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The Burbs Revisited
Education blogger Kevin Carey is unhappy with me:
As a rule I enjoy Kevin Drum's blog at Mother Jones. But his occasional forays into education generally descend into naysaying and
pessimism — Kevin's one all-purpose insight on the subject is that education policy is hard and as such not worth trying to solve.
I plead mostly guilty to this. In fact, Kevin C. is being polite. Not only do I think that education policy is hard, I think it's an absolute cesspool with very little to show for decades of effort. In my defense, though, I don't think that means it isn't worth trying to solve education problems. I just think that most claims to have done so turn out on inspection to be seriously overblown.
Take the post in question. I argued that suburban parents are basically selfish SOBs who will never allow anything more than very modest levels of integration with urban school districts and will fight like crazed weasels to protect their own leafy citadels of learning. Kevin C. disagrees. I think. He suggests that even suburban parents harbor some altruistic impulses, but then immediately admits that "when asked, parents will jealously guard the resources available to their own children." Here's his solution:
So the key thing is to not ask. For example, back when I worked on education funding in Indiana, we created a formula that allowed local school districts to keep all of the revenue they generated through property taxes, but then distributed state funds inversely to local property wealth, equalizing the overall funding level. The effect was to redistribute hundreds of millions of dollars of sales and income tax revenue from the wealthiest school districts to the poorest. But because that transfer occured in the context of an immensely complex formula understood by less than half a dozen people and negotiated in a back room long after the official hearings had finished and the press had gone home, nobody really got upset by it, because nobody knew exactly how much money they were losing, and we were in no hurry to tell them.
The point being, sometimes too much information is detrimental to fair public policy. States that have tried to explicitly transfer local property wealth between districts have had a horrible time of it, because the extent of the redistribution was too obvious. Sometimes it's better to hide the true extent of people's contributions to the common good. Otherwise they'll start asking questions and from there it's a slippery slope all the way back to every family huddling alone in a cave and foraging for fruits and nuts.
I'm not sure a rebuttal is even necessary. It sounds to me like Kevin C. is agreeing that suburban parents will protect their schools like crazed weasels, and the only way to overcome this is to lie to them early and often. And he thinks I'm the pessimistic one?
UPDATE: Richard Kahlenberg is unhappy with me too. I don't blame him, really. But as much as I respect both of these guys, neither of their counterarguments strikes me as very persuasive. Lying to parents just isn't a long-term strategy, and the fact that urban/suburban transfers have worked in a very small number of special cases isn't evidence that it will scale well.
Besides, there's another problem here that no one mentions. Even if you have a great system of urban magnet schools and urban/suburban transfers, what happens to the urban non-magnet schools? They lose all their best students either to the magnets or to open spots in the suburbs, and the suburban kids are only transferring in to the magnets. This means that the non-magnets end up with a worse student body than before. The net result might still be positive, but the majority of urban schools are actually worse off.
Again, I don't pretend to know what the answer is. But I continue to think that programs like KIPP or Green Dot that are just flatly aimed at improving urban schools are a more promising bet than counting on urban/suburban partnerships.
This guy's pretty
This guy's pretty despicable. It sounds like he's awfully proud of duping taxpayers into not objecting to something they would object it if they had more information.
"The point being, sometimes too much information is detrimental to fair public policy."
Translation: I know what's fair for everyone, and it's best if you don't worry about what I'm doing.
Let me guess, this guy's a liberal right?
P.S. I want this a**hole nowhere near my school district.
Suburbian parents will fight
Suburbian parents will fight this like crazed weasels. That is one of the reasons why they moved to the suburbs, to be away from the bad influences (never mind the fact that these bad influences exist everywhere---they delude themselves into thinking they are free from it)
As for the "Robin Hood" financing, this was tried in other states and went down in flames.
Why bother?
While the idea is nice -- there is no evidence that shipping kids around does anything to improve the education of any student (urban or suburban) and plenty of evidence that it detracts from their education and health if kids have to get up 1-2 hours earlier to bus miles away from their home.
education
As a teacher involved in curric. development, the even bigger question is: What kind of world are we preparing them for? Many of the skills teaching entrenched in our present model (long division a great example) can now be supplanted by technology in the pockets of most of the students.
We are arguing over what and how to teach them when they know that our model is based upon our world and not the one they are emerging into.
Why memorize the state capitals? They can find the info on their iPhone instantly. Their cynicism is credible.
*there is no evidence that
*there is no evidence that shipping kids around does anything to improve the education of any student (urban or suburban) and plenty of evidence that it detracts from their education and health if kids have to get up 1-2 hours earlier to bus miles away from their home. *
There certainly is evidence that integrated educational environments help poor minority students.
Minority students in such schools aren't significantly higher academic achievers in terms of grades or test scores, but far fewer of them drop out and many more go on to college.
Carey is missing an
Carey is missing an important tool in his fight for educational reform. Since he has no problem denying transparency to the taxpayers because his solution is "right" and they are obviously "wrong", then he should have no problem simply legislating that those who make more than $X or pay more than $Y in property taxes simply be forbidden from moving. If they can't move, they can't take their tax dollars with them. It is such a simple solution, and I can't imagine why anyone would object since it is for the common good.
Same in NJ - everyone knows the deal
I may be mistaken, but I believe here in NJ we have a similar funding formula. No cash is taken away from my affluent district/town's property tax collections, but a formula calculated based on wealth delivers far lower state aid to my district.
Every parent in the district knows exactly what's going on. And if they didn't, the school board members raise holy and ineffectual hell about it every year, to deflect some of the budget debate pressure off of themselves.
That's pure human nature at work. It's hard for me to imagine that it's any different in Indiana, which as I understand it, is also populated by humans.
" It sounds to me like Kevin
" It sounds to me like Kevin C. is agreeing that suburban parents will protect their schools like crazed weasels, and the only way to overcome this is to lie to them early and often."
Previous post:
" It's easy to blame Sacramento for this mess (and I do!), but the public has been complicit every step of the way."
Everyone wants to pile on Kevin C. How about accepting that the guy is actually solving problems. Is the alternative any better?
The Magic Bullet
Kevin D. makes a very important point about the unfounded grandiosity of educational reformers. Everyone is looking for the magic bullet, or combination of magic bullets, that is going to solve the achievement gap and the otherwise sorry state of education in this country. So, you have Michelle Rhee in DC promoting merit pay and taking down the union; you have Joel Klein in NYC promoting principal control and accountability; you have other reformers touting a skills-based curriculum or shipping kids to the suburbs.
Now, some, maybe all, of these things will work, but only at the margins. None of them, either alone or together, is going to overcome the combination of the socio-economic origins of the achievement gap or, as Kevin D. points out, the unwillingness of the well-to-do to share the educational wealth.
I really can't understand the incessant gung-ho-ism of educational reformers who seem to think the only impediment to solving our educational problems is negative thinking. It's really ridiculous and flies in the face of decades of evidence to the contrary.
I never understood what was so bad about admitting that you can only make small, incremental progress. It's still progress, isn't it?
I also think that the unfounded insistence on the schools by themselves being able to solve these problems is actually damaging the schools, which get blamed for fixing something they are ill-equipped to fix.
School Funding Equalization
These formulae and programs are not some secret trick the state pulls on suburban parents, as much as Kevin Carey likes to think he's clever. They are a response to the problems inherent in school funding sliding overwhelmingly toward property taxes in many states and the disparities this causes. They are enacted by legislatures, not crusading bureaucrats.
They are also notoriously complex and easily distorted by other programs that adjust assessed value such as farmland use valuation (takes money from city school districts in which all property is assessed and sends it to rural areas where farmland is under-assessed) or TIF (takes properties off the books for years to come, thus increasing equalization aid).
This doesn't mean equalization programs aren't worth it, but it does support Kevin D.'s theory that the complexity of all of this means simple policy fixes (mert's "magic bullets") are unlikely to work and can even cause unintended damages. Real reform is a daily slog that may never end.
Vicious Cycle
"Now, some, maybe all, of these things will work"
I really wish we would please, PLEASE stop looking for magic bullets. Whether it is funding levels, teaching training, curriculum, magnet schools, none of these are going to meet the needs of ALL students. Until we realize that education is about educating an individual child (very very difficult and not very sexy to talk about politically) and not simply ramping up the rhetoric or implementing the Next Big Idea, we aren't going to get anywhere. Which is why Kevin's cynicism is not unfounded.
Is redistribution really such a big secret?
I'm not really clear on the difference between what Carey is describing in Indiana and the current state of things in California. Here we have wealthy school districts, which get most of their funding from property tax revenue and only a small base amount from the state (the so-called Basic Aid districts), and other school districts which draw per-pupil funding from the state. I don't know the exact formula for deciding how much each district gets, but SFAIK there are no secrets. If you're in a Basic Aid district, you know it, and you know where your funding comes from. You don't complain about it either -- generally you're grateful, because your kids are still better off, even w/o the extra state funding.
So while I would generally be supportive of Carey's redistributive model, I see no point in attempting to pull the wool over people's eyes (and certainly not in bragging about it). Maybe you don't explicitly ask, but you don't try to hide what you're doing either.
I'm not an education
I'm not an education professional, so forgive this if it's a totally naive question. What's wrong with putting a state's taxes in a pool and distributing it for education on a per pupil basis? If residents of rich districts object, they should be reminded that it's a PUBLIC school system and they're free to move anywhere in it, including to urban schools (with large student populations) that would get more funding under that scenario. The trouble with the current system is that it isn't public, but semi-private, perpetuating failing schools by starving them of funds, while favoring already privileged students whose parents can afford to enhance their education outside the system. And if conservatives bleat that a pool is "communism," I'd remind them of all the red states that receive far more federal dollars than they contribute in taxes. How is that any different?
What is the problem with Kans...er education?
Q: Does a teacher earning $100K teach better than one earning $30K?
Not sure? Then why discuss teacher pay so much?
Q: Does busing kids around from place to place improve or degrade education?
Not sure? They why discuss it so much?
Q: Concerned about education?
Then why not discuss the process, content and structure of that?
Read the OECD stuff
The OECD analysis of PISA found that aggregating students by ability had no affect on overall achievement. The schools that got the better kids had higher scores but there was no difference to the district as a whole. They were interested in the subject because the top scoring PISA nation, Finland, is adamant about not doing this.
Education Hoarding is Another Form of Self Defense
The answer is completely outside the realm of education. A society that prizes dog-eat-dog capitalism with a token safety net will drive parents to protect their children's future with education hoarding. It's not really suburban vs. urban, it's my kids vs. the rest of their cohorts. In this culture we already know someone has to lose. Let it be THEM.
PS. My family pursued a counter-intuitive strategy-- put 'em in the melting pot at school for that particular valuable lesson and give 'em the book-learning boost at home. But, it's hard not to see the logic of hoarding.
Kevin Carey claims to have
Kevin Carey claims to have the solution to all of our problems, but he is describing what every state already does. The formulas can only be tilted so far to the poor districts because there are some taxpayer groups and suburban legislators who pay attention to the funding formulas, and they make sure that the advantages given to poor schools are not nearly enough to overcome the inherent advantages of wealthy schools. Wealthy districts understand that more state funds are going to go to high poverty districts than wealthy districts, but they are only willing to go so far.
Another reason not to buy
Another reason not to buy any thing Apple. It comes down to this we purchase the music we have a right to listen to it on any device we choose. The constitution and current laws back this up as fact. Apples refusal to allow any other device to sync with I Tunes is in clear violation. As long as Apple continues this anti-competative business model. I will not buy or use any thing they produce.