As an academic, I worked where affirmative action does most of its work: higher ed.
Each semester, I would get an e-mail from administration asking how one or two students were doing in my class. Peculiarly (I thought), they always happened to ask about the one or two D or F students in a class of perhaps 60 people, all with better grades.
Upon reviewing the exams of these one or two students, I found they were completely clueless about the material. They had missed the basics that I had thought everyone should have already known. (Imagine teaching a geometry class but discovering on the exam that the student can’t add. Your course is not helping them, but there they are anyway.)
It was only in my sixth year of teaching that I found out how the administrators were able to predict which students were doing poorly. The students they asked about were affirmative action admits. These students were (not) coincidentally always lost in class. The administration polled professors about these students because they tended to fail classes, and they needed advance notice to be able to assign tutors to keep these students afloat on a semester-by-semester basis.
Irrespective of the merits of affirmative action, my personal experience left me horrified by its ineffectiveness. The students perhaps would graduate with a degree at the very bottom of their class, which would send them back to their old neighborhood to do something they could have done without the degree. I’ve worked for a few “equal-opportunity” employers, and all that means is that we went to minority-targeted job fairs and posted jobs in minority-targeted publications. Minorities were extended no courtesy in hiring decisions, so the benefits accruing to these students were probably minimal.
I know that affirmative action isn’t supposed to work like this. AA students are supposed to be only a bit off from the students they displace, but that wasn’t my experience at two large state universities.
—
Of course, this is not the whole story. The whole story would include a note about how these students were actually among the top students back in their neighborhoods. Acceptance into a state university was the least that we could do for these students. And when I say “the least we could do”, I mean it literally.
The legal justifications for affirmative action entertained by the Supreme Court and covered by Burt last week were just that: legal justifications. All the talk of redressing past wrongs or diversity are intellectual veneer that hides our true particle board motives.
I hypothesize* that our main motives are to entrench our current social order. We on top don’t want K-12 education to be equal throughout America. Truly leveling K-12 education would horrify even middle-class parents. Especially middle-class parents.
Acknowledging this, of course, is not an option. It’s too horrific to admit. But the guilt still burns, so we soothe it with the balm of affirmative action. And if that doesn’t work, there’s always the safety net. Head Start, Obamacare, progressive taxation, and all the rest are morsels of compassion engineered to excuse us from the need to fix K-12.
* Everything in the post beyond this point is speculative. But that doesn’t mean it’s wrong.
I’d like to know what you mean by leveling k-12 education, the frequently stated notion that inner city schools is false. With the exception of a few ultra-wealthy areas (including resort areas where the year round residents are mostly lower middle class) inner city schools spend more per pupil than suburban areas. Here is the data from Massachusetts: the wealthy town of Belmont(home of Mitt Romney) spends $11,969 while the city of Boston spends $16,902, Boston has a commercial tax base that other poor communities don’t so let’s look at some other inner city area Holyoke spends $15,422, Springfield spends $14,635 Lawrence, the most dysfunctional city in the state spends $20,764. The idea that inner city schools have fewer resources is objectively false.
Thanks for bringing this up. I was not referring to spending per pupil, which is probably a mediocre indicator of actual quality. I’m referring to differences in school quality. This is probably most heavily influenced by the quality of instruction, but also probably includes peer effects and the surrounding environment in which the school is located.
Ok, the other problems are much more difficult to fix and aren’t the result of unequal treatment in the way that funding differences would be. Most large cities are taking steps to improve quality of instruction and are being opposed every step of the way by the teacher unions. Peer effects would imply that the input from the students and parents is part of the problem but no one ever seems to say this.
And peer effects would also be affected by the fact that big cities have selective admission high schools while suburban schools just have AP classes.
bullshit, if you think suburban schools don’t boot out the violent/low-achievers, you haven’t been paying attention.
bullshit, if you think suburban schools don’t boot out the violent/low-achievers, you haven’t been paying attention.
Are you saying that it’s easy to expel a student form a suburban school? It is nearly impossible unless they bring a weapon to school.
dand,
It’s called “send the kid to votech”, or at least it was when my high school was playing that game.
It’s called “send the kid to votech”, or at least it was when my high school was playing that game.
The kids I know who went to vocational school all learned valuable skills and as of about five years ago when I was last in contact with them were making more money than the kids who went to regular high school.
dand,
your votech seems like it worked better than ours. Or maybe you just knew folks who really wanted to be there. (I once heard of a votech that taught calculus! that’s a different flavor than the one that teaches horticulture).
>Peer effects would imply that the input from the students and parents is part of the
> problem but no one ever seems to say this.
Teachers unions say this.
This is probably most heavily influenced by the quality of instruction, but also probably includes peer effects and the surrounding environment in which the school is located.
I’ll take a little quibble here.
I think the quality of instruction thing isn’t monolithic. There are really, really exceptional teachers who can take 30 kids with no parental support and poor socioeconomic backgrounds and bad neighborhoods and get them all to pass the AP Calc exam, legitimately. That is, unfortunately, a very small percentage of the good teachers.
The good teachers aren’t that good. They can overcome some of those obstacles for some of those kids. Not all of them.
I don’t think there are enough really, really exceptional teachers to meet the need, even if we put them all to work in the worst schools. I’m not sure we could have enough really, really exceptional teachers if we paid them according to their actual scarcity, either.
I agree that “let’s just hire exceptional teachers and put them everywhere” is probably not going to work. There aren’t enough exceptional teachers, so we would then work on redefining “exceptional” to mean everyone who is already there.
I don’t know what exact form solutions to the problem would take. What troubles me is not that Vikram’s Foolproof Solution hasn’t been universally adopted, but that we aren’t trying imperfect solutions in an attempt to find something better than what we have now. My thesis is that there is a strong bias against doing anything that isn’t guaranteed to work because we don’t actually want anything to change.
I think the increasing teacher pay could eventually improve the quality of teaching by making it a more attractive career, however in order to do that you need to make sure the teachers are actually high quality.
That’s kind of the rub, isn’t it? I have no problem paying teachers more so that we can recruit better teachers, but don’t want to pay teachers more if it doesn’t actually result in the recruitment of more and better teachers.
Which sorta ties into Vik’s second paragraph @3:52. I have a hard time figuring out what to do with this.
@dand
The best way to make teaching an attractive career is to not expect teachers to handle discipline in the classrooms. Too many good people are driven away by the shitheads*.
When a student misbehaves and is sent back to the classroom anyway, that is demoralizing. When the number of students sent to the office is held against a teacher at evaluation time, that is demoralizing. A camera in every classroom would do wonders.
*This category includes both students and administrators.
Scarlet,
I disagree.
A major issue in the recruitment and retention of talented teachers is the ability to identify what good teaching is. If you look at many of the methods employed for evaluating teachers, well, they are pretty piss poor. This in part stems from a lack of clarity around the purpose of education. So before we start to discuss practical, on-the-ground solutions, I think we need to have much more broader conversations about the very purpose of education, how we serve that purpose, and how we identify those capable of doing so.
The best way to make teaching an attractive career is to not expect teachers to handle discipline in the classrooms. Too many good people are driven away by the shitheads*.
I think switching from defined benefit to defined contribution retirement plans would improve teacher quality. The vast majority of my teachers over the age of 50 put in minimal effort and were openly counting down the days to retirement while the younger teachers were very dedicated. Switching to a 401(K) type retirement plan would eliminate the need for them to keep a job when they were clearly burned out.
A major issue in the recruitment and retention of talented teachers is the ability to identify what good teaching is. If you look at many of the methods employed for evaluating teachers, well, they are pretty piss poor.
as a student it was easy for me to tell the good teacher from the bad ones, i’m sure most principals can as well
Most principals don’t have the time to do the sort of evaluations necessary to make that determination. Plus you have cronyism and strong unions that often fight firings.
And, again, we don’t necessarily have a clear vision of what we want teachers to do with which to judge them against.
You might have identified “good” and “bad” teachers based on how fun their classes were. That may not be the best criteria for truly assessing competency.
My issue is that I think big city schools spend money very inefficiently and I think that not the lack of funds is why the outcomes are poor. In smaller poor places it might be different.
What evidence do you have to support your theory that big city schools spend money very inefficiently?
Also, who here argued that the “lack of funds is why the outcomes are poor”?
the high amount of money they spend on “administration”.
i’m not sure if anyone here made that claim or not.
Source for info on the high amount of money spent on administration?
And what is your response to the things I listed that can contribute to variance in per pupil spending?
http://www.csef-air.org/publications/seep/national/AdvRpt1.PDF
Nationwide, per pupil spending on students with special needs was 1.9 times that of per pupil spending on regular education students. This is based on data from 1999-2000 and presuming a slight downward trend over the preceding 15 years, it might be somewhat lower than that today.
Source for info on the high amount of money spent on administration?
Boston spends twice as much per pupil on administration as suburban Dracut on administration
And what is your response to the things I listed that can contribute to variance in per pupil spending?
i’ll respond to you point by point when you respond to me point by point
Source for info on the high amount of money spent on administration?
Boston spends twice as much per pupil on administration as suburban Dracut on administration
And what is your response to the things I listed that can contribute to variance in per pupil spending?
i’ll respond to you point by point when you respond to me point by point
Are Dracut and Boston an apples-to-apples comparison? I can hypothesize, though can’t prove, of many legitimate reasons for Boston spending more per pupil on administration than Dracut.
As for responding point-by-point, what I offered there WAS a response to what I understand your point to be, which seems to be that variance in per pupil spending is solely or primarily a function of waste and that per pupil spending doesn’t impact outcomes anyway. On the first, I’m offering you examples of non-wasteful factors that impact per pupil spending; on the latter, my experience in schools has taught me that spending is one of many factors that impacts outcomes.
Are Dracut and Boston an apples-to-apples comparison?
one is a big city one is a suburb no such comparison will ever be perfect but my point was that big cities spend more on administration than suburbs and that people i know who work for big city governments have all reported that they are run inefficiently. by contrast suburban municipal governments have almost no waste.
which seems to be that variance in per pupil spending is solely or primarily a function of waste
No there are legitimate reasons for urban schools to be spending more money, my point was that big city government is much less efficient than suburban governments and this includes schools. Teachers unions will claim that the administrators are wasting money during contract negations then forget about it when advocating for increased funding.
per pupil spending doesn’t impact outcomes anyway.
For big city schools I don’t think funding is the issue, in smaller communities I think increased funding will lead to improved outcomes(when lived in suburban Boston I voted for tax hikes to increase school funding if one were on the ballot in Chicago I would vote against it). My opinions on the matter are shaped more by my views of big city government than anything else.
I think there are aspects of school governance and functioning that make them markedly different than government, including those listed above. I say this as someone who has spent 8 years teaching (plus 3 years of part- and full-time student teaching, all of it in the Boston area) and who has a bachelors and masters in education.
I struggle with the degree of authority with which you speak on this matter. There is no doubt inefficiencies in the system, and a potential for greater inefficiencies as organizations scale up, but there are many, many variables that impact funding needs, some of which I’ve described here. I am curious if anything I have said here has in any way changed your thoughts on the way schools are funded.
If I were to relay to you the experiences of an SLP, who worked in both Montgomery and Prince George’s counties in Maryland, the 1st and 14th (out of 24) ranked in the state by per capita income, and told you that her department in PG would need to hire 3 times as many SLPs as MoCo to provide the same level of service to students between the two counties, but cannot because of budgetary reasons in a county that spends $1700 less per pupil than its richer neighbor… would that make you change your thoughts at all?
SLP = Speech and Language Pathologist.
Those aren’t big city schools systems (or the schools in MD run at the county level). I’ve already said that I’m open to the idea that outside of big city schools more funding could lead to better results. I don’t know anything about the schools in MD so I don’t want to comment on them either way. My feelings about big city schools stem from my feelings about big city government as a whole; in order to convince me that the Chicago public schools aren’t full of waste an inefficacy and corruption you’d need to convince that the city of Chicago isn’t full of waste an inefficacy and corruption and there’s no way you’d be able to do that. Are the teachers unions lying when they point to inefficacies during contract negotiations?
To elaborate I don’t believe that the Chicago Public Schools are the one part of city government exempt from corruption, I don’t believe that there aren’t do nothing patronage desk jobs, no show maintenance jobs, that contracts for capital improvements aren’t steered to political insiders, or that contracts for supplies and service don’t likewise go to people with connections. I have no confidence that if funding were increased that the money wouldn’t go to a bunch of politically connected pencil pushers or consultants.
To add one more point it’s unlikely that teachers will even notice a lot of the corruption; they’ll just see chicken being served in the cafeteria they won’t know the it cost 25% more than it need to because the wholesaler is a client of an alderman’s law firm.
So, your solution to that problem is to give them the same crappy pensions the rest of the country has instead of say, fixing the issues with Chicago politics?
“My feelings about big city schools stem from my feelings about big city government as a whole; in order to convince me that the Chicago public schools aren’t full of waste an inefficacy and corruption you’d need to convince that the city of Chicago isn’t full of waste an inefficacy and corruption and there’s no way you’d be able to do that.”
This is why I struggle in our exchanges. You have a “feeling”, offer no evidence to justify it, and then say there is “no way” anyone will be able to change your mind on it.
I’m also not sure why you are limiting this to “big city”. PG County is a struggling school district. It is largely urban, bordering the northeast section of DC. It has a population approaching 900,000 and the school is managed at the county level. 41% of schools are identified as failing or struggling.
Here is my premise: There are many reasons for the discrepancies in outcomes amongst various school districts. Among them are funding issues, which per pupil spending numbers fail to properly capture, for reasons related to the different costs associated with meeting the needs of students in different areas.
Here is what I understand to be your premise: Funding is not an issue and to whatever extent it is, the problem is corruption in “big city politics”. Nothing will change my mind on this. Also, teacher unions and leftists are the problem.
Sure we’re doing things! How about community college?
That also allows good teachers into college-level study, which is often problematic.
(Imagine an entire math class taught in chinese…)
I’d put community college in the category of things we do to excuse ourselves from reforming K-12.
Major props to Kazzy for this:
This in part stems from a lack of clarity around the purpose of education. So before we start to discuss practical, on-the-ground solutions, I think we need to have much more broader conversations about the very purpose of education, how we serve that purpose, and how we identify those capable of doing so.
It’s a much deeper issue than just “quality” or even “choice.” The issue with American education is really that problem of according purpose across all our diversity – geographic, cultural, and temporal. We’re living with an education paradigm that was developed according to a clear purpose that made sense for an entirely different time and place. Everyone – students, teachers, administrators – are trying to function in the modern world but within that circumscribed, anachronistic paradigm as well, but increasingly being evaluated by metrics that are updated to the expectations of the modern world. It’s fundamentally unfair, yet it’s what we have.
Doubling down on the old model won’t fix this; neither will “choice.” People will continue to choose based on expectations that conform to the old model. We need a fundamental shift which will require a hard shove from a visionary reformer. I don’t know what institutional form that will take, but from a pedagogical perspective I believe there needs to be a basic shift from an emphasis on developing knowledge and “skills” (Yglesias has written very insightfully recently on the subject of “skills” in the new economic context that young people face today) to the development of curiosity and personal drive (figuring out what there is in the world to do that’s awesome and life-sustaining for self and others, and then developing the “want-to” in young people to go do it).
That’s my two cents. And Kazzy is right that it starts with getting back to the very first question: not even What Education? or Educate Them How?, but, Why Education?
I had some free time so a decided to research Prince George’s County, it turn out corruption is a major problem there:
http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post/8318/why-prince-georges-struggles-with-corruption/
http://pgd9politico.wordpress.com/2011/12/14/the-wide-reach-of-corruption-in-prince-georges-county-ties-into-pgcps/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/19/AR2010121903021.html
http://www.baltimoresun.com/explore/howard/news/ph-ll-leslie-johnson-sentencing-1215-20111209,0,4907970.story
http://sasscer.wordpress.com/category/public-corruption-in-education/
http://michellejanaye.com/2010/12/timeline-fbi-corruption-probe-in-prince-georges-county/
It seems like another case of bad schools being connected to political corruption.
This is why I struggle in our exchanges. You have a “feeling”, offer no evidence to justify it, and then say there is “no way” anyone will be able to change your mind on it.
Are you claiming either A) there is no corruption in Chicago or B) is the Chicago public schools are somehow exempt from the corruption and cronyism that pelages the rest of the city.
I’m also not sure why you are limiting this to “big city”.
Because I know from experience that governments in suburban Boston don’t have anywhere near the level of corruption that either the cities of Boston or Chicago do.
PG County is a struggling school district. It is largely urban, bordering the northeast section of DC. It has a population approaching 900,000 and the school is managed at the county level. 41% of schools are identified as failing or struggling.
I don’t know anything about it so I don’t want to comment. I will ask some questions; do people close to county officials get do nothing jobs? Do contracts for capital projects go to political insiders? Do contracts for goods and services likewise go to people who are politically connected? Does the county hire “consultants” whose job is to tell the elected officials what they want to hear?
Here is my premise: There are many reasons for the discrepancies in outcomes amongst various school districts. Among them are funding issues, which per pupil spending numbers fail to properly capture, for reasons related to the different costs associated with meeting the needs of students in different areas.
I don’t think I disagree with that.
Here is what I understand to be your premise: Funding is not an issue
I explicitly said unthread that’s not my position. My position is that big cities are corrupt and this includes the school system as a result a lot of money that is supposed to go to education gets wasted, I think that eliminating the corruption would improve the quality of education in those cities, but that until corruption is illuminated giving those schools more money will be wasteful because the money will be wasted on corruption. It is possible that even after eliminating corruption that the schools will still need more money to meet the need of their students when that happens (I’m not holding my breath) I’ll support increased funding.
“Because I know from experience that governments in suburban Boston don’t have anywhere near the level of corruption that either the cities of Boston or Chicago do.”
ROFL. How many District Attorneys have been quietly disappeared in Chicago this year? How about this decade? How about this century?
Just because you aren’t skilled at seeing the corruption doesn’t mean it’s not there.
ROFL. How many District Attorneys have been quietly disappeared in Chicago this year? How about this decade? How about this century?
Just because you aren’t skilled at seeing the corruption doesn’t mean it’s not there.
What are you talking about? District Attorneys aren’t even municipal level officials. I know that there is virtually no corruption in the municipal government in the town I grew up in
dand,
Are you sure about that? I know people who had their neighborhood cops blackmailed halfway to Sunday.
I’m talking about the amount of visibility of corruption. Big cities have papers, and word gets out if someone dies. I’m not going to say who killed the bloke (I don’t know, honestly), but if it doesn’t get investigated, that’s corruption. I can list off plenty of places where corruption is rife… Often it’s in the lack of investigation of an elder care facility, or of a wealthy donor.
Are you sure about that? I know people who had their neighborhood cops blackmailed halfway to Sunday.
Served in an unpaid position overseeing the finances of the town he was an outsider when he started the position and he would have called out any waste that he saw. There are no people in no-show or needless jobs and the biggest example of waste he could find was members of the fire department driving the fire truck to the grocery store to pick up food for diner (he thought they should have picked up the food before starting their shift I disagreed with him). The town budget is too small to hide any corruption and since funding comes from primarily property taxes on owner-occupied housing if there were any waste the residents of the town would put a stop to it.
I’m talking about the amount of visibility of corruption. Big cities have papers, and word gets out if someone dies.
Like I said the town budget is too small for people not notice any waste
m not going to say who killed the bloke (I don’t know, honestly), but if it doesn’t get investigated, that’s corruption.
Could you tell me what you’re talking about?
I can list off plenty of places where corruption is rife… Often it’s in the lack of investigation of an elder care facility, or of a wealthy donor.
It’s plausible that there is a form of corruption that doesn’t affect the budget but that type of corruption while problematic isn’t relevant to this thread.
since kazzy seem to be the one person in world who isn’t aware of corruption in the city of chicago, here’s an article on the subject here is the most recent example
dand,
There are plenty of forms of corruption taht affect the budget positively, as well. Cops knowing who to shake down for money, etc.
(as to the DA thing? Jerry Sandusky should ring a bell. Not that I’m particularly alleging (myself) that the mysterious disappearance of a nosy DA has much to do with a known pedophile…)
There are plenty of forms of corruption taht affect the budget positively, as well. Cops knowing who to shake down for money, etc.
i don’t think the government get’s a cut when cops are corrupt.
(as to the DA thing? Jerry Sandusky should ring a bell. Not that I’m particularly alleging (myself) that the mysterious disappearance of a nosy DA has much to do with a known pedophile…)
could you post a link to the story you’re talking about? i’d like to know what it’s about. does it affect the budget?
this example of Chicago corruption just broke now
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/chicago-corruption
sorry for the multiple posts.
Dand, I don’t think that’s a fair assessment of Kazzy’s view. I think his question is more along the lines of whether big cities are inherently prone to corruption. Is Chicago more corrupt than Peoria, or are we simply more likely to find out about the corruption of Chicago than Peoria? How many people know about Preston, Idaho (home of Napoleon Dynamite, and former public officials in prison)? Mississippi is both one of the most rural and most corrupt states in the country. And, to an extent, how much do we internally define corruption in ways that make large cities more likely to exhibit it? (I mean, I can think of things that my school district did that were wrong, but I’m not sure “corruption” is what would come to mind if I explained it… but if something similar were to happen in a larger city, I might think it was corruption or rather indicative of corruption.)
Having said that, I do share your concerns about larger governments over smaller ones more generally, at least when it comes to efficiency. I remember seeing the tax rates of all of the local municipalities near where I grew up. The correlation between a township’s size and its taxes was linear. More linear than any other data point I come come up with (including wealth). I think it’d be interesting to ponder why this is the case, and why economies of scale seem to work differently in government than in the private sector (I’d guess it’s either a government-has-its-own-incentives thing, a matter of labor vs capital, a combination of the two, and maybe some other things). I also recall my map on state debt per-capita. There was an interesting (though imperfect) correlation between a state’s size and how much debt it has incurred. Not sure what to make of that, either.
Will,
Economies of scale, primarily. It’s efficient for me to get my garbage (and recycling!) picked up by the city.
Other folks offload that stuff to “non-governmental” agencies, and pay out of pocket — they pay more out of pocket, in general.
Then you have busing, and other things that suburbs tend to mooch off of the main city.
Plus you have state/federal taxes stacked in favor of suburbs.
Kim, my comparisons are suburb-to-suburb, mostly. The town with 8k had higher taxes than the town with 4k, and two towns with 4k had roughly the same tax rates, despite one being wealthy and the other being comparatively poor (fishing community).
I haven’t really noticed a lack of services in the suburbs. East Oak, my little burg, didn’t have its own fire department or trash collection, but paid for services from nearby communities. Police services (shared between two towns of 4k) tended to be more robust than in the city (though low crimes rates will do that).
I think his question is more along the lines of whether big cities are inherently prone to corruption. Is Chicago more corrupt than Peoria, or are we simply more likely to find out about the corruption of Chicago than Peoria?
I think Big Cities are more prone to corruption, I don’t know IL outside of Chicago I know that in Massachusetts Springfield and Lawrence are both more corrupt than Boston (Boston isn’t that corrupt as far as big cities go Chicago is much worse).
My issue is that dysfunctional schools are often(not always) the result of corruption and that in cases where corruption is the cause of poor school that increasing the funding for the schools won’t produce better outcomes. There are certainly cases where a school system is well run but underfunded and in those cases increasing funding could improve outcomes. I believe that if you look at the worst school systems in the country you will almost always see corrupt local government and that when the local government is corrupt you will almost always see dysfunctional schools.
ow many people know about Preston, Idaho (home of Napoleon Dynamite, and former public officials in prison)? Mississippi is both one of the most rural and most corrupt states in the country.
My impression that rural government is often more corrupt than suburban government, although I think there are also rural governments that are very well.
Having said that, I do share your concerns about larger governments over smaller ones more generally, at least when it comes to efficiency. I remember seeing the tax rates of all of the local municipalities near where I grew up. The correlation between a township’s size and its taxes was linear. More linear than any other data point I come come up with (including wealth). I think it’d be interesting to ponder why this is the case, and why economies of scale seem to work differently in government than in the private sector (I’d guess it’s either a government-has-its-own-incentives thing, a matter of labor vs capital, a combination of the two, and maybe some other things).
I think a large part of it is A) incentives, B) the ability to hide corruption in larger governments) and the distance from the funding.
A) Willie Sutton logic people go where the money is the garbage contract for my hometown isn’t large enough for anyone to bother with while the Chicago contracts are(this is why I opposed Rahm Emanuel’s Privatization plan)
B) The budget for my hometown is too small for cronies in do nothing jobs not to get noticed there are simply too few employees. In big cities with thousands of employees you can create a large number of do nothing jobs and it’s difficult to find out about them.
C) In suburban areas funding comes from owner-occupied residential property if property taxes go up residents are going to want to know why. In large cities the funding comes from commercial Real Estate and the owners aren’t going to notice corruption in the city as much.
And I want to add that my frustration on this issue comes from here Chicago politicians talk about not having enough money when they waste so much.
On a side note much of the corruption is done without breaking any laws.
Really exceptional teachers come in a multitude of varieties. Some are pretty good at teaching determined kids, but tend to break the rest.
“I think the quality of instruction thing isn’t monolithic. There are really, really exceptional teachers who can take 30 kids with no parental support and poor socioeconomic backgrounds and bad neighborhoods and get them all to pass the AP Calc exam, legitimately. That is, unfortunately, a very small percentage of the good teachers.”
Probably 1%, if that, and I’d like to know how many of them can do it year in and year out.
A few questions I’d like to see answers to:
1) Does any of the wealth actually _attend_ the public schools in Belmont?
2) Does the fact that the schools in Boston _costs_ $5000 more mean that students actually get $5000 spend _on them_, or is it siphoned away into non-educational things?
3) Does this actually hold up anywhere _besides_ Massachusetts? Boston is a rather uniquely educational city, having both Harvard and nearby MIT, _and_ Massachusetts is a notably liberal state so might have decided to dump money into poor schools. How does the per capita spending in Georgia or Utah look?
4) And perhaps most importantly: Is Boston even one of those poorly-performing inner city schools people are talking about? If everyone says ‘Inner city schools do badly because they’re underfunded’, finding one that _isn’t_ underfunded and _isn’t_ doing badly doesn’t really demonstrate anything.
School spending in my state is all over the place, but I know my well-to-do suburban district spends notably less per pupil than the nearby urban district or the inner-run suburban district with less wealthy residents.
In general, I’m open to the notion that to achieve results in some of the more problematic districts is going to require more money. I think the case that these districts are underperforming specifically because we’re not spending money on them is a much harder sell these days.
1) Does any of the wealth actually _attend_ the public schools in Belmont?
i’m not sure how many of the super wealthy attend but plenty of upper middle class people with 6-figure incomes do.
2) Does the fact that the schools in Boston _costs_ $5000 more mean that students actually get $5000 spend _on them_, or is it siphoned away into non-educational things?
That’s not relevant to the claim the problem is unequal funding.
3) Does this actually hold up anywhere _besides_ Massachusetts? Boston is a rather uniquely educational city, having both Harvard and nearby MIT, _and_ Massachusetts is a notably liberal state so might have decided to dump money into poor schools. How does the per capita spending in Georgia or Utah look?
Boston doesn’t spend more than other major cities per pupil, comparisons across state lines aren’t perfect but a quick Google search revels that Washington DC spends $29,409 Atlanta spends $ 14211.
A choose Massachusetts because A) I’m familiar with the state and B) almost all municipalities in the state run their own k-12 system making apples to apples comparisons possible; in other parts of the country there are often separate school districts of primary and secondary schools in suburban areas make it difficult to compare them to the big cities with and inclusive k-12 system.
4) And perhaps most importantly: Is Boston even one of those poorly-performing inner city schools people are talking about? If everyone says ‘Inner city schools do badly because they’re underfunded’, finding one that _isn’t_ underfunded and _isn’t_ doing badly doesn’t really demonstrate anything.
People in Boston say the schools are underfunded, if you can find a counter example I’ll listen as long as it’s an apples to apples comparison.
That’s not relevant to the claim the problem is unequal funding.
It sorta is. If $6000 of that extra $5000 is being spent because property is a lot more expensive, or because the schools need a lot more security, or because living expenses are higher in cities so teachers pay scales are higher…
…that’s not _really_ spending more on education. Or rather, there’s absolutely no reason to expect better outcomes.
The position taken by the people you are disputing is not that ‘more spending is always better’, it is ‘lower student to teacher ratio, better facilities, better technology, more extra curricular activities, etc, all stuff that you _can_ buy with more money, is always better’. If all that money is going to _other_ things, that really doesn’t disprove their point.
And neither does a very poorly managed school. If the administrators are sucking up that extra money, it’s a good reason to not just _give_ the school more money, sure. We need to fix it first. But it doesn’t disprove the theory that the school would be better if it hired more teachers.
‘Underfunded’ is a vast over-simplification of what people think is wrong with inner city schools. It’s code for ‘hire more teachers and have an art and band program’.
I think the best thing to look at to see if a school is ‘underfunded’ would be the student to teacher ratio.
People don’t argue that the problem with inner city schools is that they more likely have corrupt or inept management people argue that they don’t have enough money. If they are given enough money and waste then that is the fault of the schools not the state for inadequately funding them.
Which “people” are you referring to? I’ve long argued that the problems with our education system are multie, with funding being one among many.
Teacher’s unions big city politicians the people who run urban school districts many elected Democrats (just about all who oppose education reform). I’ve heard it said repeatedly that the problem with inner city schools is that they don’t receive as much money as suburban schools, are you claiming that that claim isn’t often made?
and before you say that poverty is the problem please not parental education level is for more important than parental income level
http://ideas.repec.org/a/tpr/qjecon/v122y2007i1p119-157.html
Many people do make that argument. Not all. Your lack of a qualifier was confusing.
dand,
when you can find me some fucking educational reform that isn’t being run by folks who want to remove public education entirely… I’m always open to new ideas. It’s the old ones that tend to tire me out.
“Why should we have to pay money for YOUR roads? YOUR children? YOUR parks?”
here’s a 13 year old article saying atlanta has the higher per student spending in the state
http://onlineathens.com/stories/070900/new_0709000030.shtml
“1) Does any of the wealth actually _attend_ the public schools in Belmont?”
My anecdotal experience is that it depends on the wealthy/upper-middle class area. I grew up in an upper-middle class suburb on Long Island. People moved to the suburb because the school district was considered excellent and a disproportionate number of high school graduates attended Ivy League or equivalent colleges/universities.
The same is true for the upper-middle class suburbs in Westchester. However if you went to an area like Greenwich, Connecticut or Marin County (Cal), the answer seems to be different. I moved out West and know a lot of people who grew up in Marin. With one exception, they all attended private school.*
*It is my general observation that on the West Coast, the standard is to attend private school for K-12 and then go to UCLA, Cal, or one of the other UC schools. On the East Coast, the standard seems to be to send kids to public school for K-12 and then spend money on an Ivy League or equivalent private college/university. This has been confirmed for me in conversation. FWIW, Cal and UCLA are much better universities than any school in the SUNY system.
That’s new york. Round here, folks go to UPitt or Penn State, both of which are quality schools.
UPitt and Temple potentially. I’ve never known of Penn State being called a quality school education wise.
If I had kids, I wouldn’t mind if they went to UPenn, Ursinus, Swathmore, Haverford, Bryn Mawr….
I think of Penn State as being a quality school. AAU, USNWR Top 50, Carnegie VHR (though that may not qualify as education).
Newdealer,
Then you haven’t known folks in medicine, engineering, agscience, or meteorology.
What PennState does well, they do really really well.
(And temple’s still a private school. Not that folks don’t hit CMU for CS or drama…).
We saw Penn State as a good school. What turned people from my space off to it was geography, not academic standing.
Also, you “wouldn’t mind” if your kids went to UPenn? Understate much? :-p
Will and NewDealer,
In my corner of the Northeast. Penn State was known as a party school and a party school alone, dominated by jocks from the Football Team. Perhaps this says a lot about upper-middle class life and status marking in the Northeast but we were told to aim for schools like Cornell, UPenn, Harvard, Yale, Tufts, etc.
Kazzy,
My phrasing was really bad.
Temple is a public university.
Newdealer,
Yeah, it /is/ a party school, to some degree… (not much else to do up in Happy Valley)…
But you were probably also taught not to get a degree in meteorology, so you were probably not screwing yourself over too badly.
No comment 🙂
Kimmi,
Research tells me that UPitt and Temple are considered “state-related”. So both are quasi-public but largely independent.
*doffs hat* well, I learned something new today! 😉
Kimmi,
Also correct. My parents did not have a problem with me being a drama major and encouraged it to a certain extent. I imagine most parents would have the opposite reaction.
I thought Temple was private for the longest time. It wasn’t until there was a conference realignment that I learned otherwise. It’s like Clemson, Marshall, and various other schools that have names that make them sound like they’re private. Namely because they’re not named after places. (Though I’ve been fooled by some others that do have a location moniker, like Southern Miss.)
ScarletNumber and I actually had a conversation about this a while back on Hit Coffee, but googling it isn’t working (the changeover from HitCoffee.net to HitCoffee.com caused some problems in this regard).
ND,
I was just razzing you. I always had the impression that Penn State was really good for engineering or something.
It wasn’t on the level of UPenn and probably not even on the level of my alma mater (BC), but I don’t think it was seen as “settling” to go there. That’s what Rutgers was for.
Penn State was known as a party school and a party school alone, dominated by jocks from the Football Team.
With 45,000 students, I doubt even their football team could totally dominate the school. (The administration, yes, but not the rest of the school.)
@NewDealer 7:01 pm
Did you mean to respond to yourself, or did you just accidentally type your own name?
Regarding your list of schools, there is a reason why the writers of The Office made Andy a Cornell alum. I am less embarrassed with my NJ Directional College degree.
@WillTruman 7:22 pm
There is actually a Clemson, SC, but your point is still true since the city was named after the school.
Since we can’t find the original discussion, the point was that in the original Big East, the schools named after their cities were still private schools. The only public school was UConn. Only when Pitt was added did that pattern break, and Pitt was the only exception even when the Big East had 14 schools. This is why, when Cincinnati and Louisville were added, I was surprised to find out they were public schools.
I wish I could find that HC discussion. At the time, I said that the only ones who knew Temple was a public school were me and Bill Cosby.
In the same boat is Rutgers. I said over at the Lion that as long as you are west and south of DC, if you asked people to name the eight Ivy League schools, Rutgers would get more votes than either UPenn or Cornell.
Given that schools in well-to-do areas tend to have much better maintained facilities and programming, do we know that the schools in the poor areas are actually getting the same per-pupil money spent on them? Or is that money going to the schools in the good zip codes while the other are left to rot.
Average spending per pupil seems like a very murky stat.
I’ve been arguing throughout this thread that the problem is corruption, giving more money to big city schools won’t do any good if the money goes to a no-show job for a political crony.
Arguing… but not providing any evidence that this is actually happening in big city schools.
I provided evidence that Chicago is corrupt and you didn’t respond to it. Are you claiming that the Chicago Public Schools are free of the corruption that plagues the rest of the city?
Kazzy, for clarity is your claim that there is no corruption in big city schools?
Another question did either your undergraduate or graduate program consider the possibility of corruption in schools systems or did they assume that there is no such thing as corruption.
I’m saying you haven’t offered any sort of specific evidence of corruption in big city schools, Chicago or otherwise, such that increasing funding will be of no impact because the money will go to a ‘no-show job for a political crony’.
I provided plenty of evidence for corruption in Chicago is you claiming that the school department is the only part of the city free of corruption? If you think that the Chicago public schools are free of corruption then you are so naive it is n not worthwhile debating with you.
And corruption elsewhere any the city effects the schools was well if the city spends more than it needs to on the park department that takes away money that could potently be spent on the schools.
“It’s so utterly obvious that I won’t even point you towards one example!”
The Chicago Public School system has over 400,000 students in it. To skew per pupil spending numbers by $1000, you would need to create 400 “do-nothing” positions earning $1M each. Or 4000 earning $100,000. Is some money going to be lost to corruption or other inefficiences in the system? Sure. But you have done nothing… NOTHING… to demonstrate that corruption is so rampant as to justify your argument that the schools have sufficient money, they’re just wasting it.
You seem to think that corruption in Chicago is some crazy idea I made up. I’ve posted many links to corruption in Chicago you have chosen to ignore them. No show jobs are just one form of corruption there are many others that I’ve posted about in this thread. Example the contracts for goods and service will go to insiders at inflated prices when someone else can provide the same thing at a lower cost, there are countless other forms of corruption as well.
Let me add that what’s worse than a no show job is when an incompetent but politically connected person is given real authority.
The CPS system educated over 400,000 students at approximately $13K per. My school educated approximately 225 students at approximately $20K per. If CPS is wasted exorbitant amounts of money, than surely my school must be heating the classrooms by burning bills.
dand,
In my town, the school district is quite separate from the government. As in: different elections, and the government has little control over the school district. I pay different taxes too, one for school district, and one for the government.
Given this, how does showing that the government is corrupt prove anything about the school district?
I know next to nothing about Chi-town, you may have a point there.
The CPS system educated over 400,000 students at approximately $13K per. My school educated approximately 225 students at approximately $20K per
1) Smaller school systems and municipalities are much less prone to corruption than large ones
2) As teacher you wouldn’t see the corruption because it is way over your head (in the same way that a wal-mart store manager knows nothing about the bribes the company pays to foreign governments). You just notice that you have copy paper you wouldn’t know that the school district pays 30% more than it needs to for it because the supply is a client of a politicians law firm.
So how much of those per-pupil spending dollars do you think are avoidable waste?
http://cps.edu/About_CPS/Financial_information/Documents/FY12FinalBudgetBook.pdf
Here… the FY2012 budget. Go ahead and highlight the sections that show corruption.
In my town, the school district is quite separate from the government. As in: different elections, and the government has little control over the school district. I pay different taxes too, one for school district, and one for the government.
Given this, how does showing that the government is corrupt prove anything about the school district?
I know next to nothing about Chi-town, you may have a point there.
Here both city, county and state government are all controlled by the same corrupt machine, from what I understand separate machines control suburban county governments while some suburban municipal governments are corrupt and some aren’t.
So how much of those per-pupil spending dollars do you think are avoidable waste?
Most estimates put the cost of corruption at between 5-20% of the city budget, assuming the schools are as corrupt as the rest of the city and your $13,000(does that number include funds provided by the federal government and capital expenses? I can’t find an all inclusive number.) Number is accurate between $650 and $2600 dollars.
Frankly the amount of money is not the entire point. If someone is stealing from me I don’t want to give them any more money, Chicago politicians are steeling my money with corruption and I don’t want to give them another cent. Nothing angers me more than seeing politician give tax money to a crony then complains that the city doesn’t have enough money.
dand,
I should show you what some of the libraries look like around here.
I will also note that you still haven’t answered my questions: How much of the school board is related to the city government?
dand,
Okay, cancel your verizon plan.
Or don’t you actually read your bills and know what you’re getting?
;-P
http://cps.edu/About_CPS/Financial_information/Documents/FY12FinalBudgetBook.pdf
Here… the FY2012 budget. Go ahead and highlight the sections that show corruption.
They aren’t going to have a line in the budget for corruption, it’s hidden within legitimate expenses, I’m not an auditor I have no idea how much things should cost. If you could find corruption by looking at the budget the FBI’s job would be a lot easier.
I will also note that you still haven’t answered my questions: How much of the school board is related to the city government?
The schools are run by the city.
dand,
I’m starting tow onder if you know anything about corruption. It’s, in fact, rarely about money, at least stateside. Bribery is too easy to trace.
Do you even know how much it costs to buy a favor? Do you know who buys favors?
So your response to potential corruption in big city schools with struggling schools is to cut off the funds, not expunge the corruption and increase funds via mechanisms that are protected from corruption?
So your response to potential corruption in big city schools with struggling schools is to cut off the funds
I wouldn’t necessarily cut off funds but I’m not going to reward the politicians for their bad behavior by giving them more money.
not expunge the corruption
How do you think we can eliminate corruption in Chicago? People have been trying to do it for 100 years and it hasn’t gotten very far.
and increase funds via mechanisms that are protected from corruption?
How do you think that can be done while maintaining the public education system (I don’t want to turn this into a debate about vouchers)?
I’m very open to increasing funds for education provided I can be assured that it will improve student outcomes.
I’m not sure how you are defining “politician”. While not entirely separate, there is a lot of separation between schools and politicians. School board members are elected, but I don’t know of any board that is a full time position. Superintendents can be elected or can be appointed but typically have a background in education and are not your typical politician.
I’m not saying we just throw more money into a slush fund labeled “education”. But if we see a school district that doesn’t have enough SLPs, for instance, then we hire more SLPs and add the requisite money to the budget to do so, earmarked for that specific purpose.
I’m not sure how you are defining “politician”. While not entirely separate, there is a lot of separation between schools and politicians. School board members are elected, but I don’t know of any board that is a full time position. Superintendents can be elected or can be appointed but typically have a background in education and are not your typical politician.
Approximately how large is the school system you work for? I don’t think you appreciate the difference between a suburban school district and a large bureaucratic school system. In the city of Chicago the school boards is appointed by the mayor and the school system is large city bureaucracy like, all other city departments and subject to the same corrupting influences. Your belief that schools aren’t subject to political influence strikes me as incredibly naive.
I’m not saying we just throw more money into a slush fund labeled “education”. But if we see a school district that doesn’t have enough SLPs, for instance, then we hire more SLPs and add the requisite money to the budget to do so, earmarked for that specific purpose.
In large cities the city council can’t go over the budget(and they shouldn’t anyway they’d just make it worse) in that kind of detail the bureaucracy largely writes its own budget then submits for approval using the money that is allocated to them by the city.
here’s the budget process for the Chicago public schools:
http://www.cps.edu/FY13Budget/documents/AppendixD_BudgetProcess.pdf
dand,
I should have made clear that I work in a private school.
Given the link you’ve provided, it seems that CPS’s budgetary process differs from that of suburban schools primarily because of scale; many of the requirements are state mandated.
As to CPS’s specific approach…
– Individual schools plan their budgets in accordance with their stated required school improvement plan. I can’t imagine there to be any more or less room for corruption than in suburban schools.
– Central office departments determine non-personnel budgets. This is primarily going to be for stuff like building supplies and overhead. While there would presumably be room for corruption here, it would be a very, very small slice of a very large pie.
– The Office of Budget and Grant Management (it is not clear if this office is unique to the school system or is a city-wide office) directed that money be redirected from Central office to schools. Among other things, this would serve to reduce the potential for corruption.
– The budget is then submitted for community review and public hearings, though it does not appear that the community has any opportunity to reject the budget.
Is there potential for corruption? Sure. But the vast majority of funds are going to personnel, which involves the union and all that brings with it (and I realize there is a ton of room for conversation there), and to spending within the schools themselves, with the individual school administrators holding much of the sway.
There just isn’t any evidence, or even really much room, for the sea of corruption within the school system that you propose. I’ve demonstrated how small a piece of the budget it could even be and your own source shows that most of the budgeting process is uniform across the state. So, unless you have better evidence that school spending in Chicago is uniquely corrupt to the point that it justifies keeping the system underfunded, I’m inclined to dismiss most of what you’ve offered here.
I should have made clear that I work in a private school.
Ok, the incentives in private schools and public schools are completely different, if your school didn’t do a good job parents would stop sending their kids there and everyone would be out of a job. Most kids who attend Chicago public schools don’t have any other options and everyone get paid regardless of performance.
Given the link you’ve provided, it seems that CPS’s budgetary process differs from that of suburban schools primarily because of scale; many of the requirements are state mandated.
Keep in mind that an idealized description of what goes on; in practice the considerations are far more political. Additionally I believe although I could be wrong that the capital budget is developed separately and capital improvements are a major source of corruption.
– Individual schools plan their budgets in accordance with their stated required school improvement plan. I can’t imagine there to be any more or less room for corruption than in suburban schools.
Sure there is, the size of the school system makes it more difficult for people to find the corruption and the fact funding is more distant gives them less incentive to do so.
If there were corruption in the school system in the town I grew up in a could find it within an hour or two and since the schools are by far the largest share of the town budget and property taxes are a major expense residents have a strong incentive to make sure that money is being spent wisely. You can examine the school payroll employee by employee; a major debate in my hometown a few years ago was whether the middle school needed one or two assistant principals. Residents are aware of how money is being spent almost down to the penny (and as I mentioned my dad has in fact done this).
By contrast there are 681 schools in Chicago it would take me months to go over them all in detail and I don’t know what the needs of any particular school nor do I know if all the employees at the schools are doing what the budget says they do. People also have less of an incentive to look for corruption the city budget is so large that any one instance of corruption has very little impact on the budget as a whole. What’s more a large portion of the cities revenue comes from commercial property taxes and the companies that own those simply use a legal form of bribery to reduce their burden and don’t care about corruption.
The Office of Budget and Grant Management (it is not clear if this office is unique to the school system or is a city-wide office) directed that money be redirected from Central office to schools. Among other things, this would serve to reduce the potential for corruption.
That’s only if the board has an interest in reducing corruption.
Is there potential for corruption? Sure. But the vast majority of funds are going to personnel, which involves the union and all that brings with it (and I realize there is a ton of room for conversation there), and to spending within the schools themselves, with the individual school administrators holding much of the sway.
There just isn’t any evidence, or even really much room, for the sea of corruption within the school system that you propose. I’ve demonstrated how small a piece of the budget it could even be and your own source shows that most of the budgeting process is uniform across the state. So, unless you have better evidence that school spending in Chicago is uniquely corrupt to the point that it justifies keeping the system underfunded, I’m inclined to dismiss most of what you’ve offered here.
If that’s the case then I think why should end this discussion; if you aren’t going to convince me that Chicago isn’t corrupt and I’m not going to convince you that it is there is no point in continuing to go back and forth. I mentioned this before that although my main focus in this thread has been the way that corruption siphons off funds that is not the only way that corruption harms a school district, if incompetent people are put in positions of power because of their political connections that can significantly reduce the effectiveness of the schools and might be even worse than the monetary skimming. I can’t help but notice that in just about every case of a poorly performing school system there is significant political corruption in the local government I find it hard to believe that this is a coincidence.
I also want to reiterate that corruption in the schools isn’t the only thing that matters corruption elsewhere in city government affects the schools as well, if money is wasted in the parks department then that is money that could be spent on the schools.
I’m just going to officially bow out of this conversation at this point. It continually seems that you are interested only in making points, not actually dialoguing. You offered a link in service of your point and when I demonstrated how it might say otherwise, you started arguing against it. Not my interpretation of it, the source itself. It was only of service to you when it seemed to defend your still-unfounded assertion and when it ceased to do that, it was junk… “idealized”. You are free to peddle your opinions, but you may not state them as facts, especially in the absence of evidence that I have continually asked you for and which remains absent or, at best, circumstantial. It strikes me that you have an axe to grind, which is your right, but I have no interest in participating in such fruitless exchanges so, with that, I’m out.
I wasn’t going to respond further but I said let’s agree to disagree instead of responding likewise you responded with a personal attack, now I feel the need to defend myself.
It continually seems that you are interested only in making points, not actually dialoguing.
If you go back and read the thread I have almost always responded to you point by point, in many cases you have responded to me either with a general comment ignoring the majority of my post or with snark, you seem to define dialog as agreeing with you.
You offered a link in service of your point and when I demonstrated how it might say otherwise, you started arguing against it. Not my interpretation of it, the source itself.
I offered that link as evidence that the you can’t just “hire more SLPs and add the requisite money to the budget to do so” that the people providing the funding don’t control the budget not as evidence of corruption, I thought that was clear based on what the link was posted in response to.
. You are free to peddle your opinions, but you may not state them as facts, especially in the absence of evidence that I have continually asked you for and which remains absent or, at best, circumstantial.
I provided plenty of evidence of corruption in Chicago, although frankly you are the first I’ve ever seen who denies its existence.
It strikes me that you have an axe to grind, which is your right, but I have no interest in participating in such fruitless exchanges so, with that, I’m out.
If you don’t want to engage with me don’t respond to my posts you initiated all of our contact in this thread if you aren’t interest in engaging with me then don’t. If you respond to a post of mine then I’ll respond back.
I’m starting tow onder if you know anything about corruption. It’s, in fact, rarely about money, at least stateside. Bribery is too easy to trace.
i don’t even have to go back one day to find a story about bribery in Chicago;
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/ct-met-moreno-guilty-plea-20130702,0,7606836.story?track=rss
Most of the bribery in Chicago is doe legally. it works like this a developer wants a zoning variance for a project, he hire the real estate firm of an alderman for another project he’s working on the alderman then approves the variance. Nothing is ever said everything is implied, there is no way to prove any wrongdoing in court. This happens in other places as well, what do you think Hillary Clinton’s job at the Rose Law firm was all about?
here’s an article about how it works’s with the law firm of mike madigan, speaker of the house in illinois.
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2010-01-24/news/ct-met-michael-madigan-0124-20100122_1_madigan-getzendanner-tax-work-property-tax
“Underfunded” is a relative term: the schools do not have sufficient funds to achieve their stated objective.
way to move the goal posts.
That sounds exactly like the way people used to justify paying men more than women they’d say “men need more money to live therefore it’s not unfair to pay them more”
Moving the goalposts? It is defining the terms. If one district has signifigantly more students with special needs, to use just one example of the sort of variables that impact spending, it is going to need more funds. If a school has more studets qualified for free or reduced lunch, it is going to need more finds. If a school is in an area with a higher cost of living, it will need more funds. If a district is more spread out and requires more bussing, it will need more funds.
If a school is charged with doing X, but is only give enough money to do Y, and Y is less X, it is underfunded with regards to fulfillment of its mission.
Moving the goalposts? It is defining the terms.
You’re redefining the terms to fit your ideology. The argument usually goes like this leftist (I refuse to use the word liberal because it is another example of redefining words) says because schools are funded with property taxes inner city schools receive less money. When it is pointed out that those schools receive more money the leftist change the terms and argues that those schools need more money. I don’t necessarily disagree with that latter point but they shouldn’t start by claiming the inner city schools receive fewer funds than suburban schools.
When did I claim that inner city schools receive less money? Perhaps you are assuming that rather than actually listening to what people said. Since the start of my career as an educator, perhaps even before, I knew that urban schools often had similar or higher per pupil funding numbers to suburban schools.
Honestly, you are doing a lot of strawmanning. And when challenged on that, you seem to double down. Who cares what some leftists say? Why not engage the people here, none of whom are making the arguments you are attacking?
,When did I claim that inner city schools receive less money
i never claimed you did.
Perhaps you are assuming that rather than actually listening to what people said.
if you’d like i can provide you with examples of high ranking elected officials and union leaders making that claim.
Honestly, you are doing a lot of strawmanning.
addressing claims made by high ranking elected officials is not strawmanning
And when challenged on that, you seem to double down.
and when i asked you to prove that the motivation for crack sentencing you called me names then ran away.
Why not engage the people here, none of whom are making the arguments you are attacking?
i have been engaging with people here.
Kazzy here’s an article you linked to that claims urban school receive less money:
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/31911075/ns/us_news-education/t/black-white-student-achievement-gap-persists/#.UdDtvW2dtcp
“And the schools that educate them typically receive less state and local funding than the ones serving mainly white students.”
but the notion that people claim inner city schools are receive less funding is a strawman i made up.
Dand, for what it’s worth, I think that quote is actually accurate because it specifies “local and state funding.” My understanding is that it’s generally the case that poor districts do get less from local and state funding, but get considerably more from the federal government (grants, hot lunches, etc.).
dand,
Your intention seems to be, “Look at all the horrible things liberals say and do!”
You do not strike me as interested in dialoguing, with learning, with opening your mind and the mind of others to new ideas and ways of thinking.
As such, it is not of much interest to engage with you.
I am an educator and a diversity practitioner. I am capable of offering insight and information on these topics not available to many people.
But instead you want to post links that show a supposed liberal might have been wrong about something. Meh.
To elaborate, you brought up the idea of funding disparities, which Vikram indicated was not part of his idea, and then continued to push back against the idea.
Please, tell me who here is arguing that struggling schools have less per pupil funding than non-strugglings schools and/or that this is the sole/primary cause of struggling or not struggling. If no one is, than you are basically arguing with yourself on that point.
Dand, for what it’s worth, I think that quote is actually accurate because it specifies “local and state funding.” My understanding is that it’s generally the case that poor districts do get less from local and state funding, but get considerably more from the federal government (grants, hot lunches, etc.).
that’s possible, do states give less money to inner city schools or do they give the same too all schools?
On the broader subject, let’s try to stick with what people are saying, rather than holding them responsible for what other people are saying. Kazzy has, by my observation, a very nuanced understanding of the complexities of the problem. While there are people out there who do chalk it up to lesser funding, Kazzy isn’t one of them.
Dand, I appreciate you providing an alternative perspective. I think this site is better when we have voices pushing back against the consensus (even those which I share). The notion of funding as the cause of the ills of urban school districts is actually a pet peeve of mine, and I am glad that you brought up the issue.
Depends on the state, I think. I think that state+local is usually going to tilt towards the wealthier districts because they have the better tax base. State without local could go either way. On the one hand, some states have matching fund programs that would reward districts that raise local revenue. On the other hand, some states have programs directed towards the poor that would favor the poorer districts.
Your intention seems to be, “Look at all the horrible things liberals say and do!”
You do not strike me as interested in dialoguing, with learning, with opening your mind and the mind of others to new ideas and ways of thinking.
Do you think every open minded person agrees with you? If you can provide facts that show that I’m wrong about something I’ll acknowledge that I was wrong. For example if can provide evidence that harsh sentencing for crack was motivated by racial animosity I’ll acknowledge that it was racist.
I am an educator and a diversity practitioner. I am capable of offering insight and information on these topics not available to many people.
But instead you want to post links that show a supposed liberal might have been wrong about something.
You claimed that I was arguing against a straw man I provided a quote saying the very thing you claimed no one was saying. I live in Chicago I hear it claimed constantly that the problem with the cities school is funding I don’t think there’s anything wrong with me pushing back against that notion.
To elaborate, you brought up the idea of funding disparities, which Vikram indicated was not part of his idea, and then continued to push back against the idea.
once he said it wasn’t what he was talking about i didn’t day anything about it until you brought it back up
dand,
You are strawmanning the people here. No one is arguing for what you are arguing against.
Depends on the state, I think. I think that state+local is usually going to tilt towards the wealthier districts because they have the better tax base. State without local could go either way. On the one hand, some states have matching fund programs that would reward districts that raise local revenue. On the other hand, some states have programs directed towards the poor that would favor the poorer districts.
Ok it’s always been my impression that the problem isn’t so much that schools in poor areas receive less funding but rather that they have more trouble providing funding on their own. If there are states where wealthy districts receive more state funding then that is a problem.
I don’t think funding is an issue in major cities because they large commercial tax base to fund their schools with. I’ve always been exposed to large cities(Boston and Chicago) claiming the problem with their schools is funding when that’s not the case, for poor area’s without such a tax base it might be different.
You are strawmanning the people here. No one is arguing for what you are arguing against.
Who did I straw man? Why didn’t you address the rest of my post? Your posts to me are always non-responsive.
Re-read this thread. I offered a definition of underfunded. You are free to disagree with it. But you then began discussing what “the argument is” and what “people think”, despite me not making that argument and not thinking any of the things mentioned.
Again, my point was simply that a school can still be underfunded while receiving more money than another school which would not be described as underfunded.
http://bit.ly/1b0UZg8
Re-read this thread. I offered a definition of underfunded.
it was in response to my post saying that inner city schools don’t spend less money. if you weren’t responding to that point then you were being non-responsive.
You are free to disagree with it. But you then began discussing what “the argument is” and what “people think”, despite me not making that argument and not thinking any of the things mentioned.
that’s what i did in my first post, you responded by claiming offering a different definition of underfunding, then i responded to you.
if a parent gives child 1 and 2 each $5 for ice and child 1 comes back with an ice cream while child 2 claims it wasn’t enough money then child 2 was doing something wrong.
Not if they are forced to go to separate ice cream stores that charge different prices.
big city schools aren’t forced to waste money.
But they might be forced to teach a higher percentage of students with special needs.
Or they might need to offer higher teacher salaries to recruit folks into a less desirable job in a more expensive area.
Or they might need to provide more free or reduced-price lunch to students.
Or they might have higher overhead costs.
@Kazzy 3:08
I want to give you a second chance. Were you being tongue-in-cheek when you referred to yourself as a “diversity practitioner”? I hope the answer is yes; I wouldn’t be able to respect you if you said you were being sincere.
100% sincere. I’m sorry you don’t understand what that is.
@Kazzy 3:05 am
1) I am nothing if not sincere.
2) Since your comment was so risible, I wanted to give you a chance to back out of it. Since you are sticking by it, I would appreciate it if you would post it over at Steve Sailer, Lion of the Blogosphere, and Château Heartíste.
Or skip all those and go straight to StormFront.
Explain to me your objection to my being a diversity practitioner.
Scarlet,
It’s important to note that when Kazzy talks about being a “diversity practitioner” he is not just being sincere, but he’s being somewhat literal. Diversity/outreach/inclusion is a part of his job’s job description.
I should add that I don’t love the phrase ‘diversity practitioner’, but am somewhat bound by the language in practice.
Yellow caution flag: while this portion of this thread has not crossed over my interpretation of what is unacceptable in the comments culture we wish to maintain, it’s starting to draw near that line. So far, I understand the scorn is directed at the position being described rather than the person occupying it. That’s OK as I understand it. It gets to be a real easy line to fall over at this point. Please be mindful and it’ll keep things comfortable for everyone around these parts. Thanks.
@Kazzy 1:17 pm
My objection to you being a “diversity practitioner” is that diversity for its own sake has little benefit. It is a solution in search of a problem.
I couldn’t disagree more, Scarlet.
diversity for its own sake has little benefit
Perhaps not for it’s owm sake, but if is a means to at least two valuable ends.
One is that keeping an eye on diversity ensures we don’t–consciously or unconsciously–arrange our society and economy in a way that–advertently or inadvertently–exclude members of some group from the ideal of equal opportunity.
The other is that the only way we can really understand other types of people is to interact with them regularly, rathervthan live ourvlives segregated from them. This is good for the society because better understanding tends to diminish inter-group hostility and conflict. I’d also say it’s good for the individual, as more knowledge is a good in itsef, and better understanding and less hostility toward others makes one a better person.
This is not an argument for quotas, I want to make clear–a good does not require that all other values guve way before it. And I think people have every right to segregate into insular groups if they want to, but likewise those who don’t have every right to disdain the insular for their callow fear and ignorance.
I have some passing familiarity with the literature researching the effects of diversity on work team performance. Diversity seems to offer certain kinds benefits in some tasks and an impediment for other kinds of tasks. There is still work to be done in the area.
Of course, this has nothing to do with any societal justifications for diversity, which frankly we don’t care so much about in the business school. 🙂
That is actually a valid justification.
Also note that the military pays more if you have dependents.
How is that a valid justification? It doesn’t surprise me the government would act so inefficiently.
It’s a justification. Validity is in the eye of the emoter.
Vikram,
Validity is in the eye of the emoter.
+1.
to amend my post Lawrence spends $13,463 the $20,764 number was for the vocational high school.
Are there AA students who you don’t get this ‘extra’ level of questioning and support, who actually do well?
Are you certain that all students who are receive this level of questioning and support are AA students, or is this just a trend, with some exceptions?
Is there some extra level of support built into AA acceptances; as you’d see, also, for students with an identified learning difference? (If there is, I’d say that’s a good thing, btw, because these students would be receiving a level of educational support in college that they may not have received previously).
Great questions!
Alas, I have labeled this post “my affirmative action anecdotes” purposefully. I don’t have any special insight into how AA works at other universities or even how it works at the universities I worked at now rather than back when I was working for them. I can say that not all of the AA students I was asked about had Ds or worse. Occasionally, I’d see as good as a B-.
> Are you certain that all students who are receive this level of questioning and support are AA students
Yes. Or at least that was what I was told when I asked about it. I also got e-mails about some student athletes, so maybe there was something for them too. Those e-mails tended to actually mention that they were asking because those students were athletes. The AA e-mails made no mention of why the administrators were asking about them.
—
Incidentally, I never really picked up on the idea that they were more likely to identify minority students. I guess enough of the students were of ambiguous races that they didn’t fit my picture of what an AA admit would look like.
In the early 1980’s, the place I worked hired a bunch of new people. We were programmers, working for a state agency, and most of the hires were AA hires (employment differs from academics, I know). I got the plum assignment of training this group; nobody else was willing to do it, and I was low man on the totem pole.
Most of them were awesome. A couple were flops; and I heard jokes around the office that it’s because they were AA hires. Yet the whole crew, with one exception, were AA hires.
I guess I’m wondering if our judgments here are like the judgments we make when we look at private venture investing vs. public venture investing. We don’t see the non-AA failures; the thousands of middle-class white kids who don’t thrive, just like we don’t see the six out of seven venture investments that fail to pay a return on investment; but we really notice the AA failures, just like we notice the Solyndras of the world. My guess is that AA may be a lot like venture investing; there are a lot of risks taken that don’t pay off; but the successes provide a return beyond measuring.
Indeed, confirmation bias cannot be overlooked as a possible factor.
I’m very willing to believe that there’s confirmation bias.
Unfortunately, if you look for the bias, you might be more inclined to see it.
+ a million, PC.
Unfortunately, if you look for the bias, you might be more inclined to see it.
Interesting idea. Is there a name for that?
Re: confirmation bias
That’s an interesting idea, I would question the direction of the bias though. I think we *do* see the AA successes (e.g. Colin Powell) but most of us probably don’t see the failures. In my particular case, I didn’t have a preconceived notion that AA doesn’t work and then seek out evidence for it. I actually had no idea that my school even explicitly kept track of which students were admitted due to AA.
I’m open to the idea that I’m wrong on some other points though. For example, it’s possible that these students actually *did* benefit from their attendance despite not actually doing well in school.
it’s possible that these students actually *did* benefit from their attendance despite not actually doing well in school.
Some of these students benefitted, in all likelihood; it’s also likely that regular-admissions students who didn’t do well benefitted. Experiences that broaden our horizons usually seem to benefit people; though there is some risk of PTSD and/or physical harm from some experiences.
As an educator and a diversity practitioner, I can say that confirmation bias is a huge issue on schools, and not just related to AA.
“Are there AA students who you don’t get this ‘extra’ level of questioning and support, who actually do well?”
This is my question as well. It’s hard to tell, at least from the information that Vikram provides, how many of his other students–or how many of well-performing students in other persons’ classes–may have been AA admits. Also, at least in my (very limited) experience as a TA and later as an adjunct, the administration queries about how specific students were doing had more to do with their past history with the school–they were usually on academic probation because they had done poorly in previous semesters. In other words, the queries were targeted at students who had problems, not at AA students specifically.
Not that there’s not a “there” there. In one of the grad programs I was a part of, I’ve known a couple people who were admitted as AA admits–at least I assume so, because they got a minority fellowship the university granted (and without a fellowship, admittance often means nothing)–and they seemed to me very unprepared. By that I mean, they had challenges writing complete sentences or basic reading comprehension. They made the expense of moving across the country, maybe quitting a job they had, and sometimes taking on additional loans to supplement the fellowship (because the fellowship doesn’t cover all the costs), and later find themselves at a disadvantage in a hyper-competitive environment where even the most talented land on their feet thanks to a large degree on chance and luck.
Of course, those two are not the whole sample of people aided, and no one ever established me as the gatekeeper of what counts qualified or prepared for grad school. I also realize there’s the idea that people need to be allowed to make their own determinations of what’s in their best interests, and if taking a gamble on grad school based on a promised fellowship is one of those determinations, it’s not particularly my prerogative to tell them they ought to choose otherwise.
Oops, that was meant as a response to Zic.
I should add two things:
1. At least one of the people I mention above landed on her feet and got a job she probably would not have been able to get had it not been for her experiences and the connections she got in grad school. So it seems to have worked out for her.
2. It’s at least a little inconsiderate for me to opine on who is and who isn’t qualified.
> It’s hard to tell, at least from the information that Vikram provides, how many of his other
>students–or how many of well-performing students in other persons’ classes–may have
> been AA admits.
I never did much digging into that. All I can speak of is my specific experience. I hope that the programs have more success than I was able to observe, but I am pessimistic.
> no one ever established me as the gatekeeper of what counts qualified or prepared for
> grad school
Eh. Except you kind of were a gatekeeper. If you were instructing the class, then your opinion of who should be there probably matters more than anyone else’s, however imperfect that opinion is. I know that’s a weighty responsibility to assume, but it was sort of forced upon you when you were made the teacher.
I should have been more clear. I’m referring to people who were grad students while I was. My actual adjunct/TA career was as a grad student, and in those cases I taught undergrads. Because almost all of these classes were introductory in nature, I almost never was asked to recommend or otherwise assess students’ ability to do well in grad school, although there were a few who sought recommendations from me for nursing or pharmacy school.
Of course, as someone who assigned grades to undergrads, I was probably playing something like a gatekeeper role.
Ah.
What I intended to mean is that if you are the teacher of a class, you are the gatekeeper for that particular class. So, while you were a grad student teaching undergrads, you still are (in my opinion) most qualified to say who ought to be taking that course with you.
Your opinion of your fellow grad students while you are yourself a grad student while falling short of “gatekeeper” has some meaning too.
I think you’re right. I just feel a little presumptuous about assessing my colleagues when we were in the same position. In other words, maybe I wasn’t as qualified as I thought I was.
Affirmative action seems aimed at making sure that very smart and determined minorities can make their way out of poverty. This is an objectively stupid goal. People who are very smart and determined can usually figure out _some way_ to escape poverty.
What would actually get people out of poverty is AA for _not-smart_ poor people. A guy with an IQ of 100, let’s say.
Here is the life of a non-smart poor person (Probably a minority):
1) Starts working a min wage job when a teenager to support his family.
2) Hopefully graduates high school.
3) Continues working that job, and also another job, and sometimes a third job, as he has no actual ‘skills’.
Here is the life of a not-smart not-poor person (Probably a white guy.):
1) Usually doesn’t work as a teenager, and if he does he works a lot less and does it for himself.
2) So he is much more likely to graduate high school
3) And then he’s off to a technical school because he can afford not to work for a few years.
4) He learns how to be a plumber, spends the rest of his life as a plumber making five times as much as the other guy.
Same intelligence level, same level of drive (in fact, the poor person is probably _more_ driven), but their entire life is going to be decided by _whether or not they have to immediately start working shitty minimum wage jobs_ and thus will do so their entire life…or if they can actually learn some marketable skills first.
There are _a hundred thousand_ times more of these people than the ‘smart guys’ that AA is aimed at.
I don’t exactly have a plan for solving this, I’m just pointing out that AA, as designed, seems to be a clever trick to get some minority representation in the upper classes…and completely ignores the fact that minorities do not even have access to the middle class, and allowing _that_ would have a much wider effect.
You may disagree with this, but the next time I need someone from the skilled trades; a plumber, a carpenter, a mechanic, I sure as hell hope that tradesman is not not-smart; I hope he or she is both skilled and smart.
I think you’ll find that that skilled tradesman probably earns a lot more than many people with a BA.
You underestimate what this work requires. I don’t know that I do or don’t disagree with your comparisons otherwise; but I have to stand up for the middle-class solid smarts required for doing work like plumbing.
“but the next time I need someone from the skilled trades; a plumber, a carpenter, a mechanic, I sure as hell hope that tradesman is not not-smart; I hope he or she is both skilled and smart. ”
I agree. Most of the skilled tradespeople I know are smarter than I am, all my formal schooling (and I have a lot of it) notwithstanding. I also know a few people who have only a high school diploma and are not in trades normally classed as skilled and who I consider to be much smarter than me. I probably have more book smarts (probably, not definitely), and I probably know more about U.S. history than they do, but that doesn’t mean I’m smarter.
“the next time I need someone from the skilled trades; a plumber, a carpenter, a mechanic, I sure as hell hope that tradesman is not not-smart; I hope he or she is both skilled and smart. ”
Smart is as smart does. You can not be a genius-level intellect and still have learned in trade school that pipe needs to drop one-eighth inch per foot. You can be the guy who invented an entirely new dimension to do mathematics in and still not know that you shouldn’t use the drainpipe as an electrical ground.
I’ll add that someone can get a PHD in history and yet still only be an average intellect.
Though it’s unfair to tar them all with the brush of Victor Davis Hanson.
Yet the type of intellect should (must?) be different. For the most part, plumbers deal with problems that have already been solved; eg, the appropriate drop is one-eighth inch per foot. The PhD is supposed to demonstrate the ability to create new knowledge; eg, a model that shows why one-eighth inch is the proper drop.
Michael Cain, you may be right when it comes to new construction.
Rehab/renovate/maintain? Not so much. You often have to work out the solutions, and they’re often not obvious, each with its own set of tradeoffs.
I’d also point out that through the industrial revolution and well into the 1950’s, much of the patents given for new and wonderful devices were the inventions of tradesmen, not engineers and scientists. And a good deal of the history collected on the local level is the work of people who love their community, not of historians.
Education is a wonderful thing. But lack of education does not equal stupidity. And it’s quite common for extremely bright people to not thrive in school, as one Gentleman wrote about in the not-too-distant past; he drives a truck and has one of the keenest minds on display here.
> the type of intellect should (must?) be different
Yes, exactly that.
The guy who does all the work on our house is an electrician and “smarter than me” in a lot of ways. All the practical ways that seem to matter to actually doing something useful.
I do wonder if that impression would continue if the conversation turned a different direction. We don’t exactly philosophize much in each other’s presence.
Slope has very little to do with what a plumber does. Those slopes are minimums anyway.
A lot of what a plumber does involves treeing vents together.
The MedGas cert is the big thing among plumbers. It’s a type of critical brazing common in hospital use.
The best way to tell how good a plumber is is to watch how much they have to take out the jackhammer after a rough-in.
I agree with you on the smarts but it has been my observation that there is a lot of nepotism that happens in the unions for these groups. It is impossible to get into the Stage Hand union in New York unless you are related to someone. These stage hand’s can make six-figure salaries.
I’m generally pro-Union but they should not run on entry via nepotism.
New Dealer,
I think that’s a feature of unions in skilled trades and in trades in which there are few jobs and a lot of people want them. Even though I think it’s a feature, I also realize that if the unions weren’t gatekeepers, someone else (e.g., management) would be. I don’t really know the solution for making things fairer, but acknowledging some sort of problem exists might be a first step.
But the problem is as DavidTC points out is that a lot of people might be better off learning a trade but are denied access because of this kind of nepotism and keep in the family mentality.
Post in two parts, one to address general nepotism, one to address unions:
That’s not what I was pointing out. If there are ‘trade level’ jobs, and I really have no idea how I’m defining that, people who have the education can usually get a job. (Assuming such a open job position exists at all.)
Nepotism, where it actually becomes a concern for racial discrimination, is usually at the pre-education level.
I.e., if you take my example of plumbers, there’s also a third guy which might or might not graduate high school, _doesn’t_ go to any sort of college or tech school, but _he_ gets a job with his uncle as a plumber’s assistant, and eventually becomes a plumber without formal education.
And the thing is, this is functionally the same thing as not being poor, so I don’t really see the need to worry about it. We could just as easily imagine the uncle having loaned the kid the money for plumber school.
That’s not to say nepotism isn’t a problem. It’s a problem from the POV of the business, certainly.
It’s just not really a problem affecting what we’re talking about. The discussion basically already _is_ about ‘how rich someone’s family is’, and if it wasn’t nepotism, the money would (and does) flow the same way via other means.
DavidTC,
I.e., if you take my example of plumbers, there’s also a third guy which might or might not graduate high school, _doesn’t_ go to any sort of college or tech school, but _he_ gets a job with his uncle as a plumber’s assistant, and eventually becomes a plumber without formal education.
To become a plumber, you do not need to go to school. But you do need to do an apprenticeship with a master plumber for several years (I believe the licensing requirements vary, this is regulated at the state level). Same with many of the skilled trades; even with the college degree, typically an associates, the tradesman is still a journeyman until completing an apprenticeship under a master.
And I completely disagree this is a problem with _unions_. The amount of union jobs, where not being in the union keeps you out, is negligible. Usually you just join the union when you get hired, and what keeps you out is _certification_.
You mentioned stagehands in New York, and theatre actually is one of the _very_ few jobs where you might need a union card before being hired…and that’s actually pretty easy to get. It does mean that you can’t walk in off the street into a Boardway show, not even as a stagehand, but OTOH that industry has _no_ educational requirement, and is much more difficult than people think and hard to test(1), so I understand why people have to work their way up…which really just means they have to work one other jobs first before they can work at the ‘top tier’ companies. The I.A.T.S.E., the union for stagehands, requires working a total of three years at a theatre that’s on their list.
So if you want to get into the stagehand union then you have to find a jobs as a stagehand at one of the thousands of theatres that you can earn membership at. I have no idea why you think it’s a union card keeping you out…the ‘closed shop’ theatres that you have to have a union card to _apply_ to are, essentially, only broadway theatres.
And almost no jobs work like that. Show business is a weird exception, because the union is functioning as a _guild_. (Like I said, there are no educational requirements.) In other union jobs, you just join the union when you’re hired.
You might have to know someone to get hired in theatre…but that has nothing to do with unions.
1) People tend to think acting is just acting, and stagehanding is just moving stuff around. No, and all _that_ stuff is easy to check at an audition or job interview. The difficult part is doing it exactly right, night after night, under very stressful conditions, with no room for error…and _that_ what having earned your way into the union shows you can do. Getting into the union is just having a job reference for a job that, as I said before, requires literally no education, so references are all anyone has.
zic
To become a plumber, you do not need to go to school. But you do need to do an apprenticeship with a master plumber for several years (I believe the licensing requirements vary, this is regulated at the state level). Same with many of the skilled trades; even with the college degree, typically an associates, the tradesman is still a journeyman until completing an apprenticeship under a master.
Yes, and there might indeed be nepotism there. But all that is _after_ my point, in that poor people can’t go to college for plumbing _to start with_. They do not have the money to spend on college, and even if they do, they don’t have the time to spend. (They have to be out earning money.)
I am not entirely convinced that nepotism is a big enough problem to worry about it _in general_. If there actually are job openings, they will be filled by competent people. Nepotism is good at filling jobs that do not actually exist as make-work, but if nepotism is filling actual positions with competent people, and keeping other competent people out, the actual fact appears to be that we’ve got too many people trained as plumbers, and there’s not really a good solution to that that results in them all having jobs as plumbers.
I understand the concerns, I understand that nepotism can lead directly to racism, but I’m not convinced a problem of any real size, and it certainly is not comparable to the problem of people being unable to take the time and money to learn the skills in the first place, which _completely_ bars them from the industry, and completely bars them in ways that are legal and no one ‘has a problem with’. Whereas nepotism is generally frowned upon and not accepted in corporate life.
Erm, I think way too many people have focused on ‘smart’ and decided I meant the _lower_- end of smart.
I’m not even sure how to reply to this to get my point back on track. Is the issue the word ‘smart’?
I must point out I said _not-smart_, and not _dumb_. I am talking about the _average_ person, the middle of the bell curve, IQ 90 to 110. The one who _isn’t_ going to score 1520 on the SAT and get a scholarship, and has steady Bs in high school and either isn’t going to get into a top-rate college or, if they get into them via AA, will probably not do well.
The sort of people who _should_ go to a trade school and learn how to repair air conditioning, or who should go to their community college and get a bachelor’s in history or something like that. Not lawyers, not doctors, but I’m not trying to disparage them.
Moderately well-off kids can do that, and have pretty good lives.
Poor kids can’t. They have to earn money to feel themselves, and often have to feed other people also. So _they_ end up in shitastic minimum wage jobs. Sometimes they manage to take night classes or something and climb out, but that’s usually a pipe dream that soaks up a decade of time and money and doesn’t actually pan out.
That _right there_ is the problem we should be solving, not caring about how many poor black kids get into a ‘good college’. We can spend time and effort trying to shove people up _several_ rungs, which result in less resources _and_ people who don’t quite know what they’re doing when they get up there and fall back down…or we can just let them climb _one_ rung, and try to have everyone do it.
Although, again, I have no actual proposals here. I’m just here to assert that AA is coming at the problem from the wrong direction.
We’re headed for a brusing in terms of not having enough tradesmen. Plenty of folks starting programs around here for felons to learn how to lay bricks (and other stuff that’s “work with your hands and work hard”)
There is also the fact that many unions (and I sat this as someone who is generally pro-union) are closed shop and entry is based on nepotism. This is wrong.
There was an article on Window Washers in the New Yorker a few months ago. This is a union job and obviously well-paid. The guy they interviewed said he knew that is daughters were going to come to him one day and say “Dad, I’m dating this guy and we want to marry and he needs a job. Get him into the union.” My guess is that entry into the Window Washers union has always been through these “connections”.
I agree with Zic about the intelligence issues but nepotism and connections are certainly problematic.
I’m not a defender of nepotism and the need for connections, but I don’t think it’s limited to unions (and you didn’t say it was limited to them). To be honest, most jobs I’ve had in academia I’ve got because I had certain connections–some professors agreed to be references, a fellow grad student recommended me for an on-campus assistantship, etc. I imagine most professions are like that, though to greater or lesser extents.
Of course it is not limited to unions or trade jobs. I did not mean to imply that I thought it was. Many of my jobs have been through connections as well.
Nepotism is a vexing problem. Though it is interesting where people support it more or less. I’m generally opposed to white collar and blue collar nepotism. But I’ve met people who decried white-collar nepotism (the rich staying rich) but supported blue-collar nepotism (the kid was born to be a cop). Or they will decry the law practice that gets handed down generation to generation but support the window washer giving jobs to his future sons-in-laws.
Then again, I am starting to think that everything is tribal.
Hm… I’m not sure I would describe all of that as “nepotism”. Though, per your last sentence there, that might indicate my ideological blinders.
If I gain a reference from an employer, presumably one I’ve earned via a demonstration of my skills, competency, professionalism, etc., and that reference helps me land a job, I don’t necessarily see anything wrong with that part of it. Now, zooming out a bit, there surely are ways that privilege might have factored into it… maybe I only got the opportunity to prove myself to that employer because of something unearned (e.g., race, gender, family connection), but I think that is different than calling a reference a form of nepotism.
Personally, I can’t get too worked up over family and friends helping one another, even if it can lead to disparate outcomes that have no grounding in merit. Where I do get worked up is when that help is entrenched or defended via employment of the state or other coercive forces.
Passing down a food truck license from father to son isn’t appalling to me. Arguing for limits on the number of available licenses so that the son doesn’t have to face competition is.
Nepotism is a negative word. It should be reserved for situations in which otherwise qualified people are denied access to a field solely because they don’t already have a relative already in there. If a kid was “born to be a cop”, that by itself doesn’t strike me as nepotism, because that doesn’t mean some engineer’s kid cannot also be a cop.
In the window-washer example, it sounds as if entry into the field is determined by whether you already know a guy who can sponsor you into the union. The engineer’s kid is out of luck.
PC’s connections, while they might be integral to what positions he got don’t sound like they were based on his knowing a relative. Even if he did know a relative, that connection was probably neither necessary nor sufficient to getting the jobs he got.
Vikram,
These kids are described as being “born to be cops” because they come from a family of cops. This does not strike me as very good arguments. One would almost say it is that they are “entitled” to be cops because granddad, dad, and their uncles are cops.
That being said, I became a lawyer just like everyone in high school predicted I would become. They predicted I would become a lawyer because I am a lot like my dad and he is a lawyer. I tried to resist this for a long time but no other field would have me it seems.
And I do enjoy it so maybe some people are born to be something but there was another article about a woman who dropped out of college because of debts and her boss said “some people are born to serve coffee” This strikes me as being wrong.
Have you actually looked at examples?
“This is an objectively stupid goal. People who are very smart and determined can usually figure out _some way_ to escape poverty.”
Look at American McGee. Then tell me again that “people can usually find some way out of poverty.” Because the way I see it, it was 50/50 the man spends enough time in jail to become a felon. And he wasn’t even (much of) a hacker.
Erm, what? I have no idea what the example of American McGee is supposed to demonstrate.
As far as I can tell, while he might have had an abusive childhood, he didn’t have a _poor_ one. Second, he _is_ a fairly successful person, so if he did start out poor, that, uh, proves my point. Assuming he is, in fact, smart and driven, which I _also_ have no evidence of.
I know you’re a troll and all, but you usually are _understandable_.
He’s someone I’d describe as “above average” in intelligence. But he’s also the type to have been hauled in for stealing, more than once. I’d say, if you look at it, his success was more a matter of luck.
When you’re abandoned at the age of 16, I think that counts as a poor childhood, at least if we’re looking at wealth transmission.
I thank you for making this post. It represents a view point not often seen on TLoOG.
The pearl clutching is amusing.
Pearl clutching about pearl clutching.
How amusing.
“I hypothesize* that our main motives are to entrench our current social order. We on top don’t want K-12 education to be equal throughout America. Truly leveling K-12 education would horrify even middle-class parents. Especially middle-class parents.
Acknowledging this, of course, is not an option. It’s too horrific to admit. But the guilt still burns, so we soothe it with the balm of affirmative action. And if that doesn’t work, there’s always the safety net. Head Start, Obamacare, progressive taxation, and all the rest are morsels of compassion engineered to excuse us from the need to fix K-12”
Intriguing. I don’t know if this is or was true on an actively conscious level but affirmative action could have had that effect. However, I will note that conservatives who are skeptical of affirmative action are not exactly clamoring to level the playing field in K-12 either. I also doubt that the reforms of Michelle Rhee do much to level the playing field either.
What do you think needs to be done to level the playing field on a K-12 level?
How would you deal with urban neighborhoods that have different demographics?
My brother lives in a neighborhood of Brooklyn that had a immigrant population of working class or less for most of her history. Since the 1990s or early aughts, there has been rapid and nearly unstoppable gentrification. Now the neighborhood boasts a lot of young people of the hipster type but there are also a lot of upper-middle class professionals/creative class people that live in the neighborhood. They are no longer moving to the suburbs when they have kids and they want to send their kids to public school because NYC private school tuition and competition is insanity-making. This is causing friction with the poorer Hispanic community who are still a sizable presence in the community. The upper-middle class white people want a very different kind of eduction for their children than the Hispanic parents want. The communities have different values and needs. When I visit my brother, I see a lot of activist signs around the neighborhood protesting changes that the upper-middle class newcomers are doing to the schools (all elementary school level)
How do you solve a problem like this?
I don’t know if this is or was true on an actively conscious level
Oh, I would guess not consciously. I should have clarified that.
conservatives
I think conservatives are part of the same process. While they might want a smaller safety net, they are paying for the one they have, and that allows them to take mental credit for helping the people who we refuse to educate. I assign no more or less blame to conservatives or liberals.
Michelle Rhee
It’s not totally clear how much of an effect she has, but she is an example of someone who is attempting something. In that small way, she has my support.
What do you think needs to be done to level the playing field on a K-12 level?
I begin to fall down a bit when asked questions like this. This is not really my area of expertise even though I feel it is the biggest problem in the US today and for the foreseeable future. In general, I think a good way to solve such problems is to run pilots of a lot of different ideas and see what gives positive results. Then roll out the pilot for a larger scale studies using totally new staff (who were not responsible for the idea originally and are being trained from scratch). If any of the larger scale studies provide good results, you make that national policy.
Off the top of my head, here are two potential ideas (which are probably awful):
– bussing kids however far is necessary to demographically match different schools
– reassign teachers to schools from the top down
I have a feeling though that even if these ideas are awful, they would not be opposed on their merits but because of what it would mean for the kids of parents who have to slum with a new crowd.
Vikram,
Do you think those parents will object to the “slumming” because the quality of their child’s education will necessarily suffer? If so, does this assume that education is zero-sum?
Or do you think those parents will object to the “slumming” because even if the quality of their child’s education doesn’t change, the demographics of their classmates will shift?
Perhaps it is overly ambitious, but when I think about leveling out K-12 education, it is not about bringing top schools down but bring bottom schools up. Which, obviously, is easier said than done.
Do you think those parents will object to the “slumming” because the quality of their child’s education will necessarily suffer?
Yes.
If so, does this assume that education is zero-sum?
It assumes that *parents* think it *might* be zero sum. Why risk it with their own kid? (To be perfectly honest, if I had a kid in the school system and someone like me were talking about the things I am talking about, I’d be afraid.)
Or do you think those parents will object to the “slumming” because even if the quality of their child’s education doesn’t change, the demographics of their classmates will shift?
Not that so much. Though those might be too tightly linked in the mind to be given separate consideration.
when I think about leveling out K-12 education, it is not about bringing top schools down but bring bottom schools up
That would certainly be my preference too! That said, in the attempt to bring bottom schools up, I’d be willing to risk incurring some damage to some top schools if that were necessary. The moral weight of operating terrible schools justifies it.
Well said. Especially your last point.
Busing was already a massive failure when tried. There was a lot of active resistance to it in the 1970s.
Also as far as necessary might not be too healthy. I don’t think we want to give kids two-hour commutes in both directions.
I did warn you I’m short on solutions!
That said, when I hear something encounters “active resistance” that tells me that it is probably awful but possibly wonderful.
These solutions are only plausible in more radically centralized school system than what we currently employ or ever employed in the United States.
Michelle Rhee
You shouldn’t be so accepting of her. All she has demonstrated that if you run around and start grading teachers and schools based on standardized tests, you provide a _very large_ incentive for teachers and schools to cheat.
In fact, there are claims that that is the _only_ reason her methods show any gains at all. The claim isn’t that she cheated, the claim is she just ignored the cheating happening under her. (Unlike in Atlanta, where we decided to teach in the same way…and the cheating was quickly discovered.)
And you also, incidentally, turn education into this rather horrible thing of students having to sit and memorize everything that might be on the standardized tests. Instead of _actual education_.
Apparently, if you decide that schools are to be judged by a single easily gameable metric, that metric will rise as school learn to game it, either by just outright cheating, or, best case scenario, by pounding into students the random stuff that standardize testing tests for.
This is not really a shocker, and there seems to be no attempt to actually demonstrate this provides better outcomes or even a higher graduation rate. I mean, if we start judging schools by how well their students play Tetris, I’m sure we’re see Tetris scores start rising year to year also…but there’s not any way this is _useful_.
You’re rightfully concerned about the ability of tests to encourage gaming of the system and the potential for certain types of tests to encourage types of learning that are not quite as good.
But that means we need to craft tests and testing environments carefully, not that we just never administer any tests.
If you give students tests and quizzes, they will just learn to the test. Some will even cheat, demonstrating the invalidity of testing and quizzing students.
will,
yeah, there’s learning to the test.
And then there’s “I can do multiple choice with my eyes closed”
(aka learning the teacher).
Then you don’t even need to know the material.
I didn’t say anything about never administrating any tests.
I was just talking about the sort of craptastic system that Michelle Rhee runs around promoting, and its ‘success’ in…creating a generation of students that don’t know anything except the test, and causing teachers to systematically cheat.
Tests can be a useful but are ultimately an incomplete method of assessing student learning. Really, any form on its own is insufficient, and increasingly so as you move down the age spectrum.
I propose a system whereby teachers are apprenticed to master teachers. Once the teacher has reached a sufficient level of mastery, the old Grading System goes back into effect, you know, the old Report Card, where the teacher is the judge of a student and not some Scantron, sedulously poring over some blackened ovals.
I am the teacher I am today, warts and all, because I worked as an assistant for two years under a master (and masterful) teacher, who herself had worked as an assistant once upon a time.
One of the things that I think these threads demonstrate is the unique way that people with no experience in the world of education save for having once been a student presume to know exactly how to go about fixing what ails our system. I get that on the internet, everyone has an opinion, but education conversations always seem to be turned up to 11. “Listen, I have no experience or training in pedagogy, assessment, child development, school governance, public policy, or any of the other things that go into making a school work… but let me tell you why my solution is the only solution.”
It boggles the mind.
This is the Internet and humanity. Why are you surprised? God forbid anyone say that they are not an expert and will defer their opinion.
Heh… I’m not surprised. Because it happens all the damn time.
What bothers me is that it often seems to be especially bad with education. I think part of this stems from a low perception of educators, part of it well-earned.
I would never presume to tell a doctor how to treat my illness because I’ve been visiting the doctor for 30 years. But many people presume to tell teachers the best way to teach because they sat in the classroom for 12+ years.
We tend not to see teachers as experts, in part because there are a substantial number of them who aren’t. However, it is my experience that non-expert educators generally don’t care enough to involve themselves in such discussion or quickly expose themselves as non-experts. But there are a great number of educators who are experts on this field and who should be treated as such. That does not mean others can’t participate in the conversation or contribute meaningfully, but does mean that they should be willing to acknowledge when they’ve wandered into unfamiliar territory.
Case in point, I had the displeasure of sitting opposite a horrid woman during a wedding this weekend. The type of woman who brought her 7-month-old baby to the wedding against the wishes of the bride and groom. The type of woman completely ignorant or unsympathetic to my wife, who left our 3-month-old behind for the first time, demonstrated by a near unwillingness to talk about anything other than her daughter and who seemed shocked to learn that we, too, were parents, as if she was the only parent on God’s green earth. Anyway, when I finally steered the conversation away from her baby and onto what we do for a living, she was intrigued about my work with children, leading to this exchange:
“Ya know, I love being with my daughter so much, I think I could do what you do. I don’t really think I’m meant to be a banker, I think I’m meant to be a teacher. How did you get into your line of work?”
“Well, I went to undergraduate school for education, worked in the trenches for a couple of years, went to graduate school for education, and have been plying my trade for 5 years ever since.”
“Awesome. I could totally do that. So which is the best grad school for education? I should probably apply to that one.”
“Well, it is actually pretty hard and the top schools, like all top schools, are highly competitive. Since you have no background in education, you’d need to take the ‘career changer’ route to compensate for not having done anything related to the field. You’d have some catching up to do relative to other prospective students and teachers who do have background and experience.”
“Yea, but I really love parenting so I’m sure I can do it.”
It took all my energy to not say, “Well, I really love money. Does that mean I can get a finance gig like yours? I mean, what else is there to it?” Instead we got pie and never returned to the table.
And if you are reading a bit of defensiveness in my comments here… well, yes.
If we were somehow motivated to do something about all this, I would like to see experts in the area providing most if not all of the solutions that are attempted. Most of what smart people who don’t have experience in an area would do to fix something is based on personal intuitions of how the world works.
I really love baseball. After I retire, I’m going to consider becoming a second baseman.
education conversations always seem to be turned up to 11
It sort of makes some sense. Education is a public endeavor, so we probably do have more right to have an opinion of what our schools should do than what Microsoft should do with Windows 9.
Then again, police work is public as well, but people seem to defer to the forces on how things should be done.
I think it’s a combination of things
– It’s their kid. Their emotions won’t let them believe they don’t know what’s best.
– Like you said, 13+ years in the classroom makes everyone an expert.
– Personal experience with bad teachers leads us to be suspicious of all teachers.
—
Regarding dials that go up to 11, I bought an amp on Saturday and discovered that they don’t seem to do that anymore (at least on the models I saw).
Great points. Also, I hope it was clear that I was responding to the threads specifically and the typical conversation about education more generally, and not your essay. Not only do you clearly have a certain expertise as an educator, you also seem cognizant of the limits of your expertise.
You were clear.
Regarding my experience, I ought to make clear that I never really received any training how to teach from anyone. I got my PhD, which was solely directed toward business school stuff. After that, I became a professor where I taught some of the things I learned. Whatever advice I got on how to teach was mostly directed toward how to do it adequately while leaving time to do my research.
Kazzy,
So, I, um, do know someone with more than his fair share of experience in designing schools that are effective and efficient.
But, he’s trying to get the creme of the crop, and so it’s hard to look at the schooling and say, “here’s what we ought to be doing to improve urban schools.”
Something similar happens with law. Only it happens with law not just on the internet but in legislatures, too.
Heh… but at least those people theoretically have law degrees, right? Cuz those are the same folks dictating a lot of education policy!
See also.
the unique way that people with no experience in the world of education save for having once been a student presume to know exactly how to go about fixing what ails our system.
Heh, I once had a college freshman tell me quite bluntly that I had no idea how to do my job.
It’s possible he was right, but only by pure coincidence.
Heh, heh. How did Bertie Russell put it? The fundamental cause of trouble in the world is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.
You’re not wrong about people talking about stuff they have no expertise in, but I’m not sure you’re taking an impartial look at discussions here or elsewhere on the net/
Can you elaborate? I’m not sure I follow…
You’re an expert in education, so of course you can identify all the non-expert opinions (though we can’t know the pedigree of each commenter). In other matters, you’re not an expert, so you won’t identify all the non-expert opinions as easily. Hence, discussions on education are more likely to appear littered with non-expert opinions compared to other discussions.
I’m not slagging you (in fact, you’re generally very up-front about your non-expert-ness in other discussions, which is refreshing on the internet). An expert in any field is going to be more likely to see transgressions in discussions about his field.
A fair point. I’ll also concede this is a particular point of frustration for me, so I’m naturally both more sensitive to it and more critical of it.
It just seems that everyone has an opinion on education while only like 75% of the internet has opinions on other stuff.
Perhaps calling it “a fair point” understates what I meant.
I should have led off with, “You’re probably right on this.”
It’s not the nonexperts with opinions that bother me.
It’s the ones that pretend that they know something.
And then go ON and ON about how the “purported experts”
are corrupt/full of shit.
I suppose it rankles because I know people who do climate modeling.
They’re fair and honest folks who wouldn’t dream of distorting data…
Kazzy, your sensitivity is understandable (and people who are full of shit should be called out for being full of shit).
Kimmi, yeah, the know-it-all non-experts are a million times worse than your average non-expert (eg me).
I’m not sure that’s entirely correct. I.e., non-programmers rarely run around trying to explain why the halting problem is nonsense to programmers.
Education, being a public endeavor that we’ve all gone through, tends to be regarded as everyone’s business, just like the law is. And some of it _is_ everyone’s business.
But the fact that some of it is everyone’s business means we talk about it in public, which means a lot of people with no knowledge show up. This would _probably_ happen with any field, but chemists don’t stand around in public discussing some complicated chemical problem and so idiots can’t wander up and give stupid and uninformed ideas.
And what’s worse, sometimes the discussions happen with no teachers present at all, leaving a bunch of dumbasses to have a discussion where they think they’ve figured something out that is literally impossible, and will proudly wander around proclaiming it to all. Just like if you get a bunch of non-physicists together, they will happily invent a perpetual motion machine…but _they_ won’t be able to butt into a physics discussion to explain it. Whereas the educational dumbass will…go to the legislature or the public or something. In fact, they often _are_ the legislature.
I think education is a unique combination of something that looks easy, everyone has some experience with, and we talk about it in public. The only thing like it is the law itself. (And people are equally bad at writing law.)
Burt notes that the same happens in law. It clearly happens with economics, politics, philosophy, art, music, sports, human resources, business, marketing and religion. (And let’s not even get into mansplaining.)
Sure, it’s less likely to happen in science, math or technology (though it happens a bit in technology), but I didn’t mean to imply that every field of endeavour would have this happen. I just think Kazzy overstates the degree to which it happens compared to some other topics.
There’s also economics, medicine, and biochemistry (see Derek Lowe’s recent takedown of a scare piece about food additives). Or remember Elizabeth Warren’s moronic tirade about how the above-market interest rates charged at the discount window are actually a subsidy?
Jonathan,
To hone my point in a bit, I would say that the degree to which people want to give equal credence to non-experts and experts alike often seems greater with education. That is in part because many of the supposed experts are not.
I’ve often been told I don’t know what I’m talking about in conversations on ed policy by people who haven’t stepped foot inside a classroom since graduating and never studied education or anything related. I fully concede that this might happens to lawyers et al.
Generally speaking, far too many people think they know far too much on far too many topics.
It’s worth noting that our theorizing about non-expert opinions is itself a non-expert explanation based on our intuitions of how we think people behave. 🙂
Vikram, I don’t know if that proves my point or totally devastates it. Either way, you win.
I’d put community college in the category of things we do to excuse ourselves from reforming K-12.
That’s Vikram, upthread.
There may be some truth to this; certainly we have plenty of kids graduating high school who are not ready for college, and community college may well be needed for that transition.
But I think this is more the liberal arts side of things. Community college is also the place we go for technical education in a world where we’ve removed industrial arts from high schools. Automative repair, machine tool, electronics, masonry, culinary arts, many medical fields are just a few of the skills taught in community colleges, and rightly so. Community college is a vital part of our employment training system. It’s the part where business can work with the education system to make clear the educational needs for actual workforce.
Which brings up my bigger concern: the transition of employee training from business to the employee. That’s a tremendous cost shifting, and student debt, even for community college, is a huge problem.
I’m not opposed to community college. I’m opposed to using community college or the professions it leads to as a reason to tolerate the current state of K-12.
How do we fix education?
… it’s actually easy. Make what you want someone to learn
into something all pervasive.
Take reading, for example. We have had PHENOMENAL
success on this front.
Our communal extelligence deems reading to be part of
a fundamental skillset. In the 1970’s, it did not.
This, it seems to me, is the meaty core of the OP. AA students may well have been in the top echelons of their high schools, but those high schools (or maybe schools before that!) failed to adequately get the fundamental groundwork in place. Presumably these are smart kids capable of success — but success at the collegiate level assumes a foundation of success at the secondary level, and what may have looked like success at the secondary level really isn’t that.
We’ve a fair number of academics here at LoOG and every one of them can tell stories about how atrocious undergraduate writing can be. This is the problem in a microcosm: secondary schools are producing students who utterly lack the ability to express themselves in writing, to conjugate verbs, to relate verbs to nouns, to use paragraphs. Of course, math, civics, and a variety of other academic skills are foundational to a variety of disciplines for undergraduate college work: poor writing skills are simply easier for nearly anyone to see.
AA here looks like a filter to get to this phenomenon — because an AA student is likely to have come from a secondary school where these supporting-tier building skills were on offer only ostensibly, for reasons which I am probably not well-qualified to address and which are probably quite complex such that no single silver bullet can slay the beast.
So this seems like it isn’t so much an AA issue as it is a ‘not everyone should go to college’ issue.
Perhaps this is true. I am looking for a solution that is also equitable. There are probably a lot of people from very wealthy backgrounds who fall into the “not everyone should go to college” school but they get tutored and tutored and exemptions and extra-time because their parents can and do game the system. This strikes me as unfair.
The kid’s the Vikram Bath mentioned could probably succeed if they had parents who gamed the system as well or got a lot of hands on tutoring. My big issue is that “not everyone should go to college” will just damage the poor and as far as I can tell you need a college education for even the chance of a middle class life.
Of course, I came from a family where I was expected to get a graduate or professional degree because my parents reached that level of educational achievement. Growing up this seemed natural to me. When I tell other people about this, they feel rather horrified that getting a grad degree was considered expected of me.
I think it’s important to note the difference between “Not everyone should go to college” and “You shouldn’t go to college.”
I am firmly in the “Not everyone should go to college” camp, but if I was mentoring a young kid that I would otherwise figure to not fall into “shouldn’t go” category, I’d still reckon that they go. For better or worse, we confer benefits on those who go to college over those who don’t even in things that shouldn’t require college. I happen to think this hurts poor kids far worse than “Not everybody should go to college”, but it is what it is.
“For better or worse, we confer benefits on those who go to college over those who don’t even in things that shouldn’t require college. I happen to think this hurts poor kids far worse than “Not everybody should go to college”, but it is what it is.”
I think this stems from the fact that attending college has become a norm or, more precisely, an expectation. Therefore those who don’t are seen as failing to have met this expectation. I think a shift away from this would be a step in the right direction. That way rather than kids going to school because that’s what they feel they’re supposed to do, they’d go to school because they’ve identified it as their proper path.
“as far as I can tell you need a college education for even the chance of a middle class life”
… this is absolutely not the case. But in order to make it work, you need a LOT of talent at running a business. Contractors, Computer Professionals, Appraisers — none of these really need a college degree.
But it’s really, really difficult to get to the middle class life — and it’s even worse if you are asset-poor.
I think part of it is how you define Middle Class. The way I define it, a lot of people without college degrees have achieved it. A college degree does help your chances considerably, though.
Yup, definitions of middle class are a bitch. How do you define it, though?
Bear in mind that “working class” is really the upper rung of lower class.
My big issue is that “not everyone should go to college” will just damage the poor and as far as I can tell you need a college education for even the chance of a middle class life.
Neither of my parents graduated from college, and we were middle class. I don’t think any of my aunts or uncles or cousins did, either, and they’re all middle class, except for one uncle who’s just a fish-up in general. I’ve had a number of coworkers (software developers) without college degrees, including one of my managers.
There are many industries where a degree really is required due to credentialism and/or a legitimate requirement for skills that can’t easily be obtained without going to college. But there are still middle-class jobs out there for people without college degrees. In fact, I think my father makes more money than I do.
What do your parents/relatives do?
I’ve had enough trouble getting a software developer job even with a college degree. Trust me, those jobs that used to not require a college degree? They do now.
Oh, but Brandon, once upon a time you could be middle class without a college degree, but now you can’t. Haven’t you seen the discussions of the middle class here? It’s gone. Dead gone. As OWS showed us, even people with college degrees can no longer get any job other than cafe barrista, so even college educated people can no longer be middle class unless they get a degree in business/finance and go to work on Wall Street, and they can only do that if they were born into the top 2%. Everyone else is scavenging for scraps on the street. I’m surprised you haven’t noticed (but then, like me, you’re probably just zipping past them in your tinted-windows limo driven by a minimum wage driver with an M.A. in Early French Literature).
Maybe, maybe not, James. We”d have to look at the time series. A kid getting to work straight out of high school is earning money and won’t be saddled with all those student loans. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you the cost of a college education has risen far faster than inflation: all those amenities to attract students do add up. Furthermore, thanks to Congress’ pigheaded intransigence, the interest rate on student loans has just about doubled.
IIRC four crimes have no statute of limitations: murder, kidnapping, treason and war crimes. Add to that list student loan debt. It can’t be discharged in bankruptcy. It can’t be refinanced. It’s not deductible. I believe there’s 1.1 trillion USD in outstanding student loan debt out there: Wall Street just loves it and we shall never see any reforms to it.
Student loan debt is damaging young people’s lives. The high school grad, he’s earning money. He might go to the local community technical college for evening classes and pay for them out of his earnings at his two-bit job, eventually going for a better job on that basis. But as of now, a four-year degree financed on student loans is a mug’s game.
It’s easier to be middle class when you graduate with around 75 bucks in debt (and that’s due to parking) than it is when you graduate with five (or six!!!) figures’ worth.
“business/finance and go to work on Wall Street, and they can only do that if they were born into the top 2%”
… you mean math/physics.
Blaise,
>It can’t be refinanced. It’s not deductible.
It can damn well be refinanced. Or at least older debt was refinanciable. Might have changed in the past ten years. (also, PHEAA is awesome).
It is definitely deductible, up to a point.
Not legally it can’t Kimmi. Gillibrand is trying to get a bill passed so student loan debt can be refinanced. I put three kids through college.
I wish at turns I knew half as much as you think you know, Kimmi.
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1994-12-06/business/9412060045_1_pheaa-federal-direct-consolidation-loans-91-day-treasury-bill-rate
Again, I haven’t kept track recently.
He might go to the local community technical college for evening classes and pay for them out of his earnings at his two-bit job, eventually going for a better job on that basis.
Attempting that is _also_ a mug’s game, especially with the utter crap way that lower-end jobs treat their employees. I have seen so many minimum wage people attempted that and have their employers refuse to schedule around their classes or switch their shift around randomly or all sorts of bullshit. Or they get their hours cut back or laid off and can’t afford a semester or two, and then they need a new car, and they don’t have time to study and fail a class, and have to drop another, and before you know it, it’s six years later and they’ve managed a grand total of 24 hours towards their associates degree.
What people _really_ need the ability to do is just to go to technical school straight out of college, and power through the two years and come out with a degree, before starting work. Trying to get an education _while_ working enough to pay all your expenses is bullshit, and has always been bullshit. (Note there’s a difference between ‘trying to get an education while working’ and ‘trying to work while getting an education’. Are you a full time student fitting in a part time job, or are you a full time worker fitting in a part time education?)
Granted, student loans are _equally_ a stupid option, don’t get me wrong. As is not going to college.
I have no solutions here except perhaps we should figure out a way for everyone to stop being so fucking poor, and actual have an ‘economy’ that ’employs’ people again. (Instead of however the hell it functions now. I believe it’s operated entirely by trading credit default swaps.)
Stop it. I’m telling you straight up, a federally-backed student loan cannot be refinanced.
@DavidTC: I can agree with most of that on a situational basis. Yet not all employers are so stupid and short-sighted. Many employers will take advantage of Schedule C employee tuition reimbursement: it’s a wonderful perk if the employer knows how to use it effectively. Though many firms cycle through minimum wage employees like a moving kaleidoscope, they do like to promote from within.
http://www.usnews.com/education/blogs/student-loan-ranger/2011/01/19/4-reasons-to-consolidate-your-student-loans
It works like refinancing, Blaise. It allows you to lower your loan rates, if you time it properly. Particularly if you have variable rate loans, as my husband did.
From a Wells Fargo link:
You can’t “refinance” a student loan the way you can with other consumer credit products, but there are options to possibly lower your current monthly payment, reduce your interest rate, or reduce the amount you pay over the life of the loan.
http://blog.wellsfargo.com/StudentLoanDown/2009/02/can_i_lower_my_student_loan_in.html
Consolidation is not the same thing as refinancing. There are some superficial similarities, but they aren’t the same maneuver.
Burt,
yeah, you’re right. Still, to move from a 6% loan to a 4%, it looks like refinancing, doesn’t it?
No it doesn’t look like a refinance. I might add in passing, you can’t commingle any government loan with a commercial refi. That’s how Japan got its fiscal ass in a sling: nobody could sort out where the government ended and the banks began.
Heh, nothing gets folks going like a snarky comment about the middle class. 😉
Plenty of people at community college were learning “College Algebra”. They seemed to do decently at it.
I think it really says: “The motivated are still gonna need HELP, and maybe tutoring isn’t quite what’s needed”
So this seems like it isn’t so much an AA issue as it is a ‘not everyone should go to college’ issue.
I’m not sure I agree (although I agree that not everyone should go to college). Many of these kids with a lousy educational background can succeed, although they need remedial help. But initially they may not be very distinguishable from the set who shouldn’t go to college, so in Vikram’s example, those may be AA kids who needed more remedial help, or they may be kids who don’t belong in college.
Or they could be competent students who are dealing with the social isolation, lowered expectations, racial bias, racism, etc. that often plague students of color on college campuses.
I agree with both of you. Though I’m totally on board the idea that not all students should go to university, this could also be a case of crappy-high-school-fucked-its-students.
(I’m not going to suggest why the high school failed preparing these kids. I ain’t touching that discussion.)
Have you read Ron Suskind’s “A Hope in the Unseen”?
I have not, no.
It follows a standout student at an inner city DC schools and the struggles he encounters, both academically and socially, when he heads off to Brown University. It touches on all these things. A really good read.
Sounds interesting and heartbreaking. I should add it to the should-read list.
So this seems like it isn’t so much an AA issue as it is a ‘not everyone should go to college’ issue.
I disagree. Sort of.
Technically, the kids I am talking about were not ready for college and therefore should not have been there. But remember that were among the best students in their prior schools. If anyone deserved to college from their neighborhoods, it was them.
So, when saying these kids shouldn’t have been in college, it’s important to note that this is a failing almost entirely due to their K-12 experiences and not because they aren’t “college material”, whatever that is.
But remember that were among the best students in their prior schools. If anyone deserved to college from their neighborhoods, it was them.
If.
“Among the best” means top 10%, right? Given that cognitive ability is heritable, and that neighborhoods tend to segregate by SES, is it really that hard to believe that there are schools where fewer than 10% of students have the cognitive ability to handle college?
Note also that there’s a positive feedback loop. When a school gets a bad reputation, parents who care about their children’s education and have the means to do so will get their children out of that school. And then its reputation gets even worse, and some parents who were okay with it before pull their kids out, and so forth.
I’m sure that preparation is part of the story, but I don’t see how you can know that this is “almost entirely due to their K-12 experiences.”
“Given that cognitive ability is heritable, and that neighborhoods tend to segregate by SES…”
fuck yes!
Are you really trying to say that white folks are 90% more likely to succeed at college than black folks, because they are 10 times as wealthy?
is it really that hard to believe that there are schools where fewer than 10% of students have the cognitive ability to handle college?
This is a reasonable question, but I find the answer to be “yes, it is hard to believe.” “Smart” parents are almost certainly more likely to live where there are better school districts. And smart parents are more likely to have smart kids. But neither of those relationships are so strong as to make me believe that almost all the kids from a good school happen to be cognitively qualified for college while almost all the kids from a bad school are not. (Stupid parents are more than capable of birthing one smart kid in ten tries.) Sure, you’d see some differences, but they wouldn’t be as stark as what we observe.
Zowie!!! 200+ comments and counting on one of the subs?!
Nice game, V’Bath.
And we haven’t even started talking about Rush yet…
This post does provide a jumping point to vaccination in public schools. That may get us to 1000.
Especially since that will get us to Obamacare.
This post is now the record-holder on NaPP for most comments. And that’s after we imposed the four-day commenting autoclose.
I told you my man Vikram has game!
Beginner’s luck.
People love themselves a good anecdote.
GIGO is a very helpful acronym when it comes to education.