Monday, January 18, 2016

Cheap or Excellent??

So I'm on twitter, "discussing" this piece by Eric Hanushek. (I air-quote "discussion" not because of any qualities of the people involved, but because nobody can wax eloquent with depth and nuance at 140 characters a shot).

The piece belongs to the genre I think of as Befuddled Mysteries of Failure, in which reformsters scratch their heads at how reformy ideas have not worked. Hanushek's meditation on the intractability of the "achievement gap" (I air-quote "achievement gap" because it's a euphemism for "standardized test score gap") ends in typical bemusement.

Vastly more jarring is that the central goal of the report—the development of an education system that provides equal educational opportunity for all groups, and especially for racial minorities—has not been attained. Achievement gaps remain nearly as large as they were when Coleman and his team put pen to paper, even when better research has suggested ways to close them and even when policies have been promulgated that supposedly are explicitly designed to eliminate them.

"When Coleman and his team put pen to paper" is fifty years ago. But I tweeted that the mystery of why we hadn't yet closed the gap -- well, here, read for yourself the exchange that followed

And a whole bunch of people just loved that response. Liked it, retweeted it. And I realized, watching the retweets pile up, how tired I am of this particular argument.

Because it always starts with talking about the achievement gap and the non-wealthy, non-white students who are being denied as good an education as the burbians get, but then it ends up with insistence that we fix this problem on the cheap.

How could it possibly be cheap? Seriously-- we're talking, particularly if we go back to pre-Civil Rights segregated Jim Crow America, about a system that has systematically and deliberately provided low socio-economic students with underfunded, understaffed, under-resourced schools. How could it possibly NOT involve lots of money to fix that?? I don't honestly know if the 4X figure is correct or not, but if it is, there's another explanation for why we've failed to close any gaps-- because 4X 1954 education spending strikes me as not nearly enough of an increase.

You have two children sitting at a table. Pat is regularly eating full healthful meals packed with nutrients and all the food groups. Chris is eating bread and water and an occasional cup of cereal. Somebody comes in and says, "Well, this is clearly wrong. Chris is starving, while Pat is doing well. Chris should get to eat just as well as Pat does."

The dining room chief comes in and says, "Yes, you're right. But we should only spend as much to feed both of them as we are spending just to feed Pat." How does that even make sense.

This has been the reformster mantra for decades-- we should have better schools for everyone, but it shouldn't cost any more than what we're paying now. Possibly even less. After all, we've already been spending more money every year and it hasn't fixed everything yet. We've quadrupled spending since 1954!! How could we possibly spend more??

Many of the reformsters know better-- particularly the charter boosters. "Send your child to our charter school. It's located in a crumbling shell of a building, and we have no books or computers or other facilities because we understand that schools don't need any of that," said no charter operator ever. No-- charters know several secrets of success and one of those secrets is money. You spend money for a nice building and you spend money for nice resources and you spend so much money that you use both the public tax dollars that "follow" the students plus venture fund investment money plus contributions from well-heeled supporters.

But somehow, the reformster call is still for combating the effects of poverty on the cheap. "We'ver increased spending and that's been a huge waste," is the refrain, based on any one of several theorries, some crazier than others.

Crazy theory number one is that all the money has been stolen by teachers and their unions. People become teachers for the cushy job and the big bucks and to become teachers, they enter into a dark conspiracy with the union, in which the union and teachers agree to make each other rich and powerful while bilking the taxpayers with a bunch of smoke and mirrors and quite possibly refusing to unleash the Secret Methods they know for making students learn. The problem with schools is teachers (just as the problem with health care is doctors and the problem with marriage is husbands and wives). And there are people who fully believe this and I would just as soon argue metallurgy with a 9/11 truther as try to convince them otherwise.

But what about the non-crazy proponents of this theory? What's their theory?

There's the theory of huge waste, that schools are spending money on the educational equivalent of the Pentagon's thousand-dollar hammers. There's the theory of widespread incompetence, and that so much money is just being pissed away by so-called experts who don't know any better. There's the theory that by turning teaching into low-wage piecework, millions of dollars can be liberated (even if that results in a crappy educational "product"). There's the theory, popular among many who work in education, that government regulations have increased the number of non-classroom employees that a district needs (e.g. even a smallish district has probably added in the last fifty years at least one employee whose job is basically to take care of government paperwork). And there is certainly a theory that many things have gotten more expensive since 1954, or even 1984, which dovetails nicely with the theory that schools are asked to provide far more services that they were decades ago. Plenty of us would also agree with the theory that a ton of money never actually makes it to the classroom at all, increasing the per student cost but not actually affecting the students. Plus, as always, the theory that there are many other complicated factors involved, too.

And you know what? I'm a taxpayer in my own district, and I have no desire to see my property taxes ramped up just so we can hand my district a giant pile of money and say, "There you go. We trust you'll do something swell with it." There has to be oversight and accountability.

But it's still not rocket science. If I'm feeding a hundred kids, and I spend $75 on fifty of them and $25 on the other fifty, and I want everyone to be fed the way I'm feeding the high-side fifty, I can't do it with that same hundred dollars. I can't do it by trying to use a slice of the money to fund several other separate charter cafeterias while still running my original one-- there is no economic efficiency in running multiple duplicate services.

Can you look at the pictures coming out of Detroit schools, look at those, scratch your head and say, "Gee, I don't know what these crumbling decaying broken down unrepaired buildings could possibly need. Certainly not any more money. They already got some money."

In 1954, there were all sorts of cost-cutting measures baked into the system. Black kids? We don't really need to educate Those People, so we can do that cheap. Forty kids in a classroom? Sure, why not. It's cheaper than hiring another teachers. Students with any kind of special needs? We don't need to educate Those People, either. Just let them flounder in a regular classroom, or warehouse them in a back room somewhere.  In 1954, the graduation rate was 60%-- any students who had problems could just stop being students. That was also a major savings. And teachers, because we are by and large dedicated and clever people (and not part of a dark money-sucking conspiracy) have done great things with small resources, thereby contributing to the illusion that money shouldn't matter.

But how can you possibly hope to bring equity to a system whose major problem has always been a systemic underfunding and underserving or some groups without fixing the financial inequities stuck in the heart of the system. I am tempted to say the true cost of guaranteeing each child an excellent school in his or her neighborhood is impossibly daunting, but then I remember that we somehow "found"  a few trillion dollars (I air-quoted "found" because we actually use a combination of time-travel and theft) for war-waging purposes. But that was irresponsible, and I'm not going to advocate for irresponsible spending for anything, even something as essential as education.

Do we want education cheap, or do we want it excellent?

No, you can't say "both." We can't have both. We aren't made of money, so we can't have the caviar-covered Lexus of education for the whole country, and we can certainly make better use of the money we have in some places, and there are certainly areas where we need to discuss aims and goals and systems and equity and proper full funding and all the rest. There are many things about finances and excellence that we need to discuss as a nation.

But we can't have that discussion if we're going to keep lapsing into fantasy mode and suggesting that we should be able to have a new caviar Lexus and used peanut butter Kia prices. We can't say we're going to buy winter coats for everyone, but we'll do it with the same money we used to use to buy winter coats for just a few. We can't keep insisting that setting up cost-inefficient mediocre charters that serve a small percentage of the population are anything like a solution to anything.

If we really want excellent education for everybody (and not just "access" to it-- everybody on the damn Titanic had "access" to a lifeboat), we have some hard choices and some real thinking to do, and right now we've got a bunch of magical thinkers, conspiracy theorists, and cynical profiteers hogging the "conversation" (and I airquote "conversation" because people who are actual lifelong experts are rarely listened to or even invited to speak).

Don't order the steak and then bitch that it costs more than a Big Mac. Don't buy a mega-mansion and complain that it's more expensive to keep than a shotgun shack. And don't insist that you want an equitable education system for all students, then complain that it can't be done for the same amount as the problematic 1954 version.

11 comments:

  1. As you may recall, Jersey Jazzman did a multi-part exchange with Dmitri Mehlhorn a few months ago. In my oh-so-humble opinion (ahem), that discussion was well beneath the Jazzman in the first round and he should have walked away. In addition to consistent willful ignorance, Mehlhorn proved himself mendacious by deliberately twisting what JJ said and then pretending that they were in agreement. Mehlhorn and his ilk should be ignored.

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  2. In 1954, the society acceptable answer to a child with Down Syndrome was to put the child in a state hospital for life, tell everyone your baby died in childbirth, and try to ignore the fact that you just warehoused your own child in a place that almost made Victorian Bedlam look humane.

    There are a lot of things we don't do like that today, and you are absolutely correct - it cannot be done correctly AND cheaply.

    The dishonesty of the argument is breathtaking.

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    Replies
    1. YES. Making a historical argument about the cost of educating children while ignoring IDEA is just...not somebody to be taken seriously.

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  3. Another excellent righteous rant, Peter.

    "magical thinkers, conspiracy theorists, and cynical profiteers" Yes.

    And even though your post is mainly about what Dmitri said, I feel compelled to state once again my opinion that this totally clueless "expert" Eric Hanushek -- I'm totally stumped as to why anybody listens to him at all -- has done more damage to public education than almost anyone.

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  4. Makes me think of something my dad always told customers (he's a retired cabinetmaker/carpenter):
    Good
    Cheap
    Fast
    --choose two.

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  5. Hanushek is often used as an extremely-well-paid "expert witness" in education-related court cases ... particularly those cases where corporate reform school officials / politicians need Hanushek to make the argument that we already spend enough money on education --- or that we actually are spending too much already.

    Jersey Jazzman wrote an article about just such a case, where a Colorado judge who blasted such testimony from Hanushek:

    http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2011/12/americas-best-judge.html

    ----------------

    DENVER POST:

    "In declaring Colorado's school finance system 'significantly underfunded,' Denver District Judge Sheila Rappaport rejected virtually every argument presented by the state's star witnesses in a five-week trial this year over school funding levels.

    " ... "

    "A key witness for the state was Eric Hanushek, a scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, who testified that repeated studies have shown no consistent relationship between levels of funding and achievement. He also testified that average funding per pupil in the United States quadrupled from 1960 to 2007, while performance essentially stayed flat.

    "But (Judge)Rappaport blistered Hanushek several times throughout her ruling.

    " 'Dr. Hanushek's analysis that there is not much relationship in Colorado between spending and achievement contradicts testimony and documentary evidence from dozens of well-respected educators in the state, defies logic, and is statistically flawed,' the judge said, pointing to cases in which courts in other states 'found him to lack credibility.' "

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  6. Hanushek is often used as an extremely-well-paid "expert witness" in education-related court cases ... particularly those cases where corporate reform school officials / politicians need Hanushek to make the argument that we already spend enough money on education --- or that we actually are spending too much already.

    Jersey Jazzman wrote an article about just such a case, where a Colorado judge who blasted such testimony from Hanushek:

    http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2011/12/americas-best-judge.html

    ----------------

    DENVER POST:

    "In declaring Colorado's school finance system 'significantly underfunded,' Denver District Judge Sheila Rappaport rejected virtually every argument presented by the state's star witnesses in a five-week trial this year over school funding levels.

    " ... "

    "A key witness for the state was Eric Hanushek, a scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, who testified that repeated studies have shown no consistent relationship between levels of funding and achievement. He also testified that average funding per pupil in the United States quadrupled from 1960 to 2007, while performance essentially stayed flat.

    "But (Judge)Rappaport blistered Hanushek several times throughout her ruling.

    " 'Dr. Hanushek's analysis that there is not much relationship in Colorado between spending and achievement contradicts testimony and documentary evidence from dozens of well-respected educators in the state, defies logic, and is statistically flawed,' the judge said, pointing to cases in which courts in other states 'found him to lack credibility.' "

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  7. Another great one, Peter.

    Your thoughts here are well-put and entertaining, but also totally obvious. That people like Melhorn can hold degrees from Stanford, Harvard and Yale and not get this is beyond belief. Which is why my opinion of many of these reformers has shifted. I used to think they were good-hearted but misguided. I can no longer believe they are that stupid, so I am pushed into believing that they are...um...not good-hearted, let's say.

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  8. The other talking point that makes me simultaneously cringe and want to pull my hair out is, 'How will we know how the kids are doing if we don't measure through testing?' As though nothing else has ever existed. I so appreciate your thoughtful pieces. Thank you.

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  9. Here's Bruce Baker dealing with some of this silliness. https://schoolfinance101.wordpress.com/2011/04/08/dumbest-real-reformy-graphs/

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