CSotD: There’s no such thing as a free education
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Scott Stantis marks the start of another school year.
Staples will soon begin running their iconic "It's the most wonderful time of the year" commercials, which not only celebrate the fact that we hate having our children around, but also that stores can count on a nice boost this time of year.
I was out of the "Back to School Shopping" game before schools stopped being able to put out a box of tissues for kids to blow their noses, but I did catch the beginning of scientific calculators being added to the list. And I have, as a journalist, noted the rise of charity drives to provide school supplies to kids whose parents can't afford them. And I've voted on budgets and paid property taxes. I've also sat through those budget talks as a reporter.
Grammar aside (speculating against fact calls for "weren't," not "wasn't"), I'm going to criticize Stantis for this point: Of course, it isn't free and the money has to come from somewhere. The rise in property taxes for Chicago Schools will cost the average homeowner $84, which is a blow, certainly. But it's odd to add that to the amount individual families have to pony up each year, since a combination of public funding and (limited) user fees seems likely to please most people.
But I gather his point is that education is expensive, and there's a bumper sticker for that: Ignorance costs us even more.
Could the schools be more efficient? Sure. But let's start with a simple point and then get into something more complex.
The simple point is that education is not the province of parents. The argument "Why should I pay school taxes? I don't have kids!" is like saying "Why should I pay to pave that highway? I never drive on that side of town!" Education is part of the economic infrastructure and we all pay for it.
You can take that one back to the Founding Fathers and earlier. The Pilgrims and Puritans and all those folks believed in it and put their support behind it, and when towns were laid out along the tracks of the TransContinental Railroad, there was an understanding that one tract of land would be for a school.
Education has been part of public policy from the get-go in this country.
From that basic principle, we start getting into complexities. We only began to insist that children be sent to school towards the end of the 19th Century. Up until that point, we accepted that kids could stay on the farm and figure out how to make a living by doing increasingly complex chores in the natural course of growing up.
With industrialization, however, came the centralization of production, the growth of cities and influx of immigrant workers. Suddenly, the kids weren't at home, they weren't learning anything useful and they were increasingly underfoot and getting in trouble, so the Powers That Be were willing to help Jacob Riis, Jane Addams and other do-gooders beef up the schools, simply as a way to get the little bastards off the streets. (And the unions were happy to support the effort as a means of ending the use of children as underpaid workers.)
Administration of schools was kept in local hands, so that kids in some places were pretty well educated and kids in some other places didn't learn a damn thing. People think those inequities mostly disappeared during the Civil Rights Era, but NY Governor George Pataki went to the courts in this century arguing that the state's financial obligation to provide a "basic education" was fulfilled with eighth grade graduation.
He lost the argument, but that says more about New York's educational system than the public mood. I'll bet you could press that point successfully in several places around the country today.
Money is, indeed, wasted in our education system, but it's not simply a symptom of bloated bureaucracies and frivolous extras. There might be better efficiencies, yes, but the real source of waste is more basic.
The main issue is a system that we know doesn't work but are reluctant to address. We talk about how kids in Germany, Japan and other countries outscore our kids on tests, but we then start discussing the length of the school year and uniforms and discipline, all the while avoiding a very central issue:
Educational systems in other countries use a two-tiered system. One tier is for kids who are headed for University, one is for kids who are headed for technical careers.
One of my first national education conferences was in 1993, and a fellow from Motorola spoke about how his company wanted to hire American kids but, in order to get the engineering skills they needed, they had to hire a kid from Germany.
As a former business reporter, I sat there thinking, yeah, because, from the time that kid was about 12, the German school system began to help him learn the things he needed to know in terms of the things he cared about, and some German company gave him internships as he went through the upper grades and into his actual engineering training. Private industry invested about $30,000 in his technical education and then you stole him away because nobody over here wants to make that kind of investment in our kids.
We prefer a Band-Aid approach where we offer kids a few shop classes while we shove Shakespeare down their throats. And, if you ask why we don't set up a system like that in nearly every other country in the world, we say that a two-tiered system locks kids in too early.
I met with about 20 exchange students once who were from all over the world: France, Denmark, Serbia, Turkey, Vietnam, Japan, Mexico, Egypt, Venezuela and some other places. And I asked them, if you are in a technical school and you decide you'd rather be in an academic school, how hard is it to change?
They looked at me in genuine puzzlement. You go talk to your guidance counselor and you switch programs. They all agreed. It's no big deal. One of them added that, if you kept going back and forth, the administrators would become annoyed and it might take you forever to graduate. And everyone chuckled. But they were unanimous in agreeing that nobody is "locked in" in any of their countries.
Yet we talk about catching up to them by extending our school year, like those old commercials with the teetering towers of bowls of Grape-Nuts trying to equal the vitamins in a bowl of "Total." That isn't how nutrition works and it isn't how education works.
If you want to waste money, paying for more of something that doesn't work is an excellent policy: Keep trying to teach kids things they don't want to know in ways they won't learn, and pursue this folly for longer hours over more days.
And then blame your failure on teacher's unions and bureaucracy, and pump up that bureaucracy with testing and prodding, led by people who had amazing improvements in school districts where they simply had to enforce discipline, insist on standards and falsify their test scores.
If you think education is expensive, calculate the cost of ignorance.
And then calculate the cost of ignorance once it is allowed to frame public policy.
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