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Is education no longer the ‘great equalizer’?

nytimes.com

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Re: Is education no longer the ‘great equalizer’?

#251

Post by kansface »

asoneth wrote: post #141
John23832 wrote: post #7

Two parts: First, I think the ability to DO THINGS is the great equalizer at this point. Being a do-er lifts you out of poverty (or at least out of poverty's worst resting state). Being a do-er expands your network. Being a do-er prolongs your life (people with jobs/daily activities tend to live longer healthier lives). The best part about this is that technology has made it easier to become a do-er. You don't need a…

I agree with your second point that we have over-fitted education to optimize standardized test scores to the determent of encouraging intelligence. But at least from my personal network developed from growing up in a working-class town and eventually living in extremely wealthy neighborhoods in extremely wealthy cities I have not noticed a strong relationship between "the ability to DO THINGS" and someone's social o…

Intelligence, conscientiousness, affluence/social capital- pick any two and you get success on average. That’s about all there is to it. Success could look like making a bunch of money, starting a business, doing research, making interesting art. The point is a smart, hard working person can pretty much choose to do anything and an intelligent person will do fine with an infinite runway regardless of work ethic, etc. To the extent that college used to be a strong signal for those attributes it was also a strong proxy for success. Continually expanding college weakens the signal and the proximate worth of a college degree. In so many words, college for everyone confuses cause for effect - cynically, it’s not universities that make people successful, it’s that people who will succeed in life are overwhelmingly selected by and go to college- moreover, better colleges tend to matriculate people with greater quantities of those attributes. If college ceased to exist, the same cohort would still come out on top. See also, the vast majority of graduates don’t work in their major (education as a signal).

This is painting a bit too broadly - a degree still shows that you can jump through pointless hoops which is valuable to employers and some degrees are valuable in and off themselves because they gate professions that are necessary for society (medicine/engineering). I’d also point out that colleges historically ignored large pools of candidates from certain demographics for political reasons. I suppose there is probably some learning that manages to happen once in a while too, which is worth something if not the cost to society of fueling the higher ed apparatus.

Re: Is education no longer the ‘great equalizer’?

#252

Post by treis »

mnowicki wrote: post #237
treis wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Most school funding in the U.S. comes from local property tax. But if a district has a lot of poverty, then revenue from property tax is low This is a common myth but it's not backed up by the numbers. Poverty is (mostly) concentrated in inner cities and those inner cities typically contain large office builds which pay lots of real estate taxes but send no kids to schools. If you look around different states the hi…

that's interesting to hear, and I'll have to take your word on it for now, but I'm curious why(unless things have significantly changed in the past 6-7 years) inner-city schools are still horrendously bad. I've experienced schools in both the worst parts of Philadelphia as well as in middle-class suburbs of Philly, and the contrast is even more exaggerated than they make it seem on TV shows/movies that depict these t…

What we think of as school quality is mostly the quality of the students. Richer districts have, on average, students of high SES with parents that are more willing & able to help their kids succeed in school. Poorer districts have, on average, lower SES kids with terrible living situations and parents.

Having disruptive kids also makes educating them much more expensive. Discipline issues chew up a lot of resources and disrupt learning for other students. So you have to spend more to provide equal quality instruction.

And, of course, just because they spend more money doesn't mean they spend it on things that help educating students.

Re: Is education no longer the ‘great equalizer’?

#253

Post by beerandt »

Jcowell wrote: post #136
rayiner wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elections? Healthcare? (Continuing to push Medicaid expansion onto states that don’t want it?) Child care? Education?

Honestly the first two should be a federal thing. I just don’t understand how a federal election has 50 different ways of doing and qualifying things and not one way for a position that affects the whole country. If we were to pull up on a Alien planet and see this kind of election style we would ridicule the ridiculousness that is the US election system. Don’t get me started on how it makes any sense that we don’t l…

>leverage the power of the government

Because people get paid to do those jobs, and the government mandating that they do it for free, or for some reduced price is theft of labor. We've already fought that war.

Re: Is education no longer the ‘great equalizer’?

#254

Post by WalterBright »

sokoloff wrote: post #245
WalterBright wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was fully in place for the 2018-2019, and 2019-2020 school years. So yeah, I expect measurable improvement in results.

For a student who was educated for 10 years under funding level A and where funding level B was available for 1 full school year (2018-2019), resulting in some changes in the classrooms in the districts only after some time delay after funding was approved, I'd expect to see almost no change in the spring 2019 testing. Spring 2020 testing was impacted by COVID. It's fine that we have different expectations, though.

The thing is, the "fully-funding" issue has completely vanished from the agenda. It is never discussed anymore. It's back to the same old "we need more funding to make a difference" rhetoric.

In fact, I recall the very day the legislation passed, the same advocates were demanding even more money.

I've lived in Seattle for over 40 years now. Long enough to see innumerable funding increases based on demands that "this time it'll fix the schools". Nothing has moved the needle.

One of these is wrong:

1. the way the school system is set up and run

2. our expectations of what the schools can accomplish

Money is just not the problem.

Re: Is education no longer the ‘great equalizer’?

#255

Post by UncleOxidant »

WalterBright wrote: post #159
John23832 wrote: post #7

Two parts: First, I think the ability to DO THINGS is the great equalizer at this point. Being a do-er lifts you out of poverty (or at least out of poverty's worst resting state). Being a do-er expands your network. Being a do-er prolongs your life (people with jobs/daily activities tend to live longer healthier lives). The best part about this is that technology has made it easier to become a do-er. You don't need a…

> chronically underfunding schools In Washington State, for decades there was a big push to "fully fund" the schools. They finally got their way a couple years back, i.e. just about everything they wanted. There has been zero improvement in results. There has been no further mention of "fully funding" the schools in the press since, but the demands for more and more money for the schools have not abated at all. Edit:…

I'm not sure you can tell much after only 3 years and one of those years schools were shut down for covid. Let's check back in about 3 or 4 years and see how they're doing.

Re: Is education no longer the ‘great equalizer’?

#256

Post by UncleOxidant »

WalterBright wrote: post #241
yardie wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A couple years back is 2019. I'm not sure you know how schools work but suddenly pumping money in doesn't dramatically increase test scores the next fiscal quarter. I think nearly everyone agrees public schools could use more funding, the debates tend to be about "on what and how much."

I looked it up, it was fully in place by summer 2018. P.S. I didn't say "dramatically". I said "zero" improvement. Doing better than zero is as low a bar as possible . I fail to see that as unreasonable. There isn't even a plan for success.

But note that 2020/2021 school years where heavily disrupted by covid. Let's take a look back in a few years to see how they're doing, I'm not sure we can make many inferences from the limited data so far.

Re: Is education no longer the ‘great equalizer’?

#257

Post by UncleOxidant »

romwell wrote: post #247
WalterBright wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was fully in place for the 2018-2019, and 2019-2020 school years. So yeah, I expect measurable improvement in results.

This is akin to expecting improvement of a building constructed on shaky foundation after increasing funding when the construction reached the 8th floor.

And then when they got to the 9th & 10th floors there was a pandemic.

Re: Is education no longer the ‘great equalizer’?

#258

Post by dfxm12 »

John23832 wrote: post #7

Two parts: First, I think the ability to DO THINGS is the great equalizer at this point. Being a do-er lifts you out of poverty (or at least out of poverty's worst resting state). Being a do-er expands your network. Being a do-er prolongs your life (people with jobs/daily activities tend to live longer healthier lives). The best part about this is that technology has made it easier to become a do-er. You don't need a…

Having the ability to do something and being a do-er are not one in the same, but based on your comment you are treating them as such.

Re: Is education no longer the ‘great equalizer’?

#259

Post by AnimalMuppet »

dwater wrote: post #53
whb07 wrote: post #15

Controlling education is a political life source for the Democratic party in the U.S. One of the largest, if not the largest, unions is the teacher's and they are a major donor to the Democratic party. Thankfully, the one good thing about the shutdowns has been the ability for parents to observe a couple things: * how little the school system cares about the child * the indoctrination and political ideas being passed…

Schools are controlled primarily by state and local governments, which are not universally controlled by Democrats but split along typical red state/blue state lines: https://www.ncsl.org/research/about-state-legislatures/parti... Republican legislatures have shown they are quite capable of passing legislation about education that serves little purpose beyond a political agenda, as this year's crop of bills banning c…

> Schools are controlled primarily by state and local governments, which are not universally controlled by Democrats but split along typical red state/blue state lines

Fine, but the claim was about the teachers' union. In a red state, who does the teachers' union campaign for? I'd bet that there are few examples of the teachers' union campaigning for Republicans, even in a red state.

Re: Is education no longer the ‘great equalizer’?

#260

Post by UncleOxidant »

dragonwriter wrote: post #199
zozbot234 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> while also chronically underfunding schools Schools are not underfunded in the U.S., they waste money. Big difference.

> Schools are not underfunded in the U.S Most first world countries are well above the US’s 5% GDP in public education expenditures; schools absolutely are underfunded in the US. It may also be unusually poorly administered, but this isn't like healthcare where US public spending is on par, as a share of GDP, with other developed countries despite doing far less with it.

I tend to think they're underfunded and poorly administered with a lot of overhead.
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