9 ms·

Anybody up for a grand bargin? I'll trade you Medicare-for-All in exchange for a complete privatization (w/ vouchers) of education.

ThrustVectoring 7y ago
Privatization would make these sorts of problems worse, as schools compete more vigorously to sell signalling value to parents. The fix is to monopolize signalling value through legal fiat - make it illegal to ask job applicants or allow applicants to disclose the school they attended, and replace it with an examination and/or interview based certification monopoly.
- bunderbunder 7y ago
  And, indeed, what studies are available seem to confirm this. Not just for private schools - charter schools also tend to underperform the public schools. Granted, kids who go to them do tend to get better test scores, go to better universities, have more successful careers, etc. But that's because the whole education industry is a massive exercise in selection bias. The most careful studies I've seen, though, seem to indicate that, all other factors being equal, a typical kid is going to learn more in public school than in private or charter school. This rather mirrors my own experience. I did 2 years of public high school, and 2 years of college prep. I can say that it's absolutely true that my classmates were generally smarter and more studious in the prep school. But the prep school was also easy. It really didn't particularly matter how much effort I put into my homework. As long as I didn't blatantly blow it off, my teachers would dutifully send my parents a report card full of the As and Bs they were paying for. By contrast, it was the public schools where I had the teachers who'd keep ratcheting up their expectations until they could sense that I was actually working to try and get good grades on my papers.
  - hakfoo 7y ago
    In terms of actual student performance (as opposed to grades), I'd expect parents to be a major factor. They're going to build support networks-- running the fundraisers, supporting extracurriculars, keeping an eye on student performance and scandals. When we provide "options" -- charters, private schooling, even public magnets-- the parents who are motivated and concerned enough to build those networks tend to pounce on them. The "default" public school loses its champions and ends up producing worse outcomes for everyone whose parents aren't tuned in.
- DubiousPusher 7y ago
  > Privatization would make these sorts of problems worse, as schools compete more vigorously to sell signalling value to parents. That's one of the most compelling arguments against school vouchers I've encountered. Especially as that is exactly what has happened in higher education where consumer choice is higher.
- donw 7y ago
  Living in Japan, I am compelled to agree. Most universities here are private, and everybody knows that you have to get "a college education". The end result being that, outside of a select few national institutions that appear to have some degree of academic rigor, university in Japan is referred to as a "four-year vacation", and graduation is effectively automatic. Reflecting back on the original post, I'm not sure that nationalization of universities in the US would help. We have plenty of high-quality state schools as-is, but Harvard and friends are prestigious because their brands come with deeply powerful social networks. The same effect applies to making it illegal to put university names on resumes. Sure, there is definitely a halo effect in being able to put Harvard or Stanford on your resume, but I would wager that the vast majority of top-tier university students don't apply by (metaphorically) filling out a job application and handing it to the shift manager. Instead, your work comes through your network. Alice introduces you to Bob who knows that Charlene has invested in TinyCo, which is poised to be the next unicorn, and so you get in on the "ground floor" in this fashion. That's not the kind of thing you can really address via legislation. (Note that there is an assumption here that you can Do The Thing. Charlene probably doesn't want you working at TinyCo and squandering her investment if you aren't going to help make it the next unicorn.)
  - projektfu 7y ago
    I discovered that it’s even worse. Alice’s mom sends an email to Bob who tells Charlene that his friend’s kid is super smart and of course from Harvard, and then when Alice calls she can ask for Charlene directly and see if she wants to go for a glass of wine.
- aeternus 7y ago
  Competition should be a good thing. The real issue is that colleges and employers are looking at the wrong signals. This leads the existing competition. GPA for example is arbitrary yet colleges and employers are basically asking schools to 'optimize' / maximize it. Standardized testing (ACT/SAT) is much better, but still misses important aspects like leadership ability. Even the prestige of the school is a poor signal. Give employers / colleges a better objective measure and they will gladly use it. Perhaps we should have a post-college standardized test.
swivelmaster 7y ago
Privatization shifts the signaling game theory from pandering to government funding to pandering to consumers. Given that consumers don’t have nearly as much time to research options individually as governments do collectively, this can and likely will create far worse outcomes on average. edit: This comment has gone from 8 points to 4 points in about 10 minutes, so I can only assume this thread has become the target of a downvote brigade from some other web site. The joys of discussing politics in the age of 4chan!
- cobbzilla 7y ago
  By this logic, shouldn’t we nationalize most major industries? oil/energy, motor vehicles, the list is endless.
  - toiletfuneral 7y ago
    Absolutely.
  - danharaj 7y ago
    There might be a better way now than what was practical in 1900.
  - swivelmaster 7y ago
    At an abstract level, one of the major goals of regulation is to stop companies from doing things that consumers can only figure out are bad on a timescale long enough for them to have already done damage and made enormous profits. There are a ton of regulations around motor vehicles, like disclosing MPG, maintaining safety standards, and consistent odometer readings - things that consumers wouldn't necessarily be able to figure out on their own until it was too late. If a car just plain doesn't work, or craps out in less than a thousand miles, that's easy to remedy. The problem with applying these standards to education is that the timeframe to assess damage is very long, and it's more or less irreversible. If you spend a week driving a car and the engine dies, you can take it back and get a refund and then go get a new one. If you put your kid in a charter school and they fail to learn math for a year, you can't get that time back. It's gone forever, and your child will be behind for anywhere from months to years to forever. This is why we need to treat certain specific sectors differently. Consumer goods, sure, whatever, the government can make sure that toys don't contain lead and that our TVs wont randomly explode, and after that it's up to us to decide. But education, healthcare, etc., the consequences of giving consumers "choice" and allowing those sectors to advertise freely and self-regulate are severe and often irreversible.
conanbatt 7y ago
M4A is a 10~15% GDP expenditure. Way more than vouchers.
dragonwriter 7y ago
> Anybody up for a grand bargin? I'll trade you Medicare-for-All in exchange for a complete privatization (w/ vouchers) of education. It's not only a bad deal, but you don't have the power to deliver your end of the bargain, and the people that would have the power are at least as opposed to M4A as Conventional public schools, so no, it's not worth considet on many levels. And, anyway vouchers aren't really privatization, it is public with either reduced accountability or increased overhead or both, depending on the conditions attached to the vouchers, which are just a mechanism for outsourcing delivery of a public function not actually privatizing the function so that government is not involved.
msla 7y ago
> I'll trade you Medicare-for-All in exchange for a complete privatization (w/ vouchers) of education. OK, how fucked up do you want to allow the unlucky kids to become? I mean, it's a given that in a Pure True Private Education System, anti-vaccination propaganda will be unchallenged dogma in some schools. It's a big deal now and this will just remove the few impediments it has to becoming the majority opinion in some regions. Medicare-For-All means precisely shit if the people in that region think modern medicine is pharmashill toxins gunna make you an NWO Zionist zombie-slave. But that isn't even the worst of it. Public school is, at the very least, a way to get kids out of the house and into an environment where it isn't normal for parents to fuck their children. Teachers are mandatory reporters for a reason. I'm not saying that public schools are perfect at detecting child abuse, but completely privatizing the whole thing will shove that effectiveness right off a cliff. Don't piss off the people paying your bills, eh? We already have segregation academies, but complete privatization will remove all choice in some regions, in that only the segregation academies will capture enough vouchers to be effective educators. Well, if you consider "The David Duke School of Racial Tolerance" to be effective education.
get-sterilized 7y ago
I mean, you’re a useless piece of shit, but hey, let’s entertain your retarded little fantasy for five seconds. Privatization of education means less doctors (due to price gouging), but there’s a theoretically bottomless pit of sick people, which is a pool that potentially includes the doctors themselves, so... Now, as soon as the doctors are saturated, it doesn’t matter how free their care is. You’ll just burn them out until they’re sick too. But let’s think about a world where we supply an infinite amount of education, to produce as many doctors as possible... And then maybe work with that supply to stock the shelves of infinite free medicine. That actually doesn’t work because, on the one hand we have permanently stupid people who lack the competence needed to function as a doctor. On the other hand there are people too selfish or dysfunctional from a personality standpoint to even lend a helping hand, so they wouldn’t even engage in medical training for their own sheer amusement. So doctors are always in short supply, when stood next to the potential for sick people, and often even actual sick people. We never reach a 1:1 ratio of doctor to patient, as a threshold for perfect supply feeding directly into demand. Doctor time is always divided across multiple patients. In the world of spherical cows, some cows will die alone. But I get that you’re just being a snarky little douchebag. Have fun with that.
jstewartmobile 7y ago
Would it still actually be "private" with government vouchers in the mix?
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  If it's delivered by private companies, yes. In the same way, General Motors is still a private entity even if it sells cars to the government. The point is that you have a bunch of independent entities competing with each other. You don't have that with a government school district.
  - jstewartmobile 7y ago
    That is a somewhat unrepresentative example. There is a big difference between a company that sells a few things to the government vs a company where 90%+ of revenue ultimately comes from the government. Given the way most things seem to eventually consolidate, the latter scenario would be the more probable one--a WalMart of education so to speak. In that case, if the government is the one signing the checks, it is also in a very strong position to dictate how the whole thing is operated. Not that it will--see WalMart again--but it could.
tptacek 7y ago
So, the worst impulses of both extremes? Where do I sign? It's not even clear what this modest proposal has to do with the article, which is written from the premise that the whole enterprise of college-oriented secondary schooling is misguided, that no matter how well-taught the subjects, secondary school educational objectives are about signaling --- to colleges --- and not human capital, and that there's even more broad acceptance of the notion that college is itself about signaling to the labor market. How would privatizing schools address this person's concerns?
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  You would get charter schools that emphasized signalling. You might get some that emphasized human capital. That would leave parents able to choose - if they actually perceived what was going on. As it is, though, if I want actual human capital in my child's education, it's either private school or homeschooling. To the degree (if any) that private schools emphasize human capital over signalling, I'm not sure that privatizing schools plus vouchers would make them change to emphasizing signalling. So I don't think the situation would become worse, and it might become better.
  - JamesBarney 7y ago
    The biggest problem with education is that who the kid is(smart, hard working, resilient) has 20x the impact of his education. So it's much easier to select 5% better students than it is to teach them 100% better. And if teams of phd researchers are arguing over whether colleges in general are signalling versus human capital, how are some random parents going to be to solve the much harder problem of if a single school's results are due to signalling or human capital with less time, training, and information?

ThrustVectoring 7y ago

Privatization would make these sorts of problems worse, as schools compete more vigorously to sell signalling value to parents. The fix is to monopolize signalling value through legal fiat - make it illegal to ask job applicants or allow applicants to disclose the school they attended, and replace it with an examination and/or interview based certification monopoly.

bunderbunder 7y ago
And, indeed, what studies are available seem to confirm this. Not just for private schools - charter schools also tend to underperform the public schools. Granted, kids who go to them do tend to get better test scores, go to better universities, have more successful careers, etc. But that's because the whole education industry is a massive exercise in selection bias. The most careful studies I've seen, though, seem to indicate that, all other factors being equal, a typical kid is going to learn more in public school than in private or charter school. This rather mirrors my own experience. I did 2 years of public high school, and 2 years of college prep. I can say that it's absolutely true that my classmates were generally smarter and more studious in the prep school. But the prep school was also easy. It really didn't particularly matter how much effort I put into my homework. As long as I didn't blatantly blow it off, my teachers would dutifully send my parents a report card full of the As and Bs they were paying for. By contrast, it was the public schools where I had the teachers who'd keep ratcheting up their expectations until they could sense that I was actually working to try and get good grades on my papers.
- hakfoo 7y ago
  In terms of actual student performance (as opposed to grades), I'd expect parents to be a major factor. They're going to build support networks-- running the fundraisers, supporting extracurriculars, keeping an eye on student performance and scandals. When we provide "options" -- charters, private schooling, even public magnets-- the parents who are motivated and concerned enough to build those networks tend to pounce on them. The "default" public school loses its champions and ends up producing worse outcomes for everyone whose parents aren't tuned in.
DubiousPusher 7y ago
> Privatization would make these sorts of problems worse, as schools compete more vigorously to sell signalling value to parents. That's one of the most compelling arguments against school vouchers I've encountered. Especially as that is exactly what has happened in higher education where consumer choice is higher.
donw 7y ago
Living in Japan, I am compelled to agree. Most universities here are private, and everybody knows that you have to get "a college education". The end result being that, outside of a select few national institutions that appear to have some degree of academic rigor, university in Japan is referred to as a "four-year vacation", and graduation is effectively automatic. Reflecting back on the original post, I'm not sure that nationalization of universities in the US would help. We have plenty of high-quality state schools as-is, but Harvard and friends are prestigious because their brands come with deeply powerful social networks. The same effect applies to making it illegal to put university names on resumes. Sure, there is definitely a halo effect in being able to put Harvard or Stanford on your resume, but I would wager that the vast majority of top-tier university students don't apply by (metaphorically) filling out a job application and handing it to the shift manager. Instead, your work comes through your network. Alice introduces you to Bob who knows that Charlene has invested in TinyCo, which is poised to be the next unicorn, and so you get in on the "ground floor" in this fashion. That's not the kind of thing you can really address via legislation. (Note that there is an assumption here that you can Do The Thing. Charlene probably doesn't want you working at TinyCo and squandering her investment if you aren't going to help make it the next unicorn.)
- projektfu 7y ago
  I discovered that it’s even worse. Alice’s mom sends an email to Bob who tells Charlene that his friend’s kid is super smart and of course from Harvard, and then when Alice calls she can ask for Charlene directly and see if she wants to go for a glass of wine.
aeternus 7y ago
Competition should be a good thing. The real issue is that colleges and employers are looking at the wrong signals. This leads the existing competition. GPA for example is arbitrary yet colleges and employers are basically asking schools to 'optimize' / maximize it. Standardized testing (ACT/SAT) is much better, but still misses important aspects like leadership ability. Even the prestige of the school is a poor signal. Give employers / colleges a better objective measure and they will gladly use it. Perhaps we should have a post-college standardized test.

swivelmaster 7y ago

Privatization shifts the signaling game theory from pandering to government funding to pandering to consumers. Given that consumers don’t have nearly as much time to research options individually as governments do collectively, this can and likely will create far worse outcomes on average. edit: This comment has gone from 8 points to 4 points in about 10 minutes, so I can only assume this thread has become the target of a downvote brigade from some other web site. The joys of discussing politics in the age of 4chan!

cobbzilla 7y ago
By this logic, shouldn’t we nationalize most major industries? oil/energy, motor vehicles, the list is endless.
- toiletfuneral 7y ago
  Absolutely.
- danharaj 7y ago
  There might be a better way now than what was practical in 1900.
- swivelmaster 7y ago
  At an abstract level, one of the major goals of regulation is to stop companies from doing things that consumers can only figure out are bad on a timescale long enough for them to have already done damage and made enormous profits. There are a ton of regulations around motor vehicles, like disclosing MPG, maintaining safety standards, and consistent odometer readings - things that consumers wouldn't necessarily be able to figure out on their own until it was too late. If a car just plain doesn't work, or craps out in less than a thousand miles, that's easy to remedy. The problem with applying these standards to education is that the timeframe to assess damage is very long, and it's more or less irreversible. If you spend a week driving a car and the engine dies, you can take it back and get a refund and then go get a new one. If you put your kid in a charter school and they fail to learn math for a year, you can't get that time back. It's gone forever, and your child will be behind for anywhere from months to years to forever. This is why we need to treat certain specific sectors differently. Consumer goods, sure, whatever, the government can make sure that toys don't contain lead and that our TVs wont randomly explode, and after that it's up to us to decide. But education, healthcare, etc., the consequences of giving consumers "choice" and allowing those sectors to advertise freely and self-regulate are severe and often irreversible.

conanbatt 7y ago

M4A is a 10~15% GDP expenditure. Way more than vouchers.

dragonwriter 7y ago

> Anybody up for a grand bargin? I'll trade you Medicare-for-All in exchange for a complete privatization (w/ vouchers) of education. It's not only a bad deal, but you don't have the power to deliver your end of the bargain, and the people that would have the power are at least as opposed to M4A as Conventional public schools, so no, it's not worth considet on many levels. And, anyway vouchers aren't really privatization, it is public with either reduced accountability or increased overhead or both, depending on the conditions attached to the vouchers, which are just a mechanism for outsourcing delivery of a public function not actually privatizing the function so that government is not involved.

msla 7y ago

> I'll trade you Medicare-for-All in exchange for a complete privatization (w/ vouchers) of education. OK, how fucked up do you want to allow the unlucky kids to become? I mean, it's a given that in a Pure True Private Education System, anti-vaccination propaganda will be unchallenged dogma in some schools. It's a big deal now and this will just remove the few impediments it has to becoming the majority opinion in some regions. Medicare-For-All means precisely shit if the people in that region think modern medicine is pharmashill toxins gunna make you an NWO Zionist zombie-slave. But that isn't even the worst of it. Public school is, at the very least, a way to get kids out of the house and into an environment where it isn't normal for parents to fuck their children. Teachers are mandatory reporters for a reason. I'm not saying that public schools are perfect at detecting child abuse, but completely privatizing the whole thing will shove that effectiveness right off a cliff. Don't piss off the people paying your bills, eh? We already have segregation academies, but complete privatization will remove all choice in some regions, in that only the segregation academies will capture enough vouchers to be effective educators. Well, if you consider "The David Duke School of Racial Tolerance" to be effective education.

get-sterilized 7y ago

I mean, you’re a useless piece of shit, but hey, let’s entertain your retarded little fantasy for five seconds. Privatization of education means less doctors (due to price gouging), but there’s a theoretically bottomless pit of sick people, which is a pool that potentially includes the doctors themselves, so... Now, as soon as the doctors are saturated, it doesn’t matter how free their care is. You’ll just burn them out until they’re sick too. But let’s think about a world where we supply an infinite amount of education, to produce as many doctors as possible... And then maybe work with that supply to stock the shelves of infinite free medicine. That actually doesn’t work because, on the one hand we have permanently stupid people who lack the competence needed to function as a doctor. On the other hand there are people too selfish or dysfunctional from a personality standpoint to even lend a helping hand, so they wouldn’t even engage in medical training for their own sheer amusement. So doctors are always in short supply, when stood next to the potential for sick people, and often even actual sick people. We never reach a 1:1 ratio of doctor to patient, as a threshold for perfect supply feeding directly into demand. Doctor time is always divided across multiple patients. In the world of spherical cows, some cows will die alone. But I get that you’re just being a snarky little douchebag. Have fun with that.

jstewartmobile 7y ago

Would it still actually be "private" with government vouchers in the mix?

AnimalMuppet 7y ago
If it's delivered by private companies, yes. In the same way, General Motors is still a private entity even if it sells cars to the government. The point is that you have a bunch of independent entities competing with each other. You don't have that with a government school district.
- jstewartmobile 7y ago
  That is a somewhat unrepresentative example. There is a big difference between a company that sells a few things to the government vs a company where 90%+ of revenue ultimately comes from the government. Given the way most things seem to eventually consolidate, the latter scenario would be the more probable one--a WalMart of education so to speak. In that case, if the government is the one signing the checks, it is also in a very strong position to dictate how the whole thing is operated. Not that it will--see WalMart again--but it could.

tptacek 7y ago

So, the worst impulses of both extremes? Where do I sign? It's not even clear what this modest proposal has to do with the article, which is written from the premise that the whole enterprise of college-oriented secondary schooling is misguided, that no matter how well-taught the subjects, secondary school educational objectives are about signaling --- to colleges --- and not human capital, and that there's even more broad acceptance of the notion that college is itself about signaling to the labor market. How would privatizing schools address this person's concerns?

AnimalMuppet 7y ago
You would get charter schools that emphasized signalling. You might get some that emphasized human capital. That would leave parents able to choose - if they actually perceived what was going on. As it is, though, if I want actual human capital in my child's education, it's either private school or homeschooling. To the degree (if any) that private schools emphasize human capital over signalling, I'm not sure that privatizing schools plus vouchers would make them change to emphasizing signalling. So I don't think the situation would become worse, and it might become better.
- JamesBarney 7y ago
  The biggest problem with education is that who the kid is(smart, hard working, resilient) has 20x the impact of his education. So it's much easier to select 5% better students than it is to teach them 100% better. And if teams of phd researchers are arguing over whether colleges in general are signalling versus human capital, how are some random parents going to be to solve the much harder problem of if a single school's results are due to signalling or human capital with less time, training, and information?