Neoliberalism: The Ideology That Dares Not Speak Its Name

[Warren Dew]

(01-01-2017, 01:08 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:

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

Sorry, I meant to include all of those in "administrative staff".  There are also secretaries and such.  I strongly suspect that the growth in administrative staff has been a result of union pressure to reduce teachers' working hours, resulting in offloading tasks to staff.  In our city, for example, public schools have a 6.5 hour school day while the one available charter school has an 8 hour school day.  Teachers do work for an hour or two after the students go home, but given they get summers off, the public school teachers likely work about a 1500 hour year, as opposed to charter school teachers who probably work closer to the private sector standard 2000 hour year.

Quote: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.

Yes.  And if the parents and the school work together, the synergies can provide a better education than their each working independently.  Unfortunately, most public school teachers seem to try to minimize parental involvement because it makes their jobs harder to have to coordinate with parents and treat the students as individuals rather than as mass produced products - and, of course, because their jobs depend on keeping the government and the union happy, not on keeping the parents happy.