And that's why it sucks
Schools in Massachusetts and Minnesota (public schools even), for example, score about as well as Finland. Well, not quite, but at least in the top 5, much better than the rest of the country. I'm not sure why. I'll have to look up why. Remind me.
Factory models that try to have a wide audience don't seem to work in a flat economy with a wider audience. They can work when there are lots of ways to get in or out of a market (choice), which is why Wal-Mart works (and partly why GM hasn't). I think this is also why our colleges tend to be well-regarded. This model won't work so well when there is a captured market, which is why our lower schools are terrible. See the scores on reading or math for 8th grade public NYC teachers for merely getting one year's growth for students (ie: the job they were supposedly doing all year). 12%? What the hell is going on in the other 88% of classrooms? Choice for parents is already a partial option. And it's typically the one we see held up by "school choice advocates" (I consider this a misnomer for the American variety, they're usually more interested in subsidizing their own choices and not others, with the possible exception of poor people trapped in crappy urban public schools, ie minorities). Choice for students hasn't been held up very often as the ideal. It should be. (Been a while since I've had cause to go back to that.)
Speaking of music.
Pandora is highly recommended. Except I don't tend, anymore anyway, to look at the supposed musical characteristics of my likes and dislikes. I just accede to getting a boatload of older jazz music and even older classical music alongside other things. I suspect, unlike those radio surveys where people lie to say they are listening to "culture", I'm actually listening to more classical or jazz music because of this.
*Gray Matters*
2 hours ago
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6 comments:
Why don't we just legalize volutary non-attendance at public schools?
Because of the externality benefits of education. I'd suspect people should have at least some schooling as it tends to do...something... for the rest of us, either economically or personally/socially.
The trouble we have with that theory is the general worthlessness of public schools at doing whatever it is we need them to do.
And we do have "voluntary" non-attendance at public schools; you can home school or send the kid to a private school. Personally I don't think we're getting anywhere until they nix the distinction between public and private schools and let the tax dollars go where they are actually wanted rather than where they say they must.
I was thinking voluntary non-attendance of school. It would allow parents and children the ability to "vote" with their continued support of public or private schooling. (Home schooling is a form of private schooling.) Why should the government force children into a classroom against the desires of the parents and children?
I think there's a vested public interest in having an informed and modestly educated population (if for no other reason than that it provides productivity gains), such that there needs to be some demonstration that children are being educated somewhere. Some government mandate to get an education is thus useful. But I agree that compulsory attendance at a public school is nonsense, in large measure because I seriously doubt children are being educated in many of them.
In any case, many children tend to drop out during middle and especially high school, suggesting that there are indeed voluntary non-attendance measures in place already. The real trouble in my mind is that we force people to pay for public (ie, government controlled) schools through a monopoly issued and mandated by government, and not that we force people to get an education.
You think education is demonstratively good economically, socially, and personally. This is why I think it should not be mandatory.
Employers can and should mandate a minimum degree of education, not the government. Some jobs require no education, the pay for these jobs is usually poor. The decision to get an education, even now, is heavily the student's own responsibility.
It brings a free market option (without any additional cost or constitutional problems) to the educational arena.
I would hope that children would still attend school. And I would expect local government to make laws reguarding non-attending children.
I think it's certainly possible that non-governmental compulsion (such as employer hiring criteria or social stigmas toward drop-outs) can increase school attendance or educational interest. I'm highly skeptical that compulsory public education does, given that there are plenty of public school districts that students and parents flee from at full speed.
But I do think the legal penalties present give a sufficient inducement to people who are disinterested in their children's education for the sake of their child to get, something at least.
The primary free market option I see is in college education. Which should not be seen as subsidized or mandatory at all. What we find however is that despite the jobs market becoming increasingly skewed toward college educations, people are not increasingly fulfilling college attendance and the completion of credentials that entails. I suspect this is partly because of heavy government involvement (subsidies often skewing the price signals upward), and mostly because the incentives, both economic and social/personal, to attaining higher levels of education are not clear to people who do not have an adequate primary education (much less the question of whether college is attainable for most such people), ie, usually people who would not recognize the value of even that primary education. One thing a mandatory primary education would do is provide some additional incentive toward getting at least that out of the way.
The downside right now is that governments have used the most hamfisted methods to accomplish this. I suspect a minimal government intervention on this front could be replaced with no intervention at all, with simple market incentives as suggested.
But we're not there yet. The hydra in this case needs to have a few of its heads lopped off to buy us the time to kill it completely.
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