Cambridge, MA has made it into this NYT article. The public school system here has been in the news from time to time in recent years. In the mid-1990s it was the most expensive school system in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and it provided a fairly good education to the smart hard-working kids via an honors program and a fairly bad education to everyone else. In the late 1990s the honors program was eliminated in the interests of fairness. The rich parents responded by sending their kids to private schools; non-rich parents who cared about education moved to suburbs. Here we are in 2003 and the city apparently is spending $17,000 per year for each remaining student (still the most expensive in Massachusetts) to achieve some of the lowest test scores of any district in the state.
The $17,000 number combined with the poor results invites some brainstorming. The world’s best-performing secondary schools tend to be in Asia. Korean students do especially well on international tests. This U.S. military guide says that Korean private schools range in price from $2,000 to $13,700 per year. So the taxpayers of Cambridge could afford to charter Boeing 747s to fly kids to and from Korea every month, enroll them at the most expensive boarding schools in that nation, and still end up spending less than we’re spending now.
Suppose that we want to keep our kids close to home, though. For $17,000 they are getting a 1/25th share of a disaffected civil servant’s time (the teacher) plus some fraction of the time of the school administration. If we spent a bit of money on personal video conferencing setups for each kid, we could spend the rest hiring PhDs in low-wage English-speaking countries to teaching our city’s children one-on-one. Actually the way the U.S. economy has been going we might be able to find home-grown humanities PhDs to do the tutoring face-to-face for $17k/year (that’s about what they are getting now at Starbucks).
Friday Update
Just when you think you had an original idea… this more recent NYT article covers the “send a kid to a boarding school in a foreign country” idea.
Separately, it occurred to me that most people have kids in groups. If you had four kids, for example, the City of Cambridge would be spending $68,000 per year to educate them in a factory school. If you could get your hands on the $68,000, though, you could bring in Harvard grad students and PhDs to tutor your children at home. It is ironic that factory schools were started on the premise that, though they could never be as effective as the private tutoring that rich children enjoyed, at least they would be cheap and universal. Car factories certainly have lived up to their initial promise. A car from Hyundai is much cheaper than a hand-built car from a workshop. But the factory schools have actually become more expensive than the process that produced Thomas Jefferson, Bertrand Russell, and a lot of the successful people we’ve heard about. [The youngest professor at MIT, Erik Demaine, was home-schooled.]
Are you tired yet? Tired of being divided by income? Be resolute andclick this bold text.
That Korean students do particularly well on standardized tests does not necessarily mean that they go to the best schools. There is more to scholastic education than learning to perform academically, and more to academic ability than doing well on standardized tests, as the number of students with perfect SAT scores turned down by the Ivies each year testifies.
I’ve noticed that for most people school has a custodial role. If you want to change schools from the ground up, you would first have to take away the need for that function. Changing — eliminating? — that function would in turn change the nature of school. Schools have become so problematic because they serve the function of keeping the kids out of the parents’ hair — the kids can’t be home because the parents aren’t home. The schools are needed for babysitting to keep the parental economy going. If we could make it possible for parents to stop needing schools as babysitters, schools would change.
How about you just implement a school voucher program that can be spent *any* way the parent wants? While you’re at it, give the taxpayers a break and put it at $10,000 per child per year. Now you can afford to send your honors Cambridge child to any of the State University of New York colleges as an “out of stage” student. Hey, we’re not Korea, but then you can drive here!
Seriously, if a primary or secondary school can’t be run for the price of less than the price of a public university, then you’ve got a problem. One that won’t go away until you do something radical, and one of the most affective radical notions of the past 250 years was to allow people to make their own choices. Yes, it will break the back of the NEA union, and no, it won’t work for every child, but the NEA *isn’t* serving the children in this instance and many children are ALREADY losing out. Increase choice at the family level and I bet that a better system will develop.
James Damour: Most state universities are heavily subsidized, so it’s not really fair to use those numbers–you’re ignoring the New York taxpayer dollars which are probably involved.
The NEA serves the incredibly worthwhile purpose of making sure we pay our teachers a living wage. (Many teachers I know work frightfully long hours, spend the summer renewing their certifications, and spend $500/year out-of-pocket on classroom supplies.) Unfortunately, the NEA also serves the harmful purpose of protecting incompentent teachers.
A can of worms.
When it comes to schools, it seems that we all have an oppinion because we all went to school. With this much basic training in schooling, it seems that we should be able to extract the wheat from the chaf, but alas, we get lost by treating every opinion as an equal voice.
We labor under the desire to see all humans as equals at the basic level, but not all opinions deserve much more than a passing thought. Even if the opinion is supported by the majority of equal humans.
Sounds like you’ve got the same problem that the Sausalito school district here in Marin has. In World War II, Sausalito was a shipyard building “Liberty Ships”, and Marin City was the development right next to it that housed workers from all across the country who came to help build those boats. Nowadays, when it’s not recognized as a backdrop for classic Mitchell Brothers porn like “Behind The Green Door”, Sausalito is a trendy little strip of boutiques (“No, not that gallery with the bad art, the one with the naked indian princess sculpture”) and a bunch of multi-million dollar houses for financial folks who work in San Francisco.
Everyone in Sausalito is fairly (perhaps obscenely) rich, and will always vote for more funding for schools, but will send their kids to private schools. Marin City is Marin County’s public housing projects. Sausalito schools are very well funded, but compete with Oakland’s slums for the worst in the state, and occasionally their school board quarrels will spill over into the papers and really cause the rest of us to roll our eyes.
Of course what this really proves is that schools have less of an impact in creating the adults I want in my society than other factors, probably mostly parental involvement.
(And when I find a way to do it so that I don’t hurt feelings in a few years when those involved get on the net and hit the search engines, I’ll write on some of my recent experiences with the whole parenting issue…)
You mean the Korean students _who took the test_ do well on it. Not all students in many countries take these tests. It would be fairer to compare our honors students to those students. The U.S. tends to have lower averages than many other countries because we at least try to have a universal education system.
I think also you are disrespecting and under-estimating the hard and valuable work teachers (and PhDs) do. I know you think $17,000 is too much to spend on an inner city youth’s education, but consider the billions that are spent each year on new bombers and other defense spending. We need to get our priorities straight. The Iraq war that lasted just a few weeks cost $100 billion. With that money we could have given each state $2 billion for education.
At least we aren’t charging families $100,000 for their kids can go to school like Harvard does, that would be downright criminal.
while there are many ways to change education, making it more efficient financially, providing better resources, making it useful socially (i just ran into lots of over educated cheap labor in st. john), i am just not sure that i would want to cut education funding to appease the situation demonstrated here. is the problem that many people would rather be paid in us dollars at a rate that allows them to live in the same areas where the schools are, or that there is such variation in funding levels? similar to the example, new trier school district funds education excessively, and it voted recently to increase the rate. when i was younger riding the el to iit on the south side of chicago, looking into the glazed eyes of the kids made my stomach turn. it’s a true drag that we question education funding, and not our military expenditures. driving across the country is like a trip to a third world country, albeit with happy meals and big gulps. btw, what would it cost to fund education for the entire student population (pre-k through post grad: the #) at a rate of $20k per an.? just curious.
some quick numbers… with 11 million students in the 100 largest primary and secondary school districts (http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2002/100_largest/table_03_1.asp), i added a mil multiplied by $20k and came up with $240 billion. for reference, the military budget is approximately $400 billion, though this is likely not inclusive and contains things like $1000 toilet seats(http://www.clw.org/milspend/dodbud03.html). the question ultimately arrives at a society’s priorities. it also, in my opinion, centers around return on investment. do we as a society benefit from better education? do we benefit from a huge military? does education-level correlate with a reduction in other costs such as health care and crime? imho as a person who pays lots-o-taxes, i would rather pay for education than receive a tax cut. though, going to parties in a tux to support scholarships has its soothing, defence-mechanism benefits.
Up here in Ontario, Canada, the school boards typically have one administrative employee for every 4 teachers. You get the same complaints about having no funding, having to spend personal money on supplies, and lack of respect. But there’s plenty of money for a big, centralized school board building.
As a professional engineer, I cannot understand why the teachers don’t want to have performance based pay. My father in law (a retired English department head) once suggested something similar to Survivor. Every year the teachers vote one of their own off the
staff.
Another problem is the desire to have uniform test results as if all students are capable of the same level of learning. We might as well expect them all to attain the same height, or weight, or be able to do the same number of push-ups. Some kids are just smarter or dumber than others. It’s statistics!
Everyone complains about how the teachers have lost the will to teach. I say move over and let a motivated teacher take your place.
Theory: Teachers don’t want performance-based pay because “good performance” is so utterly subjective in the teaching profession. What makes a “good” teacher? The fact that all his/her students scored well on a standardized test? No, not necessarily. How about the fact that all the students like him/her? No, not that either. If we could agree on what a “good” teacher was, we’d fix public education. But, strange as it may seem, it’s probably best we never reach such consensus because, just as every student learns a little differently (some by listening, some by seeing, some by doing, etc.), we need every teacher to teach a little differently. Most things in the world come in all kinds of shapes and colors (people, businesses, political and economic systems), so why should public education be any different?
High-minded people have dumbed down our public schools for all the most virtuous reasons. This doesn’t stop private-school kids, and home-schooled kids, from getting a real education. Yet any public school kid headed for college will be competing with private-school kids and home-schooled kids.
I would like to see better education for all our kids, college-bound or not. But when public schools treat “good” students as unpaid assistants in dealing with “difficult” ones, nobody ends up with a good education.
In all the recent hullaballoo with Michael Jackson on ALL the networks , he was finally asked a question which sticks with me.
loose quote , ‘ Michael . . . do you ever just …. despair . . . of humanity ?’
long pause . . . . ” Yes .” was his answer .
Nicholas, that’s gotta be a huge under-estimate of school-age population. Obviously, the U.S. population isn’t uniformly distributed, but if we back-of-the-envelope at 280 million people, 72 year average lifespan, then 13 years of that is 50 million K-12 kids. The U.S. Census Bureau says that there are “72 million kids”, (72/18*13) is 52, so I think we can assume that 50 is reasonable for order-of-magnitude estimates. $20k*50M is a lot of money, even in national budget terms.
I think we can also safely say that money is not the end-all solution to the education problem. I have friends who used to be teachers, and they didn’t leave because of the money. The Sausalito example, and I’ll bet Cambridge has issues for similar reasons, show that parental involvement is probably much more important.
Which leads us to the macroeconomic issue here: If you subsidize children, you’re offering parents a cheaper way to pass on their genes. It’s not like we’re short on people in this country (or even in this world), but what we want to encourage is quality, not quantity. We have to be extremely careful in our subsidies that we’re not offering incentives for the wrong thing.
How is it that the private school systems manage to find “good teachers” and to produce good quality educations when it is so impossible to do the same in the public school system? Clearly, the world is not a black and white place, and so one has to make decisions based on shades of grey, but that doesn’t eliminate the need for cut off points. If you don’t like standardized testing, then you need to propose an alternative, not just throw up your hands and say it is hopeless to try to find a way to judge effective teaching. One reason why a competitive system is useful is that by competition, we find what works without having to theorize about it. Most high minded theories about how the government can intervene to solve social problems are so prone to failure because they fail to base themselves in real world hard facts, and they are so resistant when confronted with the facts.
As for the military, clearly there are limits to military spending, and wasteful spending in the military should be punished (just like wasteful spending in the public education system should be punished.) At least we can say this of the military: The proof is in the results. No one will bend a sympathetic ear to a representative of the military who aruges “well, it is just so hard to determine what victory is…maybe we won the battle and lost the war? This isn’t the type of resistance we wargamed against…” So when you want to pull out the old schill about wasting money on the military, be prepared to use the same standards you would apply to military results on other parts of the government. One important thing you learn in the military: “Sir, no excuse, Sir”
Speaking to the comments about education return on investment: someone posed the question of whether higher education resulted in reduced “life costs” such as health care and crime. I work for a publisher of scientific and scholarly books and journals, Walter de Gruyter. Our social science division, Aldine, has just published a book that specifically addresses this question. The title is “Education, Social Status and Health,” by John Mirowsky and Katherine Ross. You can pick it up on amazon here:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0202307077/qid=1052506914/sr=1-2/ref=sr_1_2/102-1458067-7236902?v=glance&s=books
These authors make the case that there is a definite correlation – interesting reading.
John Taylor Gatto wrote a short book titled, “Dumbing Us Down” that addresses what the public schools have done to this country and its people. Gatto was NY State Teacher of the Year in the early 1990’s – he resigned from teaching after concluding that the system was so broken that it could not be reformed or fixed from within. His grandchildren are home-schooled. While most Americans were homeschooled up until the late 1800’s, laws were enacted that made this basic educational choice illegal in all 50 states. Fortunately for me and my children homeschooling is now legal in all 5o states once again. In the 1970’s, many fathers and mothers risked being jailed and having their children given up to foster homes to win back this right. I was schooled in a corrupt, drug-ridden public school system in Dade County, Florida. I educated myself by reading books that I was interested in and biding my time until I was able to attend college. My children will hopefully never have to sit in any public school, if only as a matter of principle.
For around $15000US dollars each, the MA bureaucrasy could send its students to Geelong Grammar School, Australia. A school that was good enough for Prince Charles, Rupert Murdoch and most of the South East Asian royalty. They would get a phenomenally better education than they do in the MA public system, for an equivalent amount of money – and you wouldn’t be sponsoring the bureaucrasy (something that I have a personal aversion to). See the school’s web site.