years.
Anyway, this concern is misplaced, as I already observed. Schools don't prevent crime; they cause it.
(Malcolm): "Boomton argues that compulsory attendance at a State-monopoly school system promotes social mixing. Empirical evidence indicates otherwise:...
a) Assignment by district segregates students by parents' income (and so, also, by race)."
(Boomton): "True, although most of the population is spread out enough that only one or two schools are reasonably close enough to travel too (people are willing to commute a lot further to work). The segregation then is limited to how much a community is segregated. Even in the richest or poorest communities, though, you will have some people who are poorer and some richer."
So this objection to school vouchers evaporates,right?
(malcolm): "b) Jay Greene finds that students in State-monopoly schools are more likely to sit in racially segregated groups where seating is voluntary (in the school cafeteria) than are students in parochial schools."
(Boomton): "Parochial schools benefit from a host of factors that I don't think can be replicated on the scale of the public school. One of the primary ones, I suspect, is parents spend their own money on parochial schools. Vouchers are not really the parents money so its not quite the same thing. An expanded EITC, on the other hand, would be."
One resource which parents spend in a voucher environment is their children's time. To the degree that policymakers expand parents' options, tuition vouchers replicate this aspect of parochial schools. In an environment of compulsory attendance at State-operated schools, all resources are simply requisitioned by the State. Also, bundled vouchers, education tax credits deductible from taxes owed, or parent performance contracting address Boomton's objection. Anyway, I'm unclear how this disputes the rebuttal to Boomton's contention that State-monopoly schools promote tolerance.
(Malcolm): "c) Herman Brutsaert found higher mean test score performance AND a LOWER coefficient of regression (score, parent SES) in parochial schools than in State schools in Belgium."
(Boomton): "So what?"
Thanks for that admission.
Well, reducing the SES-related performance gap will reduce subsequent occupation-related segregation and so reduce income-related and race-related segregation in the next generation of school students.
(malcolm): "In Hawaii, the AFSCME represents State and County park workers. The AFSCME strenuously resists contracting-out maintenence work at State and County facilities."
(Boomton): "Somehow I doubt much of that lobbying is spent on fighting 'park vouchers'."
If people could use only one park in a year, the difference between contracting-out park maintenence and park vouchers would be minor.
One resource which parents spend in a voucher environment is their children's time. To the degree that policymakers expand parents' options, tuition vouchers replicate this aspect of parochial schools. In an environment of compulsory attendance at State-operated schools, all resources are simply requisitioned by the State. Also, bundled vouchers, education tax credits deductible from taxes owed, or parent performance contracting address Boomton's objection. Anyway, I'm unclear how this disputes the rebuttal to Boomton's contention that State-monopoly schools promote tolerance.
1. Attendence at state operated schools is not compulsory. Educating your child is compulsory. You are allowed to, for example, employ private tutors to educate your child at any hour of the day you wish.
2. State schools are not a monopoly anymore than Internet Explorer is a monopoly. Anyone may open a school. Yes state schools being free give them an advantage then again so do state parks. Nevertheless it would be bizaar for country club owners to complain about 'state monopolies' in recreation.
Anyway, this concern is misplaced, as I already observed. Schools don't prevent crime; they cause it.
No evidence of this has been cited. Perhaps you can point to studies where higher than average truency rates are associated with lower crime rates?
So this objection to school vouchers evaporates,right?
Not really, all that was cited is that segregation happens in public schools. So what? The experience of a minority of children in parachoial schools cannot be assumed to scale to the rest of society.
Yea perhaps parents will spend 'time' selecting a school with vouchers that is still hardly the same thing as spending their own cash. Why this amazing resistence to actually putting cash in parents hands and letting them decide for themselves how to use it? For all the carping about the power of the teachers unions perhaps there's some power here behind those who would benefit from the private school industry that would benefit greatly from tapping tax dollars.
Well, reducing the SES-related performance gap will reduce subsequent occupation-related segregation and so reduce income-related and race-related segregation in the next generation of school students.
I fail to see a study comparing public schools in Belgium with parochial schools in Belgium as very a damming piece of evidence. Is the Belgium public school system structured in a very similiar way to the US system? Are their parochial schools like US schools for that matter? Are their 'performance gaps', income and race related segregation issues like the US's?
If people could use only one park in a year, the difference between contracting-out park maintenence and park vouchers would be minor.
In all practicality parks are a similiar type of 'monopoly'. They are usually available for free or at a price that is below cost so it's pretty hard for many private parks to compete directly with them. Their geographic stretch is also pretty limited...a parent will be unlikely to spend 45 minutes instead of 15 minutes driving their kid to a playground unless the former playground is dramatically impressive.
If you tried to rate parks by figuring out how many pounds of fat they get their citizens to burn away, how many people fully utilize them etc. you're probably going to find it quite easy to produce lots of metrics deploring the 'failure' of public parks. Likewise 'park vouchers' would probably win by these measures. But good luck trying to get communities to adopt park vouchers. Why? Because communities use parks as a public good that extends beyond the people that use them. Park vouchers would defeat the purpose by just providing the private benefit while killing the public benefit.
Now the solution to your logical arguments (and voucher advocates do have some) is simply cash. Child credits, EITC, negative income tax, or whatever are superior because they can be used for the best marginal benefit. In some cases this will be leaving public schools and enrolling kids in private schools. In other cases, though, it may mean hiring a part-time tutor...something vouchers probably won't be able to be easily used for as both private and public schools stand to lose a chunck of 'voucher pork'...maybe buying a computer or like I said even changing the family's living situation such as moving out of a dysfunctional neighborhood. In that dept. vouchers seem to be a nice way of keeping people segregated. Those stuck in ghettos have to stay there because using their vouchers for anything other than schooling would be fraud and even if schools in their limited areas do improve the fact remains they are still stuck. A single mother trying to raise a kid in Camdem NJ would probably benefit more by being able to move 15 miles than seeing the local school system become ten times better.
(Boomton): "1. Attendence at state operated schools is not compulsory. Educating your child is compulsory. You are allowed to, for example, employ private tutors to educate your child at any hour of the day you wish."
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."--Anatole France
There are compulsory attendance laws on the books in all 50 US States.
(Boomton): "2. State schools are not a monopoly anymore than Internet Explorer is a monopoly. Anyone may open a school. Yes state schools being free give them an advantage then again so do state parks. Nevertheless it would be bizaar for country club owners to complain about 'state monopolies' in recreation."
In most US States, statutes or constitutionsl provisions restrict parents' options for the use of the taxpayers' pre-college education subsidy to schools operated by State (government, generally) employees. In most US States, the NEA/AFT/AFSCME cartel's schools occupy an exclusive position in receipt of the taxpayers' pre-college education subsidy. They qualify as a monopoly.
(malcolm): "Schools don't prevent crime; they cause it."
(Boomton): "No evidence of this has been cited. Perhaps you can point to studies where higher than average truency rates are associated with lower crime rates?"
I tried several times to get Megan's site to accept the links, but it won't. It has accepted the link to Parent Performance Contracting, so just go there and read the posts on violence.