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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   30055 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024

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I really don’t think I can defend the DoEd as a cost-effective educator. I do think it has value as a floor on provided education.

Most of its expenditures date back to 1965 Great Society programs. However, they’ve been consistently refreshed and revisited by both parties, because no one wants to turn off the firehose assume the burden themselves. Poor states don’t have a better plan waiting; slashing their only source of funding makes their options strictly worse. That may or may not be worth the tiny percentage of federal budget you’d save.

Poor states don’t have a better plan waiting

Do we still have any of those? Mississippi looks like it's still way down at the bottom of the list of US states, but the bottom of the US list is now at like $53K GDP per capita, which even if we use PPP for the nation as a whole still puts them ahead of such hellholes as Belgium, Canada, France, the UK, South Korea, Japan...

Edit: perhaps GDP per child is the right metric to use here? Mississippi is probably behind a few of the countries I just listed on that score, though I can't quickly find numbers and I still doubt the distinction would be large enough to matter.

You know, I’m really not sure. Mississippi isn’t exactly the poster child for income inequality, so it’s not like the per capita numbers are all skewed by one city.

Elsewhere I was seeing some evidence that title I funds were less than 10% of Mississippi’s education funding. If so, maybe all our states really can afford to take up more slack.

On the other hand, there’s got to be some sort of logistic curve. At some point you have to close sites and drop some people from the system entirely. If federal funding covers that cliff, I think removing it would be pretty serious.

Even if you have within-state income inequality, that can be solved at the state level. You need whole states who can't pay for their kids before you need a solution from a federal ...

Oh my. I was going to write "Dep. Ed." because "DoE" is ambiguous with Energy, but I decided to look it up and apparently the official abbreviation, at www.ed.gov, is in fact ED? "Son, I'm afraid you've got ED. I'm prescribing the Tenth Amendment, but be sure to call us immediately if you get a school board election lasting more than four hours!"

If federal funding covers that cliff, I think removing it would be pretty serious.

In theory, you could just make up for it with the extra state taxes that everyone can afford once the taxes which paid for the federal funding are reduced. In the short term, it could be a hell of a transition in the meantime. In the long term, I suspect the question of budget changes stemming from federal debt problems will dwarf budget changes stemming from how much interstate redistribution we do for schools.

I don't think anyone would conflate the Department of Education with Erectile Dysfunction as you imply.

One is an irritating and frustrating affliction most men would love to eradicate for good. The other is erectile dysfunction.

ED—especially when primed by a discussion on education-related administration, bureaucracy, and government transfers—more reminds me of those with "Doctorates" in Education (although Eating Disorder gets a nod). It's like Stolen Valor: They're trying to co-opt the prestige of PhDs, especially STEM PhDs, to lend themselves some notion of being sophisticated Experts on the right side of Science. This has not gone un-Noticed even among the general normie population, hence the "Excuse me! It's 'Doctor'!" versus "Call me Bob" meme.

I don't think anyone would conflate the Department of Education with Erectile Dysfunction as you imply.

One is an irritating and frustrating affliction most men would love to eradicate for good. The other is erectile dysfunction.

Just an aside, but is there a name or term for this particular variety of joke?

I’d call it a switcheroo joke, a species of paraprosdokian phrase. There may be a more precise technical term, but even Bing’s GPT-4 believes it to be the latter, citing a stand-up comedy site.

EDIT: Found it. It’s a bait-and-switch joke. Cognitohazard: here’s a list of them on TVTropes: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BaitAndSwitchComparison

As with other deep southern states, geographic income variation is not the right way to measure economic inequality/inequality of opportunity- the racial income gap is.

I know you're trying to steelman (and I've upvoted accordingly) but the floor ain't working. Places like Chicago and Baltimore are graduating huge numbers of illiterate and innumerate kids. I wouldn't be surprised if black reading levels are actually worse today in Chicago than in 1950s Alabama.

And of course Chicago spends like 24k per year per student, among the most of any city.

Unfortunately, educating students isn't as simple as spending money. In fact, there's little correlation between money spent and results. Cutting budgets probably wouldn't effect student outcomes at all. Certainly, raising budgets hasn't increased standards.

It’s an interesting question. This suggests a 6.2% illiteracy rate in Alabama in 1950. Even assuming that was completely segregated, which was certainly not true, that would get us 132 out of 979 thousand, or 13.5%.

Meanwhile, searching Chicago gets breathless results about 25% “functional” illiteracy…and 20% for the whole state! That’s ridiculous unless the standard of illiteracy in 1950 was much lower. But exceeding Alabama’s 6% or even 13% seems completely plausible.

As for the floor—it’s not actually the cities I was thinking of. It’s the small rural districts across the South and Midwest. I think taking the federal funding from, say, Mississippi shutters a lot of schools. I’m not sure if the budgets back this up, though. If cutting all of the DoEd only cuts marginal state budgets by 10 or 20%, it might be worth it.

It’s an interesting question. This suggests a 6.2% illiteracy rate in Alabama in 1950. Even assuming that was completely segregated, which was certainly not true, that would get us 132 out of 979 thousand, or 13.5%.

Meanwhile, searching Chicago gets breathless results about 25% “functional” illiteracy…and 20% for the whole state! That’s ridiculous unless the standard of illiteracy in 1950 was much lower. But exceeding Alabama’s 6% or even 13% seems completely plausible.

It's entirely possible that Chicago is just uniquely bad, as well.

A major challenge for comparing literacy (or illiteracy) rates across time or different countries is that the measurements are very different. In US, "functionally illiterate" means you can cipher and sound it out, but if it's a sufficiently complex sentence you can't understand it. (For example, some instructions on tax forms.) In developing countries, "illiterate" means you cannot cipher the alphabet (or kanji, as the case may be).

A while back, a student in my Liberal Arts Math class did a deep dive comparing the literacy statistics for US vs. Bangladesh, because some statistics she found suggested that US was doing worse. Turned out that the US stats were for "functional illiteracy" while the study in Bangladesh asked its participants to sound out a few written words.

Not the same thing.

The way it is explained in the UK context is that "functional literacy" is the ability to read a story in a "quality" newspaper like The Times or The Guardian and understand it well enough to answer questions about what happened. That is a much higher standard than just being able to read.

Back in the day, literacy was assessed by self-report. The census taker would ask you "Can you read?" and write down the answer.

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