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(1) Education is not a good with the kinds of features which allow approximating rational choice, and so there's little reason to expect that a market would wor

(1) Education is not a good with the kinds of features which allow approximating rational choice, and so there's little reason to expect that a market would work. The school has a good reputation, so we'll pay money to send our kid there. Sounds like a rational choice to me. (2) Even leaving aside (1), no, there's no reason to expect that; among the errors that appear to be implicated in that conclusion is confusing schools with teachers. I suspect there is a granularity problem here. Discerning comics fans follow creators, not titles. Maybe the future of the education market will involve dis-intermediation and a more direct connection between students and teachers. If they really believed that excessive central regulation was the problem, then rather then promoting charter schools exempt from the bureaucratic rules along with greater central accountability and regulation for traditional public schools, advocates would instead simply reduce central control and increase local (district and even site-level) control of traditional public schools. This is a bit of a non-sequitur to me. "Promoting charter schools exempt from the bureaucratic rules" is a perfectly reasonable step. along with greater central accountability and regulation for traditional public schools If those schools are failing catastrophically, I don't see what's necessarily wrong with that. So long as there are some schools more independent of the central bureaucracy, there is more choice in the market. Again, your "logic" relies on false dichotomies and doesn't logically hold up. They don't, because what they really want is a subsidy for private, for-profit entities What if there was a more direct way to divert funds at the behest of the parent to private for-profit entities? There's a "subsidy" for public education. What's wrong with empowering parents to redirect those funds? It's beginning to seem like you're just restating the whole point of the proposed idea, just wording it so it sounds bad to you. while engineering maximized paralysis in traditional public schools to drive an exodus to the subsidized private providers. I many cases, the traditional public schools are already "paralyzed." The whole point is to enable an exodus to private providers, if the parents so choose. Would you support such initiatives if they didn't come with "engineering maximized paralysis in traditional public schools?" Why is a for-profit school necessarily bad?

dragonwriter 8y ago
> The school has a good reputation, so we'll pay money to send our kid there. Sounds like a rational choice to me. Well, no. It's clearly a choice, but a rational choice is one where he costs and benefits are born by voluntary participants in the transaction who decide to accept or reject them based on maximization of their personal utility function with complete knowledge of all costs of and utilities that will be derived from the decision with an infinite time horizon. No real decision actually did this, but many reasonably approximate it. But childhood education fails hard and almost every aspect. Opacity of impacts and the downstream effects and the fact that where here is choice, its third party choice on behalf of a party who is not in a good position to weigh the effects of a decision against heir own utility function are the main issues. > . "Promoting charter schools exempt from the bureaucratic rules" is a perfectly reasonable step. If the problem is too many rules, then you don't need limited special providers exempt from the rules, you need to remove the unnecessary rules entirely. > > along with greater central accountability and regulation for traditional public schools > If those schools are failing catastrophically, I don't see what's necessarily wrong with that. If, as is the justification for diverting funds to private schools through vouchers and charters, the traditional public schools are “catastrophically failing” because of excessive central micromanagement, increasing central micromanagement of traditional public schools is exacerbating, not alleviating the problem. OTOH, if traditional public schools are “catastrophically failing” because of inadequate central management and accountability in the use of public funds, diverting public funds to private schools with less accountability and centralized management through vouchers and charters is monumentally stupid. But the same people advancing charters and vouchers have also been behind moves to increase centralized accountability and management of traditional public schools, and in fact have specifically linked those efforts to charter/voucher programs. > The whole point is to enable an exodus to private providers, if the parents so choose. Which would be problematic, even if it didn't involve policy designed to increase both the actual and perceived failings of traditional public schools, because it rests—even further than is already the case—quality of education on parental skill in evaluating quality of education, even if the vouchers were restricted to institutions which took them as full-cost with no supplemental required payment (which is sometimes not the case; voucher programs, and even more often tax credit systems, are often partial tuition subsidies which drive market clearing tuition up at private schools but don't make it an equal cost choice with public schools l), thereby entrenching inequality from generation to generation. But in the real world, that's not the goal; the “if the parents so choose” isn't part of the goal, the goal is to in the near term deceive parents into the choice, and in the long term collapse public education entirely so that there is no choice.
- stcredzero 8y ago
  Well, no. It's clearly a choice, but a rational choice is one where... Sorry, that sounds like a bunch of ideological gobbledygook to me. As you say, "No real decision actually did this." Parents already choose schools for their children, often doing their best to be rational based on incomplete information. That's a situation called "life." If the problem is too many rules, then you don't need limited special providers exempt from the rules, you need to remove the unnecessary rules entirely. Nope, you're strawmanning here. Again, you can have more rules for the failing incumbent players and fewer for the new experiments. No contradiction there, if the increased rules are determined by the failing track record. If the new experiments start to fail, they can have the same rules as well. because it rests—even further than is already the case—quality of education on parental skill in evaluating quality of education Parental skill in evaluating quality of education worked well enough in the 1st half of the 20th century. (Granted, public schools also worked better.) Polish, Italian, Hungarian, and many other immigrant groups arrived and scored lower than the US median on IQ tests, but had caught up and surpassed the US median by the 1950's. There were similar gains in socioeconomic status. A big difference is that there were no perverse government subsidies applied to those groups to enable 73% of children to be born out of wedlock. A big difference is that there wasn't a glorification of antisocial and anti-learning attitudes and behaviors throughout the media, making it uncool to study hard and get good grades.
astrocat 8y ago
I think your example here of “rational choice” is a great example for the problem of treating the school ecosystem like a market. Only those with means to participate will benefit. If there is someone with no means to pay for better, what is the default? You quickly end up with a system where those who need access to quality education the most (the poor) have the least access, or only access to the worst. Furthermore, markets require demand to drive pricing. In k-12 education, demand is completely inelastic - school attendance is compulsory. Who services those who can’t afford to participate but are required to do so? And how does the entity serving those have motive for quality? There’s no competition.
- stcredzero 8y ago
  I think your example here of “rational choice” is a great example for the problem of treating the school ecosystem like a market. Only those with means to participate will benefit. So why not give people the means to participate? You quickly end up with a system where those who need access to quality education the most (the poor) have the least access, or only access to the worst. That's where we are right now. Furthermore, markets require demand to drive pricing. In k-12 education, demand is completely inelastic - school attendance is compulsory. Non-sequitur again. If it's still possible to choose which school to attend, there's a choice. Eating is compulsory. There's still a market for food. Who services those who can’t afford to participate but are required to do so? We already have this entity. And how does the entity serving those have motive for quality? There’s no competition. We already have this problem, just that there's no way out for a lot of people, and we could enable a few people to get out.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > We already have this problem, just that there's no way out for a lot of people, and we could enable a few people to get out. Actual studies of choice programa generally show that in the short term they hurt outcomes and in the long term that goes away to about even; some of the worst student outcomes in the US are in the systems with most extensive availability and use of school choice. The evidence does not suggest that school choice is a solution to any actual problem in public education—which has real problems—no matter how much both those with money at stake in the private education business and religious devotees of free-market fundamentalism want us to believe it is; it's certainly a powerful distraction from efforts to find real solutions, though.

dragonwriter 8y ago

> The school has a good reputation, so we'll pay money to send our kid there. Sounds like a rational choice to me. Well, no. It's clearly a choice, but a rational choice is one where he costs and benefits are born by voluntary participants in the transaction who decide to accept or reject them based on maximization of their personal utility function with complete knowledge of all costs of and utilities that will be derived from the decision with an infinite time horizon. No real decision actually did this, but many reasonably approximate it. But childhood education fails hard and almost every aspect. Opacity of impacts and the downstream effects and the fact that where here is choice, its third party choice on behalf of a party who is not in a good position to weigh the effects of a decision against heir own utility function are the main issues. > . "Promoting charter schools exempt from the bureaucratic rules" is a perfectly reasonable step. If the problem is too many rules, then you don't need limited special providers exempt from the rules, you need to remove the unnecessary rules entirely. > > along with greater central accountability and regulation for traditional public schools > If those schools are failing catastrophically, I don't see what's necessarily wrong with that. If, as is the justification for diverting funds to private schools through vouchers and charters, the traditional public schools are “catastrophically failing” because of excessive central micromanagement, increasing central micromanagement of traditional public schools is exacerbating, not alleviating the problem. OTOH, if traditional public schools are “catastrophically failing” because of inadequate central management and accountability in the use of public funds, diverting public funds to private schools with less accountability and centralized management through vouchers and charters is monumentally stupid. But the same people advancing charters and vouchers have also been behind moves to increase centralized accountability and management of traditional public schools, and in fact have specifically linked those efforts to charter/voucher programs. > The whole point is to enable an exodus to private providers, if the parents so choose. Which would be problematic, even if it didn't involve policy designed to increase both the actual and perceived failings of traditional public schools, because it rests—even further than is already the case—quality of education on parental skill in evaluating quality of education, even if the vouchers were restricted to institutions which took them as full-cost with no supplemental required payment (which is sometimes not the case; voucher programs, and even more often tax credit systems, are often partial tuition subsidies which drive market clearing tuition up at private schools but don't make it an equal cost choice with public schools l), thereby entrenching inequality from generation to generation. But in the real world, that's not the goal; the “if the parents so choose” isn't part of the goal, the goal is to in the near term deceive parents into the choice, and in the long term collapse public education entirely so that there is no choice.

stcredzero 8y ago
Well, no. It's clearly a choice, but a rational choice is one where... Sorry, that sounds like a bunch of ideological gobbledygook to me. As you say, "No real decision actually did this." Parents already choose schools for their children, often doing their best to be rational based on incomplete information. That's a situation called "life." If the problem is too many rules, then you don't need limited special providers exempt from the rules, you need to remove the unnecessary rules entirely. Nope, you're strawmanning here. Again, you can have more rules for the failing incumbent players and fewer for the new experiments. No contradiction there, if the increased rules are determined by the failing track record. If the new experiments start to fail, they can have the same rules as well. because it rests—even further than is already the case—quality of education on parental skill in evaluating quality of education Parental skill in evaluating quality of education worked well enough in the 1st half of the 20th century. (Granted, public schools also worked better.) Polish, Italian, Hungarian, and many other immigrant groups arrived and scored lower than the US median on IQ tests, but had caught up and surpassed the US median by the 1950's. There were similar gains in socioeconomic status. A big difference is that there were no perverse government subsidies applied to those groups to enable 73% of children to be born out of wedlock. A big difference is that there wasn't a glorification of antisocial and anti-learning attitudes and behaviors throughout the media, making it uncool to study hard and get good grades.

astrocat 8y ago

I think your example here of “rational choice” is a great example for the problem of treating the school ecosystem like a market. Only those with means to participate will benefit. If there is someone with no means to pay for better, what is the default? You quickly end up with a system where those who need access to quality education the most (the poor) have the least access, or only access to the worst. Furthermore, markets require demand to drive pricing. In k-12 education, demand is completely inelastic - school attendance is compulsory. Who services those who can’t afford to participate but are required to do so? And how does the entity serving those have motive for quality? There’s no competition.

stcredzero 8y ago
I think your example here of “rational choice” is a great example for the problem of treating the school ecosystem like a market. Only those with means to participate will benefit. So why not give people the means to participate? You quickly end up with a system where those who need access to quality education the most (the poor) have the least access, or only access to the worst. That's where we are right now. Furthermore, markets require demand to drive pricing. In k-12 education, demand is completely inelastic - school attendance is compulsory. Non-sequitur again. If it's still possible to choose which school to attend, there's a choice. Eating is compulsory. There's still a market for food. Who services those who can’t afford to participate but are required to do so? We already have this entity. And how does the entity serving those have motive for quality? There’s no competition. We already have this problem, just that there's no way out for a lot of people, and we could enable a few people to get out.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > We already have this problem, just that there's no way out for a lot of people, and we could enable a few people to get out. Actual studies of choice programa generally show that in the short term they hurt outcomes and in the long term that goes away to about even; some of the worst student outcomes in the US are in the systems with most extensive availability and use of school choice. The evidence does not suggest that school choice is a solution to any actual problem in public education—which has real problems—no matter how much both those with money at stake in the private education business and religious devotees of free-market fundamentalism want us to believe it is; it's certainly a powerful distraction from efforts to find real solutions, though.