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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (66820)	1/18/2003 10:06:54 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

This argument failed, IMO, for this reason, John. First, because just raising salaries from say, 40K to 60K a year, and jumping the administrators accordingly, will not improve the teaching in the schools. Second, there is no correlation between cost per pupil in the system and excellence in the Schools. Look at DC, and the total failure of the Kansas City experiment. You miss my point. We were talking about higher education, not k-12. At that level, public universities need to put more tax payer dollars into supporting remedial education programs, helping poor students get through programs they can not otherwise afford (stipends, work/study programs, and the like--incidentally, CUNY has progressively eliminated a great deal of that), decreasing class size (all the educational literature agrees on the importance of this one, at every level, so far as I know). No, the reasons for not doing it are not policy rational; they have to do with the role of the real estate industry in the mayor's office, and a governance structure which penalizes serious long term planning. As for your point about the absence of a correlation between money put into the system and the quality that comes out, no one believes the point you just made. If it were true, parents who could afford Scarsdale would move to some cheaper housing suburb nearby. In education, we all make decisions on the basis of the notion that, roughly, we get what we pay for. If you put just a wee bit of money into schools you are almost certainly gonna get bad ones; put a great deal in and you increase your chances of getting good ones. In the latter case, you can then worry about the other variables. You need to introduce accountability and responsibility into the system. Not gonna happen anytime soon. Between the Educational, Administrative, and Teachers Union Bureaucracies, and the refusal of the public to accept Vouchers, things are gonna have to get a lot worse before we can get a revolution that will make them better. Too bad. The kids and the country lose. Well, as you know, we could not more completely disagree here. As I have said before, the literature shows exactly the right way to do it; it's just there is no political will to do it. Put the money in to lower class size; put the structures in which give teachers incentives to "own" their work; and, put the accountability in. Your way runs the very serious risk of destroying public education in large cities; certainly it will dramatically reduce funding for it. And will increase the problems that religiously based schools present. Bloomberg's plan for NYC schools is likely to produce some not too happy outcomes because he's having to work with too little money. His plan will regiment schools more; but that doesn't produce better citizens. Just more rules. It's a weekend and cold, cold, cold, in Jersey so we should be able to get something of a longer term pass than usual to stay OT. I'm about halfway through the Lind book. I'm not wild about it; you might wish to pick it up at Borders for a skim. I like the point of view; you won't. He has some wonderful lines. But he's a bit skimpy with the details of the argument. And, in this case, stapled together some essays without linking the argument well. However, it's got a very different, at least for you, view of Texas history. Relies a lot on D. W. Meinig's work.