{"id":4683,"date":"2008-08-19T10:32:17","date_gmt":"2008-08-19T17:52:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/archives\/2008\/08\/19\/yes-schools-cost-money-to-run-and-cutting-budgets-hurts-students\/"},"modified":"2012-10-02T10:14:26","modified_gmt":"2012-10-02T17:14:26","slug":"yes-schools-cost-money-to-run-and-cutting-budgets-hurts-students","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=4683","title":{"rendered":"Yes, schools cost money to run, and cutting budgets hurts students"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over at Hit and Run<\/a>, Nick Gillespie says “what, me worry?” to schools cutting programs and services<\/a> in response to tightening budgets:<\/p>\n

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?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/i> money for school districts (as does any other method of cutting the number of school days).<\/p>\n

Nick goes on:<\/p>\n

Per-pupil spending is up over 300 percent <\/a>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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.”<\/p>\n

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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

When Mozart composed his String Quintet in G Minor (K. 516), in 1787, you needed five people to perform it\u2014two 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.<\/p>\n

An economist would say that the productivity of classical musicians has not improved over time, and in this regard the musicians aren\u2019t 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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!<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,26,153],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4683","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics-and-the-like","category-education","category-libertarianism-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4683","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4683"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4683\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15895,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4683\/revisions\/15895"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4683"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4683"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4683"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}