Friday, September 9, 2011
Cost-Effectiveness of Homeland Security Expenditures
There is a good series going on this week at www.slate.com regarding the cost-effectiveness of homeland security measures since 9/11. I realize that this is a bit off the stated topic of this blog, but is a good read and a reminder that reason should be a strong counterweight to emotion in public policy-making. The best line from today's article: "Overall, by far the most cost-effective counterterrorism measure is to refrain from overreacting." Which is also sound policy since the goal of terrorism is to induce the fear that causes overreaction.
Thursday, September 8, 2011
Public Education Is a Public Good
Why do so many Americans accept the premise that corporations offer a model for and would be good stewards of public education? Received experience suggests this should not be true. If we accept the premise that public education is a public good and should be open to all, the corporate model will necessarily fail. I will start off by asserting that I do not believe American public education is in a crisis and point to Diane Ravitch's piece in The New York Review of Books for further explication. Nevertheless, large cohorts of American students are under performing. The cohorts that are under performing are those beset with poverty, disability, or English language deficits. In the corporate model, the typical response to a large subset of under performing or inefficient employees is to trim the fat, which everyone knows is a euphemism for firing employees until the organization reaches is desired level of efficiency or competence. The obvious problem with public education is that we cannot simply fire the under performers.
Let's say we describe the students as "consumers" and the teachers and administrators as the employees of a "corporation." If we accept that public education is a public good that should be available to all children, we still are in a quandary under the corporate model. No matter how we restructure the teaching profession and the administration of public education, we require an enormous workforce. It would be impossible to fire huge swaths of teachers in under performing schools without having some mechanism in place for replacing them. In the current debate, I have seen nothing that offers a reasonable solution to this quandary.
The answer cannot simply be to ramp up charter schools and voucher programs. If the education of all children shifts to different delivery mechanisms, the size of the employee-pool necessary to deliver the services will remain fairly constant. This begs the question: where are we going to get the teachers to replace the ones that are fired? I do not see any plans to fund training and education for large numbers of new teachers to replace the old set. In all likelihood, the only thing that would happen is that existing teachers would float around from school to school because the increased numbers of students would require that alternate mechanisms for delivering education search the available pool of minimally qualified employees to deliver those services. The only discernible effect is that public school teachers would find themselves in an unstable labor market with decreasing remuneration and benefits, as they jump from public, to charter, to voucher/private schools.
The above paragraph assumes that many of the teachers teaching in public schools today are under performing or inefficient. I do not accept this premise. I simply raised the argument for the sake of teasing out the logical consequences of applying a corporate model to the realm of public education. Rather, the main impediment to academic success for under performing students remains impoverishment. I actually have no quibble with some of the more intensive charter school and neighborhood programs that have achieved success in educating poor children. The insight that those programs provide, though, is that the path to success involves the schools acting to a larger degree as parens patriae. The best schools fare well because they take over much of the middle class parenting role that leads kids in middle and upper class communities to have academic success. The irony of this is that to succeed on a large scale, this approach would require a massive influx of funding to allow existing schools to do this. If one wants to level the playing field for poor students, then the school will have to function as the de facto family for them. This would mean longer school days and the provision of social and medical services to ensure the health and welfare of the children being educated. I do not hear many voices advocating a significant ramp up of public education funding to allow schools to act as the primary "home" for disadvantaged students, though.
Another factor to consider is that corporations have not exactly proved themselves to be good stewards of the public good. The financial crisis is the most obvious and recent example of why I do not want to trust my son's education to the corporate model. Maximizing shareholder profits drive corporations, even when gaining short term profits, however spectacular, is at odds with the long term health of the corporation. This is a greed-driven business that has little room for the long view, the also-ran, or the less fortunate. A steward carefully and responsibly manages that which has been entrusted to him, her, or it. The financial crisis has demonstrated that corporations are not careful or responsible even with the little that has been entrusted to them. Why on earth would we want this model to be applied to the education of American children?
Applying the corporate model to education frightens me. Public education requires acceptance of the fact that it is public and not a private, market-driven good. We educate our citizens because we recognize the lasting social good that an educated citizenry provides to the entire nation. Of course there is an economic benefit: well-educated citizens also become productive employees. The problem is that the corporate model contains no room for the public good. The market rewards some, punishes others, and leaves many behind. Is it acceptable to have a society that applies this ethos to the education of its children?
Let's say we describe the students as "consumers" and the teachers and administrators as the employees of a "corporation." If we accept that public education is a public good that should be available to all children, we still are in a quandary under the corporate model. No matter how we restructure the teaching profession and the administration of public education, we require an enormous workforce. It would be impossible to fire huge swaths of teachers in under performing schools without having some mechanism in place for replacing them. In the current debate, I have seen nothing that offers a reasonable solution to this quandary.
The answer cannot simply be to ramp up charter schools and voucher programs. If the education of all children shifts to different delivery mechanisms, the size of the employee-pool necessary to deliver the services will remain fairly constant. This begs the question: where are we going to get the teachers to replace the ones that are fired? I do not see any plans to fund training and education for large numbers of new teachers to replace the old set. In all likelihood, the only thing that would happen is that existing teachers would float around from school to school because the increased numbers of students would require that alternate mechanisms for delivering education search the available pool of minimally qualified employees to deliver those services. The only discernible effect is that public school teachers would find themselves in an unstable labor market with decreasing remuneration and benefits, as they jump from public, to charter, to voucher/private schools.
The above paragraph assumes that many of the teachers teaching in public schools today are under performing or inefficient. I do not accept this premise. I simply raised the argument for the sake of teasing out the logical consequences of applying a corporate model to the realm of public education. Rather, the main impediment to academic success for under performing students remains impoverishment. I actually have no quibble with some of the more intensive charter school and neighborhood programs that have achieved success in educating poor children. The insight that those programs provide, though, is that the path to success involves the schools acting to a larger degree as parens patriae. The best schools fare well because they take over much of the middle class parenting role that leads kids in middle and upper class communities to have academic success. The irony of this is that to succeed on a large scale, this approach would require a massive influx of funding to allow existing schools to do this. If one wants to level the playing field for poor students, then the school will have to function as the de facto family for them. This would mean longer school days and the provision of social and medical services to ensure the health and welfare of the children being educated. I do not hear many voices advocating a significant ramp up of public education funding to allow schools to act as the primary "home" for disadvantaged students, though.
Another factor to consider is that corporations have not exactly proved themselves to be good stewards of the public good. The financial crisis is the most obvious and recent example of why I do not want to trust my son's education to the corporate model. Maximizing shareholder profits drive corporations, even when gaining short term profits, however spectacular, is at odds with the long term health of the corporation. This is a greed-driven business that has little room for the long view, the also-ran, or the less fortunate. A steward carefully and responsibly manages that which has been entrusted to him, her, or it. The financial crisis has demonstrated that corporations are not careful or responsible even with the little that has been entrusted to them. Why on earth would we want this model to be applied to the education of American children?
Applying the corporate model to education frightens me. Public education requires acceptance of the fact that it is public and not a private, market-driven good. We educate our citizens because we recognize the lasting social good that an educated citizenry provides to the entire nation. Of course there is an economic benefit: well-educated citizens also become productive employees. The problem is that the corporate model contains no room for the public good. The market rewards some, punishes others, and leaves many behind. Is it acceptable to have a society that applies this ethos to the education of its children?
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
The Anti-Union Farce
I am sick of hearing how unions make America less competitive. The BLS Union Members Summary from January 21, 2011 (before the effects of the attacks on public sector unions have been fully realized) demonstrates that 11.9% of American workers belong to a union. In the private sector only 6.9% of the workforce is unionized. To blame union workers for America's economic problems is a canard. When 93.1% of private sector workers are not unionized, it is difficult to see how unions have anything to do with America's competitiveness. We should all be asking Republican politicians, corporate America, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce when we can expect to see the jobs materialize now that we effectively have a non-union private sector workforce.
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.nr0.htm
As for public sector unions, they represent workers in government. As such, the unions ought not to have an impact on the private sector's competitiveness in the global market.
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.nr0.htm
As for public sector unions, they represent workers in government. As such, the unions ought not to have an impact on the private sector's competitiveness in the global market.
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