Over at Hit and Run, Nick Gillespie says “what, me worry?” to schools cutting programs and services in response to tightening budgets:
Jesus Christ, is this the worst of it? If so, please just stop. As someone who had kids in the Maryland’s Montgomery County schools for a couple of years, I can guarantee you that they could choose to cut something other than funds for “an award-winning” math team with ease. Indeed, the district seemed hellbent on calling three-day weekends whenever snow was forecast for a Friday morning. And where are the calls to make administrators ride their bikes or carpool to school?
Some of the cuts Nick do seem pretty trivial — switching from stop-at-every-home bus service to neighborhood bus stops, for instance. Others, however, are serious: Cutting school weeks from five days to four. Raising the costs of school lunches and charging parents for bus service (in one high school, they’ve cut out bus service altogether). Not being able to get up to date textbooks degrades the quality of education, and so — believe it or not — does cutting electives and math teams.
That Nick responds to these real problems with mockery — as if no reasonable person could possibly be concerned with cutting to a four-day school week, or updated textbooks — shows how irresponsible the idealogical anti-government tax-cutters are.
Meanwhile, Nick’s ideas on how to save money are ludicrous. Administrators typically use their own cars to get to work, so calls for biking or carpools for admins won’t save a cent. And snow days actually save money for school districts (as does any other method of cutting the number of school days).
Nick goes on:
Per-pupil spending is up over 300 percent in constant dollars since the early 1960s. You’d think somewhere in that increase, schools would figure out how to fund meaningful stuff and drop crap.
Of course, a lot of that increase has gone into special education, school breakfast and lunch programs, bilingual education, and computers. These expenses were all either low or nonexistent in the early 1960s — and yes, they are “meaningful stuff” and not “crap.”
The other thing to consider is that as long as we want students to have direct interaction with teachers, the costs of education will always go up, due to Baumol’s disease.
When Mozart composed his String Quintet in G Minor (K. 516), in 1787, you needed five people to perform it—two violinists, two violists, and a cellist. Today, you still need five people, and, unless they play really fast, they take about as long to perform it as musicians did two centuries ago. So much for progress.
An economist would say that the productivity of classical musicians has not improved over time, and in this regard the musicians aren’t alone. In a number of industries, workers produce about as much per hour as they did a decade or two ago. The average college professor can’t grade papers or give lectures any faster today than he did in the early nineties. It takes a waiter just as long to serve a meal, and a car-repair guy just as long to fix a radiator hose.
The rest of the American economy functions differently. In most businesses, workers are continually getting more productive and can produce a lot more per hour than they could ten or twenty years ago. […] Generally, productivity growth is a boon, but it creates problems for non-productive enterprises like classical music, education, and car repair: to keep luring talent, they have to increase wages, or else people eventually migrate to businesses that pay better. Instead of becoming nurses or mechanics, they become telecom engineers or machinists. That’s why teachers are getting paid a lot more than they were twenty years ago. (The average salary for an associate college professor has risen almost seventy per cent since the early eighties, and that’s if you adjust for inflation.) To pay those wages, schools and hospitals have to raise prices. The result is that in industries where productivity is flat costs and prices keep going up.
I have no idea if school districts really spend more (as a percentage of the total) on “crap” now than they did in the 1960s. But I’m skeptical, because Nick presents zero evidence to support his implication.
What I do know is that the amount of “meaningful stuff” schools are providing, and the legitimate costs of the “meaningful stuff,” have gone up significantly since the early 1960s. Too many libertarians, like Nick, act as if they believe in a free lunch; we can make HUGE cuts in education budgets and not suffer any pain at all, because there’s lots of unnamed “crap” to be cut! But it’s nonsense. Just saying “costs have gone up 300%” as if that alone proves there’s a huge amount of waste is economic illiteracy.
What about all the programs that are mandated by the federal government, but not funded by the feds? Those have also contributed to increased costs of public schooling (and it’s a shame teachers’ salaries haven’t kept pace with inflation). And since technology has advanced considerably in the last 50 years, and education has to keep up with that, which is not inexpensive. So, what are you going to cut? Advanced Math? Advanced Science? Yeah, that’s really going to keep us competitive with countries that fund education better than we do.
Many of the countries with whom we compete are based on different educational goals. For example, they may not believe that everyone is equally entitled to an equal education: they may either limit those who get any education at all, or they limit (or restrict) the available “tracks” of education which their students can enter. They also frequently (though not always) have some sort of federal control of education which allows them to make changes which the current state-driven setup does not. And of course, they may not have teacher’s unions, who do not permit many (any?) sweeping education reforms.
There is still a lot of inefficiency in the school system, though.
And in Nick’s own Montgomery County, public schools are now charging parents fees for “consumables,” i.e., workbooks, chalk, etc. Parents are protesting the fees for required courses, but so far the county isn’t budging.
My school district doesn’t pay enough for the teachers to live in the district, so that’d be a long bike ride and would be pretty difficult in the winter.
(The average salary for an associate college professor has risen almost seventy per cent since the early eighties, and that’s if you adjust for inflation.)
Yes, but far more faculty members are no longer able to achieve associate professor status; instead, they are adjunct professors. They are part-time, don’t accumulate tenure and don’t get benefits.
When Mozart composed his String Quintet in G Minor (K. 516), in 1787, you needed five people to perform it—two violinists, two violists, and a cellist. Today, you still need five people, and, unless they play really fast, they take about as long to perform it as musicians did two centuries ago. So much for progress.
You might want to think about adopting another example. When Mozart composed his Sting Quintet in G Minor in 1787 you needed 5 people to perform it every time you wanted to listen to it. And if someone in the next city wanted to hear it, they had to hire five more people to perform it. And you were both at the mercy of the skills of those people you hired.
These days you can hire the 5 best people in the world to perform that piece once. They’ll charge you more, and they’ll want a piece of the action, but having once performed it you can now listen to them perform it again any time you want as often as you want without having to pay any extra. And for a fee relatively nominal to the cost of hiring 5 musicians (or buying a concert ticket) the person in the next city can listen to the same performance at the same time. In fact, the entire planet can listen to that same performance at the same time, and the quality of that performance will be much higher than the average of any 10 simultaneous performances of that String Quintet would likely have had in 1787.
Consider the availability of the ability to listen to high-quality music (either just classical, or overall) to everyone now as opposed to 1787. How many people then could choose to hear a musical performance then? How many now?
Still think that there’s no productivity difference in this example?
MIT put all the written materials for all their courses on their website. Anyone in the world can audit an MIT course for free. You can’t get a grade or get credit for the course, but if your objective is to learn the material presented you can for the cost of your time, your computer and your ISP connection. But when I went there, only the people in the classroom could learn the material.
It’s not equivalent, no. There’s a value to grades and credit and to personal interaction with an instructor. But there’s also a value to the education in and of itself. And even teachers who are giving out grades and credit can increase productivity in some kinds of courses through the use of technology, presenting the materials on-line for students to peruse as they wish and spending a higher proportion of their time assisting students directly instead of spending any time lecturing 100’s. I believe that this will continue to increase as new technologies come online and education adapts.
Of course, a lot of that increase has gone into special education, school breakfast and lunch programs, bilingual education, and computers. These expenses were all either low or nonexistent in the early 1960s — and yes, they are “meaningful stuff” and not “crap.”
Special ed isn’t crap. And it costs more. I have a good friend who is a special ed teacher and God bless her she’s worth every penny. That’s money that wouldn’t have been spent years ago. The kids would have been instutionalized or would have been homeless or “the village idiot”. This is better, and special ed is education nonetheless. Grant that public education is a valid goal and it would be shameful to not educate everyone to the best of their ability.
OTOH, why should school breakfasts and school lunches even be counted as part of the educational budget? Are we saying that we wouldn’t feed those kids if they weren’t in school? It should be part of the general welfare budget and not counted against the schools. From an educational viewpoint it is crap – not because it’s not necessary, but because it’s not education.
BTW, neither is football or basketball or any other athletic endeavor. Let’s cut athletics out of the educational budget. If people want their kids to play other communities in football, let them fund a football team. Why should the schools have to pay for it? Why should I have to pay for it, for the teams and the transport and the equipment and the fields and their maintenace and the security for games and the insurance and the coaches salaries? Understand that both my kids played on 2 or 3 school teams – but they also played those sports on private traveling teams as well, which I paid for.
Shocking? My son played for [his high school’s name] boys lacrosse team. My daughter played for the [their high school’s name] girl’s hockey team. But were those teams actually paid for and sponsored by the school? Oh, hell no. Cost of ice time (in the one case) and equiment and insurance, don’t you know. They couldn’t afford it and didn’t care to assume the risk. I paid for it. So, then, why should they be able to afford any sport? Why should some sports have a special status and others not? Why not put all on that model? It would save the schools an absolute fortune. Meanwhile, everyone still saw those teams as “the [my kids’ high school] [sport name] team” and identified with it’s successes and failures.
OTOH, math teams I can see. Schools exist to teach math, and giving kids who are good in math a chance to excel in it and to be recognized for it seems a valid educational goal. It would be shameful to not educate everyone to the best of their ability.
[ rant ]
Football at my kids’ high school is a huge money sink. Understand that the school is over 100 years old. There’s a tradition there, and it’s cool to be able to say “I’m on the football team.” So the school has a no-cut policy regarding their football team. In other words, any kid who shows up and doesn’t quit no matter how hard the coaches ride him gets a uniform and equipment and gets to practice and be “in the game”. Practically, that means that there are hundreds of kids in the football program and around 100 on the sidelines, when no more than 40 or 50 will ever step inside the lines of the field during the game. And that’s varsity; add multiple freshmen and sophmore and junior varsity teams. Think of what it costs to maintain that many fields and uniform/equipment sets and coaches salaries, etc. And it’s not the only “no cut” sport. There’s no reason for that – it’s just to enable a bunch of teenage kids to pump up their egos on my nickel.
[ /rant ]
Part of the problem is the size of the school. There’s almost 4000 kids. If you go to a school with 500 kids you have a shot to play. But it’s real high odds to make, say, the boys’ basketball team (15 boys and it’s a cut sport). this way every kid can say “I play for [the high school]”.
Also, the move of our schools towards educational communism, and away from educational capitalism, has significantly altered the costs. We have yet to acknowledge that the results of all of those systems are going to be different.
(I use those terms because they make the most sense to me. They are:
Educational capitalism: Focus on providing the most services to the top students, who can generally produce more ‘educational benefit’ from a given hour of instruction. I.e. you’re in a automobile distance race: give most of the fuel to the fuel-efficient cars.
Educational socialism (this label is a bit of a stretch): Focus on providing equal services to all students, with the result being a wide range of student achievement. Smarter students will learn more in an hour of instruction than less intelligent students, but everyone is entitled to their hour. I.e. you give every car the same amount of gas and whoever wins, wins.
Educational communism: focus on providing equality of attainment to all students. The result is a widely diverse set of inputs. Smarter students will receive less instruction than do less intelligent students. It is as if we give most of the gas to the SUVs in the race.
I use the communism label on purpose, mostly because of an interesting issue. Communism had an advantage which education does not: equality of cost. You have some people who are productive and some who are less so, but if you want to answer the question “what does it cost to feed a person” or “what does it cost to clothe and house a person” then it is reasonably equal.
Education doesn’t work like that. That is why the educational communism model is so incredibly expensive to run.
Sailorman, I love that construct, and I’m totally nicking it.
I don’t for one minute think that school lunches and/or extracurricular activities shouldn’t be considered part of the educational budget. Kids need food/fuel in order to learn. It’s a pretty well established fact. It may not be “book learning” but it is a necessary endevour for learning.
As for extra curriculars, I get peeved as much as the next person when school districts cherry pick which activities will be funded and which won’t. Somehow, basketball and football always win and Science Olympiad and Future Problem Solvers are always cut. But, the truth is that there is significant educational and other benefits to a rich extracurricular program in schools. If you expect them to become privatized endeavours you will end up with even greater disparity between rich kids and poor kids and their experiences and opportunities. Not to mention, the #1 way to keep teenagers from becoming juvenile delinquents is to get them involved in extra curricular activities (this is not any sort of fact, just my own opinion based on experience). It does 2 things. It focuses energies in productive ways and it reduces the amount of time they have available to get into trouble. Cutting extracurricular programs may solve budget issues in the short term, but it is detrimental to public education and its overall goals. It’s incredibly short sighted.
As for educational material being available to read on the internet (such as MIT’s curriculum), I can guarantee that assuming the instructor is any good, the people who are in the classroom are getting far more education than simply reading materials. I say that both as a student and as an educator. I had classes in college where professors put the powerpoint slides online. As a result I never cracked the text book, never went to class (except on exam days) and aced the tests. However, I have absolutely no knowledge of Astronomy whatsoever. I retained NOTHING and learned nothing. There are concepts and ideas that can not be learned through reading alone, or at least not completely. In fact, I’d argue that material like that available to all without appropriate instruction could even be dangerous because people will come away without a true understanding and may misinterpret or misunderstand information and then go about spreading it. That’s not productive education (though I understand that can and does happen with traditional instruction too, it should be our goal to avoid it and not ignore the potential consequences).
Sailorman, I’m afraid I don’t really understand the practical functioning of educational communism. It’s true that I have not been a part of a public school system in a long time, so I am out of touch, but I don’t have a clue what you are talking about. Are you talking about the proficiency tests and teaching to the tests? Can you elaborate with examples?
Kate, I don’t argue that there’s no value to meal programs for poor kids. Yes, kids need to be fed if they are expected to be able to pay attention and learn in school. But then, they need to have a decent coat and clothing to wear to school if they’re not to be too cold. They need glasses if they are to be expected to be able to see the chalkboard, teacher and computer screen. There are funds available for all of these things to subsidize kids whose parents cannot afford them. They don’t come out of the educational budget – why should meals? We feed the kids at the schools because that’s where they are at those meal times, but while they help kids be in condition to learn they are not in themselves educational. Budget for them, but put them in the same budget categories that other welfare programs are and don’t have the educational administrators deal with them in any fashion but perhaps logistically.
Extracurricular programs are very necessary. Once again, though, examine them and say “What here is educational and what is recreational?” The Math Team is clearly an educational endeavor. My kids were on it and participation in them helped them learn math better than if they were not on it. Orchestra is also educational; it teaches knowledge of music in general, the works and composers of what they play, and there’s a quite direct correlation between music and math.
But it’s not at all clear to me that sports are educational endeavors. They are recreational. I think sports are quite valuable; my kids played soccer, tennis, lacrosse, softball and hockey – with traveling teams they didn’t have an off-season for years. But I fail to see how that makes the case that support for them should come out of the educational budget. Do kids need activities that keep them off the streets? Sure. For that matter they need PARENTS that keep them off the streets. But just because an activity is useful for children to engage in is not sufficient to establish that said activity should be supported from educational funds.
I work with kids in Scouts all the time. We meet at the school (and elsewhere) and do a lot of great things that not only are recreational but also explicitly educate them, teaching them valuable everyday skills. I don’t get a dime out of the public educational funding system, nor should I. It’s a worthwhile topic for discussion whether extracurricular activities should be completely privatized or whether there should be some level of public funding. Money for academics should be spent for just that; academics.
Kate L, my comment on putting MIT’s course materials on-line was not to devalue instructors but to give an example of how technology can be used to make teachers more productive.
Do you not get the general concept? I can give specific examples, and I will, but if you do not get the general idea we will just side track.
Because student abilities vary, some students require more input to get a certain output. Call it “academic efficiency” if you want, or whatever else you choose. By this I mean that John can reach some reading benchmark in, say, one hour of one-on-one instruction, but Walter, starting from the same place, requires three hours of instruction to reach the same benchmark.
John is more efficient than Walter at using academic resources. You get more academic production for your dollar if you spend it on John.
Now: given limited resources, how do you allocate them between John and Walter? Let’s say you’ve got an hour.
Academic capitalism says to give the hour to John. He’ll reach the goal, which is the most efficient result. (in practice, it’s a bit less strict!)
Your output for academic capitalism is [(one goal reached) / (one hour spent)].
Academic socialism says to give them each 1/2 hour. John will get halfway there, and Walter will be one-sixth of the way there.
Your output for academic socialism is [(two thirds of a goal reached) / (one hour spent.)]
Academic communism says to get them to the same place, which in this case means giving John 15 minutes of instruction, and Walter 45 minutes. They will each get 1/4 of the way there.
Your output for academic communism is [(one half goal reached)/(one hour spent)].
Now, you can get around that in a variety of ways, most obviously that you can add or modify the goal to include factors which are non academic: “The reduction in criminal behavior and drug use for people who have at least gotten 1/4 of the way to the goal creates a benefit which exceeds the “lost 1/2 goal” of the communism model.”
This may justify increased inefficiencies in education. But it doesn’t make them efficient. It is much cheaper to get kids to a certain level of the kids are smart. Or, given a certain educational input you will reach a higher level if the kids are smart. It’s just an issue of math.
Personally, I suspect that the U.S. is going to eventually be forced into the difficult choice of allocating resources. To date the increase in educational support for those who are expensive to educate has been largely supported by taxes. But if the trend continues–and there is no particular evidence to suggest otherwise–it’s going to have an effect on the top end. That’s a cost, too.
I understood the general concepts. What I don’t understand is how it works in schools – in real life. Have schools really changed that much?
I agree that Educational communism would be bad, assuming that it meant never getting anyone to the goals. If you could get everyone to the end goal, then it’s a good, thing, right? In your example, it’s clearly a bad thing because only in the first example does anyone actually attain the goal. My confusion is that I can not see how this plays out in schools.
ASFAIK, There are a set number of hours in the school day and depending on the grade level, they teach a variety of subject matters for whatever proscribed length of time the teachers have decided to spend on those lesson plans. They generally have to deal with a variety of learning styles and abilities in the class room and usually have to play toward the middle. Kids who understand and get concepts faster are generally bored sooner, sure, and not always challenged to their potential, which is one reason that the better public schools have gifted and talented programs. Kids who are behind the curve may need extra help before/after school because the instruction alone doesn’t help. Is this how everything still works? Or have things radically changed?
Usually–see below.
Well, one obvious way is that they can change the goal.
…or bottom.
Those programs are, in the current atmosphere, more likely to get cut. Without making a judgment on the efficacy of it, it is becoming increasingly common for the “catch up” programs to steal budget time from the “spring ahead” programs.
The main driving change has been on how we treat the kids behind the curve. We used to let them lag behind the curve. Now we try harder to catch them up. That has diminishing returns ad is expensive. THAT means that in a resource-limited world, we have to cut somewhere. And that tends to be the kids who are otherwise easy kids.
[shrug] it doesn’t take much to slow down a classroom. A small minority of students take the majority of teacher time. Private schools who boot the troublemakers and who refuse to admit the slowest students are a great example: it’s not that their kids are necessarily that much smarter, it’s just that they don’t have as many people who are actively slowing down the classes. Because of the efficiency aspect, removing the slowest 10% of a class can have an effect which is larger than 10% on the rest of the class.