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I'm going to take something completely unintended from this article and ask:
Hasn't the official narrative for the past couple decades been that the reason schools in the U.S. underperform is due to lack of funding?
And thus, shouldn't the suggested solution to Yeshivas underperforming state requirements be to give them more money?
I could swear that the argument regarding, e.g. Baltimore, St. Louis, and yes, New York was that there was simply a large gap between how much money the schools needed and how much they actually received.
Perhaps it is fair to peek into how that money is being spent and closely examining the type and quality of instruction being provided to judge the value of such spending?
I'm not trying to make any larger point with this besides noting how interesting it is that the NYT takes up a story which tacitly admits that funding is, itself, not the end-all be-all for improving education outcomes, as the state tends to measure such outcomes.
If the fear is that organized groups with goals orthogonal to those expected of the school system may be seizing too much control and funneling that money towards priorities other than education on the topics society generally considers important, then we can certainly open this debate up to other groups with similar power.
Yes. And that despite the fact that a massive increase in school spending in staffing per pupil, failed to do anything noticeably in terms of increasing educational achievement. - https://www.cato.org/blog/obama-vs-romney-public-school-jobs (old data now but it shows a decades long trend).
Later that spending increase slowed, and in some places even had short term reversals, but still generally kept an upward trend (and again I'm talking about real per pupil spending so ts not inflation or more students causing the increase).
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I’ve been under the impression that the “moar funding!” angle has been less popular since Bush 2. Partly due to the stellar reception of No Child Left Behind and partly due to the recession. But then I’ve also been out of public school for long enough that it may have passed me by. Aannnnnd I’m down here in a part of Texas where the property taxes completely define school mappings. So take anything I say with a grain of salt.
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I don't think the argument has ever been "all schools everywhere that are underperforming need funds", it's "all public schools...".
Fair.
I mean to say, the general, reflexive response to pointing out that a given school (usually public) is underperforming compared to expectations is "they need more money!"
Schools that aren't underperforming are usually just not considered in the question at all.
Yes, I understand the general form of the argument you are making. But I don't think it's nearly as contradictory as you make it out to be if you admit what I'm saying is fair. The underlying assumption is that the school is not a private religious school run by a community that refuses to work and instead leeches from welfare.
And if we admit that how a school is run is actually very impactful on student outcomes, we can frame the debate in terms other than whether funding is sufficient. Which normally the NYT seems reluctant to do. Yet here they try to imply that the schools in question gets too much money despite failing to produce results. Stripped of context, this sounds like a conservative talking point!
That's the leap I'm willing to make. I think poorly runs schools are poorly run schools, regardless of being private, public, religious or secular. I don't necessarily agree with all the metrics the state uses to determine education outcomes, but basic literacy seems like a fair one. I don't think religious schools are somehow worse at producing literate students, nor that disparate outcomes are attributable to them being religious schools.
However, I think it is completely and utterly fair to say that if a school is performing poorly, then the first step towards a solution should be examining why it is poorly run, and holding those who are in charge of it accountable. Then one should examine if the school is adequately funded and whether increasing funds would be likely to help.
Because throwing more money at a poorly-run school seems like an obvious way to set said money on fire for no real improvement. Dis-functional systems don't magically improve merely by adding more funds.
In short, if we assume that the Yeshivas are failing to educate their students in important subjects, I DO NOT see why we should assume the reasons for this are somehow inherently different than if a public school likewise fails at the task. Which many of them do.
Why should Yeshivas be singled out as if they present a unique problem? Note, I'm not claiming that the NYT shouldn't publish stories about this issue, I'm questioning the framing.
No disagreement here.
As other commenters have mentioned, Hasidic Jews are an insular community who are politically organized to give little and take lots. They appear to actively disdain and prevent their community members from seeking employment and instead just study religion all day. They very much violate the unspoken assumption that a school is trying to make a better American citizen (loosely defined as that is) who will not take from the public more than necessary. I'd say that's deserving of higher scrutiny.
Then public schools are worse. The Hasids are just scamming America, not trying to train its executioners.
This comment and your other one:
Are low quality.
I see you participating heavily in this discussion and some of your other comments are better contributions.
But there are some rule violations. Please try to support controversial arguments with evidence. Speak plainly and without sarcasm. Do not be antagonistic or inflammatory.
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Alright, but that's just grounds to fix all of them, not declare that what the Hasids do doesn't matter.
Edit: Also, that's an incendiary and divisive way of speaking about them. They have a different view on what makes someone a better citizen, and would describe you as trying to bring back a reactionary and bigoted government. Neither your accusation nor theirs is conducive to the discussion.
Fair enough. Once we've made all the public schools cost-effective, educational and nonpartisan, the Hasidim are next.
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I'm amenable to this argument.
But explain to me why this same line of thinking wouldn't apply to Teachers' Unions. Especially if we swap in 'woke' ideological teachings for religion in this instance.
https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/how-teachers-unions-are-influencing-decisions-on-school-reopenings/2020/12
https://nypost.com/2021/07/04/teachers-union-vows-to-fight-back-against-critical-race-theory-critics/
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2022-election/teachers-union-wants-democrats-fight-back-republican-crt-attacks-rcna38001
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/teachers-ohios-largest-school-district-go-strike-2-days-start-new-scho-rcna44239
...Because there's no religious defense being offered? For all that you want to claim hypocrisy about this, there's a big difference between "a public school that is run to spread controversial messaging to kids as truth" and "a privately run religious school which actively tells you to not do more than study religion all day".
Moreover, you seem to think that I would support the teachers unions but not the Hasidic Jews. You shouldn't assume that about me when I haven't said anything about it.
From the perspective of outcomes, why should it matter?
At least the Hasids aren't making it mandatory to send other people's kids to their schools.
Well make your position known, if you care.
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Yeah, but it's always been a ridiculous lie. The United States outspends almost every country in the world. The failures of American schools (such that they exist, I would argue that the failures are more with the local demographic stock than with the schools themselves) cannot plausibly be explained by funding at schools that are spending more than Germany, Japan, or our neighbor to the north.
The good news for the NYT and the larger narrative regarding education spending is that no one really bothers to maintain much continuity of analysis between these points. Even better for narrative maintenance is that anyone who notices that Americans actually do very well on PISA testing relative to similar demographic groups (suggesting that there isn't much of a problem with the schools) can be countered with rhetoric around how this demonstrates that schools are racist.
I don't see a toggle for displaying the desired data in the direct link, I assumed people would be able to look at those pretty easily.
I am strongly against using percent of GDP rather than PPP or nominal dollars. The education sector isn't entitled to a fixed percentage of the overall economy.
Using percentage of GDP makes sense in certain circumstances, such as when your trying to analyze the burden the spending puts on the economy but I agree it makes less sense when your comparing national education spending to see who spends more, or when you considering whether spending is increasing over time and how rapid the increase is.
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No, but to the extent it provides services via humans rather than automation, it is subject to Baumol's cost disease. Ironically, the education you can afford in a country where most talented would-be-educators don't have any better options may be greater, at the same adjusted dollars-per-student price, than the education you can afford in a country where that education really pays off in other sectors of the economy. GDP isn't a good unit against which to compare this, but neither are dollars adjusted by a PPP basket which weighs mass-produced consumer goods along with skilled man-hours.
On the other hand, that's about as much of a steelman as I can come up with before noticing that the education sector may be to blame for this themselves. "Students work on computers at their own pace, teachers are on hand to work with students who are having problems the automated lessons can't handle" was how a few of my best classes were handled, experimentally, decades ago, and it's a tragedy that the closest most kids can get today is "Make a Khan Academy account, then hope you have time for it on top of whatever superannuated one-size-fits-all busywork your teachers assign instead". I'm not sure what happened over those decades, but I don't think that whole "software" thing turned out to be just a fad in the rest of the economy, so I have a suspicion that the possibility of teaching more students better even with fewer teachers was treated as a threat to unionized teachers rather than an opportunity for the kids.
Somewhat unrelated, but I was watching Vinesauce last night, and he was playing a few of those JumpStart games by Knowledge Adventure. The Kindergarten game (yes, seriously, I'm going somewhere with this) got me thinking: could people ever really trust software to educate their kids? Edutainment games are one thing; but serious educational programs, software, and websites have developed to the point that they can serve as legit building blocks for getting through at least public school. I understand that at the undergrad level and beyond, anyone who might hire you for a cushy job expects a prestigious credential that digital services can't offer, but if we pretend that doesn't exist, what happens then? Could software (have) eat(en) the education world so thoroughly that the way we teach children would be radically different?
For some anecdata, in undergrad, I had to take two algebra classes, and both of those relied heavily on a mixture of hardware (a "clicker" device) and Pearson's testing website. The second one was practically an online course (something my college offered) that I still had to physically show up for (though few of my classmates did).
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Indeed.
The other narrative killer is when you disaggregate the U.S. so that outcomes across the nation are not squished together and smeared across the entire country as if it represents the performance of every state and city and town.
I have gotten extremely tired of the tactic of lumping in every single state's statistics to create a single metric and then pretending this somehow accurately depicts the state of the union as a whole.
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