Valerie Strauss covers the news from OK that one more state is Mighty Unhappy with Common Core. Unlike the pretend rejection of the Core happening in other states, the OK legislature has laid out a set of standards for how it shall be determined that the new standards do not resemble the Common Core Standards. They are rejecting both CCSS and the horse they rode in on.
That piece of legislative legerdemain awaits a gubernatorial pen stroke (or lack thereof) to determine its fate. That'll be fun to watch. But in the meantime, I was struck by the appearance in Strauss's article of a hot new talking point that is a serious contender for Dumbest Argument in Favor of Keeping CCSS.
The Oklahoman newspaper quoted
Steven Crawford, executive director of the Cooperative Council for
Oklahoma School Administration, as predicting that “chaos” would ensue
if the Core is rescinded. One middle school math teacher, Heather
Sparks, Oklahoma’s 2009 Teacher of the Year, was quoted as saying:
“For next year, we’ve already written our curriculum map and the
pacing guides for the Common Core standards. It’s kind of disheartening.
If these are repealed, we’ll have to go backward.”
We've seen this on a couple of occasions now, including John White's spirited defense of those poor Louisiana teachers facing the totally confusing and disorienting CCSS defection of Gov. Jindal.
The argument seems to be that, having come this far, we just have too much invested in time and effort and blood and sweat and, well, if not tears, a little bit of mistiness right at the corner of our eyeballs, right there-- anyway, we've put so much into this, we can't just back out now.
So, you know, it's a good idea to throw good money after bad. And we've got yourself dug deep in a hole, you should totally keep digging. If you're stuck waist deep in the Big Muddy, you should totally listen when the big fool says to push on. When the snake oil salesman says you need to buy just a few cases more to get your health back, well, then, buy a hundred cases! When you've already lost your car and home, it's a great idea to keep feeding coins into the one-armed bandit.
It's not that Core opponents aren't sympathetic to this disinclination to change direction. After all, a few of us may have expressed a similar sentiment back when we were being told that we needed to dump out everything we'd done in the past and get with the Common Core program right now, right this moment, build-the-plane-while-we-fly-it immediately.
The difference is that back then, we had no reason at all to believe that jumping on the Common Core school bus would take us anywhere we wanted to go. We know with a high degree of certainty that it is a one-way trip to Education Malpracticeland.
So, pro tip for Heather Sparks and other CCSS boosters-- if the best thing you can say about your product is, "Well, you've already thrown a bunch of money away on it. You shouldn't back out now!" and not something like, say, "Let me tell you how great this is working," you are doing a very poor sales job. It may be that you're a lousy salesperson, or it may be that you've got a product that no salesman could make attractive, but either way, you're in a hole and you should stop digging.
Monday, June 2, 2014
Civic Irresponsibility
For the true opponents of public education, these are heady times, because as the battle for public education heats up, these folks can see nothing but clear sailing. It's not a question of finding a path to victory-- it's just a matter of deciding which path of many they would like to follow and which allies they would like to invite to the after-party.
On the one hand, they could continue to buddy up to the Reformsters. The Reformsters have done them the favor of strapping public education into a straightjacket of reformy nonsense-- a set of lame, amateur standards tied to punitive high stakes tests of no educational value, used to create a punishing system of evaluations. The Reformsters are sure that public schools and public school teachers are failing, and they are going to keep making up data gathering systems based on how well those systems prove that failure exists. Reformsters are determined to drive career teachers away and hamstring the ones who stay. The Reformsters will use Common Core as the backbone of a system designed to reform public education into oblivion.
On the other hand, we have the Tin Hat crowd who oppose CCSS and all that comes with it-- because it all proves that government schools cannot be trusted and have always been waiting to indoctrinate young people into evil ways. They don't see reformy stuff as a perversion of public ed, but as an expression of public education's true nature, and they are arming themselves to fight back against the evil beast.
In other words, if public education is the girl next door, Reformsters are the ones who dress her up like a twenty-dollar hooker to "help fix her up," and the Tin Hat crowd are the ones pointing and hollering, "I told you! I always knew she was a dirty whore!"
Waiting in the wings? The moustache-twirling uncle who has been planning to steal her inheritance.
There's another group, a group for whom the problem of public education is similar to the problem of welfare, health care, and other social programs. The problem is simple. They don't want the government taking their money just to turn around and spend it on the little people, the poor people, Those People, the people whose lowly station in life is just proof that they are inferior and undeserving.
So they work both sides. They're busy whispering in ears one one side ("Hey, maybe you should have her show even more boobage!") and while tickling earlobes on the other ("Oh my God! Do you believe how trampy that trampy tramp is?!")
Watch out!! The feds are destroying local control-- destroy the Department of Education!! Beware! The standards aren't being pushed strongly enough-- make those school districts toe the line!
Then there are occasional moments like this extraordinary tweet from Neal McClusky of the Cato Institute
I'm thinking of the story from Frederick Douglass's autobiography. His owner's wife had taken to teaching the little boy to read; her husband took her aside to instruct her strictly in the proper non-education of slaves. Because throughout history, people who have wanted to maintain control of their lessers have understood that withholding education from the lower classes is an excellent way to keep them in their place.
What's American is to make the tools of socio-economic mobility, starting with education, available to all. It is an ideal that we have had trouble living up to at times for a variety of reasons including gender and racial prejudice.
But these days public ed is in more peril than ever. We have people who want to dismantle it and make money from the parts. We have people who want to tear it all down. And we have people who simply don't want to have to use their good money to educate Those People. Say what you will about Rockefeller and Carnegie-- they had at least a rudimentary sense of civic responsibility. These days we're looking at people who believe that civic responsibility is great as long as they don't have to actually give up money or power to indulge it.
They will call themselves champions of freedom, and they are, sort of. But it's the freedom of poor folks to take on the great grinding engine of life and society with nothing but a pea-shooter loaded with grit. And they are fans of their own freedom-- the freedom to be in complete control of their own lives, free from any need to worry or care about what happens to the lesser beings who are their countrymen in name only.
On the one hand, they could continue to buddy up to the Reformsters. The Reformsters have done them the favor of strapping public education into a straightjacket of reformy nonsense-- a set of lame, amateur standards tied to punitive high stakes tests of no educational value, used to create a punishing system of evaluations. The Reformsters are sure that public schools and public school teachers are failing, and they are going to keep making up data gathering systems based on how well those systems prove that failure exists. Reformsters are determined to drive career teachers away and hamstring the ones who stay. The Reformsters will use Common Core as the backbone of a system designed to reform public education into oblivion.
On the other hand, we have the Tin Hat crowd who oppose CCSS and all that comes with it-- because it all proves that government schools cannot be trusted and have always been waiting to indoctrinate young people into evil ways. They don't see reformy stuff as a perversion of public ed, but as an expression of public education's true nature, and they are arming themselves to fight back against the evil beast.
In other words, if public education is the girl next door, Reformsters are the ones who dress her up like a twenty-dollar hooker to "help fix her up," and the Tin Hat crowd are the ones pointing and hollering, "I told you! I always knew she was a dirty whore!"
Waiting in the wings? The moustache-twirling uncle who has been planning to steal her inheritance.
There's another group, a group for whom the problem of public education is similar to the problem of welfare, health care, and other social programs. The problem is simple. They don't want the government taking their money just to turn around and spend it on the little people, the poor people, Those People, the people whose lowly station in life is just proof that they are inferior and undeserving.
So they work both sides. They're busy whispering in ears one one side ("Hey, maybe you should have her show even more boobage!") and while tickling earlobes on the other ("Oh my God! Do you believe how trampy that trampy tramp is?!")
Watch out!! The feds are destroying local control-- destroy the Department of Education!! Beware! The standards aren't being pushed strongly enough-- make those school districts toe the line!
Then there are occasional moments like this extraordinary tweet from Neal McClusky of the Cato Institute
I have exact opposite view of @palan57: http://t.co/2vONgqLQuU U.S. built on individual liberty - gov schooling fundamentally un-American
— Neal McCluskey (@NealMcCluskey) June 2, 2014
I'm thinking of the story from Frederick Douglass's autobiography. His owner's wife had taken to teaching the little boy to read; her husband took her aside to instruct her strictly in the proper non-education of slaves. Because throughout history, people who have wanted to maintain control of their lessers have understood that withholding education from the lower classes is an excellent way to keep them in their place.
What's American is to make the tools of socio-economic mobility, starting with education, available to all. It is an ideal that we have had trouble living up to at times for a variety of reasons including gender and racial prejudice.
But these days public ed is in more peril than ever. We have people who want to dismantle it and make money from the parts. We have people who want to tear it all down. And we have people who simply don't want to have to use their good money to educate Those People. Say what you will about Rockefeller and Carnegie-- they had at least a rudimentary sense of civic responsibility. These days we're looking at people who believe that civic responsibility is great as long as they don't have to actually give up money or power to indulge it.
They will call themselves champions of freedom, and they are, sort of. But it's the freedom of poor folks to take on the great grinding engine of life and society with nothing but a pea-shooter loaded with grit. And they are fans of their own freedom-- the freedom to be in complete control of their own lives, free from any need to worry or care about what happens to the lesser beings who are their countrymen in name only.
Cato: Why Are Schools Too Expensive?
In 2005, David Salisbury published a paper for the Cato Institute entitled "Saving Money and Improving Education: How School Choice Can Help States Reduce Education Costs." As the title suggests, the paper supports school choice as the solution for a particular problem. I've considered the solution elsewhere, and so today I'm just looking at Cato's conception of the problem. Even though the paper is a decade old, it tells us more than a little bit about right wing thinky tank thinking in this area.
Back in 2005, of course, Cato was still a libertarian think tank and not part of the Koch Brothers PR machine. Salisbury's title was director of the Center for Educational Freedom (because if there's anything that has always characterized American public education, it is bondage and slavery). The problem that he set out to solve in this paper was a simple one-- schools cost too damn much tax money.
Salisbury proposes three reasons that schools are increasingly costly.
Increasing Number of Employees
Between 1988 and 1998, public education employment grew faster than student enrollment, faster than the private sector. The student-teacher ration has been dropping steadily, and government figures indicate that the trend has continued since 2005. Salisbury offers charts and graphs to make this point for visual learners, but I never really doubted him for a second on this one.
In the more recent past, school-age population has dipped in many areas, but school districts have been reluctant to cut staff, so the ratio goes up. Additionally, the trend over the past thirty years has been a parade of regulations and court cases that result in mandates for more of certain staff. Aides, para-teachers, teachers all have to be added to meet the legal requirements for serving certain populations.
Additionally, growth in nominally public charter schools creates more teacher job openings. Twenty five students previously put in one classroom might now be spread out over three different classrooms (one more way in which choice systems do not save money).
Beyond teachers, we see growth in administrations to cope with additional regulation. Most school districts in the last forty years have added at least one Official In Charge of Nothing But Filling Out Government Paperwork and Accounting.
Artificially High Labor Costs
Those are Salisbury's words, and don't they just say volumes. Salisbury compares public school teachers to private school teachers, and since private school teachers are paid less, we must conclude that public school teachers are paid too much. There is also a comparison to other professions based on hourly rates which strike me as wonky, but I don't have access to the data necessary to see what exactly is going on there. So why are public school teachers paid these unnatural wages? Salisbury cites the influence of the union, and names three techniques as "likely" culprits.
1) Negotiations. Because, I guess, there should be no negotiations for wages. Teachers should just take what's offered and be done with it.
2) Political pressure. It's not immediately clear to me where the political pressure appears in teacher wages, other than unions occasionally use political clout to help elect politicians who don't totally want to screw teachers over. This really hasn't been working all that well lately.
3) Threat of strikes. Again, I'm not sure how much impact this has these days. It certainly isn't a factor in states where the possibility of a strike has been more-than-sufficiently counterbalanced by the possibility that any teacher can be fired at any time for any reason.
But these are the three problems that need to be solved in order to solve the problem of too-high wages for teachers. It's funny, because when a CEO negotiates a new salary with the corporate board that has been packed with his powerful friends and threatens to walk away if he doesn't get what he wants, I don't hear a lot of right-wing squawking about how unnatural the CEO wages are.
When the banksters in the wake of the Wall Street-induced financial meltdown negotiated heavily by twisting every political arm they could touch with money, saying that their positions and insitutions had to be preserved or else-- that wasn't considered unnatural, either.
No, in the corporate world, the rule is that you use whatever tools you have, and however much money you wring out of the process is, by definition, what you're entitled to. I have to conclude is that what's unnatural here is the working classes daring to use similar tools.
Patterns of Teacher Retention
In the last decade, lots of reformsters have implied it, but here Salisbury comes right out and says it-- the fact that teachers stay in the profession for a lifetime is a problem. The fact that longevity leads to better pay is a problem. To control costs, we need to either churn teaching staff regularly or not pay them more for staying.
You can see pretty plainly in this paper a layout of the problems to be attacked, and in the last decade reformsters have certainly attacked these issues with everything they've got. They have worked out a variety of attacks on the "bloated labor costs" and the unions that create them, giving us everything from TFA temps to full frontal assaults of tenure destruction and no-raise teaching. In North Carolina, legislators propose to end teaching as a profession-- there's some real cost control for you.
Because public schools are just too damn expensive.
Back in 2005, of course, Cato was still a libertarian think tank and not part of the Koch Brothers PR machine. Salisbury's title was director of the Center for Educational Freedom (because if there's anything that has always characterized American public education, it is bondage and slavery). The problem that he set out to solve in this paper was a simple one-- schools cost too damn much tax money.
Salisbury proposes three reasons that schools are increasingly costly.
Increasing Number of Employees
Between 1988 and 1998, public education employment grew faster than student enrollment, faster than the private sector. The student-teacher ration has been dropping steadily, and government figures indicate that the trend has continued since 2005. Salisbury offers charts and graphs to make this point for visual learners, but I never really doubted him for a second on this one.
In the more recent past, school-age population has dipped in many areas, but school districts have been reluctant to cut staff, so the ratio goes up. Additionally, the trend over the past thirty years has been a parade of regulations and court cases that result in mandates for more of certain staff. Aides, para-teachers, teachers all have to be added to meet the legal requirements for serving certain populations.
Additionally, growth in nominally public charter schools creates more teacher job openings. Twenty five students previously put in one classroom might now be spread out over three different classrooms (one more way in which choice systems do not save money).
Beyond teachers, we see growth in administrations to cope with additional regulation. Most school districts in the last forty years have added at least one Official In Charge of Nothing But Filling Out Government Paperwork and Accounting.
Artificially High Labor Costs
Those are Salisbury's words, and don't they just say volumes. Salisbury compares public school teachers to private school teachers, and since private school teachers are paid less, we must conclude that public school teachers are paid too much. There is also a comparison to other professions based on hourly rates which strike me as wonky, but I don't have access to the data necessary to see what exactly is going on there. So why are public school teachers paid these unnatural wages? Salisbury cites the influence of the union, and names three techniques as "likely" culprits.
1) Negotiations. Because, I guess, there should be no negotiations for wages. Teachers should just take what's offered and be done with it.
2) Political pressure. It's not immediately clear to me where the political pressure appears in teacher wages, other than unions occasionally use political clout to help elect politicians who don't totally want to screw teachers over. This really hasn't been working all that well lately.
3) Threat of strikes. Again, I'm not sure how much impact this has these days. It certainly isn't a factor in states where the possibility of a strike has been more-than-sufficiently counterbalanced by the possibility that any teacher can be fired at any time for any reason.
But these are the three problems that need to be solved in order to solve the problem of too-high wages for teachers. It's funny, because when a CEO negotiates a new salary with the corporate board that has been packed with his powerful friends and threatens to walk away if he doesn't get what he wants, I don't hear a lot of right-wing squawking about how unnatural the CEO wages are.
When the banksters in the wake of the Wall Street-induced financial meltdown negotiated heavily by twisting every political arm they could touch with money, saying that their positions and insitutions had to be preserved or else-- that wasn't considered unnatural, either.
No, in the corporate world, the rule is that you use whatever tools you have, and however much money you wring out of the process is, by definition, what you're entitled to. I have to conclude is that what's unnatural here is the working classes daring to use similar tools.
Patterns of Teacher Retention
In the last decade, lots of reformsters have implied it, but here Salisbury comes right out and says it-- the fact that teachers stay in the profession for a lifetime is a problem. The fact that longevity leads to better pay is a problem. To control costs, we need to either churn teaching staff regularly or not pay them more for staying.
You can see pretty plainly in this paper a layout of the problems to be attacked, and in the last decade reformsters have certainly attacked these issues with everything they've got. They have worked out a variety of attacks on the "bloated labor costs" and the unions that create them, giving us everything from TFA temps to full frontal assaults of tenure destruction and no-raise teaching. In North Carolina, legislators propose to end teaching as a profession-- there's some real cost control for you.
Because public schools are just too damn expensive.
Sunday, June 1, 2014
School Choice Is UnAmerican
When I was busy listing reasons that conservatives should be opposed to school choice, I missed a biggy.
School choice is taxation without representation.
When some cranky old fart (crankier and older than I am, anyway) wants to complain about having to pay taxes for schools when his kids aren't even IN school any more, I have a standard answer. Schools are not a service for parents. The people who produced the student are not the only "customers" for the school.
The educated human who emerges from school will become a neighbor, an employee, a parent, a spouse, a voter, a (one hopes) involved citizen, a person whose job will contribute in some way to the life of the community. Everybody who will ever deal with her in any of those capacities shares the benefits of that education. They are all "customers" of public education. Whether they are relatives of the educatee or not is hardly the point.
We all have a stake in public education. We all pay taxes to support public education. And we all get to vote on who will manage the operation of our schools (well, unless we are in occupied territories like Philadelphia or Newark).
School choice throws all of that out the window. Do you think it's a bad idea for a student to attend Flat Earth High School or Racial Purity Elementary School or God Is Dead Day School? Well, under school choice, if you don't have a kid, you don't have a voice. Too bad for you.
Oh, your tax dollars will still go to that cute school where the mascot is Jesus riding a dinosaur-- but whether you're upset because that mascot is ironic or because it isn't, you don't get to complain.
And that's not the worst of it. In PA, we've already seen how this works with cyber-charters-- just thirty or forty families can decide that an entire school district will have to make massive cuts. When they jump ship, they don't just take their own tax dollars with them-- they take the tax dollars of all their neighbors as well, and those neighbors get no say in the matter at all. Even electing new school board members won't make a difference.
Local control of schools used to be one of the last remaining arenas in which regular folks, regular taxpayers still had a say (yes, I know, large city school politics are a messy cesspool of, well, politics-- but that's not where we all live). School choice undercuts that power, sometimes removing it completely. I don't see how any part of the political spectrum can think that's a great idea.
School choice is taxation without representation.
When some cranky old fart (crankier and older than I am, anyway) wants to complain about having to pay taxes for schools when his kids aren't even IN school any more, I have a standard answer. Schools are not a service for parents. The people who produced the student are not the only "customers" for the school.
The educated human who emerges from school will become a neighbor, an employee, a parent, a spouse, a voter, a (one hopes) involved citizen, a person whose job will contribute in some way to the life of the community. Everybody who will ever deal with her in any of those capacities shares the benefits of that education. They are all "customers" of public education. Whether they are relatives of the educatee or not is hardly the point.
We all have a stake in public education. We all pay taxes to support public education. And we all get to vote on who will manage the operation of our schools (well, unless we are in occupied territories like Philadelphia or Newark).
School choice throws all of that out the window. Do you think it's a bad idea for a student to attend Flat Earth High School or Racial Purity Elementary School or God Is Dead Day School? Well, under school choice, if you don't have a kid, you don't have a voice. Too bad for you.
Oh, your tax dollars will still go to that cute school where the mascot is Jesus riding a dinosaur-- but whether you're upset because that mascot is ironic or because it isn't, you don't get to complain.
And that's not the worst of it. In PA, we've already seen how this works with cyber-charters-- just thirty or forty families can decide that an entire school district will have to make massive cuts. When they jump ship, they don't just take their own tax dollars with them-- they take the tax dollars of all their neighbors as well, and those neighbors get no say in the matter at all. Even electing new school board members won't make a difference.
Local control of schools used to be one of the last remaining arenas in which regular folks, regular taxpayers still had a say (yes, I know, large city school politics are a messy cesspool of, well, politics-- but that's not where we all live). School choice undercuts that power, sometimes removing it completely. I don't see how any part of the political spectrum can think that's a great idea.
School Choice Does Not Reduce the Cost of Education
Neal McClusky at the Cato Institute tweeted that I was wrong in my recent assertion that a school choice system costs more than a single public system. I asked him for an example of a place with a choice system that had lowered the cost of schooling, and he referred me to a couple of articles, the most thorough of which is a 2005 paper from Cato, "Saving Money and Improving Education: How School Choice Can Help States Reduce Education Costs."
James Shuls cites some of the same studies in the smackdown he administered to me over at the Friedman Foundation blog. Shuls also proves I am not a Jedi, which strikes me as an easier sell than convincing me that choice saves money.
What May Be The Heart of the Matter
What we're going to learn here is that McClusky, Shuls, and I disagree in part because we are using the same words to mean different things.
The Cato report, for instance, says "reducing the cost of education" when it really means "reducing the amount of money spent on education by government." Can it be that just as some liberals think that government money is basically free and doesn't have to be factored into cost, some conservatives think that only government money counts.
The paper looks at several studies of school district (though on district studied is DC, which is never an example of anything) as examples of how this magic trick works. In an earlier draft I tried to walk you through each report with responses and parallelllllzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.... Yeah, it was like that. So although the following is not exactly a point-by-point response to Cato's research, I think it better captures why several favorite examples of how choice saves money are simply false.
It's About Capacity, Not Output
A school is like an airplane, not a factory. Flying that 747 from PIT to LAX costs almost exactly the same for five passengers as it does for a full flight. The idea that having one less student reduces the school's costs by-- well, by anything at all-- is just insupportable (nor, in fairness, does the Cato paper try to support it). At most, if we move twenty-some students who are all the same grade out of the district, we might be able to lose a teacher.
Cost-per-pupil figures are meaningless. It's a statistical construct, like saying someone dies in a car accident every twelve minutes. If I reduce the number of pupils in my district, my cost per pupil just goes up. There will be occasional break points, where I can shed a teacher, an administrator, or in extreme cases, a building. But if my cost-per-pupil is $10K, that doesn't remotely mean that reducing my pupil population to one student would mean I could run the district for $10K.
So let's say my school district serves 100 students at $1 million total budget. You take ten students to your charter. My district is still spending, say, $980,000, and your charter is spending, say, $200,000 to educate your ten. Total cost-- the actual amount of money being paid by somebody-- to educate the 100 students has gone up $180,000.
Where Does the Extra Money Come From?
"Not from the taxpayer-by-way-of-the-government" is the important answer that we're looking for.
The real answer varies with situation. In many communities, private school means parochial school. Catholic school tuition is generally way below the cost-per-pupil in a public school. But the tuition cost is also not sufficient to keep the school running. Hence the fund-raising fairs and sports ticket raffles and slice of the collection plates that all help fund the parochial school systems.
If we're talking fancy-shmancy private school, the answer is Mumsy and Dad. If Lillywhite Academy will even accept your voucher, the voucher will only make a small chink in tuition costs. Tuition at the exclusive Ivy Preps like Philips Exeter will cost you four times the public school cost-per-pupil. Onviously not everybody is in the Ivy Prep league, but nobody out there is making a serious attempt to run a top-notch private school on $4 K a head.
No, the OTHER Extra Money
The public school money. Because, in my example, the public district still needed $980,000 to run, but they were down to $900 K because of the lost ten students. The public schools will recoup that same way as always-- increased local taxes.
And If The Extra Money Doesn't Appear
There is a scenario in which the choice set-up does reduce total costs, but that's not truly a function of choice-- it's a function of slashing a school district's budget thereby forcing it to cut programs. So having school choice can have the side-effect of reducing educational offerings for the community as well.
Concrete Example: Pennsylvania Paves the Road To Hell
Regrettably, I am neither a Jedi nor a thinky tank (just a guy with a blog), so my access to big baskets of facts and data is limited. Given that the Cato Institute's best reading recommendation to me was a paper from ten years ago, I'm not sure anybody else is actually loaded with real data on this issue, either. It would be nice if someone filled that gap, because I can even entertain the notion that there is a combination of numbers and price points that might make these mythical savings actually appear.
But in the meantime, I'm reduced to what I've seen and researched first hand in Pennsylvania.
In PA, we loves us some cyber-charters. And we have a funding formula that sends pretty much the full cost-per-pupil figure to the charters. In two local district, in one school year, a loss of about seventy-some students to charters resulted in a loss of about $800,000 in school revenue. In my own district, with about 1,500 students K-12, that was a brutal chunk of money, and the only way to make up that kind of shortfall (which a school cannot budget or plan for because it does not know how many charter students it must pay for until the students make the move) was to do some massive slashing-- in our case, closing neighborhood elementary schools.
Losing those students did not significantly reduce the costs of running our district at all; it simply forced us to offer fewer educational opportunities to our students.
Bottom Line
There are many many arguments to have about choice, and it's good at times to focus on just parts (I am not even annoyed that the Cato paper is all about choice cutting costs with nary a word to consider the educational effects-- sometimes you just have to focus). But the argument that choice makes education cheaper is a loser, and the fact that some very smart people with access to lots of resources have failed to throw anything convincing at me only makes me more secure in my own Jediless findings.
Running several school districts is more expensive in toto than running just one. The savings that keep being touted are really only about savings of tax dollars, and keeping taxes low. Why would I want to keep my taxes low if that just means that I'm going to be spending more of my own money on my children's education? There's an ugly conclusion at the end of this line of inquiry-- I can afford to pay big bucks for my own children to get a good education, but if we keep public schools low-budget and tax support down, I won't have to spend my money educating the children of Those People. Choice doesn't reduce the total cost that we as a country pay for education-- it just moves the cost around a little, and reduces still more of the requirement for Some of Us to spend our perfectly good money supporting Those People.
So unfortunately, I must concede that from such a point of view, there are certainly some conservatives who can get behind that.
James Shuls cites some of the same studies in the smackdown he administered to me over at the Friedman Foundation blog. Shuls also proves I am not a Jedi, which strikes me as an easier sell than convincing me that choice saves money.
What May Be The Heart of the Matter
What we're going to learn here is that McClusky, Shuls, and I disagree in part because we are using the same words to mean different things.
The Cato report, for instance, says "reducing the cost of education" when it really means "reducing the amount of money spent on education by government." Can it be that just as some liberals think that government money is basically free and doesn't have to be factored into cost, some conservatives think that only government money counts.
The paper looks at several studies of school district (though on district studied is DC, which is never an example of anything) as examples of how this magic trick works. In an earlier draft I tried to walk you through each report with responses and parallelllllzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.... Yeah, it was like that. So although the following is not exactly a point-by-point response to Cato's research, I think it better captures why several favorite examples of how choice saves money are simply false.
It's About Capacity, Not Output
A school is like an airplane, not a factory. Flying that 747 from PIT to LAX costs almost exactly the same for five passengers as it does for a full flight. The idea that having one less student reduces the school's costs by-- well, by anything at all-- is just insupportable (nor, in fairness, does the Cato paper try to support it). At most, if we move twenty-some students who are all the same grade out of the district, we might be able to lose a teacher.
Cost-per-pupil figures are meaningless. It's a statistical construct, like saying someone dies in a car accident every twelve minutes. If I reduce the number of pupils in my district, my cost per pupil just goes up. There will be occasional break points, where I can shed a teacher, an administrator, or in extreme cases, a building. But if my cost-per-pupil is $10K, that doesn't remotely mean that reducing my pupil population to one student would mean I could run the district for $10K.
So let's say my school district serves 100 students at $1 million total budget. You take ten students to your charter. My district is still spending, say, $980,000, and your charter is spending, say, $200,000 to educate your ten. Total cost-- the actual amount of money being paid by somebody-- to educate the 100 students has gone up $180,000.
Where Does the Extra Money Come From?
"Not from the taxpayer-by-way-of-the-government" is the important answer that we're looking for.
The real answer varies with situation. In many communities, private school means parochial school. Catholic school tuition is generally way below the cost-per-pupil in a public school. But the tuition cost is also not sufficient to keep the school running. Hence the fund-raising fairs and sports ticket raffles and slice of the collection plates that all help fund the parochial school systems.
If we're talking fancy-shmancy private school, the answer is Mumsy and Dad. If Lillywhite Academy will even accept your voucher, the voucher will only make a small chink in tuition costs. Tuition at the exclusive Ivy Preps like Philips Exeter will cost you four times the public school cost-per-pupil. Onviously not everybody is in the Ivy Prep league, but nobody out there is making a serious attempt to run a top-notch private school on $4 K a head.
No, the OTHER Extra Money
The public school money. Because, in my example, the public district still needed $980,000 to run, but they were down to $900 K because of the lost ten students. The public schools will recoup that same way as always-- increased local taxes.
And If The Extra Money Doesn't Appear
There is a scenario in which the choice set-up does reduce total costs, but that's not truly a function of choice-- it's a function of slashing a school district's budget thereby forcing it to cut programs. So having school choice can have the side-effect of reducing educational offerings for the community as well.
Concrete Example: Pennsylvania Paves the Road To Hell
Regrettably, I am neither a Jedi nor a thinky tank (just a guy with a blog), so my access to big baskets of facts and data is limited. Given that the Cato Institute's best reading recommendation to me was a paper from ten years ago, I'm not sure anybody else is actually loaded with real data on this issue, either. It would be nice if someone filled that gap, because I can even entertain the notion that there is a combination of numbers and price points that might make these mythical savings actually appear.
But in the meantime, I'm reduced to what I've seen and researched first hand in Pennsylvania.
In PA, we loves us some cyber-charters. And we have a funding formula that sends pretty much the full cost-per-pupil figure to the charters. In two local district, in one school year, a loss of about seventy-some students to charters resulted in a loss of about $800,000 in school revenue. In my own district, with about 1,500 students K-12, that was a brutal chunk of money, and the only way to make up that kind of shortfall (which a school cannot budget or plan for because it does not know how many charter students it must pay for until the students make the move) was to do some massive slashing-- in our case, closing neighborhood elementary schools.
Losing those students did not significantly reduce the costs of running our district at all; it simply forced us to offer fewer educational opportunities to our students.
Bottom Line
There are many many arguments to have about choice, and it's good at times to focus on just parts (I am not even annoyed that the Cato paper is all about choice cutting costs with nary a word to consider the educational effects-- sometimes you just have to focus). But the argument that choice makes education cheaper is a loser, and the fact that some very smart people with access to lots of resources have failed to throw anything convincing at me only makes me more secure in my own Jediless findings.
Running several school districts is more expensive in toto than running just one. The savings that keep being touted are really only about savings of tax dollars, and keeping taxes low. Why would I want to keep my taxes low if that just means that I'm going to be spending more of my own money on my children's education? There's an ugly conclusion at the end of this line of inquiry-- I can afford to pay big bucks for my own children to get a good education, but if we keep public schools low-budget and tax support down, I won't have to spend my money educating the children of Those People. Choice doesn't reduce the total cost that we as a country pay for education-- it just moves the cost around a little, and reduces still more of the requirement for Some of Us to spend our perfectly good money supporting Those People.
So unfortunately, I must concede that from such a point of view, there are certainly some conservatives who can get behind that.
Democrats: "We Suck Less Than That Other Guy"
Every election and primary cycle brings the same question back around-- do we support the lesser of two evils, or throw support to a non-viable third party candidate?
This used to qualify as not-really-a-question. In 2012, lots of Democrats were super-unhappy with Obama's first term. Teachers were already being pretty open about feeling that Obama had implemented education policies that George Bush would have been proud to call his own ( I was one of those vocalizers). But the Democratic party responded with a fairly clear policy of, "Screw 'em. They're never going to vote for Mitt Romney, so we'll do exactly what we have to do to keep their votes, which is jack squat." And they weren't wrong; I, too, held my nose and voted for Obama.
I'm pretty sure that I'd like to have that vote back.
Democrats have gotten lazy and abusive. Every election we trot out scary pictures of reactionary right-wingers (and a handful of GOP candidates always oblige by acting like cartoons). "You know you're going to vote for us," they barely bother to say. "We're not as bad as those other guys."
If we make noises about voting for an RC Cola candidate (someone not from the two major marketeers), we get a guilt trip about how that will spoil the election for somebody, and we won't end up with our preferred lesser of two evils. Don't throw your vote away on a non-viable candidate.
And then they go back to sucking up to Hoi Polloi Posteriors.
But every cycle, the challenge to the status quo gets a bit more real.
For a while this week, it looked like Working Families Party might actually back somebody other than Andy Cuomo. It looked enough like it that the establishment Dems were required to go cut a deal, and even then the vote came in at 58.66% to 41.34%, which is not exactly a nailbiter, but it's not nothing, either. Meanwhile, de Blasio fished the Cuomo knife out of his own back, cleaned it, and knelt before Cuomo to present it hilt first while saying, "My liege." The result of all this is not good news-- Cuomo is no more a liberal Democrat than a Twinkie is a great source of protein-- but it is certainly one more clear sign of how completely the Democratic establishment has abandoned anything remotely its principles.
Up in Connecticut, Jonathan Pelto is mounting a third-party challenge to pretend-Democrat governor Dannel Malloy, which will inevitably be dismissed in language suggesting a vote for Pelto is just a wasted vote. And hey-- third party challenges work out almost never
And so Democratic voters in those states and in other locations around the country face the same question again-- do we vote for someone who is arguably the lesser of two evils? If you're facing the question, here's a couple of questions to ask yourself.
1) If you are always going to vote Democratic no matter what, what reason does the party have to ever listen to you ever? If you cannot imagine circumstances under which you would deny the Democratic party your vote, then you also cannot imagine circumstances under which the party would listen to you. (Unless you're really rich, in which case they will totally listen to you.)
2) How much worse would the other guy be, really? Yes, he's probably some GOP tool that you don't like, but really honestly truly, how much worse would he be?
Because this is going to be a marathon, not a sprint. The Democratic party will not turn on a dime, and it will not turn at all until it perceives that Democrats in general and teachers in particular have really had enough, enough to actually change election results. A third party candidate who loses, but who steals a sizeable chunk of the vote, sends a message. It may well take a bit for the message to sink in, but no message will even be sent if teachers keep going back to the Democratic party, nursing our black eyes and saying, "Well, it was my fault he got upset and punched me, and besides, he's so much better than anyone else who would have me."
Important political pro tip: It does not matter how upset people are with you. As long as it doesn't interfere with your ability to win elections, you don't have to pay it the slightest bit of attention.
The lesser of two evils is still an evil. For Democrat teachers (particularly the ones in NY) it might be time to stop voting for an evil and to start using the vote to make a statement about what is good.
This used to qualify as not-really-a-question. In 2012, lots of Democrats were super-unhappy with Obama's first term. Teachers were already being pretty open about feeling that Obama had implemented education policies that George Bush would have been proud to call his own ( I was one of those vocalizers). But the Democratic party responded with a fairly clear policy of, "Screw 'em. They're never going to vote for Mitt Romney, so we'll do exactly what we have to do to keep their votes, which is jack squat." And they weren't wrong; I, too, held my nose and voted for Obama.
I'm pretty sure that I'd like to have that vote back.
Democrats have gotten lazy and abusive. Every election we trot out scary pictures of reactionary right-wingers (and a handful of GOP candidates always oblige by acting like cartoons). "You know you're going to vote for us," they barely bother to say. "We're not as bad as those other guys."
If we make noises about voting for an RC Cola candidate (someone not from the two major marketeers), we get a guilt trip about how that will spoil the election for somebody, and we won't end up with our preferred lesser of two evils. Don't throw your vote away on a non-viable candidate.
And then they go back to sucking up to Hoi Polloi Posteriors.
But every cycle, the challenge to the status quo gets a bit more real.
For a while this week, it looked like Working Families Party might actually back somebody other than Andy Cuomo. It looked enough like it that the establishment Dems were required to go cut a deal, and even then the vote came in at 58.66% to 41.34%, which is not exactly a nailbiter, but it's not nothing, either. Meanwhile, de Blasio fished the Cuomo knife out of his own back, cleaned it, and knelt before Cuomo to present it hilt first while saying, "My liege." The result of all this is not good news-- Cuomo is no more a liberal Democrat than a Twinkie is a great source of protein-- but it is certainly one more clear sign of how completely the Democratic establishment has abandoned anything remotely its principles.
Up in Connecticut, Jonathan Pelto is mounting a third-party challenge to pretend-Democrat governor Dannel Malloy, which will inevitably be dismissed in language suggesting a vote for Pelto is just a wasted vote. And hey-- third party challenges work out almost never
And so Democratic voters in those states and in other locations around the country face the same question again-- do we vote for someone who is arguably the lesser of two evils? If you're facing the question, here's a couple of questions to ask yourself.
1) If you are always going to vote Democratic no matter what, what reason does the party have to ever listen to you ever? If you cannot imagine circumstances under which you would deny the Democratic party your vote, then you also cannot imagine circumstances under which the party would listen to you. (Unless you're really rich, in which case they will totally listen to you.)
2) How much worse would the other guy be, really? Yes, he's probably some GOP tool that you don't like, but really honestly truly, how much worse would he be?
Because this is going to be a marathon, not a sprint. The Democratic party will not turn on a dime, and it will not turn at all until it perceives that Democrats in general and teachers in particular have really had enough, enough to actually change election results. A third party candidate who loses, but who steals a sizeable chunk of the vote, sends a message. It may well take a bit for the message to sink in, but no message will even be sent if teachers keep going back to the Democratic party, nursing our black eyes and saying, "Well, it was my fault he got upset and punched me, and besides, he's so much better than anyone else who would have me."
Important political pro tip: It does not matter how upset people are with you. As long as it doesn't interfere with your ability to win elections, you don't have to pay it the slightest bit of attention.
The lesser of two evils is still an evil. For Democrat teachers (particularly the ones in NY) it might be time to stop voting for an evil and to start using the vote to make a statement about what is good.
Saturday, May 31, 2014
Welcome to Common Core Hospital
Nurse Duncan: Welcome to Common Core Hospital. How may I assist you?
Chris: My name's Chris Wobble. I was just in a car accident. My arm seems to be broken in about three places.
Nurse Duncan: All righty, then. We just need to do some assessments here to see what shape you're in. As a major health care provider, your health data determines our success rate. Now first we're going to take your blood pressure. Let me just put the blood pressure cuff on your arm here...
Chris: Ow! Owwww!! Hey!! Holly mother of God! I told that arm's broken!!
Nurse Duncan: Sir, our standard procedure is to take the blood pressure with the right arm. Stop whining. Show a little grit.
Chris: Aaaaaaiiieeeeeeee!
Nurse Duncan: Goodness. Your blood pressure numbers are quite bad. Quite bad. We are going to have to address that with an immediate treatment plan. Bad blood pressure numbers are a sign of poor health. Often they are related to excess weight. Are you fat?
Chris: Do I look fat? Look, do you want to just weigh me?
Nurse Duncan: Oh, we don't have any scales here. We find that the blood pressure measure is all we need to determine patient health quality. Let's just continue with my questions. Are you suffering from any stress or anxiety over the last few weeks that might have elevated your blood pressure?
Chris: Well, my frickin' arm is broken!! But that only happened today.
Nurse Duncan: I think we must conclude that your blood pressure problems are the result of a sedentary lifestyle. Please answer the following multiple choice question. Which strikes you as the most likely cause of your sedentary lifestyle. A) Your apartment does not have a gym, B) Your apartment is too small to offer room for exercise, C) You only socialize by drinking at bars, or D) Meal selections at your regular restaurant are high caloric content.
Chris: What? What??!! Those don't even make sense. And I live on a farm.
Nurse Duncan: We'll just write down A.
Chris: What hell is wrong with you?!!
Nurse Duncan: Let me consult my individualized treatment options chart. (Fiddles with iPad). According to our individualized treatment chart, your personalized treatment program is a regular series of push-ups to be performed daily. Could you drop and give me ten right now, please?
Chris: Are you insane? Can you not see that my arm has extra bends in it?
Nurse Duncan: The use of my own senses for diagnosis is strictly against hospital policy. By the way, if you could give me your drivers license, credit cards, and on line passwords, we'd like to copy those for our records.
Chris: Why do you need that information for anything? What are you going to do with it, anyway?
Nurse Duncan: Well, that's not really any of your business now, is it? And I must say, Chris, that this is a charter hospital, and if you are going to be difficult to work with or require additional treatment options or indicate that you are likely to yield poor results that would hurt our ratings, I will be counseling you out.
Chris: You mean I won't get any treatment?
Nurse Duncan: Oh no. You will still be able to seek treatment at the public hospital. You passed it on your way in-- that gentleman in the back of the pick-up truck out in the parking lot.
Chris: Man. Will he take my insurance?
Nurse Duncan: Well, he can have what's left of your coverage payment. We'll still be keeping our full fee here. Now, about those pushups...
Chris: Oh look!! Isn't that Mark Zuckerberg in the hall? Is that a check he's holding?
Nurse Duncan: What? Where?? (Runs out of room. Returns shortly, confused and sad). I guess I must have missed him. Now then, about those push-ups...
Chris: Oh, I totally did them while you were in the hall. Can I have a pain pill at least?
Nurse Duncan: We're happy to hand out pills, particularly if it will make you more co-operative. As soon as we've finished our consultation here. I need to give you a final blood pressure check to measure your progress during our visit.
Chris: Here, give me the cuff. I'll put it on myself.
Nurse Duncan: But you've put it on your foot, outside your boot.
Chris: Just get your data.
Nurse Duncan: Very well..........Hmm
Chris: Yes?
Nurse Duncan: (Picks up phone). Maintenance? Yes, the patient I'm seeing is apparently dead. Get someone down here to process the patient out before it counts against us.
Chris: Oh for the love of God.
Chris: My name's Chris Wobble. I was just in a car accident. My arm seems to be broken in about three places.
Nurse Duncan: All righty, then. We just need to do some assessments here to see what shape you're in. As a major health care provider, your health data determines our success rate. Now first we're going to take your blood pressure. Let me just put the blood pressure cuff on your arm here...
Chris: Ow! Owwww!! Hey!! Holly mother of God! I told that arm's broken!!
Nurse Duncan: Sir, our standard procedure is to take the blood pressure with the right arm. Stop whining. Show a little grit.
Chris: Aaaaaaiiieeeeeeee!
Nurse Duncan: Goodness. Your blood pressure numbers are quite bad. Quite bad. We are going to have to address that with an immediate treatment plan. Bad blood pressure numbers are a sign of poor health. Often they are related to excess weight. Are you fat?
Chris: Do I look fat? Look, do you want to just weigh me?
Nurse Duncan: Oh, we don't have any scales here. We find that the blood pressure measure is all we need to determine patient health quality. Let's just continue with my questions. Are you suffering from any stress or anxiety over the last few weeks that might have elevated your blood pressure?
Chris: Well, my frickin' arm is broken!! But that only happened today.
Nurse Duncan: I think we must conclude that your blood pressure problems are the result of a sedentary lifestyle. Please answer the following multiple choice question. Which strikes you as the most likely cause of your sedentary lifestyle. A) Your apartment does not have a gym, B) Your apartment is too small to offer room for exercise, C) You only socialize by drinking at bars, or D) Meal selections at your regular restaurant are high caloric content.
Chris: What? What??!! Those don't even make sense. And I live on a farm.
Nurse Duncan: We'll just write down A.
Chris: What hell is wrong with you?!!
Nurse Duncan: Let me consult my individualized treatment options chart. (Fiddles with iPad). According to our individualized treatment chart, your personalized treatment program is a regular series of push-ups to be performed daily. Could you drop and give me ten right now, please?
Chris: Are you insane? Can you not see that my arm has extra bends in it?
Nurse Duncan: The use of my own senses for diagnosis is strictly against hospital policy. By the way, if you could give me your drivers license, credit cards, and on line passwords, we'd like to copy those for our records.
Chris: Why do you need that information for anything? What are you going to do with it, anyway?
Nurse Duncan: Well, that's not really any of your business now, is it? And I must say, Chris, that this is a charter hospital, and if you are going to be difficult to work with or require additional treatment options or indicate that you are likely to yield poor results that would hurt our ratings, I will be counseling you out.
Chris: You mean I won't get any treatment?
Nurse Duncan: Oh no. You will still be able to seek treatment at the public hospital. You passed it on your way in-- that gentleman in the back of the pick-up truck out in the parking lot.
Chris: Man. Will he take my insurance?
Nurse Duncan: Well, he can have what's left of your coverage payment. We'll still be keeping our full fee here. Now, about those pushups...
Chris: Oh look!! Isn't that Mark Zuckerberg in the hall? Is that a check he's holding?
Nurse Duncan: What? Where?? (Runs out of room. Returns shortly, confused and sad). I guess I must have missed him. Now then, about those push-ups...
Chris: Oh, I totally did them while you were in the hall. Can I have a pain pill at least?
Nurse Duncan: We're happy to hand out pills, particularly if it will make you more co-operative. As soon as we've finished our consultation here. I need to give you a final blood pressure check to measure your progress during our visit.
Chris: Here, give me the cuff. I'll put it on myself.
Nurse Duncan: But you've put it on your foot, outside your boot.
Chris: Just get your data.
Nurse Duncan: Very well..........Hmm
Chris: Yes?
Nurse Duncan: (Picks up phone). Maintenance? Yes, the patient I'm seeing is apparently dead. Get someone down here to process the patient out before it counts against us.
Chris: Oh for the love of God.
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