The Political Economy of Education Equity

"To really make this work, you'd need to totally change the way the American education system works and gets paid for."

We expect big things from you, Mr. Yglesias.

You're right, and an example shows why. In 1997, the Chattanooga city schools merged with the suburban and rural Hamilton County school district and the new superintendent of the merged district made it his priority to eliminate the double standard that relegated the urban schools to second- or third-class status. He focused in particular on nine schools that were among the lowest-performing in the state (one was indeed last in performance in Tennessee). He replaced the principals, said all the teachers had to reapply for their jobs, provided bonuses for good teachers to move to those schools, and provided numerous supoports for teachers, including full-time coaches and time for joint planning and professional development. The schools' pereformance improved dramatically. But I asked the superintendent at a recent meeting if the other schools in the district didn't start demanding the supports and incentives provided to these schools, and he said, "getting rid of the double standard is the reason I'm not superintendent anymore." In other words, the suburban areas did resent the extra resources showered on the urban schools.

But the superintendent didn't tell the whole story. While he faced opposition and decided to resign to defuse the issue, the community rose to the defense of his policies. The county replaced commissioners who opposed the reforms with ones who backed it, and the commission approved a revenue increase to pay for them. And the board appointed a new superintendent who pledged to continue the same reform direction.

This suggests to me that equity is possible, even if politically painful. But there aren't a lot of places--or people--willing or able to withstand the pain.

As you have wisely pointed out in the past, the problem is beyond those of the education complex: You would have to transform the American class based system of income, wealth and its attendant rewards structure in order to change the current bleak outlook for poor kids.

Assume a can opener? Assume a pony!!

"Schools full of poor kids could do just as well as schools full of middle-class kids if they had more resources at their disposal than the middle-class schools had."

I think that's highly doubtful--minority students in richly-funded districts perform worse than middle and working class students in districts with fewer resources. Pick a wealthy high-performing district with a substantial minority population and I guarantee that you will find that district is struggling with an 'achievement gap' and has been for many, many years. Too see what I mean, google 'achievement gap' and any of the following: Princeton, Ann Arbor, Berkeley, Shaker Heights, Evanston, Madison. Money has not solved the problem of minority achievement in these wealthy, successful (and politically liberal) districts.

And this is the result of money being spent by effective public school systems. What would be the effect of pouring more money into dysfunctional inner city school systems? Raise your hand if you think that would make a significant difference in achievement rather than result in patronage, bureaucracy, bloat, and inflated salaries.

And in the end, all American kids learn at schoool these days is how to mimic the functions of a $5 calculator and a word processor...

Watch out, China!

Schools full of poor kids could do just as well as schools full of middle-class kids if they had more resources at their disposal than the middle-class schools had.

Ah, the old liberal trope - if we just spend more on the schools, they'll just magically get better! Standard issue liberalism. Apparently it's immune to years-upon-years of learning to the contrary. Oh well.

Is Matthew even aware that many inner city school districts spend MORE per pupil than suburban schools? Matthew seems blissfully unaware that his sentence is already true - schools full of poor kids ALREADY HAVE more resources at their disposal than schools full of middle class kids (even adjusting for things like special needs).

Ah well, the reality-based community strikes again.

minority students in richly-funded districts perform worse than middle and working class students in districts with fewer resources. ... Money has not solved the problem of minority achievement in these wealthy, successful (and politically liberal) districts.

What, is Steve Sailer posting under a pseudonym now?

I actually googled "achievement gap" + "ann arbor" and the first result is a UM study showing that minority achievement has improved across the board and that the achievement gaps have narrowed.

Study here:
http://sitemaker.umich.edu/daddona.356/introduction

What's needed, besides more money, is integration. Statistics are very clear on this point. Minority students do better when integrated with better-off whites.

But you're right to be pessimistic. "Segregation forever" seems to be the mantra for US education. New York, Michigan, Illinois and California are the most educationally segregated states.

Clearly Al and Slocum did not read the article. The point of the article was that there is empirical data suggesting that in order to improve the performance of schools with poor children you need to 1) lengthen the school day so children get more time working on basic skills (e.g., reading) after the main school day, 2) engage the parents, 3) enforce better behavior by the students, 4) get students to commit to working harder, and 5) encourage the best teachers to work in schools with poor children.

You are not going to do this without increasing resources for these schools. As Matt indicates in his post, that is presumably going to come at the expense of schools with middle class and wealthy students.

David Morgan says,

You are not going to [lengthen the school day, engage the parents, enforce better behavior by the students, get students to commit to working harder, and encourage the best teachers] without increasing resources for these schools.

This is undoubtably true. However, it is equally true that simply increasing the resources available to these schools will do those things either. That is, increased monies for these schools is a necessary-but-not-sufficient condition for the kind of changes that the article advocates.

I think that a worry of many people is that if you give the schools more money, the money will end up being spent to, say, attempt to engage the parents in some ineffective program created by overpaid consultants using buzzwords fashionable five years ago, and fail, or to increase the salaries of existing teachers who were bad to begin with and aren't getting any better rather than attracting new teachers, or mistake buying some new computers for "getting students to commit to working harder."

Unfortunately, I think that probably you get into a chicken and egg situation, here: nobody wants to invest significant new monies unless there's some kind of track record which suggests that they'll be used reasonably, but without significant monies coming in, there's no way to create the kind of ambitious programs that would create such a track record.

I think that Matthew is certainly right that most parents would resist "taking money away from their children's education to spend it on someone else's education," but I do think that you could garner a lot of support for "spend more money on education in general, and target most of that money towards poor/minority schools," if the taxpayers in question thought that more money would actually improve educational standards.

The point of the article was that there is empirical data suggesting that in order to improve the performance of schools with poor children you need to 1) lengthen the school day so children get more time working on basic skills (e.g., reading) after the main school day, 2) engage the parents, 3) enforce better behavior by the students, 4) get students to commit to working harder, and 5) encourage the best teachers to work in schools with poor children.

You are not going to do this without increasing resources for these schools.

In other words, if I throw money at these programs, then we'll get better schools. And I should ignore the gazillion other times in the past that we were told by liberals that if we threw money at some other programs we'd get better schools... claims that turned out to be completely false. Right. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me a gazillion times, shame on me.

Let me try to put it another way so that maybe you'll understand: to me, a liberal saying "we just need to spend X more dollars on this new education program" is like a conservative saying, to you, "we just need to put X more troops in Iraq for this new military program".

If you don't fix the streets, you won't fix the schools. Why don't so many here, including MY, realize this. The longer school day works because you're keeping the kids off the streets, and out of their houses. The prenatal damage, plus the chaotic environment, needs to be addressed by society or the schools will fail. It's hard to emulate Horatio Alger when daddy is in jail and mommy is so concerned about day to day threats of the streets.

Integrate--housing, not just schools.

BTW, not only does Matthew seem ignorant of the fact that most inner city schools spend more per pupil than do suburban schools in the same region, but Matthew also seems ignorant of the way many inner city schools get funded.

Perhaps Matthew hasn't heard of this ingenious funding technique used by many areas to get wealthy suburban folks to pay for inner city schools. It's called... state taxes.

Let's take an example from the state I grew up in - NJ. According to the last data I saw, Newark schools spent over $18,000 per pupil, of which over 80% came from state. Toms River, which is a large suburban school district, spent around $9,000 per pupil, with less than half coming from the state. Now, who do you suppose pays those state taxes - poor inner city folks, or wealthy suburbanites? I'm thinking the latter.

I would say spend the property tax revenue on police, fire, public utilities and services tangibly related to property. Schools should be funded equitably by a progressive state income tax. Over a generation or two, this simple change would not only improve schools, but also transform the ex/sub/urban landscape and much of American family life along with it.

Imagine a world where it's not necessary to live an hour from your job, just to get your kids into an excellent public school.

I actually googled "achievement gap" + "ann arbor" and the first result is a UM study showing that minority achievement has improved across the board and that the achievement gaps have narrowed.

Study here:
http://sitemaker.umich.edu/daddona.356/introduction

Unfortunately, the kind of progress the district is always trumpeting (I'm in Ann Arbor, BTW) is a statistical artifact. Here is an example:

If one peruses further at the differences between African-American 4th graders and White 4th graders, over the past 8 years, the gap has narrowed by 13%. In 98/99, African-American students met or exceeded expectations in reading in only 36% of the African-American population, while White students were proficient in 72% of the White population. In 05/06, both racial groups have increased their achievement; 74% in the African-American population and 97% in the White population have met or exceeded expectations.

So the white pass rate went from 72 to 97 while blacks went from 36 to 74? High fives all around? Unfortunately no. The particular test was made easier (or the pass criteria changed) so that there's really very little room left for the white sub-group to improve, which means an apparent narrowing of the gap is pretty much inevitable (if you make it easy enough, 100% of both groups will 'pass', and there will be no gap).

But that doesn't mean the group means have gotten closer at all. Make the test hard enough to push the white pass rate back down to 72 and the African-American rate would likely be right back where it was, too. It is unconscionable that the district trumpets this kind of measure as 'progress' in closing the achievement gap since they surely know better, but they're under a lot of pressure to show results...

I would say spend the property tax revenue on police, fire, public utilities and services tangibly related to property. Schools should be funded equitably by a progressive state income tax. Over a generation or two, this simple change would not only improve schools, but also transform the ex/sub/urban landscape and much of American family life along with it.

Imagine a world where it's not necessary to live an hour from your job, just to get your kids into an excellent public school.

Michigan has had state funding of its schools for many years. Property taxes are still used, but they are sent to the state and redistributed back to the districts on a per-student basis. But there are still high-performing and low-performing districts, and that's not likely to change with the funding. The high-performing districts are those with families who produce high-performing kids (educated, middle-class, etc).

So Al, exactly what big liberal education programs are you asserting have failed? Are you trying to claim that Head Start or meal programs don't work? Because if you are then I think you are reading different data then I have seen. Maybe some school districts in some states have implemented bad programs in the past which didn't work, but I am not aware of some big expensive education proposal that flopped on its face like you seem to claim. And I know that no serious attempt has been made in our nations history to overhaul the education system of this country to address the systemic problem that this article was addressing.
And if you try to blame 'new math' or some other program in that vein, I think you might be missing the point of what kind of education reform we are actually discussing here.

All of them. You want just one? How about Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which is the main federal "throw money at the problem" law. After all, it's been around since 1965, and as the NYT piece shows, has failed completely to improve the schooling of poor kids.

But, really, the most impotrant takeaway from my posts is that we ALREADY spend a lot more on poor kids schooling than on middle class kids' schooling. It's not a lack of money that's the problem here.

Hate to say this, but as someone with some familiarity with this literature through about 5 years ago, I think Al and Slocum are winning this one on points. But picking up on Al's great analogy from above, I would say that we are a whole lot more likely to get progress by throwing $100 billion at low-performing schools than by throwing $100 billion at Iraq. I think $350 billion or so could have made a real dent in the achievement gap int this country, while all it did in Iraq was wreck the place. Hell, for $350 billion we could have gotten every low-performing kid adopted by their own personal tutor.

Alright, I just had to throw some water on my face and take a short rest on my couch, because I agree with Al.

From my limited experience: I worked as a Tech in Middle Schools for a couple of years in North Carolina, and the newest and best equipment almost always went to the schools in the poorer areas. The "rich" schools often had a lot of inherited equipment that was passed down through the county. A school in the richest town in the county had an entire lab of 386s (in 2004!) It was funny to hear teachers at the poorer schools moan about resources while they sat behind brand new computers with LCD screens attached to touch-screen blackboards, wondering what kind of great stuff the "white" schools were getting. Most often the answer would be, "Your old Pentium II."

Again, this is just my experience in a county in NC two years removed, but I thought I'd chime in.

I wonder how much of the discrepancy in teaching quality can be explained by the concentration of high paying jobs in the area? If good teachers tend to be married to other smart (but better paid) people, and relocate with them (since teaching jobs are everywhere), then communities with lots of good paying jobs should have better teachers. Granted there are many other factors at work, but this might partially explain why attracting the best teachers to urban schools is difficult.

I guess it depends which "suburban homeowners" you mean. It is probably the case that secular and nominally religious people are generally satisfied with their schools. It is also the case that evangelicals - some of whom do live in suburbs and own their own homes - have felt increasingly alienated from the culture of public schooling over the past forty years.

I really have only one point to make on this issue generally, and I make it repeatedly because it's one of the few points I have to make about which I feel quite strongly. The only way you're going to build a consensus for generous and equitable funding for k-12 education in this country is by adopting some variation on the Danish (and northern European) model, which is to say by adopting a rich system of choice.

This doesn't mean you need to countenance teaching creationism in high school science courses, but it does mean recognizing that in the Netherlands (which like America has a large evangelical minority, but which directly funds and provides indepenent oversight to parent-founded schools of any religious denomination or educational philosophy) national pride may be barely above in the 30th percentile, but satisfaction with their school system is almost off the charts. I myself believe the Danish system is even more preferable (the Danes have state sponsored parochial and independent schools, but also provide vouchers for pre-existing independent schools), and that a tax credit for homeschool parents would be a good thing for America.

BP--Having gone to public high schools in the deeply impoverished Oakland school system as well as the much more well off Berkeley school system, I observed the exact opposite. Oakland schools had few resources--our science labs were nearly non-existent compared with regular experiments and ample materials in Bekeley (for example.) Classes in Berkeley were also much smaller. So at least in my experience, schools in poorer areas are much poorer.

But this whole debate seems a bit misplaced. To use a bit more anecdotal evidence: My mom teaches 4-5 grade elementary school (in Oakland) and has said she has students who still don't know things like the names of all of the states, the name of the Governor, etc. She is testing them on that sort of stuff-but honestly, it's the sort of information that students should learn at home. A kid who talks to his parents about the news every day, no matter the quality of the teacher, will have a much easier time of grasping any sort of social science/history/current event issue, and that principle extends throughout different subjects. And sure, some poorer students from bad homes will do well, but on the whole, students with the wealthiest, most educated and involved parents will do better.

I've always thought the solution was to funnel money/resources into giving parents the tools to spend more quality time with their kids. But in any case, it seems to me that debates on reforming education need to drop the assumption that students walk into class on an equal footing. Do we really think the best teachers and best schools can make the kid who has to take the city bus to school equal to the kid who was driven to class in a Lexus?

My mom teaches 4-5 grade elementary school (in Oakland) and has said she has students who still don't know things like the names of all of the states, the name of the Governor, etc. She is testing them on that sort of stuff-but honestly, it's the sort of information that students should learn at home.

Wow I am really amazed by that statement. Standards of what parents are supposed to teach their kids really have changed!

I am a boomer, my parents (father college educated, mother a second generation American with high school education) would never have thought of teaching us the states. I went to parochial school, but I remember that that was a standard and big part of the curriculum and I remember public school kids doing the same things: we made "salt maps" as special project homework of the U.S. with the 50 states (which good parents helped you with) and we were taught all the state capitals rote, vocal drilling included. We learned a little about each state and then we chose a state which we had to research and write a report on. To do this second project, we were taught how to look up info. of that type at the library and were expected to do that as homework. We were also given the address of the state's tourism board and, using the opportunity to teach us how to write a business letter at the same time, told to write to them for brochures and information. The latter was very exciting for lots of kids because it was the first time we got real mail in response to mail we sent from grown-ups other than family.

I remember it all so well because it was intensive and took up a such a long amount of our study of "geography" for year. I can't imagine my parents sitting down and talking about the states with me, this was just not what you expected of parents. They helped you with your homework if you needed help, but "curriculum" came from school.

As for my parents parents teaching their kids the names of the states: fat chance, especially the Polish ones of which only 1 could read and didn't speak English. Somehow they both learned those, better than some people they meet these days. Which reminds me of another story. My father met a guy at the gym who tried to chat football when the Patriots were doing well and said he's not up on football, he hasn't been following pro sports for quite a few years, where are the Patriots from? The guy said: New England! And my father said: yes, but what state? And the guy adamantly answered: "New England!" in a tone that implied my father was a totally deaf and idiot at same time.

So..... minorities and poor kids can't learn at the same rate than affluent kids in school, but they can quickly assimilate the very complex instructions and drills of team sports with exemplary dedication and perseverance at the same schools. I humbly suggest to adopt the ways and methods of coaches all over the country who day in and day out succeed in achieving excellence from kids who according to you all can't read or do math or know the state capitals. Where is the concern about producing teachers who can coach?

Could it possibly be that the "resource allocations" be nothing but a game of building bureaucratic morass and corruption?

Brad is right. There is a huge social/economic class issue here. Poor parents pressed to the wall with multiple jobs don't have the time or (sometimes) the background to help their kids succeed in school. The importance of parents as role models, reading, talking about current events, valuing the educational process can not be overstated. This is a generational issue. Poor parents probably received a very substandard education that did not lift them out of poverty. Chances are this is a multigenerational phenomena, a cycle of underserving poor children. Why should they put effort into a system that failed them so completely? Even with extra resources and support, poor children will probably under perform, but that doesn't mean that we as a society shouldn't try to help these kids. The way that NCLB penalizes schools with low performing students drives the best teachers out of those schools.

p.s. to My mom teaches 4-5 grade elementary school (in Oakland & my comment on it above: I forgot to mention that I am sure that that curriculum was taught 4th or 5th grade. 3rd grade would have been too early. When did it become parents' job to teach children the states in 3rd grade or they will forever be doomed to failure? How did teachers get out of doing it?

Artappraiser--I'm not quite sure why you're taking that example so literally. The point was to contrast general knowledge and the ways in which kids from more affluent homes tend to have much greater advantages, in terms of how they're raised, that gives them a major edge in the sort of knowledge that can help a kid become successful. Would a parent literally quiz her kids on the names of the states? No. Of course not. That would be silly.

But in a house where they talk about news and politics, and get to go on vacations, the kids will have a much better intuitive understanding of a state than in a house where the parents work so hard to feed their kids they can barely muster the energy to teach them about news, etc.

Let's take another example: An affluent family almost certainly owns a computer, and may own multiple computers. The kid learns computers from when he's little. Wouldn't he be more likely to be better at computers than a poor student who only has access to a computer for an hour a week at school? When it comes time to learn to research papers, who will have an easier time?

Education reform, no matter how good, can only do so much, and to blame all educational inequality on educational institutions is utterly myopic.

I'm glad artappraiser is here.

I always liked his comments at the TPMCafe.

The article pointed out that because poor children start at a deficit, they need the best teachers to provide more and different kinds of instruction and support. As a former teacher I saw the best teachers "earn their stripes" and move to the "nicer" schools with higher achieving, better prepared students, because their jobs were so much easier there. Without substantial economic incentives and other inducements, this trend will continue.

The most interesting part of this conversation is that everyone agrees on the underlying; that it is possible to bridge the current achievement gap. It seems a truly comprehensive national study district by district with details available over the web to everyone is long overdue. We seem to have many specific local problems that unsurprisingly have resisted the national blanket solutions provided by federal legislation. We also seem to have uniformly bad policies at the state and local levels that contribute to the problems in these schools. However there seems to be more than enough interest in fixing this.

It would seem the next frontier of blogging and wikipedia is to document the truly local information while providing a uniform structure to that information so that it can be followed by and incorporated into a national consensus.

Why spend time tying up the conversation with specifics only from Toms River, NJ when only a subset of all districts nationally will have similar problems. Or why propose a solution that would fit only situations similar to Toms River, NJ when that solution will certainly avoid addressing the problems of districts whose effective behavior profiles do not match Toms River?

We have the technology and brainpower to slice and dice the national data so that each and every separate sub problem can be addressed with the appropriate solution to its circumstance. We also have the ability to provide multiple transparent and verifiable methods of gathering and verifying the data so that quantifiable and comparable results can be generated.

To start we must get the data and studies out of the dungeon of academic journals and onto the web.

Slocum, I don't know the deal with Michigan's standardized tests, but the logical response for rational states is to lower the standard - because No Child Left Behind mandates 100% proficiency by 2014, and any schools that fail are labelled as failures and restructured.

If you have a test that will label 98% of schools as failing, as we do in Massachusetts if schools had to hit that level based on 2005 test results, you're not doing public schools a service. So unless federal law changes, it is a rational response in Massachusetts for supporters of public schools to hope that test results are fudged, because having 98% of the schools declared inadequate, turned over to state control, and farmed out to private managers is not a positive step.

I think it would be more productive to get federal law to set achievable goals and change emphasis from punitive sanctions to research-based interventions to put best practices in place. But figuring out those best practices isn't easy. More money sometimes helps, but as often as not doesn't. Choice can improve results for some, but it serves familes that have socioeconomic mobility better than those without, and it can sap the social resources from the population left behind.

I'd like to see schools like the Kipp schools set up as neighborhood schools rather than as lottery schools, so that the default would be putting a representative set of families from a district into the schools, rather than using a lottery among families that want the mobility. That's how you can find out if the results can be replicated. You'd have to let parents opt out of schools that have those higher demands, but I think that has a better chance of closing the gap than setting up "better" schools that cater to familes that are seeking mobility.

On the other hand, the city of Cambridge transformed its choice program several years ago, trying to switch from it's successful public school choice program that was leaving behind some neighborhoods and neighborhood schools, to a plan that sought to allocate better-school slots based on socioeconomics, and the results were mixed. I don't know enough of the details to delve further, but suspect the outcome is a pessimistic one for anyone who hopes for radical socioeconomic improvements based on reallocation of prime slots.

The funniest line in Paul Tough's article was that one of the things needed are "teachers who work 15 to 16 hours per day." That sounds like a nationally scalable solution!

Artappraiser--I'm not quite sure why you're taking that example so literally. The point was to contrast general knowledge and the ways in which kids from more affluent homes tend to have much greater advantages, in terms of how they're raised, that gives them a major edge in the sort of knowledge that can help a kid become successful. Would a parent literally quiz her kids on the names of the states? No. Of course not. That would be silly.

You actually said that that was the sort of thing your Mom as a teacher now expects them to learn at home. I took it literally because you wrote it that way. Go back and read what you said. It struck me as not just silly but amazingly outrageous. I thought: well heck, what the hell is public education for? If every parent is expected to be up to teaching their own kids, then why do we even need it? We have public education so that kids that cannot be educated by their parents will be educated. It strikes me as folly to expect my mothers' Polish immigrant parents with 8 kids to do anything further than provide the shoes, paper, book fees and a rested, fed kid with respect for the teacher. The education system of my time expected the parents to furnish the salt, flour and food coloring for the salt maps for geography class and the stamp for the letter, not the lessons on the states themselves.

Yeah, of course, one cannot compete with rich private school kids or children of extreme privilege with parents that are highly cultured and educated in their home surroundings. So what? What does that even have to do with public education for the public good? The rich have more advantages, that is a new problem in the equation? Puhleez.

But in a house where they talk about news and politics, and get to go on vacations, the kids will have a much better intuitive understanding of a state than in a house where the parents work so hard to feed their kids they can barely muster the energy to teach them about news, etc.

I didn't have the kind of advantages you are stressing as so important, neither did my 3 of my brothers, yet all 4 of us got college degrees, two of us have Master's. (Have a 4th brother, retarded, and even he has a high school degree and a 2-year vocational college degree in cooking.) The main thing is not what your parents can teach you or give you in books and media and culture but that they instill that school and education is important, that it's your job as a kid, and that you will get nowhere without it, you are expected to go and do your best.

No art in my house growing up hung or discussed, they didn't know from art. Requisite visit or two to the science museum, yes, but not art. The state fair instead. Little music, no phonograph, just an AM radio rarely played and the single black and white TV. (dad was interested in news and politics, but we hated his interest and he didn't burden us kids with it, thinking children should have protected fun childhoods of play. And we did hate that boring male talking head Meet the Press when he turned it on, it was like torture.) Yet I ended up with a Master's in Art History and jobs in the auction business followed by independent work as an art appraiser for very wealthy people.

Some of those wealthy people, I see their private lives. Sorry but all those advantages can easily produce a Paris Hilton or someone in lifelong depression as much as a Matthew Yglesias type.

Sorry, I just don't buy your explanation as the answer. It's not so simplistic as that.

The longer I live and travel the U.S. and learn about it's sub-cultures, the more I believe that that is of the ultimate importance how education itself is viewed. Bill Cosby famously let us all know about those dirty secret problems with black culture. Lately, in the NYC area (living in the Bronx) I have seen much progress on this front with black kids, the attitude toward education is changing. Where it is hurting now is with Latino culture, where family and having children, rites of passage like quinceras and weddings and births are given high priority over education, big flashy plastic toys over books, cell phones over computers. don't get me wrong, I understand the rejection of the white man's rat race or whatever, I guess it's a valid choice about quality of life, but therein lies some of your failing schools, low test scores, low incomes and heavier rate of falling through any safety nets. Actually, I was interested to see in the press over the last year or so some stories about 2nd/3rd generation Latinas finally getting a yen for education over the wedding (or kids without one) at 16 or 18.

Oh, and one of those brothers of mine is a free-lance coach to primary schools in a midwestern city, teaches sports in 4 parochial and 1 charter school, 3 of those are more than 1/2 minority, another has a lot of Jewish kids. I get a lot of stories over the phone from him. So I am not exactly dense about the situation "on the ground," as it were.

Finally your comment really hit me over the head, bringing forth related thoughts that had been bubbling over the last few weeks with Yglesias' posts on topic: this reliance on/blaming of parents is getting out of hand and it goes hand-in-hand with some unhealthy attitudes about raising overscheduled competitive monsters in suburbia, some which might not end up as well as we all think.

That a certain cultural subsector of suburbs are doing one thing, it does not necessarily follow that it is the right answer for the rest of the population nor that their way of doing things is going to turn out all right in the end for those kids with the cutthroat race to get into the best college from age 5, ala the character of Rick Moranis's kid in the movie "Parenthood," where sometimes letting a kid butt his head against things is better than forcing flash cards at 3 years old. I'm starting to think it's more likely that they end up like a lot of rich kids folks, not happy, aimless, and the country with a big burnt-out slacker boom in a decade or so.

Linus:

[blush] Your kind words are hard to take graciously since I have kind of adjusted long ago to a internet image thrust upon me of contrarian crank (one totally devoid of anything to do with my actual personality.) But the comment is appreciated, and I'd like to say: LIKEWISE--you're a great commenter and I do seek out what you have to say.

I like how any discussion of "resources" is automatically translated into "throw money at it" language by the standard-issue Reactionary Reading Goggles. Very handy for removing any chance of a real exploration of the issues.

Al:

we ALREADY spend a lot more on poor kids schooling than on middle class kids' schooling.

I guess it goes without saying, but obviously this is false. In reality, after years of political struggle over school funding, there are some places in the U.S. where schools with high levels of poverty spend more per-pupil (though almost never "a lot more") than nearby schools with low levels. (Boston is one example.) In many more places, spending in high poverty schools is the same or lower than in low poverty schools. Then if spending is weighted according to special needs, there are almost no places when more is spent per-pupil in high poverty schools.

Beyond the specifics of this issues, though, I'm really amazed by the total lack of common sense that exists in people like Al. It's like the Iraq-WMD issue: even if people didn't know the subject in detail, just the fact that Iraq had never successfully hidden banned weapons from UN inspections should have indicated that they probably weren't hiding anything in February, 2003. Yet you had this enormous amount of completely certain blathering that was 100% wrong.

Likewise here: what person with an iota of common sense thinks there are political forces in the U.S. that would cause "a lot more" to be spent on the schooling of poor kids? Does that jibe with anything that you see in the world around you? It's preposterous before you even look at any specifics.

blogospheric lovefest over, now back to regularly scheduled programming.

the discussion of resources and results misses a few key points. firstly, simple economics dictates that to achieve the same level of infrastructure (e.g. schools, etc.), spending in urban districts will have to be higher. why? things in cities cost more. land, labor, etc. this of course translates into higher per pupil expenditures for urban districts to serve the same number of kids.

secondly, it's not that in some cases we need to start throwing more money at the problem. dc for example has the highest per pupil expenditures but the lowest achievement. a large part of this is due to economic conditions of students who attend schools in DCPS. it also has a lot to do with the fact that DCPS is one of the most ineffective and frustrating bureaucracies around (symptomatic of DC gov't generally, i'm afraid). ineffective and wasteful utilization of resources in the case of DCPS might be an understatement. so certainly bureaucratic reform would be necessary, and could generate some savings. this efficiency issue is also one of the drivers behind charters and school choice, obviously.

third, al is missing the key point here: if you start with a group of students who have lower levels of achievement and are developmentally behind AT SCHOOL ENTRY (due to poverty, parental social capital, etc.), then you will have to SPEND MORE MONEY than you would in suburban districts to reach the same achievement outcomes. COLA/price adjusted spending for suburban and urban districts will never be equal unless we had the exact same inputs (i.e. students) in both systems (ignoring a few assumptions here, i know, but the basic point holds).

my home state of vermont did pass an education funding equalization law (Act 60), and it was quite contentious at first. after some tinkering, things have settled down. others have provided some other examples. so it is possible.

Well, the elephant in the room here is, unsurprisingly, the Drug Wars. You remember the war on drugs, that throws parents in jail, gobbles state and local budgets to pay for the jails, and gobbles school budgets with programs like the DARE program, which turned out in many districts to be costing over $50,000 per school per year. Add in a different kind of war, in Iraq, and you can practically guarantee that funding for education will suffer.

Secondly, as the Al-bot reminds us, it's not really about achievement at all- it's a wedge issue, largely designed to exploit the feelings of older people who no longer have kids in school, and are asked to vote for levies that tax property. Add generous doses of Creationism and anti-unionism and then count on folks like Al to just make up what they cannot prove.

In the face of all this, local school districts have done surprisingly well in getting levies passed and providing good classrooms- probably better than any other American institution under such a relentless two-fold attack.

Of course, there's no law against talking endlessly about a subject that interests you mildly. Just don't expect a little tinkering with the carburetor to make your lawnmower engine into a big-block V-8.

Artappraiser:

I didn't have the kind of advantages you are stressing as so important, neither did my 3 of my brothers, yet all 4 of us got college degrees, two of us have Master's. (Have a 4th brother, retarded, and even he has a high school degree and a 2-year vocational college degree in cooking.)...
Some of those wealthy people, I see their private lives. Sorry but all those advantages can easily produce a Paris Hilton or someone in lifelong depression as much as a Matthew Yglesias type.

Well, yes. There are individual examples where people will excel no matter what, or bumble around no matter what. But in the aggegate, having wealth, well-educated parents is strongly correlated with students doing well; having poorer, struggling parents is a good indicator that the child will grow up struggling in school. Or as a couple univesity people note here:

Perhaps two-thirds of the members of society who ultimately reproduce their parents' level of educational attainment, while about one-third take a different path.

There are a variety of explanations for why that might be, including how parents view education--as you suggest Artappraiser--but this viewpoint doesn't happen in a vaccuum, and the socioeconomic position of parents does impact how they talk about education with their children. And parents who can barely pay the electric bill may not feel comfortable encouraging their kids to go to college--after all, who would pay?

I am in no way suggesting that this is the largely the fault of paents--over and over again, I've pointed to the ways that poverty might make it harder for parents to raise kids. Nor am I trying to suggest that they are free from blame--poor parents can certainly raise very successful children.

And there is nothing wrong with improving schools--we should hope to improve urban schools. My point, though, is that thinking that anything we do to improve schools that does not seek to address larger issues will miss some of the key factors which perpetuate inequality in and out of school.

Al, as usual you are full of it. Would it kill you to do some research?

A report comparing per pupil spending in cities and suburbs:
http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d03234.pdf

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