4 ms·

As for government in education, it corrupts education completely. <snip> [Government-run education] sinks to a very low level, teachers are handcuffed by bureau

by mkn 17y ago

As for government in education, it corrupts education completely. <snip> [Government-run education] sinks to a very low level, teachers are handcuffed by bureaucrats and public opinion in their teaching methods, honest perspectives on history, ethics, and civics become impossible to learn, bad teachers don't get fired, good teachers with non-traditional backgrounds don't get hired... like, government doing a lot of stuff is a relatively new idea, and it's a nice idea, but it usually doesn't work so well in practice. What an incredibly simplistic analysis! 'Analysis' is too strong of a word; this is mere polemic. It is clearly not the case that government completely corrupts education. It is further untrue that any of the consequences described can be attributed entirely to the fact that government runs public education. The parent merely asserts that government 'corrupts' education and then lists a bunch of alleged educational maladies. Many of these maladies are clearly due to the fact that schools are institutions and that they serve pluralistic communities. The point about bureaucracy is especially vacuous. Can we even imagine a school or school district, public or private, without imagining an attendant bureaucracy? Another poster mentioned Marx; is it lost on the parent that Marx talks about, iirc, alienation due to private bureaucracies as well as government ones? The real causes of problems in education will not turn out to be so simple as 'government.' The real problems will turn out to hinge partly on the peculiar aspects of government bureaucracies vs. private bureaucracies for sure, but will also stem from economic issues like poverty and hunger, social and socio-economic issues like the amount of time parents spend away from home working, and cultural issues like the value placed on education and civic responsibility by contemporary culture, and many other possibly irremediable causes. Finally, the form of the original 'argument' offered is this: There is an overly simple problem, it has an overly simple cause, and the solution is simply to remove that cause. The truth is that both the causes and effects of real-world situations are both more complex and more intractable than that. That any adult should fall for such a blatant oversimplification is perhaps a clearer indicator of the trouble with current corporatist culture than the addled mind of Michael Moore could ever conceive.

barry-cotter 17y ago
The point about bureaucracy is especially vacuous. Can we even imagine a school or school district, public or private, without imagining an attendant bureaucracy? Probably not above a certain minimum size (of school), but we can easily imagine a smaller bureaucracy. If you abolished the LAUSD or NY's and made school districts for every area with 10,000 ± x students you could replace the vast majority of the bureaucracy with volunteer labour, otherwise known as busybody parents. Seriously, what is the point of having these administrators? Record keeping and quality control are the only thingsd that come to mind. Parents have pretty good incentives to monitor quality if they have a chance of actually getting something done by making a stink, which becomes harder and harder the bigger a school district becomes. Someone explain the point of school districts above size x to me please. I don't see any obvious economies of scale above the levels where you have enough kids you can hire your own ful time child psychologist, and I think 10,000 people per would be well above that, and smaller than the size where people's first response to crap schools would be to think about private schools, and second would be to think about moving.
- evgen 17y ago
  > If you abolished the LAUSD or NY's and made school districts for every area with 10,000 ± x students you could replace the vast majority of the bureaucracy with volunteer labour, otherwise known as busybody parents. This only works when parents have the available free time and resources to replace these administrators with their free time. The problem with this is that parents with available free time and the motivation to donate to their child's school is very unevenly distributed. You are also going to end up duplicating a lot of administration bureaucracy across these smaller districts and losing a lot of efficiencies that can be gained from centralization. Centralization has its own costs, but sometimes these costs are not as large as the cost of a lot of duplicated effort.
  - btilly 17y ago
    The problem with this argument is that the larger the distance between bureaucracies and productive work, the more free the bureaucracy is to grow based on internal dynamics with no reference point to actual productivity. Therefore when it comes to bureaucracy, I generally expect centralization to cost more. Point of comparison based on actual statistics from Detroit 20 years ago. (See http://www.mackinac.org/article.aspx?ID=6014 http://www.mackinac.org/article.aspx?ID=6014 for a citation.) Administrative overhead for the Detroit public school system: nearly 40%. Administrative overhead for parochial schools run by the Catholic Church: 0.7%. Key difference? The parochial school system is bottom up, whenever possible responsibility is pushed down to the individual school. By contrast Detroit's schools centralize responsibility with the district, and over time that grew into an ever expanding bureaucracy. Admittedly not an entirely fair comparison. However decentralization sure looks good.
btilly 17y ago
The point about bureaucracy is far from vacuous. You rhetorically ask whether we can imagine a school or school district without any bureaucracy. Well obviously not. But I can imagine a bureaucracy that is so minuscule that it is practically invisible. Not only can I imagine it, but I can point out that Catholic schools manage to devote less than 1% of resources to administration, yet have better outcomes than public schools with comparable populations. By contrast the figure I saw quoted a couple of decades ago ago is that New York City had more school administrators than France, and New York State had more than the whole European Union. (Looking around, http://www.mackinac.org/article.aspx?ID=6014 http://www.mackinac.org/article.aspx?ID=6014 was from 1991 and cited the source as William Brock.) If you consider that France has 3x the population of New York State, clearly some bureaucracies are worse than others.

by mkn 17y ago

barry-cotter 17y ago

The point about bureaucracy is especially vacuous. Can we even imagine a school or school district, public or private, without imagining an attendant bureaucracy? Probably not above a certain minimum size (of school), but we can easily imagine a smaller bureaucracy. If you abolished the LAUSD or NY's and made school districts for every area with 10,000 ± x students you could replace the vast majority of the bureaucracy with volunteer labour, otherwise known as busybody parents. Seriously, what is the point of having these administrators? Record keeping and quality control are the only thingsd that come to mind. Parents have pretty good incentives to monitor quality if they have a chance of actually getting something done by making a stink, which becomes harder and harder the bigger a school district becomes. Someone explain the point of school districts above size x to me please. I don't see any obvious economies of scale above the levels where you have enough kids you can hire your own ful time child psychologist, and I think 10,000 people per would be well above that, and smaller than the size where people's first response to crap schools would be to think about private schools, and second would be to think about moving.

evgen 17y ago
> If you abolished the LAUSD or NY's and made school districts for every area with 10,000 ± x students you could replace the vast majority of the bureaucracy with volunteer labour, otherwise known as busybody parents. This only works when parents have the available free time and resources to replace these administrators with their free time. The problem with this is that parents with available free time and the motivation to donate to their child's school is very unevenly distributed. You are also going to end up duplicating a lot of administration bureaucracy across these smaller districts and losing a lot of efficiencies that can be gained from centralization. Centralization has its own costs, but sometimes these costs are not as large as the cost of a lot of duplicated effort.
- btilly 17y ago
  The problem with this argument is that the larger the distance between bureaucracies and productive work, the more free the bureaucracy is to grow based on internal dynamics with no reference point to actual productivity. Therefore when it comes to bureaucracy, I generally expect centralization to cost more. Point of comparison based on actual statistics from Detroit 20 years ago. (See http://www.mackinac.org/article.aspx?ID=6014 http://www.mackinac.org/article.aspx?ID=6014 for a citation.) Administrative overhead for the Detroit public school system: nearly 40%. Administrative overhead for parochial schools run by the Catholic Church: 0.7%. Key difference? The parochial school system is bottom up, whenever possible responsibility is pushed down to the individual school. By contrast Detroit's schools centralize responsibility with the district, and over time that grew into an ever expanding bureaucracy. Admittedly not an entirely fair comparison. However decentralization sure looks good.

btilly 17y ago

The point about bureaucracy is far from vacuous. You rhetorically ask whether we can imagine a school or school district without any bureaucracy. Well obviously not. But I can imagine a bureaucracy that is so minuscule that it is practically invisible. Not only can I imagine it, but I can point out that Catholic schools manage to devote less than 1% of resources to administration, yet have better outcomes than public schools with comparable populations. By contrast the figure I saw quoted a couple of decades ago ago is that New York City had more school administrators than France, and New York State had more than the whole European Union. (Looking around, http://www.mackinac.org/article.aspx?ID=6014 http://www.mackinac.org/article.aspx?ID=6014 was from 1991 and cited the source as William Brock.) If you consider that France has 3x the population of New York State, clearly some bureaucracies are worse than others.