View 573 June 1 - 7, 2009 (original) (raw)
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
I get a number of notes like this, although this is the first one I have that links to the particular essay.
The Biggest Mystery in American History
http://tcsdaily.com/Article.aspx?id=052609A
"I submit that all of these facts taken together are paradoxical; one might say, impossible. It's as if I told you that an ordinary man consumed 5000 calories a day and lost weight. So this, I submit, is the greatest mystery in our history.
But why have our educators allowed this decline to take place? Or is "allowed" a trick word, and they have actually abetted this failure? Ah, mystery on top of mystery. This is a puzzle that academic historians should be trying to solve.
For starters, can't we all agree that genuine experts, making a sincere effort, would have our schools functioning at a higher level? Why, oh why, don't our educators do a much better job?"
Possibly a bigger mystery is why, faced with obvious signs of failure, we think the solution is more of the same.
Graves
The mystery is why, given that the US spends more on education than anyone else, and increasingly more every year, the results are from poor to mediocre. The essay says without exception, but that's wrong. There are some good schools, but generally they are so despite the national system, not because of it.
What there aren't is exceptions to the rule that half the population is below average.
On that score: I am thoroughly aware that in the real world the mean -- the arithmetical average of whatever variable you choose to measure -- is often different from the median -- the middlemost score -- and thus you may have the result that half are not below average -- or, more likely -- that far more than half are below average. Think, for example, of a sample that includes 1000 people chosen randomly; we determine the mean income of that group. Chances are pretty good that the number we calculate will be pretty close to the national average income, and that half those in the sample will have incomes above that average and half below it. Now add Bill Gates to the sample, and things change a lot. But then we all know that. As a tool for discussion of the real world, "half the children are below average" is a useful abstraction. It can also be misleading, and we can get to that later.
The No Child Left Behind goal is to see that all children get some agreed upon minimum score on national achievement tests. When that doesn't happen -- and it can't, for reasons that ought to be obvious to anyone but a hopeless romantic -- then the goal changes to raising the average score. It turns out the best way to do that is to concentrate on the students who are just below target so that they go to just above the target score. This will slightly raise the mean score, so there's a moving target here, but that's called overall improvement. Scores go up, numbers with that score rise, and congratulations and praise are distributed. Of course the practical effect of all this is pretty low, and the return on investment lower still.
We've covered all this before, of course. There's no real mystery here. Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy is sufficient explanation for the failure of the school system. The remedy is pretty much the remedy to most situations stalemated by bureaucracy: what Jane Jacobs called transparency and subsidiarity, which is to say, to the best we can manage it, institutions ought to be paid for by those who control them, and their costs and results should be freely and openly available. Local control of schools will inevitably result in some very bad schools controlled by silly people who get elected to the school board; but if those are truly local (not monstrous bureaucracies like LA Unified), some will be very good, and serve as examples.
It's transparently obvious that nationalization of the school system (through Federal Aid to Education, which came about after Sputnik -- it surprises many to discover that until Sputnik there was widespread opposition to Federal aid to Education on both Constitutional and pragmatic grounds) has not worked. It may not have failed as badly as some assert, but it's pretty grim, largely because the goal is wrong. Instead of trying to give every child in the country "a world class university prep education" we ought to be trying to identify those who can benefit from a university prep education and see that they get it, while devising something more appropriate for the 60 to 85% who ought not be in a university prep high school program.
But doing that requires admitting that many of the assumptions of modern education experts are nonsense.
The remedy here is obvious. Congress has the power to do what it will with the DC school system. I suggest they put the education experts in charge, and give them most -- I dare not say all -- the resources they day they will need. Olympic swimming pools? Tutors? Anything. Spare no expense. At present I believe that average expense per child in DC is about $12,000. Double that. Treble it if need be. And let's see the results.
And when that fails to raise the averages much, and leaves a great number of children behind, perhaps we can denationalize the school system on the theory that the experts don't know enough, and go back to transparency and subsidiarity. Give local school boards local control over both the schools and the school tax. (You can subsidize the really poor districts, but those who elect the school boards should pay a substantial part of the costs.)
Well, I can dream, can't I?
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But what if they CAN all benefit?
"Instead of trying to give every child in the country "a world class university prep education" we ought to be trying to identify those who can benefit from a university prep education and see that they get it..."
Well, but there it is. You're taking it as given that NOT every child in the country will benefit from a university-prep education. Not everyone agrees with you. I do agree with you, actually, but you have to bear in mind that many of the people out there believe that if a child does not grow up to be Einstein then it's because she was taught wrong...
-- Mike T. Powers
We haven't, and it hasn't been for want of trying: but as I have often said, try it. Do it. Try in the District of Columbia, where Congress has the undoubted power. If every kid in DC benefits from a world class university prep education then it's a lead pipe cinch that everyone else can, and we will all cheer. As I have said, we have many studies showing the enormous national benefits we would have if we can raise national IQ by 5 points! That point is made with lots of numbers in The Bell Curve. No one I know is against Head Start -- but no study can three years later differentiate a Head Start kid from one who didn't get Head Start. We all think Head Start ought to work, we all want it to work -- and nobody can show that it does any good at all.
Whatever system you want to use, try it in DC. Try some here and some there and some in other parts. Try Charter Schools, paid tutors to assist home schools, tutors in public schools, free laptops, -- go from 12,000peryearperstudentto12,000 per year per student to 12,000peryearperstudentto24,000 per year per student. Raise teacher salaries for those who succeed.
It won't work, but I will cheer if it does, and I'll sure support trying. But not nationally. The evidence is just too convincing. Half the children are below average, and average won't benefit from a world class university prep education -- and trying to give every child a world class university prep education generally results in fewer kids getting the world class university prep education because the teachers have to spend so much time just getting the lower half of the class through something that looks like a passing grade that they haven't much resource left for the brighter kids who should be taken from above normal to way above normal. But I've said all that before.
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If the point above is that it is politically difficult to impossible to fix the school system, then the option is what? Despair? Well, we will run out of money fairly soon now.
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In a few hours the President will give his speech to the Muslim world. Of course it is difficult to identify the Muslim world, but perhaps Obama will be able to do so.
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And a friend points out that Harvard University is a huge hedge fund with a university attached: that it managed to lose huge amounts of money and now owes about as much as its endowment is worth; and that much of this happened during the presidency of a brilliant economist who left Harvard to become financial advisor to the United States.
It should be interesting to see what happens next, and who bails out what. Incidentally Harvard is no longer hiring junior faculty. And many of its financial managers earned more, a few years ago, than any of its professors.
http://business.theatlantic.com/
2009/05/how_harvard_university
_almost_destroyed_itself.php
It's not clear that we have seen all of this story.
http://www.bostonmagazine.com/
articles/drew_gilpin_faust_and_
the_incredible_shrinking_harvard/page6