I have personal experience with urban education, having been a member of a fairly large city's school board. One thing I realized is that centralization has killed the ability for anyone to think outside the box. There used to be thousands of school districts in my state, but that number has dropped by around 90%.
Sure, I get the argument that it's more efficient to pool some resources, such as buses, food service, etc., but I really believe that education is really just about having a good principal who can choose his/her teachers and hold them accountable. Most people aren't aware that many union contracts prohibit the principal from choosing the teachers in the school because of seniority rules, and getting rid of bad teachers is essentially hopeless. And of course all teachers are paid the same, based on years of tenure, rather than actual outcomes or instructional needs.
I've seen schools which most would consider being in the worst part of the ghetto doing very well because of a highly motivated principal. The more we centralize, the harder it becomes to do anything of value to help schools perform better. And the trend continues to be more and more in the direction of centralization.
> and getting rid of bad teachers is essentially hopeless.
This is the big problem with education. I don't like how unions have co-opted the narrative to "Just pay us more and we'll finally do our jobs right" which somehow has become crowd friendly. Instead better performance testing and easier firing is what we need, especially in my hometown of Chicago. Public sector unions have interests that go against those of taxpayers by default. Until we fix unions we won't fix education.
> I don't like how unions have co-opted the narrative to "Just pay us more and we'll finally do our jobs right"
They're probably even less happy about the right-wing has co-opted the narrative that the problems in education are caused by the teachers.
Teaching is a challenging job which requires an advanced degree, very long hours with no flexibility, low pay even before you adjust for true hours worked, and you are given very little professional discretion. Do you really think you're going to get better results by putting even more pressure on things which teachers have only marginal control over[1] rather than simply encouraging more teachers to leave?
To put some facts into the discussion: this assessment by the American Statistical Association found that teachers are responsible for 1 to 14% of student's test score variance:
Follow Amdahl's law: even if you could load the school up with the best teachers on the planet, lavish pay, fully merit-based, etc. you're not going to see the kind of improvements you're claiming.
The problems start outside of the classroom and need to be fixed there.
My dad worked hard as a teacher. But he didn't work 60 hours a week or anything like that. He'd grade papers while the kids were doing homework.
low pay even before you adjust for true hours worked
Two months vacation.
and you are given very little professional discretion.
I agree with you here. The constraints put on teachers and schools by all sorts of outsiders are very limiting.
Most of them are because the people paying the bill want some sort of feedback and control mechanism. Instead, I think teachers should be given great leeway, but also be very easy to hire and fire. If a parent isn't happy with their teacher/school, they shouldn't need to appeal to the schoolboard to place rules on the teachers. Instead they should be able to vote with their feet. Exit beats voice.
To put some facts into the discussion: this assessment by the American Statistical Association found that teachers are responsible for 1 to 14% of student's test score variance
If the theory is that teachers aren't that important, we shouldn't worry so much about who they are, or if we are paying enough to attract quality teachers. NB I am not saying I agree with the antecedent.
So your one experience with your father not working 60 hours weeks means what exactly when talking about teacher hours? Not much. I know a lot of teachers, most of whom work in very poorly performing urban districts, which are much different than say a well funded suburban district. They work all the time. 7am-10pm. They work weekends. They teach 4-6 classes of 40 kids where 5 students leave and 5 join every 2 weeks and 90% are ESL. Even with "2 months vacation" which also is shortening every year with professional development requirements (not saying those are bad, but it is becoming a myth in a lot of places that teachers get the summer off) it doesn't balance out.
Sure there are some teachers that don't need to work all those hours. Some because they are in a good district, some because they are fine doing the minimum, but you just can't make the blanket statement that teachers don't need to work long hours and "it's ok" because of the summers break. It just is not correct.
My data point sure isn't dispositive, but it heads off the "none of you know what teachers jobs are really like!" noize. As a rule almost all my friends have a parent who was a teacher or worked as teachers themselves.
shortening every year with professional development requirements (not saying those are bad
I'll say they are no good. They are, again, credentialism: put up some hurdles for people to jump over, and then say that they should get paid more because they jumped over some hurdles.
> If the theory is that teachers aren't that important, we shouldn't worry so much about who they are, or if we are paying enough to attract quality teachers. NB I am not saying I agree with the antecedent.
I was just trying to point out that we're talking about a small part of the problem. I think teachers are incredibly important but they only have a limited area within which to work and the results are hard to reduce to a single number. Merit pay systems aren't a bad idea in theory but basing them so heavily on standardized tests doesn't seem like it'll set good incentives since it discourages all but a very small part of what you'd hope someone learns in school.
By analogy, imagine how it'd sound if we looked at America's obesity problem and said that the problem was caused by bad doctors and we should fix it by linking pay to their patients' blood pressure, measured annually.
Nobody would spend a minute taking that person seriously but the equivalent is basically the mainstream consensus for how to talk about education - even the Democrats who generally considered friends of the teachers unions always talk about how we need to attract better teachers, which is basically an insult to anyone who currently has the job.
"Chicago school teachers make a median salary of $71,017. That's a whole lot more than the city's median household income (which can include multiple salaries for households with more than one earner) of $46,877, and greater still than its median per capita income of $27,148"
According to the actual Chicago Public Schools site that average is now $74,839. "Low pay" seems like quite a reach for me, especially for an employee who works only 9 months out of the year.
I agree with your last line very much, but I don't think it hurts to aim some focus towards getting students that extra 14%.
It sounds good compared to the median for the city but you're talking about a job which requires a masters degree - look at the median for that and then remember that you're talking about job which has a RIGID daily schedule, no vacation time during the year, etc. If you're a bright college student, how does that look versus say learning enough Python to get that income straight out of college? Before answering, remember that one of these jobs involves dealing with difficult children, bad parents, often pointy-haired administrators, meddling politicians, etc.
9 months of the year is a popular claim but it's very misleading: most teachers are working 60+ hours during week (and weekends) during the school year and the summer vacation has been steadily shrinking as schools add various administrative days and many teachers are required to engage in ongoing professional development which means that they're using some of that time to take classes.
This isn't to say that teaching is abject misery but we aren't exactly going out of our way to make the job appealing. If you look at the total time commitment or stress levels, there are plenty of jobs where you'll get a better deal.
The master's requirement is nonsense. It was put in place as a credential roadblock to make entering the teaching profession more difficult, but it has zero effect on student results.
If we are going to compare inputs in that way, we can look at the test scores of college students going for education degrees, and see that they have worse English scores than the math majors and also have worse math scores than the English majors.[1] For most education majors, their alternative isn't to become a lawyer or scientist or Python developer.
The education degree is useful for people who are doing research into education, not actually teaching themselves.
I'm not saying that masters degree should be a requirement but it is in many districts and if you look at the pool of college-students who are able to get a masters degree in any subject, teaching pays worse than most of the options after you balance the low pay of academia with the considerably higher level of flexibility.
My sample is skewed by knowing mostly science teachers but basically 100% of the ones I know could easily learn to program as well as a fair percentage of the developers I've worked with. They might not be doing original CS research or doing kernel driver development but there's an awful lot of work, much of it quite well paying, which depends more on skills other than core programming ability.
and if you look at the pool of college-students who are able to get a masters degree in any subject
If you keep on bringing up the Master's degree as some kind of proof of the other jobs they could get, I'll have to keep on posting things like[1] It's almost like the Master's of Education has been watered down to a credential to people who are willing to put in a bunch of busy work.
I'm not surprised that science teachers are pretty smart. Almost all my science teachers were pretty on it (I can name two exceptions). We probably need to do something to attract more quality science teachers. But, of course, saying that is an insult to current teachers.[2]
You obviously feel that it's useless, which is debatable but not the issue under discussion, namely that it's a professional barrier to entry which requires extra time or money to get. My point was simply that it's misleading to compare the median incomes for an city to a subset almost entirely comprised of people who've completed both an undergraduate degree and masters program.
You can argue about the merits of the requirement, whether schools of education should change their practices, etc. but until that changes, honesty compels you to compare the median incomes of people with roughly equivalent time invested in their professional skills.
> We probably need to do something to attract more quality science teachers. But, of course, saying that is an insult to current teachers.[2]
You appear determined to misunderstand that comment: it's a question of balance. The next time you hear a politician talk about education, see how many times they say anything positive about teachers versus the negatives – and note the dubious aspect to, say, “hard working” when you know that means “nights and weekends at no extra pay”.
How would you feel if your CEO kept talking about your company is releasing buggy code and we need to hire better programmers and make shipping bug-free code a key part of your pay? And, of course, no department is getting more staff, pay isn't going up in absolute terms, and none of the major obstacles people have been trying to get fixed for years are getting addressed first.
Now consider if it was paired with, say, major investment in a world-class QA operation, internal support resources and developers gaining some influence over deadlines and features. The core program might be the same but how it would be perceived is completely different if it's backed by signs of commitment and doesn't feel like you're being scapegoated.
You obviously feel that it's useless, which is debatable
If you want to bring it up again, this time I'll throw Teach For America onto the list of organizations that say it has no impact.[1]
that it's a professional barrier to entry which requires extra time or money to get
This is exactly credentialism. EXACTLY. "I don't know if it provides any benefit, but it takes time and money to get" is the perfect description for a useless credentialism structure.
when you know that means “nights and weekends at no extra pay”
I really don't know this. NPR seems to be part of the conspiracy keeping me ignorant [2]. Teachers work about 30 or so minutes less per day than other professionals, and that includes weekend work.
How would you feel if your CEO kept talking about your company is releasing buggy code and we need to hire better programmers and make shipping bug-free code a key part of your pay?
Like any professional, I would leave and get a different job. Fortunately my profession has not worked hard to arrange that there is only one employer in town. Since my wages are roughly what I would get on the market, as opposed to being set by some third party despite my market value, it means I haven't priced myself out of other jobs. My current employer pays me (roughly) enough to keep me around which is (roughly) what I would get elsewhere.
If I was being paid way above market for some reason, though, I'd raise a stink to high heaven and keep a hold of that prior job no matter what.
Modulo the need to keep things staffed for a whole semester, switching jobs into or out of teaching should not be as insanely difficult as it is. The beneficiaries of this system are the high-seniority people currently in the field who have no plans to leave. If someone wants to switch into teaching from another career, they need to go through the silly Masters-In-Ed hoops via night school. If someone wants to switch out after a few years, they are walking away with nothing from their pension-vesting system, and they have a "Masters In Education" degree which no one values besides school boards that have negotiated contracts.
If you subtract the number of teacher/administrative work days they get about 20 days off per year - during the school year.
My wife has been a private school teacher for almost a decade now and worked briefly in public schools. She saw firsthand the insane rigidity of the teachers union and how incompetent teachers were kept on because they were fast to involve the union and were more senior.
The median Chicago teacher's salary is over $70,000. I'm not sure the "advanced degree" is required (the degree you're referring to is a Masters in Education).
A Masters in Education is, literally, an "advanced degree" by every definition I've ever seen. Ignoring definitions, the point is that it's expensive in both direct and opportunity costs relative to its future earning potential - most earners of masters degrees can expect to enter fields with significantly higher salaries, especially later in their careers.
I agree with your first part that a Masters in Education is a hassle to get, even if you are currently a teacher during the day plugging away at night school to get the degree. It's a lot of sunk time (and money if you don't have it paid for somehow).
I'll disagree that it's any benefit to job performance. Any evidence that it is indicative of other job qualifications is very limited. It's telling that the first page of google results for "benefits of a masters degree in education" are mostly about how it can improve the teacher's salary, not how it makes one a better teacher.
Master's degrees for other liberal arts degrees don't bring any salary boost.
I didn't make that point at all. I really have no clue whether the degree has an impact on job performance. All I meant to say is that many teachers are required to get it to progress in their careers and that it is expensive to do so without much future compensation for that expense relative to other degrees.
I read "most earners of masters degrees can expect to enter fields with significantly higher salaries, especially later in their careers" as "people with masters degrees make a lot of money, so we should people with a masters of education to also have high earning potential." (That may not be what you said; I'm just saying how I read it to clarify discussion.)
I should not have implied that you said it indicated job performance; that was the wrong place for me to challenge your statement (as I read it). Instead, I will say that it's not proper to treat a masters in education as giving the same signal as a masters in other fields.
Yeah, I figured I'd be (rightly) called out on that - I don't know of anywhere that teachers are required to get the degree, but I know teachers (in Colorado) whose career progressions are limited early on without it (hence "required ... to progress in their careers").
Do we know if the median teacher also has a masters? I know what my kids teachers make (significantly more), so wouldn't be surprised to learn that 70k is reachable without the degree.
70k is significantly above the US median salary.
FWIW: My mom was (until a couple years ago) a CPS teacher with a Masters and a focus on BD/LD teaching; she has strong feelings about this stuff, but I think I might disagree with a lot of them.
To change tack a bit, because I don't have data to answer your question: Am I meant to think that 70k is a really high median salary for the teaching profession? Because I really don't - it seems really low for such an important profession. Especially now that so much teaching at the college level is done by similarly low-paid adjuncts, I wonder, why does it seem like our society doesn't think teaching should be an attractive employment choice for the smart, talented, and well-educated among us?
Well, ~70k is ~20k higher than the median salary; in other words, an entire full-time minimum wage salary higher. That 70k salary comes with a 3-month break and (much more importantly) a defined-benefit pension plan.
Relative to investment bankers, teachers are not highly paid. But relative to the economy and, in particular, to supply/demand, they have what seems to be a pretty solid deal.
I don't think either minimum wage workers or investment bankers are the proper comparison. I think we should be talking about professionals like doctors, lawyers, engineers, and other businesspeople; those are the professions that teaching competes (largely unsuccessfully) with for talent.
Ok, let's make that comparison: a CPS teacher makes 70k, and teachers have low single-digit unemployment and defined-benefit pensions. Lawyers, on the other hand, make a median 110k, but don't have a 3 month vacation, don't as a rule have defined-benefit pensions, and have ~12%(!) unemployment.
A lawyer is also required to shoulder an average of 85k of postgraduate education to enter the field; a high school teacher can start with a bachelors.
Unemployment rates for teachers are projected to fall. The unemployment picture for lawyers is bleak, due to the slow-motion collapse of biglaw.
And yet, those current and prospective unemployed lawyers almost certainly aren't flocking to become teachers! There are absolutely things that are attractive about teaching, I'm not at all arguing that it's the pits, just that it isn't as competitive for talent as I would like it to be. I'd love to see more of those smart kids from Stanford that go work on websites go educate our youth instead.
Another point of irrationality. Nobody can show any correlation between having that masters degree, and being a better teacher. Its just more institutions included into the education industrial complex ... now the Masters accreditation institutions fight reform too ... because without this shit system, we don't need them and their deadweight either.
This is weird, you and danielweber both put the same words in my mouth. I made no comment at all about the value of the degree, only about its necessity to teachers and its expense.
I can't speak for the other person, but my point was only that the expense of the degree wasn't actually necessary for the proper functioning of an education system. Its just more waste.
In general, yes, although I do have one major exception: paying teachers more would reduce turnover (which is expensive to deal with) and I think there's still plenty of room for improvement in support services: tutors, particularly for non-native speakers, special needs assistance, counseling / mentoring / etc. In many cases simply having a second person in the classroom who could help a kid who's struggling, deal with discipline issues, etc. without disrupting the overall lesson as much would be a worthwhile investment.
This would cost more, although I'd hope we could compensate by having fewer administrators making hard-to-discern contributions at [generally] much higher pay.
I do not think the statement you quoted implies this. Schools could always use more money -- the money just needs to be better spent. The article mentions that a lot of money went to high-priced consultants, some of whom earned $1,000/day. What a teacher could do with a grand a day...
Moreover, the two ideas are not mutually exclusive: the outside-the-home situation could need improvement AND schools could benefit from more money.
One thing article clearly illustrates is that only throwing money at a problem does not work and difficult discussions must be had to improve the schools in this area. This benefits the economy in the long run.
I would say the amount of funding the US education system as a whole currently has is adequate to achieve much better average results than are currently being produced. That does not mean that there are no individual schools/districts which need more money to efficiently achieve better results than they are now. It also does not mean that removing money from the system will not further reduce its efficacy.
You can't fix US education by pouring more money into it, but you're also not going to fix it by dismantling it. The source of the primary problem isn't the education system, it's poverty.
Except that it's very consistent that the states with strong unions have the highest academic achievement and the states with weak or no unions have the lowest. So the facts easily refute this common but erroneous opinion. (This is most likely because nonunion states correlate with high poverty, and so does low academic achievement, but it conclusively disproves the notion that unions are to blame for low academic achievement.) (Also, whoever told you that lied, so disbelieve anything else that source told you -- fool me twice shame on me.)
The union contracts are really out of control. For those that aren't aware, research "rubber rooms". Hundreds of teachers in NYC are literally paid to come and sit in empty rooms and do nothing while they wait years to be reviewed because the districts don't have the ability to fire teachers.
As a European I wouldn't blame the unions there; the right to an arbitration hearing when you're accused of misconduct does not seem unreasonable. What else would you do, allow anyone to just be fired on the principal's say-so?
The real problem seems to be that the arbitration proceedings in NYC take years - partly because NYC isn't paying the arbitrators (in contrast to the union, which is paying its half of the arbitrator wages). How is that the union's fault?
I'm not sure holding up any other profession, much less "just about every other profession" as a model of how we should organize our employer/employee relationships is a good idea.
The kind of relationship you describe has created a general environment in which wages are depressed and working conditions continue to deteriorate. Every time unions lose power, workers' working conditions--including compensation and intangibles--deteriorate.
Most professionals -- which teachers desire to be treated like -- have done quite well over the past 34 years despite fewer and fewer organizational defenses of their conditions. Unskilled labor is another story.
Unless teachers should be treated and protected like factory workers. Usually teachers object to that characterization, but if you want to argue for it, okay.
As a teacher joining the school, how can you know whether the principal is a power-tripper? Sure, maybe the district would catch it eventually, but that's no good if he fires you in the meantime. So why would you ever take a job where you can be fired just like that? It's not going to be easy to get another job when your CV says you were fired for misconduct from your last one.
(That goes for any profession - I don't see why anyone would work under "at-will employment" laws, particularly in the US where you can choose to work in a state that doesn't have those laws)
I would rather work in an at-will state than elsewhere because I prefer to work with colleagues who pursue excellence rather than mediocrity, and because I have faith in my abilities.
There are two types of people in the world: those who see themselves as perpetual victims, passively experiencing the actions of others; and those who see themselves as protagonists. The former want things like work councils, unions, arbitration boards and so forth, because they believe in conspiracies and cabals &c.; the latter prefer freedom, because they have faith in their ability to succeed in a free environment.
There are no states in the U.S. that are not at-will states. When people make a differentiation between states based on some at-will status, it's usually based on the number of exceptions a state recognizes, none of which are based on work councils, unions, or arbitration. In most cases, these are protections like:
- you can't be fired for refusing to break the law
- you have an implied contract (good luck proving that)
- you can't be fired in bad faith or with malicious intent
The last of those is considered the most broad exception, and is the least common. You want to work in a state with none of these exceptions? You're looking at Georgia and Florida. The longest period of time I spent in Florida was in a union shop.
The largest exception to at-will employment in the U.S. is civil service workers, the second largest is non-unionized private sector workers with contractual exceptions.
Whether working in a union or without a union, I've found that there are always people that work, and people that work the system.
I received better wages and better job security as a non-union worker, but that may not be the case for others. I receive better benefits as a union worker (eventually the job security would come, but I have yet to see a union in which anything other than seniority improves job security).
The only place I've ever seen freedom come into it is in how the law limits your ability to defend your professional reputation if you encounter a malicious or incompetent manager. Thankfully, I've never needed to test that.
> it should be noted that this policy started to be dismantled 4 years ago
Sure, if by started to be dismantled you mean "was completely unchanged other than they stopped assigning the thumb-twiddling teachers to big rooms/facilities (too visible a target to critics) in favor of assigning them to smaller spaces - spare cubes, broom closets, locker rooms, conference rooms - more widely distributed around the city and hence harder to count."
I'll refrain from pointing out the strong political biases your sources because I did cite the NYT, but I wish to note their use of tone arguments to highlight waste. $22M a year spent on teachers awaiting arbitration sure sounds like a lot as a number out of context. Take a minute to note that they have close to a $20B[1] yearly operating budget, putting the cost at roughly 0.11% of their spending.
I don't wish to make the argument that this makes the spending or this practice ideal, but rather than in scale of the NYC DOE it does not appear to be as large of a leakage as the press might like to make it seem.
The other way to figure it is that ~220 out of 75k teachers affected suggests a waste factor of 0.3%. (which agrees with your number if teacher salaries are about 1/3rd of the operating budget.) It's still substantial because in absolute terms $22M is a lot of money and it's all waste - the only sane policy would be to just fire these people or put them on unpaid suspension.
Nonetheless if we are to believe the official figures, they claim the number of rubber-roomers has declined from ~700 to ~200. Which isn't "dismantled" but is certainly "reduced"; it does seem like some progress is being made.
The alternative widely prescribed is to move towards quasi-private charter schools. These schools attract enrollment mostly because of their 7-5 school day, which eliminates daycare expense and hassle for many parents.
Educational outcomes vary.
The thing that doesn't vary is that the bondholders who fund the school buildings, etc tend to be protected. So if the charter school flops, you're stuck with it.
On the other hand, tiny little school districts were created for the purposes of racial segregation and continue to act as mechanisms of racial and economic segregation. Also depending on state law and various other contingent factors, you can end up with regional or even state wide union contracts even with balkanized school districts. Finally, specialized (including aggressively tracked) schools are difficult to impossible with small catchment areas that only support a few schools per level.
Although it's far far from perfect, the NYC education department has managed to increase principal autonomy somewhat without throwing out all the advantages to scale.
You must have read a different post than me. The one I read pointed concrete (true or not) problems with the model of small school districts, not "platonic ideals".
You can get rid of the 'bad' teachers but there's a finite supply of 'good' teachers. You can pay them more or give them smaller class sizes or educate them more, but you're still not going to just magically end up with everyone being a great teacher.
It's just like you can't make any ten programmers all 10x programmers, no matter what.
In many places you can't get rid of the bad teachers - largely because of overly powerful unions. People who would make good teachers are driven away from teaching by the perverse incentives. Yes, the number of good teachers is finite, but so few of them are actually in front of students that the upper limit hardly matters for the foreseeable future.
I would argue that high school education is generally better in Maryland and Virginia, where school districts are by county (or equivalent city) than in Pennsylvania, where there are many more school districts.
It's interesting to note that well supported public school districts aren't fighting to switch to charter schools and vouchers and the end to tenure. Nobody is saying "Sure our high school is among the best academically, but think of how much better it would be if the teachers were worried about not having a job next year." Then again, $100 million won't buy them off. Perhaps because it's not enough to cover the construction of a new high school.
In a place like Newark, a child's teachers may be the only people in their lives with stable employment. That doesn't matter when implementing free market Wahhabism. Teachers must fear for their jobs.
Tenure is an imperfect proxy for employee ownership. As the article shows, it may be a better model than venture capital rocket fuelled disruption. The tragedy, in human terms, is not the failure. The tragedy in human terms is that unjust means were rationalized for ideological ends and the result was still a failure...in human terms.
Free market Wahhabism just writes up all those charter schools and consultants and studies and threatened livelihoods to a failed "ability to think outside the box." The solution to the solution failing is always the solution.
[Disclaimer: my sister is a public school teacher. Tattooed and pierced, she does the Dirty Harry. She had the kid the who was afraid that the pictures wouldn't be there later if they closed the book - think video tape. She had the kid who was kept in a closet at home for four years before third grade. The kid whose mom called the school to say he wouldn't be in because the boy friend had just killed the baby brother - and that's how the police found out when the principal called them - that's one of kids whose improvement on the FCAT determined her bonus. These are the kids who stand out from the usual parents in jail or dead of AIDS or homeless or just coming to school hungry or sick because they don't have affordable health care. Why is she in the union? Well so that some born again Southern Baptist principal can't fire her tattooed Wiccan ass.]
I worked for a while as a government contractor. I'd become disillusioned with libertarianism (no connection to the decision to take the job), and still am, but that experience cured me of any leanings toward the sort of liberalism that sees government as a solution to much of anything.
The system was actively anti-meritocratic and the waste was simply incredible. They ran an entire data center at around 1% utilization. The electricity wasted alone must have been tens of thousands worth a month at least.
Contractors were the worst. People often complain about too many and overpaid government employees, and there certainly was that, but the contracting waste was where the real hemorrhaging was going on. I routinely saw outside firms hired to do things at many multiples of what it would have cost to have federal employees do it, or even to recruit new federal employees. These contractors would proceed to waste the money much more flagrantly than anyone inside the government did, would deliver barely-working solutions, and would then get contracted again to fix them. It was a routine thing. I started to really suspect that someone was getting kick-backs, but gross incompetence in the handling of outside contracting could explain it too.
I've seen that a lot and very similar stories at large companies and private organizations. The main lesson I've drawn is that we spend far too much time talking about isolated small examples and ignore the questions about the incentive structures which lead to it. (The classic example being the pressure to exhaust your budget by the end of the year, which has been joked about for ages but few organizations seem interested in fixing.)
Most of the explanation is probably the obvious answer: fixing the broken system requires calling higher-status people on the carpet. Attacking a few teachers, clerks, etc. is much safer politically than asking exactly why the superintendent or CEO doesn't seem to care about efficiency absent a crisis.
if you observed that the private contracting waste was where the real hemorrhaging was going on, then your problem was with all the privatized resources being paid with public money - essentially the vast influence of the "free market" on a public resource that is not well suited to traditional free market forces. This article is specifically about the failure of privatized resources, such as charter schools, private donations delivered directly to contractors with no public oversight or review for the purposes of improving the public good. It is about billionaires with no experience or justification for being at the center of a complex public system attempting to inject gigantic, ad-hoc donations into systems they don't understand, and failing.
Not a bad point. If I, say, donated $100million to Microsoft to improve the Windows UI and did not know precisely where to put that money in the company and what that money should be doing, it probably would not fare much better.
Still: the waste I saw was incredible. There is definitely a systemic incentive problem in government, not to mention a problem with private contracting and oversight.
The key part of your comment is "would get contracted again to fix them".
Contractors optimized for money-over-work.
I had a similar situation where I politely mocked a competitor's product for breaking down in 3 months when mine would die after 2 years, and the other guy answered that they make a lot of money on service contracts (it's nautical equipment, so warranties work a little differently).
The problem with schools in a place like Newark is that they serve as a rare source of economic opportunity in an otherwise shithole neighborhood. Schools are a font of money in a place where almost every other economic activity is illegal.
That's why reforming a school is a shit show. Its the place where everyone is feeding at the teat.
Here is one possible solution for a billionaire to try. It won't work for anything but a tiny minority of students at the moment, but it will shine a light on how our education problems are a problem of the education bureaucracy, and not of the students.
Set up a magnate boarding school, outside of the city (perhaps even outside the state). Run it EXACTLY the way you want to run it. Let anyone apply. Give admission based on a lottery ... not on the basis of an examination ... so no one can accuse you of taking only the best kids.
Offer free room/board/education.
Start only with first graders. Then add a grade, every year, as your first class ages. In 12 years you will graduate your first class of students.
Hire the best teachers. Spend a lot on infrastructure. Teach programming/science/technology. Make partnerships with the best universities. Get internships for your students in start ups and companies, using your connections. Maybe your own company can hire some of them.
Show the world what kids from an inner city failed neighborhood can do, without the interference of these teachers and their unions.
When your kids succeed, however spectacularly, or modestly, that will be a beacon.
Encourage your graduates to give back to the school. You will still hemorrhage cash every year, it may never be sustainable without your continued involvement ... but it would be the kind of experiment that would leave an impact for decades ... and if you succeeded in making it sustainable, maybe for centuries.
At the end of their 12 years of boarding school, is it still fair to say that these are kids from an inner city failed neighborhood? Much of the challenge with education in poor (inner city or rural) communities is that, at the end of the day, the kids still have to navigate the stresses and risks of home life. Eliminating that for all or most of the year (depending on your school calendar) would stack the deck hugely in your favor, and by the end of their high school abroad it would strike me as dishonest to refer to these kids as being "from Newark".
In my limited experience with kids from elite boarding schools (which tend to draw from already wealthy communities), graduates of these programs seem to tend more towards the culture of the school than that of their hometown. I think this effect would be even more pronounced in your proposed system.
I'm not saying there would be losers. But his scenario proposes, essentially, "I'll bet that if I take a random group of at-risk kids, move them to a system where they spend 100% of their time living, studying, and playing in a well-staffed, well-resourced, safe program, that those kids will perform better than their once-peers."
You aren't talking (only) about policy change, you're talking about a financially untenable utopian solution that doesn't bother with the actual constraints of the problem. It reminds me of the old physics yarn "consider a spherical cow..."
Here are some constraints that I can come up with in a minute of thinking.
1.) Land costs. If you are building inside a major city land costs are huge, and you need acres of land. Outside of cities can be less expensive, but it's still a steep cost.
2.) Permitting/regulations/etc. I have no idea what it would cost to get the land you just built zoned to allow you to build a school, but I'm sure it isn't cheap or easy.
3.) Infrastructure costs. You have to build each of these new schools. The private boarding school that I went to[1] just built two new dorms after receiving a gift of $10m to house 98 students. They are probably really nice dorms, but it's not cheap to build. And that's just the dorms. You also need an academic center, library, gym, and possibly support buildings (like faculty housing, student centers, etc.). You also need to build roads, sewers, electricity, etc.
4.) You need to find and hire administrators and teachers. If you go with the chicago stats cited above then you'll need to pay each teacher ~$70k. One of the best things about private schools is the high teacher to student ratio. My biggest class was 14 students and most were in the 6-8 range. It's complicated to figure out the exact number of faculty off the top of my head, but you'll need at least 10 teachers. My high school had around 380 students and they have more than 60 faculty. So, for 100ish students you'd need 15ish faculty. That's $1m a year in funding. Chicago spends roughly $12k per student, which would cover faculty costs, but...
5.) You also have to pay administrators, janitors, lawn care, and a ton of other providers for service. Chicago administrators make roughly $120k a year. That difference has to come from somewhere.
6.) Oh, and you have to get accredited somehow so your students would be able to get into college.
There's probably plenty more constraints that we could come up with. But the biggest one is cost. Who is paying for this? A billionaire could do it, for sure. But it doesn't seem like people are upset enough about the current situation to pay more taxes to support the schools we do have. I'm not sure how you could convince people to pay to create a private school from scratch...especially if their kids aren't going to be the ones eligible to go.
It's going to take more than a minute to think about whether or not things are actual constraints. What you've done is list obstacles, which are not at all the same thing as constraints.
Look at your list. Can you think of alternative approaches that reduce or eliminate each item on the list?
You won't have created any kind of scalable / repeatable model that would work at the regional or national level; nobody is going to raise taxes enough to fund that and most people aren't going to sign up to send their kids off to boarding school for K-12.
I disagree that it isn't scalable and repeatable. Have you seen what the budget of these schools is like? A billion dollars is not a small amount of money, regardless of what Silicon Valley acquisitions make you think.
If we spend that money on institutions that actually WORK, we could do a lot. If we need to build those institutions outside the city, to get them away from the clutches of the political machines in those cities ... then we do THAT.
This comment is ignorant beyond belief! Have you ever been to Newark? It's a huge, bustling city - actually, New Jersey's largest city. When you make absurd claims like "[schools] serve as a rare source of economic opportunity in an otherwise shithole town" how can anyone take anything you say seriously?
I go by what I see. I should probably have said "neighborhood" not city.
Do you see how people cling to those fucking administrative jobs, while screwing over kids, like those jobs are the last life preserver on a sinking ship.
Every school district has teacher's unions that are a pain in the ass ... but only in Newark do you see an utterly corrupt organization defended tooth and nail by entire neighborhoods, without regard for how the children are effected.
Its ridiculous. People treat the firing of clerks like its a genocide of a colonized people.
Not every state in the union has teachers' union. (In the traditional sense. Some have "unions" but participation is completely voluntary so they more like professional organizations.)
My kids' time in a public school without these unions have had mixed results. The teachers seem good, but the administration seems utterly incompetent. Which is kind of the failure mode I would expect. Bad teachers cannot continue to hide, but what can I do about an administration that takes 3 years to conduct an IEP?
(The answer to that last question is one of "fight to fix the system" or "use legal recourse." Option 1 is incredibly irrational: these insiders know the game better than me and have a lot more invested in it than me. Option 2 is what my spouse and I are doing now, but it doesn't feel at all like it's improving the situation for anyone but our immediate child for the immediate time frame.)
The objectionable part is that it's not a regional issue. Vampires chasing money are everywhere and will relocate to follow the cash teat. This would've happened anywhere in the USA.
If graduation rates truly are only 67%, I can't help but question how many generations it'll take before the town becomes a "shithole" (if you don't consider it one already like the OP).
I'll never suggest that teachers are overpaid, but hyperbole doesn't help. The starting salary for the lowliest teacher in the Newark Unified School District is $54,300/year.
It depends on what that teacher's other opportunities were.
Based on how some of these teachers taught school some twenty years ago, when I was a student, I'm willing to bet some of them would never be employed in any other career, if they were to lose their jobs.
Teaching is a tough job, but if you see how teaching is done, you can see its not actually being done in the "difficult" way. People are just warming their seat cushions.
Don't muddy the waters with your romantic notions of some hard working hero toiling against the system.
I'm happy to pay more taxes to give new teachers $100,000 a year in pay ... but not these low-quality morons that they stuffed in my school when I was growing up. And certainly not for these armies of unnecessary administrative drones.
Tenure is a stupid f'in concept. I'm not guarded for life in my job. I don't see why a teacher should be.
"I'm not guarded for life in my job. I don't see why a teacher should be."
I'm willing to bet that your job isn't at the mercy and whim of whatever political viewpoint is in vogue at the moment, overly vocal minority groups (meaning small in size, not minority in the ethnicity sense), or just random pissed off parents with access to the school board. Some amount of protection is necessary when one loud person can ruin your career.
Remember that people get very, very irrational when it comes to their children.
Its not like people get fired every year based on whims, in places without unions.
Administrators still want good people even if there isn't a union backing them.
Public sector unions have no constraints against them until system collapse. At least private sector unions have some constraints in the sense that their place of work will go out of business if they are completely ridiculous. Public sector unions do whatever they want till the taxpayer base literally flees to another place.
This is exactly what I had in mind. I'm thinking about the school I'll build when I'll be a billionaire.
And no, it's not an orphanage. These kids are a burden for their poor parents who try to provide for them, and fail, and have their heart torn apart failing that. And the kids see their parents' misery, and have their heart torn apart, too.
It's a convolution of sadness with itself.
I had this exact same plan, starting at the youngest possible age, so they grow with you. The school teaches them everything, so they become normal human beings and not ghetto people. I don't think there's a single parent who'd like his child to grow up in misery, and if there's a way to shield that child from this shit-hole, I think any parent would be willing to do almost anything.
"The school teaches them everything, so they become normal human beings and not ghetto people. I don't think there's a single parent who'd like his child to grow up in misery, and if there's a way to shield that child from this shit-hole, I think any parent would be willing to do almost anything."
Who decides what 'normal' is?
What makes your upbringing better than 'ghetto people'?
You're walking a very, very fine line between what is best for children, and what is just cultural indoctrination. Do you see how easy it is to slip between the two?
What you're operating under is called cultural relativism. Melville Herskovits said it best, "Judgements are based on experience, and experience is interpreted by each individual in terms of his own enculturation." In other words, while you may believe that a 'ghetto' upbringing is worse than what you had, you came to that conclusion under a biased observation. Yes, there is a higher crime rate in 'ghetto' areas, but that has less to do with culture, and more to do with opportunity. When you have 0 opportunity, you tend to become hopeless. So, we'll educate the kids, make sure they conform to our standards, then release them back into hopeless areas. What outcome is that looking for?
And yes, there are parents who would prefer that their children not simply be 'white washed' into cultural conformity based on someone else's standards.
I knew I'd get this reply from people who don't live in a ghetto, because only them think the stink of these shitholes isn't that bad. So here I go Takayanagi:
>Who decides what 'normal' is?
Common sense. Saying "I don't know nobody" isn't normal. Imagine you lived in a ghetto with your kid, and there's a billionaire who proposes to offer him a good education, wouldn't you want your kid to get out of that place ASAP.
The most probable outcome for a child who grew up in a ghetto isn't that bright, and refusing to acknowledge the benefit of the above plans just for the sake of political correctness and free choice isn't
>What makes your upbringing better than 'ghetto people'?
Everything. Growing up in a ghetto, you start in life with a handicap:
- They are stereotyped (for good reasons, because they probably fit that stereotype).
- They have to deal with things children don't have to deal with.
- They are, most probably, less educated than children who grew up in normal neighborhoods. Again, let's leave political correctness aside for a minute, this is a fact.
{
You're walking a very, very fine line between what is best for children, and what is just cultural indoctrination. Do you see how easy it is to slip between the two?
}
The line is so thick, it's not even funny. It's not cultural indoctrination, these are facts. There's a reason why ghettos suck, and why no one in his right mind would make a conscious choice of living there. Let alone with a kid.
{
What you're operating under is called cultural relativism. Melville Herskovits said it best, "Judgements are based on experience, and experience is interpreted by each individual in terms of his own enculturation."
}
Oh really, where did he live? And where did his children grow up and study? I bet he didn't send them to a slum just to be philosophical.
Try telling this to people living in those places. Anyone who says he lives there and is "proud" is full of shit. The minute they make it, they get out there. Only mobsters choose to keep living there because they'd be a nobody if they ever left.
Ghettos suck. This sentence would get an "Amen" from China to South Africa, and it doesn't even need to be translated.
>In other words, while you may believe that a 'ghetto' upbringing is worse than what you had, you came to that conclusion under a >biased observation.
Biased by numbers, yes. Criminality, illiteracy rate, rate of single moms, murder, poverty, health. Ghettos suck. If they didn't, we'd have no problems actively making a choice of moving there with our families. But we don't. Nobody who can afford to live elsewhere makes an active decision to live in a ghetto.
>Yes, there is a higher crime rate in 'ghetto' areas, but that has less to do with culture, and more to do with opportunity.
Isn't opportunity closely tied with culture?
How many startups have been started by a guy named Maleeek (with 3 'e' s) who grew up in a ghetto? If not none, then very few. Why? Because they didn't have the opportunity to drop out of MIT, Harvard, or Stanford or to get there in the first place for that matter.
Yeah, there are few people who "hustle". A very few. And these apples don't fall really far from the Hip-Hop tree. There are of course outliers, but they're that: Outliers. We need something consistent. Something we can see on a graph and say "Holy shit, the correlation!".
>And yes, there are parents who would prefer that their children not simply be 'white washed' into cultural conformity based on someone >else's standards.
Maybe. But I also think that most parents would prefer that to the most likely outcome of their kid. Any parent can choose to ignore the realities of the world just to make a point, or make the best out of the situation he's in.
1st, it's not for political correctness, not one bit. It's that your view is stating that those people are essentially less good at being people than what you are, and need a savior to fix them. That's just not true, regardless of what you believe.
That view was extremely popular in the 40's and 50's, and is also extremely ineffective. It's a true story.
What is effective, instead of indoctrinating 'ghetto people' to your "better" way of life, is providing them with opportunity. Look at areas, schools or neighborhoods than have been effective and successful, regardless of being in a 'ghetto'. There is one common theme; internal hope and prosperity. It doesn't take white culture to fix 'ghetto people'. It takes hope, opportunity, community investment and old fashioned work from those people living there. Without it, all you'll do is drain the youth from these communities, and allow real estate brokers access to swaths of uninhabited city centers.
Your argument is fundamentally wrong, and is incredibly ignorant of education and community development in failing areas. You are arguing that 'those ghetto people' are broken, their culture is broken, and only removing them from their surroundings and supplanting their culture can fix their problems. You're wrong, you're just wrong is all there is to it. That's been proven by history and research - I'm not at home and don't have access to a database, but you're wrong.
I'm not saying that ghettos need to remain for the sake of themselves, that the individuals living there love it, or that the people living in there start even close to the same footing as the rest of the world. I'm saying that the way to fix the issues associated with these areas isn't a white knight swooping in to save the poor colored kids; that.does.not.work. It's for these areas to be empowered through community investment to fix it for themselves.
Do you know the best way to empower a community? Education focused INSIDE of it.
And for Melville: I'm not certain that his upbringing is really all that important. Your argument here is really, really weak (and is an outstanding example of Ad Hominem; what does it matter where he's from?). You're arguing that, unless you are from a ghetto, you're not allowed to have an opinion on them. Where did you grow up?
But look at what you said "It doesn't take white culture to fix 'ghetto people'"..
This means your presupposition is that ghettos are predominantly non white, which means that you subconsciously think white folks don't have that problem, which in turns contradicts what you said about not needing white culture to fix ghetto people.. Which is not what I said.
It says a lot: If you can do feature exctraction on a social problem that easily, it means something is really screwd.
I also think there's an impedance mismatch here between what you say and what I understand, and vice versa. I agree on the fact that people living in ghettos must be empowered, and a way to do that in my mind was to get their children a better education, easing the financial burden on the parents, and shielding the children from their toxic environment.
If I went overboard, it's because it's too important to let ourselves dwell on rhetorics. My reasoning was: We may not be able to help the parents (they had their lives), but the children still have a chance. The parents played their turn, now it's the children's turn at life.
But I agree on your point about draining the youth from these communities. I haven't seen it that way.
{
I'm saying that the way to fix the issues associated with these areas isn't a white knight swooping in to save the poor colored kids; that.does.not.work. It's for these areas to be empowered through community investment to fix it for themselves.
}
Which would be easier if they had a better education, education which would be easier to obtain if they didn't have to hustle to eat, or have to choose which child to send to school, or chose if the child is going to eat or get an education.
>Do you know the best way to empower a community? Education >focused INSIDE of it.
I'd say education no matter where. As I said, my rationale is that children are too precious to waste on a social experiment of community stuff. They need education and be able to be children.
{
And for Melville: I'm not certain that his upbringing is really all that important. Your argument here is really, really weak (and is an outstanding example of Ad Hominem; what does it matter where he's from?). You're arguing that, unless you are from a ghetto, you're not allowed to have an opinion on them. Where did you grow up?
}
I didn't attack him, Loughla. I even agree with him. And I didn't even say you're not allowed to have an opinion unless you live there (I didn't say that). But the issue at hand has nothing to do with opinion. Living in a ghetto just sucks and nobody needs research or a PhD to know that. It's just reality, man. Not "perception" and not "endoctrination".
It's a toxic environment that would influence the most immune systems. And I didn't say it needs a "white knight", I didn't even mention a white dude saving the day (you did). You assumed that when I said "billionaire", the guy would be white.. Which again, says a frigging lot about the reality you are trying to polish. In other words: you are contradicting yourself because, deep down, in your guts, you don't feel that way about the issue.
Mentalist out (I'm not half as good looking as he is. Oh, well..).
This is pretty much exactly what the Milton Hershey School does. "Today, Milton Hershey School is a cost-free, private, coeducational home and school for children from families of low income, limited resources, and social need. The School is funded by a trust established by Milton S. Hershey and his wife Catherine. Milton Hershey School offers a positive, structured home life year-round and an excellent pre-kindergarten through 12th grade education. Our vision focuses on building character and providing children with the skills necessary to be successful in all aspects of life."
I'm guessing you don't have children. Putting children under the age of 12 in a boarding school isn't the best idea. Putting kids under the age of 8 in a boarding school is simply a terrible idea. They need too much care at these ages.
If you're idea is done in the context of replacing foster homes for kids who are removed from their parents by social services, I suppose it can work.
There are many successful societies where boarding schools are the norm for the most wealthy and successful people. I don't just mean China and India, where it is extremely common. I mean also England, where it had been more common, and has now become less common; Wealthy WASPS in the North East of America have a few institutions where they send their kids; there is at least one public boarding magnate school that is highly regarded in the American South ... I don't remember its name, but a quick Google will provide I'm sure. There are many other examples.
The idea that a child is best served at the bosom of his parents might be right in the best of circumstances. It is certainly NOT right in an American inner city neighborhood.
Now if your goal is to say, I refuse the best solution, because I hold out for the dream of solving all inner city problems at once, and turning these neighborhoods into pleasant neighborhoods ... then I say, cheers.
You are precisely the reason why we need a billionaire for this venture ... public money will never come to support something so radically different.
Give admission based on a lottery ... not on the basis
of an examination ... so no one can accuse you of taking
only the best kids.
It's better than that: if you admit based on lottery you're providing the randomization for a randomized controlled trial. Either you or someone else can measure the difference later in life between applicants that are and aren't admitted.
Except it's not random who applies for the lottery. And also charter schools are notorious for rejecting students for various reasons that public schools are not allowed to use, including rejecting special ed students, all in the name of making their test scores look better: http://nepc.colorado.edu/newsletter/2013/05/tcr-dirty-dozen
> Except it's not random who applies for the lottery.
It's not, but you can randomly choose an equally-sized comparison group from the population who apply and are not selected.
> And also charter schools are notorious for rejecting students for various reasons that public schools are not allowed to use, including rejecting special ed students, all in the name of making their test scores look better: http://nepc.colorado.edu/newsletter/2013/05/tcr-dirty-dozen
Now you are changing the stated starting conditions. The plan is based on admission by lottery. Period. What other, selective private and charter schools do in admissions is irrelevant.
Your thesis seems to be that education could be made better simply by making it private rather than public, and that it would be so obviously better that it could serve as a beacon.
Given that there is evidence of very successful schools run by governments outside the USA (Finland is often used as an example, but it is certainly not alone), despite the fact that they have bureaucracy and unions, why do you believe this?
No. My thesis doesn't care who runs the school outside the city. Only that it should be outside the reach of these dysfunctional city institutions and neighborhoods.
Let anyone run them.
A billionaire is necessary only because the current political system brooks no competition. The teachers will not allow it. Their cushy incompetence would be put in sharp relief if something like this were to succeed.
An out of state boarding school starting with six year olds? Doesn't that sound an awfully lot like an orphanage to you? I don't think many parents would go for it. Even Eton in its heyday waited until 11 or 12.
If I was a poor parent in a neighborhood with no other options, I would send my kid to the boarding school.
Kids would be sent home for holidays, and weekends even (if the parents want to pick them up).
I think some parents would leap at the chance to have the week free, so they can work. Childcare is a big problem in the inner city.
People I know would be taken care of by grandparents, old neighbors, trusted older kids, etc., while their mothers would work (in the case when father was absent).
Absolutely. I've lived for 3+ years in Shenzhen in China. Every Sunday night, you'd see a ton of school kids lining up at the subway and bus stations lugging suitcases to go spend the week at school. They'd have dorms and everything. If this is a social norm in an entire city with millions of residents (albeit with a different culture), why wouldn't that be a possibility in other cities in the US too (albeit with different cultures)?
> Let anyone apply. Give admission based on a lottery ... not on the basis of an examination ... so no one can accuse you of taking only the best kids.
That doesn't fully counter the "creaming effect" argument unless you assume the applicant pool is a representative sample of the population.
I don't know why people are so opposed to newspapers showing advertisements.
How are they supposed to operate their organizations without funds?
Or do people seriously think government funding of papers is the way to go?
I happen to think that state funded news papers would be worse than papers funded by advertisers. At least with advertisers you have many different sources of funding. With the state you have just one boss, and you can't print stories that would piss him off.
I wish more places would adopt Ars Technica's model where you can pay to not see ads. I think ad antipathy is a long-term trend the industry should adjust to but it would break the revenue model at some places – e.g. it costs more to for an online-only New York Times subscription than for online+paper because the business has been dominated by print advertisements for so long.
I wish this model would work, but I don't think it does in practice.
For one thing, it drives the value of the ads you do show way down to commodity prices. Think about it: no advertiser is going to spend big bucks on ads that are literally only shown to the cheapest and least engaged members of your audience.
It also misaligns the incentives. Now the ads function like the "nag screen" on old shareware apps. The site's revenue is tied to the ads being annoying enough that you'll want to get rid of them.
I too don't mind them collecting ad revenue, but I really hate clicking next on multi-page stories. There is no "page limit" on a web page and clicking through and reloading the entire page to get the next part is annoying...
A few bad teachers can't explain Newark's low graduation rates. Bad teachers exist outside Newark, but kids outside still graduate in greater rates than Newark students. The difference between Newark and everywhere else is poverty. That's why I never had any hopes for Zuckerberg's donation. You've got to fix poverty to fix education.
Unfortunately, the best way to raise someone out of poverty is through education. So you've got a chicken-egg problem.
Have we tried doing both? Create new jobs for poor parents while simultaneously improving schools for their children?
But using the same reasoning you give, we can point out that there are other poor regions in the US with better graduation rates. Surely, cultural and historical reasons also play a big role.
The solution is to realize that the causes are many and big. Rather than trying to take these on in a gargantuan effort, which is pretty much doomed, my suggestion would be to ... just ignore the causes! Forget about what causes the problem, just fix the problem for now. When somebody heavily bleeding you don't stop to find out what caused the wound.
This would be a transitory approach, of course. But, as you stated, once you make headway into education, you'll be much better equipped to tackle the root causes.
"A few bad teachers can't explain Newark's low graduation rates."
The problem is it's not just a few it's probably a lot of really crappy teachers, principals, and administrators. Teacher unions like to use the phrase "just a few bad apples" but when you have a system that bad your're right a few doesn't explain it it's probably the whole bunch or close to it that is rotten.
Somewhat related there was an earlier comment from HN that I really liked (though don't remember who said it) - about the bad apples phrase.
"In situations where accusations of widespread corruption, misconduct, unethical action, etc are made, a phrase that is often trotted out in defense of the accused is "just a few bad apples". It's not WhereEver Police Department that has an issue with racial bias and violent escalation, it's just a few bad apples. Our school district does not have a bullying problem, it's just a few bad apples. Etc.
What is interesting about this cliched defense is that it is actually a malformed statement of the original cliche, "A few bad apples spoil the barrel."
The original cliche refers to a phenomenon where overripe or rotten apples release ethylene gas, which is a ripening agent. This ethylene gas will accelerate the ripening/rot of nearby apples. If you are not vigilant in weeding out the bad apples, the rot will rapidly spread and soon there will be no good apples left to rescue.
Human "bad apples" don't release ethylene gas, but they corrupt their peers nevertheless. When a good cop backs the cover story of his corrupt cop partner, he becomes a bad cop as well. When prosecutors take up arms in defense of their corrupt prosecutor peers, they become no better than the initially targeted. If school administrators allow a bully to have his way for too long, then everybody else sees that they can get away with it too and before long you have daily fistfights behind the school at the end of the day.
Institutions that have had widespread unchallenged corruption for decades rarely need keyhole surgery, they need amputations."
Because it is a negative reinforcement loop. Good teachers will self select and leave on their own because they can. Since Newark isn't going to be a desirable district to work in it is that much more important to actively remove bad teachers and provide incentives for the good ones to stay.
It's not that cut-and-dried. My own high school had both very good and some rather bad teachers. The union was a stabilizing force that good teachers used to ignore everything but helping their students while the bad teachers used it to bide time until they could hit the magic year for their pensions.
I don't think fixing the problem necessarily requires destroying the unions or just allowing school administrators to just fire people willy nilly but the problem will not be fixed unless there is a measure of accountability.
Bad parents are the ultimate equalizer, and are inherently unfixable. Good parents will have children that perform under bad teachers, and excel under good teachers. Bad parents will have student no matter how good the teacher is (or, it takes an exceptional student to break out of that.)
I see no reason why it's inherently unfixable. I feel like there's a bias in our culture that parents will "just know" how to raise children properly. How often do you see classes for teaching parents of toddlers/young kids/preteens/teens how to deal with kids in that age group? There's plenty of resources for newborns, but little past that. Just recrimination and blame for parents who can't get it right. Parenting classes might actually go a long way, but there's no way of knowing for sure right now.
I would phrase this another way: many things can be attempted. Getting people to actually permanently and radically change their behavior has to be one of the most difficult tasks in the world.
So very true, and that's what makes it so depressing. I believe many of the problems with schools are structurally unfixable because there's a powerful network effect with - for lack of a better phrase - "good people". The good ones want to be with other good ones, naturally. So they all move to certain suburbs and neighborhoods, and the result is a segregation of good and bad folks. And of course, breaking the cycle of bad parenting often times seems nearly impossible...
The impact of bad schools systems hits poor students disproportionately.
Imagine two school systems that otherwise have the same general qualities.
In one you have children who have wealthy, educated parents. Parents who read. Parents who take an active interest in their children's education. Parents who encourage their children to learn independent of school. Those children are going to acquire an education more or less independent of the quality of their teachers. They will be able to get as much out of the text books as they would from the teachers, because they are more likely to read on their own, more likely to spend the effort doing the work, and more likely to care (or have their parents care) about learning. If those children have bad teachers it's a momentary setback, and something they can often overcome with the help of their parents, fellow students, and self-study.
In the other you have children who have poor, uneducated parents. Those children are almost completely and utterly dependent on their teachers. They're not going to read at home, they're parents may not have a strong interest in their education (assuming that the school is handling it), and so on. If those students encounter a bad teacher it translates to a huge setback. They have no support network to deal with bad teacher, it could easily cause them to fall behind or, worse, to lose interest in school and education.
Public schools and the NEA are a monopoly. Monopolies will never fix themselves or act in the best interests of their customers. The only way to fix a bad monopoly is to divest it of power, break it up, and let others take a crack at using the same resources.
Applying corporate logic to education is a mistake. In Finland there are no private schools, and the education system is ranked among the highest in the world.
As someone who works in a Finnish company and is surrounded by Finnish culture, let me be the first to say that what works in Finland won't work in the United States.
Actually, I'd be the second to say that. My Finnish colleagues would be first.
While schools in Finland are publicly funded the responsibility falls on the shoulders of the principal: "If a teacher is bad, it is the principal's responsibility to notice and deal with it." So it's not really comparable to a monopoly.
It's barely beating out Singapore for second place, and Singapore has a system almost the complete opposite. If Finland didn't exist, your logic would compel you to make everyone follow the Singapore model.
Nowhere did I recommend following the Finnish model. Rather, I provided a counter-example to the parent comment, which implied that the problem was due to a public system monopoly.
> Unfortunately, the best way to raise someone out of poverty is through education. So you've got a chicken-egg problem.
Education is clearly one factor, but there are many others. The most effective way to ameliorate poverty is to improve all factors simultaneously. E.g. employment/income, housing, healthcare, incarceration, transportation, education--just to name a few of many factors.
Experiments like this expose a really fundamental problem with how Americans approach the issue of poverty. We're convinced that the solution to poverty is education and funding education, because it has to be to validate our political assumptions. For a liberal, it would be tough to swallow the idea that cultural dysfunction (fatherless kids and the gangs that fill that power vacuum) is a root cause. For conservatives, it would be tough to swallow the idea that free market globalization has simply left places like Newark to die. So we pump ever more money into education, and blame teachers for not solving problems that are totally outside the scope of their ability to solve.
I was with you until "free market globalization has simply left places like Newark to die."
Can you explain that in more detail? Detroit is the counterexample where the firms did not offshore the jobs, but the city still got decimated. I'm not sure how "free market globalization" is the root cause. Maybe you could say as "other countries industrializing has simply left places like Newark to die" but I don't think our economic policies could slow or reverse that trend.
Detroit was decimated because Americans started buying Japanese and Korean cars. That was possible because of free-market globalization.
Now, I'm not saying that on the whole the world isn't better off as a result of free-market globalization. On the net, the gain to consumers in Phoenix from cheaper foreign goods might well outweigh the loss to workers in Newark. But I don't think it's controversial to say that alternative policies could have left Newark better off than it is now, even if they are globally less efficient, or that economic conservatives tend not to highlight the downsides of pro-globalization policies. Nobody comes out and says: "more competition means more efficiency, but it also means there will be winners and losers, and lower-skilled workers in America are likely to be the losers."
Agreed on your quote, but of course no one will win elections with that kind of truth.
But I still don't think there was any policy the US could have taken to prevent the rise of industrial Korea and Japan, and the downfall of Newark and Detroit.
Statistical studies have long shown that (1) education outcomes strongly correlate with parenting; especially having two parents. (2) education outcomes have near-zero correlation with funding.
Given this, one would expect this exact outcome. Santayana and all that.
If you want to use money to improve education, I suspect the best use would be to provide parental education as soon as the child is born. It would be nice if someone provided a small amount of money to try that out.
It's really really hard to figure out which correlations mean something. If the New York Times says tomorrow that wearing knit caps during pregnancy makes your baby smarter, then all the high-conscientious women who are high-income to be in the NYT's readership will wear knit caps. 20 years later when you measure, sure enough, there is a correlation between knit caps in pregnancy and educational outcomes!
You have to work hard to correct for all these effects. For example, is there a difference between : single mom because mom never married; single mom because parents divorced; single mom because dad died on a business trip?
All good points; which is why I was careful to call it correlation instead of causation. For example, distance from the Canadian border is also well-known to correlate with education outcomes (with larger distances correlating with worse outcomes).
That said, by far the strongest correlation is with dual parents. I don't know if anyone has studied the details you ask for, but it does stand to reason that a single parent -- of either sex and regardless of cause -- has a much tougher life and therefore less time to spend one on one with their child.
It's easier to figure out if correlations mean something if they make intuitive sense. We're not talking about knit caps, we're talking about the notion that kids are more likely to be successful if they have two parents raising them instead of one, all other things being equal. This is borderline common sense, just like it is also borderline common sense to suppose that kids having parents who are uneducated drug addicts are less likely to succeed than those who have successful educated parents.
The knit cap is simply to point out the ridiculousness of the problem. Breast-feeding is a common issue where there is the "intuitive sense" but it's really a "just-so story." There's "well, it's just common sense" theories that turned out to be useless when studied by smart people that weren't blinded by "well of course we will find some effect from this" bias.
I don't agree with their proposed remedies, but the book "Schoolhouses, Courthouses, and Statehouses" by Eric Hanushek and Alfred Lindseth has thorough documentation of the disconnect between spending and outcomes.
I don't mean to be that jerk, but I'm going to anyway: citations are needed on this: "Statistical studies have long shown that..."
"We"—schools, society, etc.—can't really control parenting. But we can control schools, and per the articles I list here: http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2009/11/12/susan-engel-doesnt-... , it is probably possible to get substantially better outcomes than the ones we're getting now, chiefly through better teachers. At the moment, most public school teachers are paid in lockstep based on seniority—CS teachers and PE teachers get the same pay—and can't be fired after their second or third year of teaching, and that creates a lot of perverse incentives.
""We"—schools, society, etc.—can't really control parenting."
Sounds like you need a citation of your own. I'm sure you could come up with hundreds of ways to apply money towards the solution of improving parenting.
"We"—schools, society, etc.—can't really control parenting. But we can control schools,
I agree with this statement as it is. But I think it's one of the problems.
There have been complaints elsewhere in this thread about the strict work rules under which teachers operate. And I agree with them.
You know the story of the drunk looking for his keys under the streetlight instead of in the bushes where he lost them, saying "the light's better here"?
If we keep on expecting schools to be the magical institution that fixes society's problems, we are going to keep on being disappointed, all the while greatly bothering all the people working at the school in the meantime.
There are innumerable small-scale programs that show limited positive results, but almost none of them scale up (see http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2007/11/scale-ma... for more on that general problem; her book The Upside of Down is also good on this subject). Lots of small-scale Head Start programs show promise too, but the program's effects on the whole fade out after a couple years, and on a large scale it hasn't done anything except provide daycare and jobs.
Programs like "Nurse-Family Partnership – Top Tier" already operate. I know because I've written numerous Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) Healthy Start Initiative (HSI) proposals (see more about the program here: http://blog.seliger.com/2013/12/15/hrsas-healthy-start-initi...) that attempt to do just this. I do grant writing for nonprofit and public agencies, so I see citations like yours all the time. Next time I write an HSI or similar program, I'll cite "Nurse-Family Partnership – Top Tier." Doing so isn't going to make the program any better, because HSI has been operating for a couple decades, under different names, and hasn't accomplished much on a large scale, in part because of the scale-up problems described in the first paragraph.
Many thanks for the info - this is a topic I care about deeply so I appreciate your time and the resources you mentioned.
I understand that scaling is very difficult. But what makes you think scaling these types of programs is harder than scaling those that directly target education? In fact, the first link you provide talks about the difficulty of scaling an educational program.
I'd love for there to be strong evidence backing a scalable program that addresses generational poverty, be it an educational approach or not, but I don't know of any. Until we find that, I really don't think it's helpful to limit public discourse to only one potential solution to such a complex problem.
Another instance of the principle that money is, in many ways, like violence: you'd like to think that if it hasn't solved your problem already, if you just keep throwing more and more at it it, you'll solve it eventually -- but all to often, it just makes the problem worse.
And inasmuch as Zuck would like to believe that being young means you're smarter... whatever your baseline, oftentimes, having too much money -- in Zuck's case, literally more money than he knows what to do with -- just makes us stupider.
Between 2010 and 2012, The New Yorker reports that "more than twenty million dollars of Zuckerberg’s gift and matching donations went to consulting firms with various specialties: public relations, human resources, communications, data analysis, [and] teacher evaluation." Many of the consultants were being paid upwards of $1,000 a day.
“Everybody’s getting paid but Raheem still can’t read," Vivian Cox Fraser, president of the Urban League of Essex County, was quoted saying.
I often compare XML to violence: "if it doesn't solve your problem, you need to use more."
Perhaps in Zuckerberg's case, it was PHP rather than XML.
In any case, the headline gets a gigantic "well, DUH" from me. Two reasons:
1. It strikes me as unlikely that a lack of funding is Newark's fundamental problem here.
2. Even if lack of money is the fundamental problem, the annual budget for the system is a billion dollars. Why would anyone expect 10% of their annual budget, spent over a period of years, to do anything interesting?
At the time, people were wondering if it was a PR move to help defuse _The Social Network_. Zuckerberg isn't mentioned as being incensed at the waste of money, so...
Submitters: please do your due diligence. HN wants original sources, not ripoffs. If the article you're posting is ripped off of something else, post the something else.
Did he explain why/how? I really don't understand what you're trying to say.
Was it because he was too fond of it? Was it because there were many causes he'd like to give to and couldn't make his mind?
I can guarantee Bill's reason is because he wants the money he provides to be used as efficiently as possible. You want the most benefit to be provided for your dollar. You want to donate to the organization who can use your funds at 70% efficiency, and not one that will use it at 7% efficiency, otherwise you are providing less good for your dollar.
Based on his other comments, I assume he was referring to the challenges of finding the right places to spend money--places where the money will have the most positive effect. It's easy to give money away. Goodness knows there are endless people and organizations who would gladly take it. What's much harder is knowing ahead of time what impact a given donation will have. Or, to put it differently, knowing how effective a charity is at advancing its stated mission.
I imagine it was because making good choices and judgments about who deserves it is difficult. Making sure the money is spent in a manner that matters, as opposed to given away as salaries to a bunch of consulting groups, is very hard.
I may be wrong, but it's quite obvious to me. You wouldn't want to donate to an organization where the money doesn't make a traceable and measurable impact. Luckily I see more and more charities prioritize transparency.
I'm sure he means that doing it responsibly (having the money actually be spent correctly and not wasted or lining other peoples pockets) actually takes a lot of time and effort.
From the article in The New Yorker, Ras Baraka is paraphrased as saying:
"The Booker-Christie-Zuckerberg strategy was doomed, he said, since it included no systemic assault on poverty."
Poverty truly is this issue.
Giving meal tickets to a bunch of proclaimed "reformers"
is not the solution, as this case proves.
Until every child has a warm place to sleep, food to eat, and at least one devoted adult to discipline and encourage them, children will be "left behind," to use the phrase of yesterday.
I say this as someone who statistically excelled at teaching reading in the West and South sides of Chicago for nine years.
They should have watched the documentary "Waiting For Superman" which talks about schools that defy the odds and produce good outcomes for the their students in places where the schools in general are a total failure. It used to be on Netflix streaming but looks like it is only available via DVD now.
The proposals mentioned in the article (replacing regular public schools with charter schools, performance-related pay for teachers, a new "transformational" superintendent) are similar to the policies proposed in Waiting For Superman. The success of those policies, however, is pretty questionable, and this case may be another reason to be sceptical (see Diane Ravitch's criticism of Waiting For Superman here: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/nov/11/myth-ch... )
Well I'd say their first problem is that they didn't actually _implement_ any of the ideas they just spent 100 million on over paid consultants (one of the cited problems in the documentary) and didn't change a single thing. Waiting for superman talks specifically about the epidemic corruption in Newark's school system.
I would love to see someone try this experiment: let's say we pay teachers $200K/year, gave them huge discretionary budgets, and put a lot of performance pressure on them. What would happen in place like Newark? I'm not saying that's a sustainable, scalable solution, but it certainly sounds like a good use of $100M.
It's possible to overpay for a position. If you pay significantly over market rates, it is going to be hard to filter through all the applications, and you need a separate auditing mechanism to check for people, say, slipping $20,000 to the HR person to get themselves on the top of the pile.
BTW, this is an excellent way of fairly determining if a job is overpaid or underpaid: how hard is it to find applicants? Do people camp out for 3 days beforehand for a chance to apply? In case of performance issues, do people cling to their jobs like a drowning man to a life-preserver?
LATE EDIT
I agree with the discretionary budgets. Each teacher should have an expense account on a credit card for when things come up and s/he needs to buy something.
No doubt. And I pulled the number 200K out of my ass; it could be a lot of numbers. But on the question of how hard it is to find applicants, it depends what you hold constant: the qualifications or the compensation. Here we're holding the compensation constant and raising the qualification bar however high we can. I'm sure hoards of people would apply to become CEO of Microsoft if that was a thing you could do, but that doesn't mean the position is overpaid. The experiment here is to see if you could get much better teachers by widening the pool of potential applicants to people who who wouldn't normally want to do that, by a) making the pay competitive with other high-skill industries and b) cutting out a lot of the bullshit involved in applying that skill to teaching children. That pool would surely include plenty of people who are already rockstar teachers, but additionally lots of people who think of themselves as bound for, say, business consulting or finance or software engineering. How would you choose among your applicants? I don't know, but I'm sure there are plenty of answers to "if I could turn anyone into a teacher, who would it be? And I how could I maximize their abilities?" Maybe this is actually lots of different experiments with different selection criteria and different degrees of freedom in applying themselves to the task (e.g., in defining curriculum).
Some people in this thread have mentioned some primary boarding schools for high-risk students. I'd want to internalize the results of those interventions, too.
Whenever I hear talk about school reform, or teacher's pay or how long they work, I am reminded of Dean Kamen's http://www.usfirst.org/. I heard him speak last fall, and he points out that a significant part of the problem is the glory and fame attached to entertainment figures and sports figures, rather than to scientists, engineers, and doctors.
His program sponsors local competitions, such as building robots, and other technology-oriented activities.
While the issues raised in the article are valid ones, we need to look at the whole picture.
Startup school receives $100 million in funding based on an idea..... and fails? I wonder if it was a mobile social local school like Color?
It seems that perhaps what is needed is a YC of education that provides small grants and helps with follow-on investment once those small bets pay dividends.
Education is fundamentally pretty simple, you need a room, a teacher, and a few dollars worth of paper. Seems like the ideal thing for a startup. Fundamentally once you teach a person basic literacy and basic numeracy they can spend the rest of their life teaching themselves.
That's the efficiency of the free market. People sought to capture as much of the $100 million as possible while investing a minimum of effort and resources. It's entrepreneurial.
From my direct experience working in this field for over ten years, parent's attitude and social environment probably account for most of the variation in education achievement at the elementary level. Kids are curious by nature, but acquiring the three Rs (reading, writing, arithmetic) is not built into human nature. It requires sufficient cultural support from the kid's environment and caretakers. Dedicated teachers and good learning process help, but children spend much more time at home and in their neighborhood than at school.
Another factor, not very politically correct to say but real nonetheless, is genetics, although genes likely play a larger role when the subject matter is more complicated, at the high school level and beyond, and when the learning environment is worse. If the teaching system is suitable and children have the motivation to learn, most students can master elementary school materials quite well.
At the high school level though, not everyone can master abstract concepts, like equations involving complex numbers and trigonometric functions, with reasonable effort, especially if their basics from elementary education are lacking. (They may be able to get fairly good at them with Herculean efforts, but few would want to dedicate their whole teenage life to academics.)
Given the hypothesis from real-world experience above, I suspect that reform successes at the high school level is significantly harder to come by than at the elementary one. If anyone has empirical data to support or refute this hypothesis, it would be helpful.
In any case, involving parents and caretakers to support children education is essential for any school reform efforts in poorer neighborhood. This is likely to be more effective at the elementary level when parents have stronger influence over their kids, and other confounding factors (like drugs and love life) are less important than when they become teens.
Parental push is definitely behind the academic success of Confucius regions in Asia: Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, and Shanghai-China. All of them perform excellently in international academic assessments in reading, math, and science.
But there has been cases for schools for inner-city children that showed great results ,for example sabis. Not sure how they did it , but maybe not all is lost ?
$100M is roughly 10% of Newark's annual budget and was offered as one time funding. Education is a service industry so that 10% is effectively spread thinly across all the schools in the district. This is in stark contrast to Zuck's product development background where 100M can be concentrated into developing a single product that can produce amazing ROI. Perhaps this is why our IT billionaires flounder in education?
"It came in the form of philanthropic donations, which, unlike government funding, required no public review of priorities or spending."
This is why we should raise taxes on Billionaires. A lot of them are willing to give away a lot of their money but, no matter how well intentioned they are, they are not as good at spending money for the public good as the government is.
Sometimes more money without the appropriate structural changes does not yield the intended 'miracle'. This is almost like someone winning the lottery which amplifies their troublesome behaviors ...
Put into a trust, you could pull out interest every year, say $2 million, and have your project funded forever.
What would the project be? Well, if you set the funding up that way, that's the beauty: you could try different things with that $2 million every year and see what worked the best. That way, instead of trying to "fix" a problem, you could create a system that would continue to help find optimizations.
Hell, one year you could give away cash prizes. Another year hire in-home tutors for at-risk kids. Another year you could try some kind of vouchers. You could on and on like this, continuing to experiment and evolve. Or you could just write a check to somebody.
Maybe Zuck has learned that you don't write checks to fix systemic problems.
As a proud NJ-raised kid, I can confirm hat others say about Newark, but with my own personal spin: Newark is a shithole, and no amount of money will fix that problem.
There are a lot of myths out there about (U.S. K12) education, such as all these "bad teachers" that we can't ever fire because of tenure, and how awful U.S. education is compared to other countries or compared to the U.S. in the 50s and 60s, and how charter schools or vouchers will solve all education's problems.
There is actual data and research out there on all this, buried under all this opinion. Did you know for example that tenured teachers are twice as likely to lose their job as non-tenured teachers? http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/teachers/the-m...
There is also a history behind all this. Before teacher tenure, teachers were regularly fired on the whim of principals or because of getting pregnant. See for example "Why Teacher Unions Are Good for Teachers—and the Public" http://www.aft.org/newspubs/periodicals/ae/winter0607/ravitc...
As the authors state: "The mythical failure of public education has been created and perpetuated in large part by political and economic interests that stand to gain from the destruction of the traditional system."
Once you get past the myths, I'd recommend doing a little reading on how people actually learn (it's not just dumping information on empty brains). See for example the book How People Learn (free, pdf): http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?isbn=0309070368
Or this even shorter video on the counter-intuitive nature of how people learn from videos (criticizing the Khan Academy videos): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVtCO84MDj8
Teaching is an incredibly difficult job, because learning is incredibly complex. A single phrase or gesture can have an enormous positive or negative influence on learning. If you tried spending even one hour in a typical K12 classroom, most likely you'd be eaten alive. It may not seem like many K12 teachers are getting fired, partly because most teachers quit within 5 years.
This is why Steve Jobs used to say "everyone can throw money at a problem and fail to change anything", but people chose to see it as the excuse of a greedy businessman (who actually did donate to a number of projects privately).
Throwing money at a problem and forgetting about it almost never works. It just breeds corruption. Case in point.
Well, in a way the money wasn't wasted. Mark really needed the positive PR back then what with The Social Network movie and all the privacy vulnerabilities and abuses of Facebook. He got his PR. Facebook surviving was worth $100 million to him, so good job. Facebook survived. So he stopped donating.
What a waste! Government agencies should provide data, supporting services, etc. when needed, they should not be developers of solutions, because, due to their very nature, they cannot do it. Curiously enough, money is not a motivator in this realm for better work, it's like watering the Sahara in the hopes that suddenly vegetation will sprout.
What Zuckerberg should have done is to put out $10M-$20M of that money as prizes for small non/for-profit startups to come up with ingenious solutions. Then, after this survival of the fittest mode ends, push money into the promising ones.
> What Zuckerberg should have done is to put out $10M-$20M of that money as prizes for small non/for-profit startups to come up with ingenious solutions.
What kind of solution would a startup come up with for a kid who doesn't sleep under the same roof three nights running or who doesn't have a single role model who succeeded at school and is doing well professionally because they live in an area which has been systematically screwed over (race, class, etc.) for so long that everyone they know has given up?
There are a few areas where the tech-world style approach could help — building better software for class management, lesson planning, etc. if for no reason other than reducing the amount going to huge, under-delivering enterprise software vendors – but most of the problems are areas where we've chosen not to invest as a society: jobs, housing, medical care — critically long-term disability care — etc. Ask a teacher how it feels when a bright student starts missing school because their family was evicted or is being pressured not to go to college because their family wants them to watch a younger/disabled sibling while the parents are at work.
The best use for that $100M probably would have been opening some sort of high-headcount employer in the area to help break the cycle — even a call center job is a big step up if it provides a consistent, livable income.
Tragically opening a call center likely wouldn't help at all. Many people in poverty in the US are actually better off staying unemployed because their entitlements (food stamps, housing assistance, free child care, etc) go down or disappear if they get a job.
Our current setup is severely broken and full of perverse incentives that trap people in poverty. In an effort to prevent abuse we've stripped eligibility for assistance programs to only the near-destitute but then set the payouts at a higher level than many of those people are likely to earn on re-entering the workforce.
Dozens of programs, at both a state and federal level, would need to be overhauled so that the incentives led people out of poverty instead of creating a chasm between government dependence and entry-level labor.
Very strong agreement on this point – one of the strongest arguments for those basic income schemes is that it would get rid of the welter of conflicting incentives the current patchwork creates.
>The best use for that $100M probably would have been opening some sort of high-headcount employer
That assumes these people are employable or want to work.
We agree the biggest problem for these kids is family life, I just don't think that will stop with employment or even just handing their parents money.
> That assumes these people are employable or want to work.
Do you have any reason to believe that we have a huge population of parents who aren't willing to work to provide for their families? Skills can be a challenge but it almost always comes down to other factors like whether jobs are available in their area, transportation and child care availability, and whether things like public assistance benefits were set up in a way which penalizes anyone who gets a job.
I haven't gone door to door and done a proper survey if that's what you mean. But yeah, I've met people who either have avoided getting a job or lament not having one despite spending most of their time watching TV all day.
>things like public assistance benefits were set up in a way which penalizes anyone who gets a job.
So true. However, in many cultures pride is more important than the monetary benefit of free loading.
>>> They were not aiming at the root of the problem: massive poverty and massive inequality.
While this is completely true, you also have to factor in politics. Take a look what's happening in NYC right now. You have charter schools that are doing incredible work in low income areas and De Blasio wants to shut them down:
"Bill de Blasio, who repeatedly singled her out on the campaign trail as the embodiment of what he saw was wrong in schooling, and who last week followed his word with deed, canceling plans for three of her schools in New York City while leaving virtually all other charter proposals untouched."
Call me pragmatic but I see those problems to be not (easily) solvable. Rather than endlessly debate about what the cause is, my proposal would be to involve young, energetic outsiders to come up with solutions and move quickly to implement them. Not all of these will be workable but some will (remember the Go entry from yesterday and how Monte Carlo methods are much better in developing strong AI compared to truing to come up with good computer strategies? Similar approach).
Call me pessimistic, but I think the last thing underprivileged education needs is a bunch of douchey "fail fast" startup types "disrupting" a problem they could never understand.
No, they need every bit of help, even from douchey people who can get off their asses and try to help rather than wisecracking on HN. Have you ever done something to help underprivileged kids? If so, try provide feedback rather than witticisms.
"Young, energetic outsiders" in the "startup set" are disproportionately likely to also be in the set of individuals from privileged backgrounds; in America this means they're also more likely to be white and male. They haven't got the empirical foundation necessary to even comprehend the depth or scope of the problems, much less devise "ingenious" solutions to them.
My point was that making a full understanding of the students' plight a prerequisite to helping them is a mistake. I teach programming to a low-income high school in the South side of Chicago. I am male and "white" and was born and raised in a different country far away in quite a different culture. I cannot even begin to understand the problems these kids are facing everyday.
Yet, there I am helping them, raising money for equipment, buying them rPi's, trying to teach them Python, implementing software for their FRC robot and trying to act as an all around mentor.
My cost to the CPS is negative (I bring in all the money, $1k-$2k here, from my company). This is the solution I'm talking about. Of course, my impact is minimal. But money from donors such as Zuckerberg could be used to create bigger grassroots efforts and amplify the impact greatly.
Ask yourself: What is the solution that YOU suggest? Reading the thread I was only one concrete suggestions, using the $100M to open a calling center in the area. Is that the best we can do?
They haven't got the empirical foundation necessary to even comprehend the depth or scope of the problems
How ironic. You write off an entire group of people because of their background as not being able to understand a problem and then throw out the privilege (AKA: "You are being preemptively blacklisted from this argument) card. In a thread about education.
Note that "not having the background to understand a problem" isn't the same as "incapable of understanding a problem." However, having the capability and having the experience are two different things.
If a group of people haven't got the background to understand a problem, they aren't likely to produce a solution that is viable. I don't see how that's a controversial statement. We "exclude" on this basis all the time in our every day lives (e.g. by selecting doctors for solutions to medical problems, as opposed to, say, firemen or physicists), because it's entirely rational and the empirically correct thing to do.
The answer to that is to get people the background to understand a problem.
People go to to med school to become doctors, you don't automatically blacklist everyone of a particular socioeconomic/racial background (NB: there's a word for this..) as being incapable of having the background necessary to be a doctor.
Sure, I get the argument that it's more efficient to pool some resources, such as buses, food service, etc., but I really believe that education is really just about having a good principal who can choose his/her teachers and hold them accountable. Most people aren't aware that many union contracts prohibit the principal from choosing the teachers in the school because of seniority rules, and getting rid of bad teachers is essentially hopeless. And of course all teachers are paid the same, based on years of tenure, rather than actual outcomes or instructional needs.
I've seen schools which most would consider being in the worst part of the ghetto doing very well because of a highly motivated principal. The more we centralize, the harder it becomes to do anything of value to help schools perform better. And the trend continues to be more and more in the direction of centralization.