Neoliberalism: The Ideology That Dares Not Speak Its Name

[pbrower2a]

(12-31-2016, 08:04 PM)Warren Dew Wrote:

(12-31-2016, 09:29 AM)The Wonkette Wrote:

(12-30-2016, 07:04 PM)Warren Dew Wrote: Public schools worked well when women were shut out of the vast majority of careers, and were expected to accept being underpaid in those that were available, such as teaching in public schools, so those schools could have their pick of smart women that made good school teachers.

That's no longer true today, and I suspect that you don't advocate going back to shutting women back out of other careers any more than I do.

The benefits of having a market in schooling and the benefits of universal schooling could easily be combined by replacing public schools with voucher systems.

And how will private schools be able to attract quality teachers any more than public schools?

Private schools can make up for that issue through other efficiencies unavailable to public schools.  For example, private schools can easily fire the severely underperforming teachers, which teachers' unions prevent public schools from doing without great difficulty.  More importantly, private schools, since their survival will be at the whim of the parents rather than of the government and the unions, will optimize their operation to serve the interest of the parents rather than those of the government and the unions.  This will result in better schooling because the parents actually care a lot about how well their kids are educated, which is not generally the case of the government or the unions.

The public schooling system spends money very inefficiently.  Total costs have risen by a factor of three, after adjusting for inflation, since 1970 - a factor of 17 before inflation - and head count has doubled.  This is to educate the same number of students, and achieving the same test scores:



Most of the increase in personnel is not an increase in the number of teachers, but an increase in administrative staff.  School vouchers set at the average current cost to educate a student, and adjusted for inflation, would permit private schools to forego the excess administrative staff and either to pay teachers better and thus attract better teachers - at the high school level, for example, they might hire people with actual math and science degrees to teach those subjects, rather than people with education degrees - or at least to improve the teacher/student ratio.

Quote:Public goods are not like flat screen TVs or iPhones; they benefit all of the public and thus need to be publicly funded.  Do you disagree with that?

There is a category of goods which are natural monopolies and where the consumption cannot easily be traced to the individual consumer; these may thus be most efficiently provided by the government.  Local streets are the most commonly cited example; having two competing street systems is impractical, as is tracking exactly who uses streets how much.  Schools are not in this category; one can easily have competing schools, and it's easy to track which students go to which schools.  For this reason, schools should not be run by the government.

If by 'administrative staff' one means supervisory personnel, public schools have  some of the lowest ratios of management-to-core worker (teachers) in any economic activity. This may reflect that pedagogy has changed little in 200 or more years, so much of the activity of K-12 teachers is extremely stereotyped and predictable. Content may have changed, but teaching has changed far less than, for example, transportation.

Schools have employees who are not teachers and are not administrators-- for example, the people in the school cafeteria, school bus drivers, a school nurse, a school librarian, and maybe a social worker (kids can't avoid bringing problems from home), and in some places security guards. But that hardly reflects inefficiency. Maybe we need to ask ourselves why schools need social workers (teachers are generally  not competent as social workers), let alone security guards.  

Teachers who are any good are models of efficiency. So are schools. Such is the nature of K-12 education. I doubt that adding a layer of for-profit ownership or management will make private schools any better.

Psst -- want to know what makes a stronger influence on the quality of educational outcomes than even the quality of teachers? The sort of home that a kid goes to, and attitudes of the parents toward education.