this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2024
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The reason private schools, and charter schools, perform better than public schools is that there are more teachers per students, and they have more resources to keep their curriculum up-to-date. Having more teachers per student is what allows for flexibility. When a teacher has 40+ students per class they can't balance any special considerations for anyone. When a teacher has 12 students they can learn how each of their students learns and make accommodations for it. This also allows for greater consideration of input from places like parents. Though you need to be very careful with this. There are a lot of parents out there that believe they know better than everyone and will force everyone to comply if they can. See Moms for Liberty. This is achievable, many countries accomplish this. In fact, for countries in a similar range of per capita wealth, this is largely a US problem.
The reason the high school diploma only really good for the low end of the pay grade jobs isn't because of schools. It is because employers want a whole bunch of barriers to entry. They also want to shift the burden of training. The reasons for this are numerous. From being able to get over qualified people because everyone wants a masters and 10 years experience for an entry level tech job, to using it as yet another reason they just can't find anyone from this country to do the job, and that's why they need foreigners who need a corporate sponsor in order to keep their visa. Nothing creates compliance with an employer like your life being destroyed if you lose the job. See also employer tied healthcare. The reason vocational courses were removed was largely due to demand from parents, though the efficacy of them is debatable. However a lot of places still have whole vocational curricula. Several days a week kids go to a secondary school that teachers various trade courses. This is common in the mid-atlantic and northeast. The problem is that the larger portion of employers want certificates from secondary education sources. A lot of big names in vocational industries actually used to be paid by those schools to do so. See EDMC schools. I mean, I am pretty sure it is still happening, but I haven't been in the school industry in a long time. This allows employers to offload more of it's expenses on training and creates a predatory industry the process. So a win-win from a capitalist perspective.
The point about treating charter schools as an end goal isn't really meaningful. They replaced public schools with the promise they would out perform them. They were allowed a lot of freedom in how they operated. That was kinda the point. The problem was that they fell into needing to compete with each other because anyone could potentially go to any of them. None of them wanted to be the one where they kids that didn't perform as well ended up. In fact once that happened they then had to start fighting with the public about why they got tax money when they were the worst performer. I mean, having to pay for under performing schools is why they moved to this. This quickly turned into them eating each other. This ended up with fewer total schools than when there was only public schools, while they were also fighting to not be forced to do much more than they were because that undermines the idea behind them.
This is the "on paper" definition of libertarianism in the US. The reality is that groups like The Silver Legion were the early adopters of the label, and they were fascism supporters. The zealots also took a liking to it, not because they wanted people to have personal freedoms, but because the arguments for states having more individual power, and less federal oversight over individuals in the form of taxes, was a scheme to weaken the secular government enough to force their theocratic initiatives on people. The corporate lords like the idea for similar reason, but instead of religion, it's just having them be the government. These are where most of the money behind the US libertarian comes from. Even now you can watch libertarian groups, and the libertarian party, align themselves with the fascists. Just look at August Invictus as a starting point for this rabbit hole. This is why I mentioned the no true scottsman thing. All these people go "No. Of course I am not a fascist/theocrat/oligarch. I told you, I am a Libertarian! That is fundamentally opposed to that. I just want the individual liberty to live life as I see fit." Then other libertarians point to the same contradiction in definition to explain how the libertarians here are not like that, and if they are they aren't real libertarians. Which doesn't matter because their movement was hijacked before they were born.
The reason we got stuck with federal loans is because in order to get more people into college the government was pondering giving out the money to do so. This caused a lot of interference on the part of private interests, not to mention public cries of socialism, and the result was that loans with virtually no barrier would be what happens instead. As time went on there was a concerted, long term, effort to make the situation today where schools can basically ask for anything and get it.
While I agree we need more vocational training, just making primary education focused on getting a job will be worse for society as a whole. We need broad, academic, education. We need to bring things back to focusing on critical thinking skills. This, more than pretty much anything else, has been under attack for decades. Primary school needs to teach people how to learn and how assess information. Moving towards primary school teaching people how to work a job, rather than the companies that profit from that labor, is just another way to kill critical thinking. In the contemporary age, where we are inundated with information like never before, this is more important than ever. We need more vocational secondary schooling. We also need to push for college as well. It is certain that university level education raises the long term earning power of those who take it. Having a college degree increases the average lifetime earning by about 1.5 million dollars, its about 600k for vocational certification. There is a distortion of perception around this because vocational certification has a larger up-front return than college degrees.
The idea that it is not debt, but instead useless degrees, that is the problem, is propaganda. You have bought into a lie here. STEM degree enrollment has been increasing by leaps and bounds, it is at an all time high. Meanwhile all other degrees, except Law and MBA, have been crashing. They are at historic lows and there is currently no end to the decline in sight. So the "valuable" degrees that get jobs are vastly more popular than those who do not. It is to the point where most other academic departments are on the precipice of extinction. Worst part is? In the long run the average individual with a "useless" degree will make more over their life time than anyone without a college degree. Even when controlled for familial wealth.
Competition will not fix schooling. There is already a huge amount of competition in the school industry, you just don't see it much if you aren't involved, except maybe for universities. Even public schools are in heated competition. I can't tell you how hard so many schools work to be recognized as the best public school in their region/state/the US. Making it more so will just make it look like the corporate world, a race towards just a few controlling everything. Much like the corporate world it's not because they are the best for the people they serve either. That happens already with charter, and private schools, even with the public schools there. If you look at the number of non public schools in a region over time, one with a long established population, or as their growth cools, you actually see a decline in their number, or number per capita, even as the capacity to go to them increases. They get to a point where there is one of a number of types of schools (catholic, jewish, performing arts, the one that offers a radically different environment to very high performers, the fine arts one, the secular very expensive non coed ones, etc.) to a given geographic area. You see those grow as the others fade away.
IDK, maybe?
The research on smaller class sizes seems mixed, so I don't think class size is the main factor here (assuming it's within reason; national average is 19). I think our charter school (about the same class size as our state average) self-selects families where at least one parent is invested in education. You have to apply for the lottery, coordinate dropoff and pickup, kids need uniforms, and the school expects parents to volunteer 40 hours over the course of the school year. That's a lot of hoops to jump through when you could otherwise just have the kid take the bus. So kids are likely getting better support at home vs public schools.
Perhaps smaller class sizes matters more in poorer areas (i.e. teachers are providing the support instead of parents). What seems to be important is teacher quality, and what that means varies by child. So matching children with the right teacher/teaching method may prove more impactful than just reducing class sizes.
Sir Ken Robinson argues that giving kids a say in what they learn dramatically improves outcomes because people learn faster when they're interested/excited about a topic. To do that, teachers need more control over their curriculum, and to do that, they need their leadership on board.
Schools teach principles, businesses teach application of those principles to their particular domain. Businesses expect you to show up with a solid foundation, and they'll train you in their particular processes.
And that's where high school specialization comes in. I'd like to see kids have the option between college prep and a vocation in their last two years. College prep would get them college credit for courses or even an Associates Degree, whereas a vocation would teach them a skill to make something like $20+ instead of $10-12 per hour straight out of high school. The vocation track wouldn't prevent them from going to college, so kids could work a vocation while attending college to minimize or eliminate student loans.
The goal should be to provide a range of options so most (ideally all) kids have better options than what they'd otherwise get with a regular highschool diploma. But to make room for that, K-12 education needs to be more efficient, and you get that by getting kids interested in school, and how that happens is different for each child. Hence the need for different approaches.
Huh, I'd never heard of them, and a quick search shows no correlation with libertarianism. Every source (and I browsed several) just calls them fascist, pro-Hitler, anti-Semitic, etc, but never "libertarian" or anything similar.
The only similarity I see is opposition to FDR, but they attacked him for very different reasons. They were a relatively small org, though I guess big enough to be mentioned in It Can't Happen Here.
This seems like a failure of the Florida Libertarian Party, not an actual symptom of rot in libertarian ideology. Fringe groups attract weirdos, especially if that group is so supportive of free speech. He lost the nomination by a landslide and switched to the Republican Party, so that tells me the nomination process at least is working in this case.
That said, the national Libertarian Party in the US is moving right, and I think that's troubling for the reasons you've outlined. If we use the political compass as a reference, here's where I place things:
Public prescription seems to put libertarians hugging the right edge top to bottom, and that seems consistent with what you've said. But libertarianism is a big tent, covering the entire bottom half of the chart. So my definition here is anyone who fits in the bottom half, which excludes people like Invictus and includes socialists like Noam Chomsky.
And that's the problem, the goal was misplaced. The goal should be to get people into better jobs, not get people more education. More education generally leads to better jobs, but here are lots of ways to achieve that end goal.
It's kind of like the idea behind EV subsidies: we want less dependence on oil, EVs don't depend on oil, so we subsidize EVs. But there are tons of alternatives, such as investing in mass transit, hydrogen fuel cells, or cycling infrastructure. The solution shouldn't be to pick a winner and pump money into it (in this case, college), but to design a system that benefits all favorable alternatives at the expense of the thing we want to discourage. For energy, this probably means carbon taxes (discourage fossil fuels), and for energy it means changing the focus of K-12 from "college or bust" to different paths depending on interest.
Sure, and that's what K-10 should be about (or even K-8), and we should expect more from it.
I think the pace of education is way too slow and that we could cover the same ground as K-12 currently does (and maybe more) in fewer years. I was constantly bored in school and finished my Associates Degree while in high school (mostly did it because it took less time per day vs high school), and I'm not particularly smart, I just had good parents that helped keep me engaged. And that was in a progressive state that invested a lot in education (near top in the nation for teacher pay as percent of salaries, top half for total spending).
Expanding options in teaching style should allow us to increase the pace of education. To get there, we need a mixture of:
But all the "solutions" I've seen are:
They all seem to miss the point.
I think it gives a context for those discussions.
Like for a vocation, class work could include comparing pay and obligations for self employment vs working under someone, deciding whether to buy or build something, comparing the impact of spending more to do a good job vs going cheap to get it done fast. Or factoring safety costs and benefits, identifying potential hazards, etc. That's probably a lot more interesting to a teenager who just wants to work than analyzing Macbeth.
These kinds of statistics are super misleading though. College degrees are all but required for a lot of high income jobs, but a lot of degrees are completely worthless (at least from an earning perspective). So you're getting a lot of upward skew on the data from doctors, lawyers, etc. Those lucrative fields are very competitive since there's a limited number of spots available, so my guess is that increasing the number of people in college will largely increase the number of people in less lucrative fields.
And yeah, trades don't pay as well as degrees, but they pay a lot more consistently. A lot of college graduates don't get a job in their field, and many resort to vocations anyway. It's a lot better to find out that a vocation is right for you in high school than after trying college.
If you're interested in STEM, you're probably not interested in a vocation anyway. I'm talking about the rest of students who are told to get any degree.
Are you talking about averages here? Because I'm wondering if it's comparing to all people without a degree, when it should be comparing vs people in the trades. If you don't get a job in your field, what are the chances that you'll go to even more school to finish an apprenticeship or something? You'll probably take what you can get (management role at a restaurant or something) because those loans need to be paid. We shouldn't be comparing against GED only here, but other skilled professions.
I don't think we need free college. If you're going to college, you should be expecting to get value from that investment. But we do need to get prices back to being reasonable, a lot of your tuition isn't going to your professors, but all the other nonsense schools do (probably a lot of it ironically dealing with financial aid).
Kind of, but they're competing for test scores, not student satisfaction, actual achievement, etc. Growing up, we had an important state assessment, so we spend a lot of class time studying specifically for it. That sucked, and I don't think it was very productive, but it probably helped the school secure better funding or something.
That's not constructive competition because it leads to teaching to the test. Teachers don't want to do that, but they need to in order for their school to look good and get funding.