Public schools
Sep. 7th, 2003 09:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fishsupremeContinuing my observations of current events, I just read this Newsweek article about overspending for home ownership, and what can be done to avoid requiring two incomes to live. Of particular interest to me is the last paragraph:
Don’t have kids. A drastic choice, but you’ll have more options on where to live. Good public schools are now for the moneyed class.
That's not what's supposed to happen. After all, they're public schools -- the whole point of the public paradigm, as opposed to the naturally-occurring capitalist one, is to have equal treatment for everyone, regardless of income. After all, the whole reason we have public schools is so that everyone can get an education, not just "the moneyed class."
And yet good public schools are accessible only by the rich? So everyone can get an education... you just have to be rich to get a good one. Somehow I doubt that's what the central planners had in mind when they amalgamated and homogenized the school systems at a county, then state, and finally federal level. Now, of course, there are undoubtedly exceptions to this rule -- for instance, I grew up in Kokomo, IN, and there was only one high school for the whole 50,000-person town, so rich and poor alike had access to the same education (or at least the same school). But the fact that this statement is being uttered as uncontroversial fact in a Newsweek article should tell us that this situation, while not universal, is not uncommon, either.
The particular tragedy of this is that we're paying for a good education... yet only the wealthy get what they paid for. After all, in most areas the schools are paid for by the state, not the neighborhood around the school -- which means that your tax dollars go to good and lousy schools alike. Most states spend over $6,000 per pupil per year... some spend as much as $9,000. Note that this is about what a good private school costs (a good school, not a prestigious one -- most of the quotes about private school costing $15,000 a year or more are referring to east-coast "prep schools" where you're paying more for the name and reputation than you are for the education), and a great deal more than what a good religious school costs (Catholic school runs about $2,000-$3,000 a year, primarily because you don't have to pay public school teacher salaries to nuns.)
Of course, this is balanced out somewhat by the progressive tax system... sure, the rich and poor alike are paying for good and crappy schools alike... but the rich pay a lot more taxes, and the poor get a lot more of the crappy schools. Now, this may make sense from a purely capitalist standpoint -- as a general rule of life, you get what you pay for -- but why doesn't the public school system, whose whole purpose is to equalize the education people get, fix this? The Department of Education spends billions of dollars a year, and the worst public schools are getting more money per pupil than some of the best private schools get, and to show for it we get... everyone getting a school whose quality is commensurate with what they paid?
Coudln't we have gotten that without having public schools at all? At least in a purely-private system, the poor would have the choice of paying a little more (by sacrificing quality of life in other areas) for a little better education, if they so chose... the public system denies them even that choice.
So how does this happen? The denial of choice is exactly the cause of it. People are denied choices at many levels:
1.) You don't get to pick the public school your kids go to -- it's determined by where you live. Result: home prices around good schools go up, making them accessible only to the rich, while home prices around bad schools fall, making them more desireable to the poor. You can't move your kids to a new school without buying a new house, so the schools have a captive audience -- which decreases incentive to perform.
2.) You don't get to pick the schools your tax money goes to -- it's divided up by the political class. Result: failing schools get more money, not less, so failure is rewarded. Now, I'll grant that taking money away from a school is not likely to make it better -- but the side-effect of this rewarding of failure is a sort of reverse Darwinism -- survival of the most unfit.
3.) Schools don't get to pick how much to pay people -- the politically-protected unions demand uniform pay scales. Result: there is little incentive to be an exemplary teacher (there is some, as the kind of people who would be truly exemplary tend to consider excellence its own reward to some degree) because an exemplary teacher is paid no more than a merely passible one. Indeed, working harder is punished, for "making everybody else look bad". Teachers can actually grant themselves a raise by getting a masters' degree, irrespective of their job performance. Pay for performance is expressly forbidden by the union contracts.
So for all that bureaucracy, for all that coercion that taxation entails, for all the administration (public schools tend to have administrator to teacher ratios at least ten times higher than at private schools), we get... the rich go to good schools (and overpay for them), and the poor go to crappy schools (and other people overpay for them).
The problem here is that the central planners who came up with the public school system have failed to recognize a fundamental truth -- capitalism is not optional. Capitalism is not an economic system you can choose to accept or reject, a premise you can choose to follow or ignore. Capitalism just happens -- it is the result of people's voluntary choices, and it is inevitable. The fact is that people with money will use that money to get better things for themselves, and you can't get around this because people without money will accept money in exchange for these things. To quote a wonderful line from Heist, "Everybody wants money -- that's why they call it money."
In order to improve the public school system, we must stop fighting against capitalism and instead harness it to improve education. It does no good to say "But it's not fair for the rich to get a better education than the poor" -- true or not, it doesn't especially matter if it's fair. Indeed, what matters is not how good the poor's education is relative to the rich -- that comparison does nothing but breed envy. What matters is how good the poor's education is on an absolute basis. It matters that this education is improving -- it does not matter how much slower or faster anyone else's.
To do this, we need to offer choices again.
1.) Schools must have the freedom to reward good performance and punish bad -- they must be able to pay teachers for performance. The NEA and the other teachers' unions are among the greatest impediments to quality education in America. Tenure is one of the worst ideas in history -- it seems to exist for the sole purpose of rewarding teacher laziness at the expense of students.
2.) Zoning laws that place limits on construction have to go. They are used by those in wealthy areas to "protect property values" -- that is, to keep the poor out. As a private citizen, you can't build a low-income housing development in the middle of a wealthy neighborhood by a good school. It's illegal. This is an obscenity -- if the wealthy want to "protect property values" on neighboring land, they can bloody well buy it themselves (and at those extremely high property values they're so desperate to protect -- it's not going to come cheap) instead of using the sword of government to keep out people who don't live up to their "standards". Without the zoning laws, people would build lower-cost housing in higher-cost areas. Would they be overpriced? Yes. But that would allow people to choose how much of their income (and housing quality) to sacrifice for a better school district. Is this an easy choice? Of course not -- if "the poor" had money to burn we wouldn't call them "the poor." But even a difficult choice is better than no choice at all... at least it helps those who do want to sacrifice quality of life for their children's education.
3.) Let people choose what schools to send their children to, even if it results in school population imbalances. If good schools have too many people applying to them... expand them. If poor schools have too few people applying to them... close them down, and send kids to the (expanding) better schools. And the teachers and administrators at those failing schools? Fire them. Yes, it's harsh, and involves firing people with years of loyal service. The harsh bits are why capitalism works. This is a human cost -- but the alternative is what we have now, and I don't think many people think that's much better.
And note that this is before we even get into more radically free-market solutions -- this is just looking at solutions that maintain the socialist education system! School vouchers, education tax credits, even complete privatization offer even greater advantages... but as everyone knows (since the politicians and teachers' unions trumpet this so loudly) they have some disadvantages, too. I think the majority of those disadvantages are overblown, but some are real concerns -- complete privatization, for instance, does not offer even the objective of having equal-quality schools for rich and poor.
But look what an objective of equality gets us. It gets us lower-quality schools for everyone... and "somehow", the wealthy still get the higher-quality schools, even in public school.
To quote P.J. O'Rourke, "When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators." Putting something under government control doesn't get money out of it -- it just means the money goes under the table, rather than on top of it, and you need both wealth and political connections to get ahead.
Don’t have kids. A drastic choice, but you’ll have more options on where to live. Good public schools are now for the moneyed class.
That's not what's supposed to happen. After all, they're public schools -- the whole point of the public paradigm, as opposed to the naturally-occurring capitalist one, is to have equal treatment for everyone, regardless of income. After all, the whole reason we have public schools is so that everyone can get an education, not just "the moneyed class."
And yet good public schools are accessible only by the rich? So everyone can get an education... you just have to be rich to get a good one. Somehow I doubt that's what the central planners had in mind when they amalgamated and homogenized the school systems at a county, then state, and finally federal level. Now, of course, there are undoubtedly exceptions to this rule -- for instance, I grew up in Kokomo, IN, and there was only one high school for the whole 50,000-person town, so rich and poor alike had access to the same education (or at least the same school). But the fact that this statement is being uttered as uncontroversial fact in a Newsweek article should tell us that this situation, while not universal, is not uncommon, either.
The particular tragedy of this is that we're paying for a good education... yet only the wealthy get what they paid for. After all, in most areas the schools are paid for by the state, not the neighborhood around the school -- which means that your tax dollars go to good and lousy schools alike. Most states spend over $6,000 per pupil per year... some spend as much as $9,000. Note that this is about what a good private school costs (a good school, not a prestigious one -- most of the quotes about private school costing $15,000 a year or more are referring to east-coast "prep schools" where you're paying more for the name and reputation than you are for the education), and a great deal more than what a good religious school costs (Catholic school runs about $2,000-$3,000 a year, primarily because you don't have to pay public school teacher salaries to nuns.)
Of course, this is balanced out somewhat by the progressive tax system... sure, the rich and poor alike are paying for good and crappy schools alike... but the rich pay a lot more taxes, and the poor get a lot more of the crappy schools. Now, this may make sense from a purely capitalist standpoint -- as a general rule of life, you get what you pay for -- but why doesn't the public school system, whose whole purpose is to equalize the education people get, fix this? The Department of Education spends billions of dollars a year, and the worst public schools are getting more money per pupil than some of the best private schools get, and to show for it we get... everyone getting a school whose quality is commensurate with what they paid?
Coudln't we have gotten that without having public schools at all? At least in a purely-private system, the poor would have the choice of paying a little more (by sacrificing quality of life in other areas) for a little better education, if they so chose... the public system denies them even that choice.
So how does this happen? The denial of choice is exactly the cause of it. People are denied choices at many levels:
1.) You don't get to pick the public school your kids go to -- it's determined by where you live. Result: home prices around good schools go up, making them accessible only to the rich, while home prices around bad schools fall, making them more desireable to the poor. You can't move your kids to a new school without buying a new house, so the schools have a captive audience -- which decreases incentive to perform.
2.) You don't get to pick the schools your tax money goes to -- it's divided up by the political class. Result: failing schools get more money, not less, so failure is rewarded. Now, I'll grant that taking money away from a school is not likely to make it better -- but the side-effect of this rewarding of failure is a sort of reverse Darwinism -- survival of the most unfit.
3.) Schools don't get to pick how much to pay people -- the politically-protected unions demand uniform pay scales. Result: there is little incentive to be an exemplary teacher (there is some, as the kind of people who would be truly exemplary tend to consider excellence its own reward to some degree) because an exemplary teacher is paid no more than a merely passible one. Indeed, working harder is punished, for "making everybody else look bad". Teachers can actually grant themselves a raise by getting a masters' degree, irrespective of their job performance. Pay for performance is expressly forbidden by the union contracts.
So for all that bureaucracy, for all that coercion that taxation entails, for all the administration (public schools tend to have administrator to teacher ratios at least ten times higher than at private schools), we get... the rich go to good schools (and overpay for them), and the poor go to crappy schools (and other people overpay for them).
The problem here is that the central planners who came up with the public school system have failed to recognize a fundamental truth -- capitalism is not optional. Capitalism is not an economic system you can choose to accept or reject, a premise you can choose to follow or ignore. Capitalism just happens -- it is the result of people's voluntary choices, and it is inevitable. The fact is that people with money will use that money to get better things for themselves, and you can't get around this because people without money will accept money in exchange for these things. To quote a wonderful line from Heist, "Everybody wants money -- that's why they call it money."
In order to improve the public school system, we must stop fighting against capitalism and instead harness it to improve education. It does no good to say "But it's not fair for the rich to get a better education than the poor" -- true or not, it doesn't especially matter if it's fair. Indeed, what matters is not how good the poor's education is relative to the rich -- that comparison does nothing but breed envy. What matters is how good the poor's education is on an absolute basis. It matters that this education is improving -- it does not matter how much slower or faster anyone else's.
To do this, we need to offer choices again.
1.) Schools must have the freedom to reward good performance and punish bad -- they must be able to pay teachers for performance. The NEA and the other teachers' unions are among the greatest impediments to quality education in America. Tenure is one of the worst ideas in history -- it seems to exist for the sole purpose of rewarding teacher laziness at the expense of students.
2.) Zoning laws that place limits on construction have to go. They are used by those in wealthy areas to "protect property values" -- that is, to keep the poor out. As a private citizen, you can't build a low-income housing development in the middle of a wealthy neighborhood by a good school. It's illegal. This is an obscenity -- if the wealthy want to "protect property values" on neighboring land, they can bloody well buy it themselves (and at those extremely high property values they're so desperate to protect -- it's not going to come cheap) instead of using the sword of government to keep out people who don't live up to their "standards". Without the zoning laws, people would build lower-cost housing in higher-cost areas. Would they be overpriced? Yes. But that would allow people to choose how much of their income (and housing quality) to sacrifice for a better school district. Is this an easy choice? Of course not -- if "the poor" had money to burn we wouldn't call them "the poor." But even a difficult choice is better than no choice at all... at least it helps those who do want to sacrifice quality of life for their children's education.
3.) Let people choose what schools to send their children to, even if it results in school population imbalances. If good schools have too many people applying to them... expand them. If poor schools have too few people applying to them... close them down, and send kids to the (expanding) better schools. And the teachers and administrators at those failing schools? Fire them. Yes, it's harsh, and involves firing people with years of loyal service. The harsh bits are why capitalism works. This is a human cost -- but the alternative is what we have now, and I don't think many people think that's much better.
And note that this is before we even get into more radically free-market solutions -- this is just looking at solutions that maintain the socialist education system! School vouchers, education tax credits, even complete privatization offer even greater advantages... but as everyone knows (since the politicians and teachers' unions trumpet this so loudly) they have some disadvantages, too. I think the majority of those disadvantages are overblown, but some are real concerns -- complete privatization, for instance, does not offer even the objective of having equal-quality schools for rich and poor.
But look what an objective of equality gets us. It gets us lower-quality schools for everyone... and "somehow", the wealthy still get the higher-quality schools, even in public school.
To quote P.J. O'Rourke, "When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators." Putting something under government control doesn't get money out of it -- it just means the money goes under the table, rather than on top of it, and you need both wealth and political connections to get ahead.
