> Given the type of government service they’re going to get—one run by New Yorkers, not Swedes or Japanese—are they wrong?
You won’t hear me argue the NY state legislature is not deficient and/or corrupt. pushing back against monopolies writing their own legislation to kill competition is definitely a part of how we begin to fix it.
> You won’t hear me argue the NY state legislature is not deficient and/or corrupt.
What makes you think that’s the problem? The NYC school system, for example, spends $38,000 per year per student. Thats about triple what Japan spends per student. What else can the legislature do? And do you think the NY or NYC legislatures are any more corrupt than those in Japan or Germany or Sweden?
To me, the problem seems to be the workers running who are running the system, not how the system is designed on paper or how it’s funded.
> pushing back against monopolies writing their own legislation to kill competition is definitely a part of how we begin to fix it.
How does that follow? Say you defeat this legislation and NYC adopts community broadband. Will that system be fast, affordable, and reliable? That seems like putting hope over experience.
So having worked in the system before, one major headwind with NYC's operating costs is their buildings. The vast majority of schools are old, often dating back to prewar or immediate postwar period. As a general example, there is no plan to completely eliminate lead piping in NYC school buildings because it would cost too much money.
The school system spends a lot of money on inefficient heating, poor insulation, inefficient water fixtures, repairs etc. because there is no capital budget to replace schools or even these individual systems wholesale. Even finding a site to place a replacement school building is difficult in a city as crowded as New York and with NIMBYs; and then usually a new school isn't replacing buildings because all the buildings are over capacity, sometimes even 200% or 300% capacity with children in trailers on the playground and some lunch periods at 10am because there is no room in the cafeteria.
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One other thing is that NYC spends a lot of money doing things like extensive ESL education. In fact it is pretty rare for an NYC school to have zero ESL resources given the extensive immigration into NYC. This kind of remedial resource is generally not provided in a country like Japan, where only specific schools would have these kinds of resources.
Having lived in Japan, I recall monstrous class sizes of 40 or so, with only one kid that needed "Japanese as a second language" classes (that was me).
And, I live in Florida now, and the public schools here also have lunch at 10 am because they don't want to fund building a new cafeteria. It's real. But, we don't have "woke" problems anymore, I guess.
Japan has some of the best educational results in the world with huge class sizes and modest funding. If everyone speaking Japanese is part of how they achieve that, that suggests immigration is a bigger burden on our educational system than people appreciate.
Do other countries that spend much less on education not have to deal with inefficient and outdated school buildings?
And how much does ESL even cost? If it comes remotely near explaining why NYC needs three times as much money as Japan to do a worse job, that seems like a huge downside to immigration that nobody is talking about.
ESL is essentially a second staff on top of the normal staff. It’s not the only kind of support staff though; US schools mainline special needs children in regular schools because it leads to better educational outcomes and societal integration in the long run, whereas Japan usually separates most of these children into separate schools.
A lot of countries have significantly newer schools, because a lot of the physical building were destroyed like everything else during the wars, or most people moved into newly developed suburbs and new towns. NYC notably doesn’t includes its suburbs so its share of old buildings is a problem that suburban districts do not have.
> US schools mainline special needs children in regular schools because it leads to better educational outcomes and societal integration in the long run, whereas Japan usually separates most of these children into separate schools
If it delivers much worse results at much higher costs for everyone else, that seems like a terrible trade off.
this depends on if you think that the school system is more expensive than basically running an institutionalized welfare state for special needs people. The US dismantled these systems and then proceeded to enshrine these rights in the ADA.
Given that the US can barely handle the meager social security of those with work disability, it's hard to imagine that we could afford widespread, more expensive specialized institutions. And Japan is not exactly doing hot with spending given that they run a 263% debt to GDP ratio.
Does japan run an institutionalized welfare system for special needs people? I don’t believe that’s the case.
Japan has a different set of problems, but delivering efficient and cost effective, high quality education is something they get right. And insofar as special needs people are evenly distributed among various countries populations, we should be able to learn from what they do.
> > You won’t hear me argue the NY state legislature is not deficient and/or corrupt.
> What makes you think that’s the problem?
The US has a presidential system (even at the state level) where the legislative and executive branches are kept independent, which harms policy coherence
Most of the rest of the Western world (outside of Latin America) has either a parliamentary system (in which the executive is fully subordinated to the legislature) or a semi-presidential system (in which the executive is partially subordinated to the legislature and partially independent of it).
This doesn't just happen at the national level, but often gets repeated at the state level – in American states the executive (Governor/etc) and legislature are independent, in Australian states and Canadian provinces the state/provincial legislature controls the state/provincial executive
When things go wrong in the US system, it is so easy for the legislature and executive to engage in buck-passing in which each side claims they could solve the problem if only the other side would let them do it. In the rest of the English-speaking world, in most of Europe (and Japan too), that technique doesn't work, since the leaders of the legislature are also the leaders of the executive.
See also Latin America, where the same system leads to even worse problems. The US has other advantages (wealth, power, etc) which lets it overcome some of the downsides of its political system, where countries lacking those advantages can't
Under this theory, whenever all branches of government, executive and legislative, are held by a single party, we expect the policy to be coherent and the governance solid.
Suffice to say, observing the data from California or New York allows us to quickly reject this theory.
> Under this theory, whenever all branches of government, executive and legislative, are held by a single party, we expect the policy to be coherent and the governance solid
No we shouldn’t. Dominance of a single party will prevent inter-party fighting/fingerpointing/blame-shifting, but their intra-party equivalents can be just as bad. This is especially the case given the US has very weak party discipline by global standards, the party leadership has rather limited powers to tell the party’s elected officials what to do
In a parliamentary system, the executive needs to actively retain the confidence of the legislature, since a bare majority of the legislature can fire the executive at any time for any reason (and in a bicameral system, generally just a bare majority of the lower house). In a presidential system, the executive is an independent power base, separately elected, and the legislature can only remove it on the basis of serious misconduct (and often needs a supermajority to do so)
Busing, sports, schools attached to correctional institutions with crazy-high (six figures) per pupil spending may be in the same system and that may not be true everywhere. High health insurance costs for staff.
A few things off the top of my head that may be different (or maybe not!) but there could well be more.
OTOH lots of other places have far better school lunches and they’re free, but maybe those aren’t budgeted under the school but some other department. Lots of ways to get different outcomes with different accounting, without even doing anything plainly incorrect.
We don’t spend a lot of money because we bus. It’s the other way around: we bus because we have a lot of money to spend.
What happens here particularly often is that insiders (in context of schools, these are teachers and their unions, administrators, consultants, etc) are able to sell more of their services to users, who don’t mind the cost, because it’s spread among non-users (taxpayers), and they have very ability to exercise control over the insiders.
In what manner do you consider taxpayers to be non-users of public schools? If you went to a public school you're continually building on the foundation they provided. If you went to a private school you're continually surrounded by people who are as educated as the system could make them.
The world is currently in a race to see who can make the most advanced microchips the fastest, and we're doing that because it's starting to look like whoever makes the best chips gets to call the shots.
There aren't enough people who grasp the fundamentals well enough to contribute to this effort. Education is now a critical national security concern.
But NYC has an extensive and well funded public transit system. It’s unreliable, dirty, and unsafe, but that’s just more evidence that New Yorkers suck at running public services.
Are there schools attached to correctional institutions in NYC driving up the $38,000 per student spending? If we at just guessing, how about: New Yorkers are just bad at running public services?
We actually had a natural experiment with this during COVID. Schools in Western Europe and Asia quickly got students back in the classroom. But in places like NYC, teachers refused to go back to work for a year or more.
US schools are paying higher wages. We're comparing wages across international boundaries, and we're not adjusting for purchasing parity, so this isn't surprising (and also doesn't mean that US schools pay remotely well).
Not to disagree with your larger point, but comparing school performance is basically bogus. The biggest deciding factor in that is how the parents raise the kids. Do the parents raise mild mannered respectful children who are eager to learn, or do they raise little narcissistic brats who want to terrorize other students and in fact the teachers as well? That's what matters the most, not the quality of teachers or the amount of funding the school gets.
Furthermore, while there are bad teachers who hate kids and don't try, few if any start out that way. They become that way after prolonged exposure to bad students, their bad parents, and the school system which binds their hands and tells them to put up with it.
> What makes you think that’s the problem? The NYC school system, for example, spends $38,000 per year per student. Thats about triple what Japan spends per student. What else can the legislature do? And do you think the NY or NYC legislatures are any more corrupt than those in Japan or Germany or Sweden?
I wanted to ask if you were joking, but that wouldn’t be productive.
What else can the legislature do? Figure out why throwing money at a problem isn’t working. This is the point someone above made about private vs public industry. Private can’t operate at a loss. The federal, state, and local governments can, and generally do. I’m sure I don’t need to point out the federal budget deficit.
If a private company was given the same 38k per student with the mandate “fix the graduation issue or you’re fired” the graduation rate would absolutely change.
> If a private company was given the same 38k per student with the mandate “fix the graduation issue or you’re fired” the graduation rate would absolutely change.
Perhaps, but the better question is _how_ it would change. As we can see from the history of charter schools, typically that would happen by trying to cherry pick the least expensive, best performing students while excluding the most expensive.
As a simple example, one thing which makes large school district costs higher is that public schools are required to have expensive staff to care for students’ health, mental health, and special needs. If you are running a private school, you immediately see a cost advantage if you can find a way to discourage students who need those services from enrolling. It’s illegal to say “no special needs kids” but if you’re careful you can effectively approach the same outcome without a high likelihood of being sued successfully.
So stop trying to pay the same amount for every student and instead explicitly allocate more money to students who are legally required to be provided with more services. If you're paying for it either way you might as well have an accurate line item in the budget and mitigate the perverse incentive.
That would be my preferred option, too, especially if it allowed for things outside of school hours or locations more effectively, but it’d be a big change legally. School lunch is similar: arguably food insecurity should be dealt with separately but that’s a political minefield and so we have schools sending kids home with care packages over holidays because doing it directly is too hard to get through.
Then why would the charter schools avoid those students? They'd get more money. This would only not be the case if the funding isn't an accurate accounting of the costs.
You also gave them a graduation rate mandate, that’s why.
A school with half the funding full of healthy children of white collar professionals in the ‘burbs will graduate more kids than a school with full funding teaching kids who speak broken English, whose parents move them around a lot between schools because they’re not housing-secure, who don’t always eat breakfast or dinner, and who are on an IEP for a learning disorder.
By far the easiest way to hit a graduation rate target is to try to take as few hard-to-teach kids as possible. The funding to make up the difference in difficulty is… I dunno, astronomical. Maybe pay for their family’s entire living expenses or something.
> You also gave them a graduation rate mandate, that’s why.
If some people take longer to learn things than others, you pretty much have two options. Either you teach them slower, and then accept that they're not going to graduate on time and those students aren't going to get a high school diploma until age 21. Or you teach them less, and relax the graduation requirement so they can graduate on time. Both of these are unpleasant, but you have to pick one or you get the default option where they flunk out and never graduate.
At least in the US there is the concept of classes as denoted: AP, honors, standard. If I child can’t pass the standard class threshold, then fine, fail them.
I imagine most of us remember being in high school and there was always that kid in _every_ class that gave the teacher a hard time, caused distractions, etc.
There are, imho, two ways to handle that. Either drop the hammer on the kid, or do a home a visit. Or perhaps, both.
If the home visit shows the kid is just a jerk, keep dropping the hammer. If the kid has a shit home life, I imagine that 38k/yr could be spent in much better ways.
> If I child can’t pass the standard class threshold, then fine, fail them.
Now suppose the child has a medical condition and they have to spend half their time in the hospital getting treatment. Or they have a mental health condition and the meds only work until they build up a tolerance and then they have to switch medications and spend three months in a stupor trying to find another one that works.
They can pass the standard classes if you give them twice as long, but then they're learning one semester's worth of material every two semesters. What do you want to do with them?
> The funding to make up the difference in difficulty is… I dunno, astronomical. Maybe pay for their family’s entire living expenses or something.
Yeah, these days I lean towards housing as the root of a lot of these problems but that feels kind of that that “now draw the rest of the owl” joke. There’s so much pent up demand for affordable housing and each density improvement takes long enough that the kids affected today will probably be adults by the time we see improvements.
Or - the graduation rate would stay the same, and schools would be asset-stripped so that most of those 38k would flow to shareholders rather than school budgets.
There are plenty of examples of mediocre public services getting privatized and becoming even worse, from a capital-efficiency perspective (e.g. UK railways, UK water...). Private companies are out to make a profit, and efficiency is just a mean to it; if there are other means, even to the detriment of what should be their core mission, they will pursue those means.
The real objective is both empowering, motivating, and holding accountable the middle-management layers of essential public services: administrators, teachers, railway workers, etc. Privatization doesn't magically do that. Creating a competitive system doesn't require corporate profits.
Another example of this: in the UK the government pays as much as £250,000 per year for severely autistic young people to be looked after in private homes and hospitals. Many of these were funded by private equity. They take huge profits and the level of care is disgraceful. Even when the patients are not being actively abused [1] they are not receiving any care as such. The homes and hospitals are little better than prisons.
This always always seems to happen, and the people never wise up. Government acts as a money funnel to private companies, who pocket as much as they can as profit and provide the most criminally minimal service they can get away with.
And every time it happens and the people are ripped off, the answer is always “even moar privatization.”
> If a private company was given the same 38k per student with the mandate “fix the graduation issue or you’re fired” the graduation rate would absolutely change.
Funnily enough NYC has charter schools which aren’t exactly this but are an approximation. They’re renowned for pushing poorly performing students out of their schools and doing a terrible job serving special needs. As a result they do indeed often have great graduation rates.
> If a private company was given the same 38k per student with the mandate “fix the graduation issue or you’re fired” the graduation rate would absolutely change.
Often when an ultimatum along these lines happens, whether public or private, the problem winds up being "fixed" in large part by some combination of double standards, gaming the metrics, and outright fraud. Some number called the "graduation rate" would surely change, but it wouldn't necessarily mean the same thing as what was called the "graduation rate" previously, let alone necessarily represent a materially better outcome for students.
You won’t hear me argue the NY state legislature is not deficient and/or corrupt. pushing back against monopolies writing their own legislation to kill competition is definitely a part of how we begin to fix it.