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> "You're talking about out-of-school. I agree with that part." Yeah, and my argument is that is the part that has really changed in the last few generations.

by roc 16y ago

> "You're talking about out-of-school. I agree with that part." Yeah, and my argument is that is the part that has really changed in the last few generations. In the school, at least in my area, is all but frozen in time since I went through the public schools. Yet the test scores are dropping. I guess it's possible the teachers have all gotten worse, but what sticks out to me is the attitudes of students and parents. > "Based on your message I don't think you understand the theory behind school choice" No, I get it. But what I also understand is how little the school and the teacher matter, comparatively. Put it this way: say we're updating a house to use less energy during the winter months. You're saying we could hang better insulation all around the house and goose up efficiency 8-10%. I don't disagree at all. I'm saying maybe we should focus on the windows, since they're the biggest problem areas. And with a lot less money, effort and potential for collateral problems, we could boost efficiency around 40+%. You don't say you disagree either. But where we're not seeing eye to eye, is where you want to start taking down the siding first. Addressing the cultural problem is lower risk, lower cost and higher return. And if we don't do it, we're still going to have an educational problem when we're done rolling out school choice.

jerf 16y ago
Allowing school choice is the single largest thing we could do to address the culture problem. That's my point. You're just handwaving on the culture problem, I'm giving you a step you can actually take to get there. Second-order effects, second-order effects, second-order effects. When schools actually respond to more effort and it has some sort of visible effect on a child's education, more people will care. Incentives matter. The current system absorbs all of a parent's care and hammers it flat into the same basic mediocre product, suppressing it instead of amplifying it. A caring parent may do better than an uncaring one, but nowhere near enough better. Unfortunately, not investing a lot into the system at that point is perfectly locally rational. How do you propose to fix the culture problem? The same-old, same-old first order solution where you appropriate some money and run some ads exhorting people to care more about schooling? New programs with the sweet, sweet intentions and nobody even examining the question of whether do anything because everybody's too busy feeling good about themselves? Paying people to care more, perhaps by incentivizing good grades? We've tried all those and more. It's not like "it's a culture problem" is exactly a new idea, and it's an easy one for "the system" to deal with because it does involve just what I said (money and government programs, for better and for worse not hard to push through), a solution very easy for the system to deploy. It won't work until schools actually magnify efforts instead of squashing them, and no amount of central mandating is going to get us there. Cultural issues like schools aren't houses. That's first-order thinking. They're life forms, second order and so on. They react to your decisions, they do not passively consume them. With those sorts of systems it's actually quite common for the straightest path from here to there to be anything but simply striking out in what is most obviously the direction of the goal and pushing as hard as you can. If it were that easy, we wouldn't have a problem in the first place!

by roc 16y ago

jerf 16y ago

Allowing school choice is the single largest thing we could do to address the culture problem. That's my point. You're just handwaving on the culture problem, I'm giving you a step you can actually take to get there. Second-order effects, second-order effects, second-order effects. When schools actually respond to more effort and it has some sort of visible effect on a child's education, more people will care. Incentives matter. The current system absorbs all of a parent's care and hammers it flat into the same basic mediocre product, suppressing it instead of amplifying it. A caring parent may do better than an uncaring one, but nowhere near enough better. Unfortunately, not investing a lot into the system at that point is perfectly locally rational. How do you propose to fix the culture problem? The same-old, same-old first order solution where you appropriate some money and run some ads exhorting people to care more about schooling? New programs with the sweet, sweet intentions and nobody even examining the question of whether do anything because everybody's too busy feeling good about themselves? Paying people to care more, perhaps by incentivizing good grades? We've tried all those and more. It's not like "it's a culture problem" is exactly a new idea, and it's an easy one for "the system" to deal with because it does involve just what I said (money and government programs, for better and for worse not hard to push through), a solution very easy for the system to deploy. It won't work until schools actually magnify efforts instead of squashing them, and no amount of central mandating is going to get us there. Cultural issues like schools aren't houses. That's first-order thinking. They're life forms, second order and so on. They react to your decisions, they do not passively consume them. With those sorts of systems it's actually quite common for the straightest path from here to there to be anything but simply striking out in what is most obviously the direction of the goal and pushing as hard as you can. If it were that easy, we wouldn't have a problem in the first place!