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> Given the type of government service they’re going to get—one run by New Yorkers, not Swedes or Japanese—are they wrong? You won’t hear me argue the NY state

• rayiner 3y ago
  > You won’t hear me argue the NY state legislature is not deficient and/or corrupt. What makes you think that’s the problem? The NYC school system, for example, spends $38,000 per year per student. Thats about triple what Japan spends per student. What else can the legislature do? And do you think the NY or NYC legislatures are any more corrupt than those in Japan or Germany or Sweden? To me, the problem seems to be the workers running who are running the system, not how the system is designed on paper or how it’s funded. > pushing back against monopolies writing their own legislation to kill competition is definitely a part of how we begin to fix it. How does that follow? Say you defeat this legislation and NYC adopts community broadband. Will that system be fast, affordable, and reliable? That seems like putting hope over experience.
  • dgfitz 3y ago
    > What makes you think that’s the problem? The NYC school system, for example, spends $38,000 per year per student. Thats about triple what Japan spends per student. What else can the legislature do? And do you think the NY or NYC legislatures are any more corrupt than those in Japan or Germany or Sweden? I wanted to ask if you were joking, but that wouldn’t be productive. What else can the legislature do? Figure out why throwing money at a problem isn’t working. This is the point someone above made about private vs public industry. Private can’t operate at a loss. The federal, state, and local governments can, and generally do. I’m sure I don’t need to point out the federal budget deficit. If a private company was given the same 38k per student with the mandate “fix the graduation issue or you’re fired” the graduation rate would absolutely change.
    • toyg 3y ago
      Or - the graduation rate would stay the same, and schools would be asset-stripped so that most of those 38k would flow to shareholders rather than school budgets. There are plenty of examples of mediocre public services getting privatized and becoming even worse, from a capital-efficiency perspective (e.g. UK railways, UK water...). Private companies are out to make a profit, and efficiency is just a mean to it; if there are other means, even to the detriment of what should be their core mission, they will pursue those means. The real objective is both empowering, motivating, and holding accountable the middle-management layers of essential public services: administrators, teachers, railway workers, etc. Privatization doesn't magically do that. Creating a competitive system doesn't require corporate profits.
      • masfuerte 3y ago
        Another example of this: in the UK the government pays as much as £250,000 per year for severely autistic young people to be looked after in private homes and hospitals. Many of these were funded by private equity. They take huge profits and the level of care is disgraceful. Even when the patients are not being actively abused [1] they are not receiving any care as such. The homes and hospitals are little better than prisons. [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/apr/24/learning-disabled-autistic-neglect-uk-institutional-abuse https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/apr/24/learni...
        • ryandrake 3y ago
          This always always seems to happen, and the people never wise up. Government acts as a money funnel to private companies, who pocket as much as they can as profit and provide the most criminally minimal service they can get away with. And every time it happens and the people are ripped off, the answer is always “even moar privatization.”
    • 0xcde4c3db 3y ago
      > If a private company was given the same 38k per student with the mandate “fix the graduation issue or you’re fired” the graduation rate would absolutely change. Often when an ultimatum along these lines happens, whether public or private, the problem winds up being "fixed" in large part by some combination of double standards, gaming the metrics, and outright fraud. Some number called the "graduation rate" would surely change, but it wouldn't necessarily mean the same thing as what was called the "graduation rate" previously, let alone necessarily represent a materially better outcome for students.
  • gopher_space 3y ago
    > The NYC school system, for example, spends $38,000 per year per student. Thats about triple what Japan spends per student. The US school system’s remit is larger than any other nation’s. Ever seen an article that breaks down costs between countries when education is discussed? I haven’t.
    • rayiner 3y ago
      > The US school system’s remit is larger than any other nation’s. What does that mean?
      • nullindividual 3y ago
        > remit > an area of responsibility or authority
        • skissane 3y ago
          Is that true though? I mean, what is it that US schools are doing which schools in other countries aren't, which would produce significantly higher per student costs?
          • vundercind 3y ago
            Busing, sports, schools attached to correctional institutions with crazy-high (six figures) per pupil spending may be in the same system and that may not be true everywhere. High health insurance costs for staff. A few things off the top of my head that may be different (or maybe not!) but there could well be more. OTOH lots of other places have far better school lunches and they’re free, but maybe those aren’t budgeted under the school but some other department. Lots of ways to get different outcomes with different accounting, without even doing anything plainly incorrect.
            • rayiner 3y ago
              Are there schools attached to correctional institutions in NYC driving up the $38,000 per student spending? If we at just guessing, how about: New Yorkers are just bad at running public services? We actually had a natural experiment with this during COVID. Schools in Western Europe and Asia quickly got students back in the classroom. But in places like NYC, teachers refused to go back to work for a year or more.
  • lupusreal 3y ago
    Not to disagree with your larger point, but comparing school performance is basically bogus. The biggest deciding factor in that is how the parents raise the kids. Do the parents raise mild mannered respectful children who are eager to learn, or do they raise little narcissistic brats who want to terrorize other students and in fact the teachers as well? That's what matters the most, not the quality of teachers or the amount of funding the school gets. Furthermore, while there are bad teachers who hate kids and don't try, few if any start out that way. They become that way after prolonged exposure to bad students, their bad parents, and the school system which binds their hands and tells them to put up with it.
  • skissane 3y ago
    > > You won’t hear me argue the NY state legislature is not deficient and/or corrupt. > What makes you think that’s the problem? The US has a presidential system (even at the state level) where the legislative and executive branches are kept independent, which harms policy coherence Most of the rest of the Western world (outside of Latin America) has either a parliamentary system (in which the executive is fully subordinated to the legislature) or a semi-presidential system (in which the executive is partially subordinated to the legislature and partially independent of it). This doesn't just happen at the national level, but often gets repeated at the state level – in American states the executive (Governor/etc) and legislature are independent, in Australian states and Canadian provinces the state/provincial legislature controls the state/provincial executive When things go wrong in the US system, it is so easy for the legislature and executive to engage in buck-passing in which each side claims they could solve the problem if only the other side would let them do it. In the rest of the English-speaking world, in most of Europe (and Japan too), that technique doesn't work, since the leaders of the legislature are also the leaders of the executive. See also Latin America, where the same system leads to even worse problems. The US has other advantages (wealth, power, etc) which lets it overcome some of the downsides of its political system, where countries lacking those advantages can't
    • xyzzyz 3y ago
      Under this theory, whenever all branches of government, executive and legislative, are held by a single party, we expect the policy to be coherent and the governance solid. Suffice to say, observing the data from California or New York allows us to quickly reject this theory.
      • skissane 3y ago
        > Under this theory, whenever all branches of government, executive and legislative, are held by a single party, we expect the policy to be coherent and the governance solid No we shouldn’t. Dominance of a single party will prevent inter-party fighting/fingerpointing/blame-shifting, but their intra-party equivalents can be just as bad. This is especially the case given the US has very weak party discipline by global standards, the party leadership has rather limited powers to tell the party’s elected officials what to do In a parliamentary system, the executive needs to actively retain the confidence of the legislature, since a bare majority of the legislature can fire the executive at any time for any reason (and in a bicameral system, generally just a bare majority of the lower house). In a presidential system, the executive is an independent power base, separately elected, and the legislature can only remove it on the basis of serious misconduct (and often needs a supermajority to do so)
  • bobthepanda 3y ago
    So having worked in the system before, one major headwind with NYC's operating costs is their buildings. The vast majority of schools are old, often dating back to prewar or immediate postwar period. As a general example, there is no plan to completely eliminate lead piping in NYC school buildings because it would cost too much money. The school system spends a lot of money on inefficient heating, poor insulation, inefficient water fixtures, repairs etc. because there is no capital budget to replace schools or even these individual systems wholesale. Even finding a site to place a replacement school building is difficult in a city as crowded as New York and with NIMBYs; and then usually a new school isn't replacing buildings because all the buildings are over capacity, sometimes even 200% or 300% capacity with children in trailers on the playground and some lunch periods at 10am because there is no room in the cafeteria. --- One other thing is that NYC spends a lot of money doing things like extensive ESL education. In fact it is pretty rare for an NYC school to have zero ESL resources given the extensive immigration into NYC. This kind of remedial resource is generally not provided in a country like Japan, where only specific schools would have these kinds of resources.
    • rayiner 3y ago
      Do other countries that spend much less on education not have to deal with inefficient and outdated school buildings? And how much does ESL even cost? If it comes remotely near explaining why NYC needs three times as much money as Japan to do a worse job, that seems like a huge downside to immigration that nobody is talking about.
      • ethbr1 3y ago
        I'd be curious on the apples:apples comparison between NYC and Tokyo education costs. On the one hand, Tokyo is much older than NYC. On the other hand, the Japanese have a penchant for tearing down and rebuilding things (partially policy-driven).
        • bobthepanda 3y ago
          Most of Tokyo was firebombed in WWII.