[HN Gopher] Is education no longer the 'great equalizer'?
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Is education no longer the 'great equalizer'?
Author : gumby
Score : 124 points
Date : 2021-06-23 10:58 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| clarkmoody wrote:
| Education and schooling are different things. There is a lot of
| schooling going on. I can't say the same for education.
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| Citizens in a democracy need to learn to how to participate in
| a democracy. Citizens in a capitalist system need to learn how
| capitalism works. Citizens in an engineering economy need to
| learn engineering.
|
| There is a little of the latter happening.
| kstenerud wrote:
| Education never was the "Great Equalizer". Its purpose has always
| been "to educate people in what they need to know."
|
| Now, "what they need to know" differs by caste.
|
| The high caste learn how they deserve their privileged position,
| how to perpetuate their position, and who are the key players.
|
| The medium caste learn how to set up or run business and merchant
| operations, how to be an exec, how power works, who are the key
| players within their field, and how to cultivate their networks.
|
| The low caste learn how to do the jobs they're destined for, how
| to take orders, how to climb the ladder (somewhat), and hopefully
| how to politick at work.
|
| The bottom caste are lucky to learn anything beyond reading,
| writing, and a smattering of arithmetic. They might learn a few
| things to help them in their jobs, but there's really no point
| since they're easily replaced anyway.
|
| Education follows our birth caste. That's all we're raised to
| realistically aspire to, and that's also all the higher castes
| will allow for you unless you get VERY lucky (i.e. someone wasn't
| paying attention), or someone throws you a bone (scholarship or
| the like - and even then you're limited in how far you can rise
| without resentful pushback). New money is always frowned upon for
| at least a few generations.
|
| Most of us are in the bottom two castes. Medium is reserved for
| the 2% whose families are wealthy and influential enough. I doubt
| you know anyone in the high caste.
| alexgmcm wrote:
| I somewhat agree with the sentiment although I think it's a bit
| pessimistic and as described holds a stronger resemblance to a
| YA dystopian novel than reality.
|
| I went to a state school (i.e. public school in American
| terminology) in a poor area and studied hard and did well, got
| scholarships, went to Uni etc.
|
| There are some problems with people not being able to afford to
| dedicate time to study - this can be solved by offering a
| maintenance allowance to all students, as I believe is done in
| some Nordic countries.
|
| But the biggest issue I saw in my high school was people either
| giving up on education altogether, or having unrealistic
| expectations leading them to choose University degrees with
| poor job prospects.
|
| Note, I include the trades in education as in fact they better
| than many University degrees when it comes to helping people
| improve their lot in life.
| rejectedandsad wrote:
| Eh, it's pretty real, we just call it going to a top school.
| People like me will never achieve what the people at Ivy+
| schools will, and I'll be locked in a lower caste for good.
| mc32 wrote:
| I thought one of the main complaints of the system is "too
| many ivy leaguers" (who share diff values), so why aim for
| the thing that we talk bad about?
|
| What's bad about not being part of the derided elite class?
| rejectedandsad wrote:
| Being near the bottom of any hierarchy is bad, and
| without smashing these hierarchies people like me are
| just destined to suffer.
|
| After all, the elite class is usually not derided anyway
| - and many of the people deriding them (think JD Vance)
| are elites already.
| mc32 wrote:
| I can totally understand wanting to reject and "smashing"
| the elite Ivy League.
|
| I can't understand wanting to join them if they are so
| bad. It's akin to slaves wanting the right to own slaves
| --that's not the solution to the problem of the
| institution.
| danielodievich wrote:
| Take a look at the
| https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/07/george-...
| for a similar viewpoint, articulated much more deeply, and
| check out the "elite overproduction" concept.
| dsign wrote:
| > Is education no longer "a great equalizer of the conditions of
| men," ... but instead a great divider?
|
| The article is very "feet on the earth", it reviews existing data
| and arguments, and generally _advocates_ for a "no" as an answer
| to that question.
|
| But what if education _were_ a great divider? What if--like
| wealth--the education gap were self-reinforcing, even across
| generations?
|
| To the well-educated, that seems far-fetched, but it's easy to
| find examples across the world where some people choose to
| believe or live according to X, which results in less emphasis
| put into "modern" education, which in turn makes it easier to
| keep believing in X, and so on.
|
| On the other side, learning skills A, B and C may require a
| considerable investment in time and money. Right now is not that
| bad, but just imagine for a moment that ten or fifteen years of
| education were needed for job K, which pays three orders of
| magnitude more than the jobs that people who live according to X
| have access to.
|
| Still, death would seem the perfect equalizer (not education),
| except if expensive life-extension is added to the mix...
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| I think it's cultural, but not perhaps in the way you describe.
|
| Parents who believe in education often produce better-educated
| children. Reading to them when they're small, helping with
| homework when they need it, talking about college even when
| they're young, and just not letting them give up on school. I
| suspect that, at least to some degree, that is transmissable -
| that is, it tends to produce children who, when they are
| adults, will value education for _their_ children.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| In a lot of European countries, a robust social safety net is the
| great equalizer. You don't get locked up to work in order to
| afford healthcare, food, etc. - and are thus more free to take
| chances.
|
| Furthermore, strong labor laws have compressed salaries towards
| the mean, so people are not locking themselves into poverty by
| working low-wage / low-skill work, but there's a difference
| enough that people are incentivized to get educated. I think it's
| a decent harmony - compared to other countries, where you have a
| poor working class and rich/wealthy middle/upper middle class.
|
| I think that if education is the _only_ ticket to a better life,
| then you get stuck with the problem that not all educated people
| are equal, and only certain educated people get to climb
| socioeconomic classes (too many schools, too many graduates, i.e
| inflation)
| slibhb wrote:
| > You don't get locked up to work in order to afford
| healthcare, food, etc. - and are thus more free to take
| chances.
|
| If Europeans are more free to take chances, why is there
| substantially less innovation in Europe?
|
| I don't think Europe is "worse" than the US. I think Europe is
| optimized for the poor whereas the US is optimized for the
| middle class and above. There are good arguments for both of
| these situations. In the US, it is widely felt that the system
| should serve the tax payers. Europeans, on the other hand, seem
| to have a lot more solidarity with the poor who, for whatever
| reason, don't pay significant taxes. Additionally (and
| controversially), I think a significant amount of the European
| attitude comes down to ethnic solidarity. European countries
| are ethnostates and the US isn't.
|
| One interesting thing is that Europeans benefit from American
| innovation. They have iphones, windows pcs, use google, etc
| like everyone else.
| imtringued wrote:
| Honestly, I'd say it's because the Eurozone doesn't encourage
| cooperation between member states.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > If Europeans are more free to take chances, why is there
| substantially less innovation in Europe?
|
| Someone told me a joke about the Vasa Museum in Stockholm.
| The Vasa was an ambitiously designed ship that capsized
| shortly after leaving the shipyard on her maiden voyage. The
| joke was that they build the museum to send the message that
| if you try to do anything ambitious, you'll fail, and they'll
| build a museum to your failure so others won't make the same
| mistake.
| the_solenoid wrote:
| And to the rest of your comment - paying in taxes and getting
| universal benefits benefit society as a whole, not just the
| poor.
|
| I think it was finland that got rid of private schools, and
| all of aa sudden schools got WAY better , for everyone.
|
| Insulating people with wealth from everyone else is an overt
| societal negative. People are their experiences, and if you
| go through life without meeting people with different
| experiences than you, you grow up in a bubble.
|
| Having everyone be able to enjoy life and not having a govt
| bought off that laser focuses on making a small class of
| people even richer is their goal, not solidarity with a
| certain class.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| Finland has good results because of the methods of
| teaching, not because of the ownership of the schools. We
| have a school on this system in my town and 2 kids in the
| family went there, the system is better even if the school
| is ... private.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| Personally, I think we're going to see a change in the trend
| of relying on two superpowers (USA, China) for tech and
| innovation. For the past years, it's been increasingly
| obvious that the political landscape can change almost
| overnight.
|
| Europe has also been lacking a proper VC scene and culture,
| but this seems to have changed more in the past years.
|
| So, don't expect the next 20-30 years to be identical to the
| previous decades.
| alexgmcm wrote:
| > why is there substantially less innovation in Europe?
|
| I know people who started start-ups and spun out side
| projects here in Europe (both the UK and the continent).
|
| One thing I noticed was that when it came time to raise money
| almost of all of them ended up needing American investment.
| We don't have anywhere near as much VC capital here in Europe
| and the banks are incredibly conservative.
|
| Plus depending on the country the taxes/fees for being self-
| employed or starting your own business can be incredibly
| punitive.
|
| > One interesting thing is that Europeans benefit from
| American innovation.
|
| While we do benefit from American innovation I'd also argue
| it's a sort of 'digital colonialism' for want of a better
| term - we don't grow our own huge firms like Yandex, Baidu
| etc. and instead just hand our cash over to American ones
| (Google, Facebook etc.)
| zepto wrote:
| > I'd also argue it's a sort of 'digital colonialism' for
| want of a better term
|
| I think that's a terrible term for it unless you think that
| America is somehow responsible for preventing Europe from
| developing its own tech industries.
| IdiocyInAction wrote:
| Not purposely, but the dominance of American tech does
| make it almost impossible for European competitors to
| arise. That's why the Chinese are hesitant about US tech.
| arvinsim wrote:
| But US Big Tech does affect at a global scale. What are
| the chances of a country developing their own search
| engine?
|
| Their own mobile OS and hardware?
|
| Their own social networking app?
| zepto wrote:
| What are you talking about?
|
| Lots of countries have their own social networking apps.
| Some have their own search engines.
|
| Also, quite a few countries have strong computer science
| schools and developers.
|
| Linux was developed in Finland. Raspberry PI was
| developed in England.
|
| "Big tech" isn't preventing them from developing
| anything. The only thing holding these countries back is
| their business culture.
| oriolid wrote:
| > Linux was developed in Finland.
|
| I'd say that Linux kernel was developed by an
| international network of hackers with a Finnish leader,
| and benefited a lot from GNU userland. If you want more
| Finnish operating system, try Jolla. There was a lot of
| Finnish contribution to Series 60 too, but it's kind of
| awful.
| minikites wrote:
| >If Europeans are more free to take chances, why is there
| substantially less innovation in Europe?
|
| What leads you to believe there is less innovation in Europe?
| Do you have data to back up that assertion?
| the_solenoid wrote:
| As a % of population, and % of military spending... does
| "less innovation" hold up? I assume you have some data
| backing that claim, would be interesting if true, and the
| reasons why.
| gumby wrote:
| > One interesting thing is that Europeans benefit from
| American innovation. They have iphones, windows pcs, use
| google, etc like everyone else.
|
| Until the iPhone, Europe dominated the mobile phone business
| both in handsets and wireless network equipment. And this
| wasn't just the manufacturers; texting was pretty heavy and
| ubiquitous in the mid 1990s while it was still a novelty for
| the US a decade later.
|
| Europe was a significant player in the early PC revolution
| and other technologies ubiquitous today; consider, for
| example, that the ARM processor was developed in the UK.
|
| There was an interesting discussion in the Economist that
| appeared in HN a week or so ago discussing how Europe has
| fallen behind economically over the last couple of decades.
| It's rather surprising.
| mc32 wrote:
| Has regulation changed appreciably the last two or three
| decades resulting in less drive for innovation?
| gumby wrote:
| I don't think so; in particular I believe the strength of
| the European economy in the late 90s was merely
| hysteresis from the growth and investments of the 70s and
| 80s.
|
| There is a certain structural "stiffness" which is a mix
| of regulation and culture but I don't believe it changed
| much. There was a big war in the middle of the 20th
| century that you might have heard of :-) and I feel like
| it upended things; poor countries like Sweden and
| Switzerland were able to spring ahead and the low energy
| point that the economy settled on was actually pretty
| solid for the second half of the 20th century: a
| resilient network of medium sized businesses with great
| socialization (the soi-disant "Mittelstand" of Germany is
| the most well known example). Unfortunately it didn't
| respond well to the global giants of the late 20th and
| early 21st century.
| mc32 wrote:
| Thanks for the perspective; there might be something to
| what you said.
| megameter wrote:
| It makes me think that actually, the war had the same
| imposition of "stiffness" to all its biggest players. The
| US, Japan, the nascent EU and even the former Soviet
| Union all had a defined "place in the world" in the post-
| war order and followed more-or-less the same trajectory
| with their domestic economy. Gradually things started
| slipping, the Soviets being the obvious first to
| collapse, but everyone started running into some issues
| later in the 20th century and started kicking the can
| down the road to address them.
|
| Countries outside of those great-power roles in the
| conflict didn't end up on the same timeline and so are
| landing in a different place today. Australia or Taiwan
| for example; both changed status and became markedly more
| independent.
| oriolid wrote:
| Another thing is that Europe didn't have any need for
| Paypal and others, because we already had working national
| bank transfer systems and SEPA for international transfers.
| The only time you'd need to cash a check was when you
| received a payment from USA.
| mnouquet wrote:
| > Until the iPhone, Europe dominated the mobile phone
| business
|
| There was no such thing a "European domination", it was all
| Nokia, and to a much lesser extend Ericsson.
| oriolid wrote:
| Siemens was there too before the Nokia domination.
| herbstein wrote:
| There is no such thing as "American innovation", it is
| all Apple, and to a lesser extent Google.
| mnouquet wrote:
| Are 95% (to be conservative) of the tech unicorns US-
| based ?
|
| At this point, you can start drawing a trend. European
| successes are more the exception than the rule, which is
| kinda irrelevant anyway as 95% of European successes will
| end up being merged into a US behemoth...
| pydry wrote:
| Europe doesn't create Ubers because it doesn't have the
| capital. its not to do with innovation.
|
| VC as a model requires huge markets and huge amounts of
| financing. It doesn't require home grown innovation.
| gumby wrote:
| Europe has enormous, deep pools of capital. The culture
| though is to fear loss rather than fear loss of upside.
| Capital is deployed differently in the US and China.
| iammisc wrote:
| > In a lot of European countries, a robust social safety net is
| the great equalizer. You don't get locked up to work in order
| to afford healthcare, food, etc. - and are thus more free to
| take chances.
|
| That is a great explanation in theory, but simply does not work
| out in practice. In order to support the safety net, the EU has
| to impose several regulations that remove the ability of people
| to 'take chances', such as higher taxes on business,
| paternity/maternity leave policies that cause parents to have
| fewer children, higher regulatory atmosphere, etc.
|
| Whether it's in business, family, education, etc, the EU is not
| particularly excellent at any. America still has most of the
| world's large innovative companies, still has a higher birth
| rate, still has more VC money (and access to capital in
| general), and still has the best universities and best research
| institutions.
| standardUser wrote:
| Just because the European system isn't perfect doesn't mean
| we can't learn from it or try to emulate its strengths. For
| too long the American approach has been "other ways aren't
| perfect so we'll keep doing it our way". But I think its
| becoming clear that "our way" does not lead to better
| outcomes across a wide range of metrics. Not seriously
| entraining some major adjustments based on these learnings is
| borderline insanity.
| ozim wrote:
| Yes EU does not have more VC money or crazy startup unicorns
| but also it has a lot less bums dying on the street and
| people ruined by medical bills.
|
| There is no need to help Elon Musk or Travis Kalanick to take
| chances. There is a need for average Joe to be able to say
| "f*k it I am quitting" so he can get something better.
|
| That is why topic of this submission is about equalizing
| society.
|
| So we want to have a society where people are not dying on
| the streets but maybe going to Mars will take us longer.
| silvestrov wrote:
| > higher taxes on business Denmark + Norway:
| 22% Sweden: 21.4% Finland: 20% Germany: 15%
| Nederlands: 25% France: 25% USA: 21% (but 35%
| until 2017).
|
| So the tax argument does not hold, especially for the period
| before 2017.
|
| Birth rates are also the same: https://www.cia.gov/the-world-
| factbook/field/total-fertility...
|
| > the EU is not particularly excellent at any
|
| Odd that there are so many EU countries at the list of most
| happy countries when EU is not good at anything:
|
| https://www.cntraveler.com/gallery/the-10-happiest-
| countries...
| iammisc wrote:
| > Odd that there are so many EU countries at the list of
| most happy countries when EU is not good at anything
|
| Putting words in my mouth. I never said the EU is not good
| at 'anything'. But it's not as good as America in terms of
| financing, innovation, or education.
|
| One does not need great capital access, top-notch
| technology, or even the best education to be happy. You sad
| that european safety nets lead to the ability to 'take
| chances'. Typically, the result of this would be more
| innovation, which leads to more capital, which leads to
| better financing, which incentivizes education so that
| those with education can convince investors to invest in
| new innovation. However, the result you claim does not
| exist in Europe at the same level it exists in America.
| asdff wrote:
| Does the median american even benefit from these sorts of
| things? I would guess not at all, but I'm sure for the 1%
| the regulatory environment is extremely favorable.
| Someone working with their hands doesn't care much about
| national financial policy, since it has very little
| practical effect on their life vs. something like a
| national healthcare policy, which they would use
| regularly throughout their lives.
| iammisc wrote:
| Perhaps not, but you're changing the goalposts. You said
| European style safety nets would spur individual
| innovation and risk taking. That was the only metric I
| was interested in. If you want to change the conversation
| to generic 'benefits' or happiness, by all means, go
| ahead, but that's not a conversation I'm personally
| interested in.
| mnouquet wrote:
| Nobody in the US pays the full 21% after taking into
| accounts credits and write-offs.
| usaar333 wrote:
| The main difference is not taxes, but how loose employment
| and business regulations in the US are vs. EU. In general,
| it is much easier to fire people in the US
| (https://smallbusiness.chron.com/compare-us-labor-laws-
| europe...)
| flavius29663 wrote:
| The corporate tax might be nominally higher in the US, but
| the cost of doing business is definitely higher in Europe.
| When you have to pay 55% to the state if an employee has a
| salary above 100k, that will seriously hinder your ability
| to hire top talent, retain them, and motivate them (why
| work harder if it will go down the tax drain?)
| asdff wrote:
| It's not a tax drain though. It funds things like higher
| education and healthcare. Things that most Americans have
| to pay out of pocket if they want which entrenches the
| lack of class mobility in this country. Imo the european
| system is better.
| flavius29663 wrote:
| > It funds things like higher education and healthcare
|
| The US funds the healthcare above and beyond what any
| other country on Earth is doing. I think it's 50% higher
| than the next contender, per capita.
|
| As for higher education, the US universities are doing
| much much better than their European counterparts. If you
| get a STEM degree, you're basically set for life in the
| US, pay your debts in no time and then enjoy a salary
| that can easily be 2 times higher than in Europe. In
| Europe you get a free education, which opens up the
| exciting opportunity to toil for 60k-80k (pre-tax) a year
| for the rest of your life. Take the tax out, and you're
| left with around 50% of that money.
|
| The US universities are fine. The STEM graduates are
| fine. The problem is with all the non-marketable degrees
| for which students get into serious debt. I don't think
| we should subsidize those more, I think we should
| discourage students from attending useless degrees. If
| the government will pay for the degrees, then the
| government will also have a heavy hand in picking winners
| and losers in terms of classes, degrees, schools etc.
| This is how it's in Europe, and it shows, they are
| lacking performance.
|
| e.g.
| https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/french-
| unive...
|
| To put it shortly: if everybody has X, then nobody has X.
|
| Education and healthcare in the US do not lack funding.
| We don't need more money thrown at these nuanced and
| delicate problems.
| distances wrote:
| > paternity/maternity leave policies that cause parents to
| have fewer children
|
| Could you expand what you mean by this? The higher birth rate
| in US (compared to Europe) is usually attributed to poverty
| and religion.
| iammisc wrote:
| This is going to be an extremely heterodox opinion. Please
| be charitable. As far as I know I'm the only person other
| than my wife with this opinion. I don't get this from
| anywhere. Then again, I don't read very much sociology so I
| don't know. I guess what I'm saying is I come by these
| views honestly.
|
| My wife and I are pretty traditional Catholics. That is to
| say... we don't use birth control. We also got married
| pretty young. All things considered, I imagine we will have
| about 4 - 6 kids by the time she enters menopause. This
| informs my views.
|
| Now to my points.
|
| From a business perspective, people taking time off for
| their kids is disruptive to the business. Try as you may to
| incentivize businesses to get around this, the truth is
| that a worker that is present is going to be better than
| one who takes several weeks off every 2-3 years. Now, the
| typical response is that parents are more productive and
| dedicated as employees. That is perhaps true, but I doubt
| the parents of six children are any more productive or
| dedicated than the parents of one or two.
|
| In order for a good fertility rate, you need most couples
| to have 2 or 3 kids, and some to have 4 or more kids, to
| account for those who do not marry or cannot have kids or
| cannot have enough to replace themselves.
|
| If parents can potentially take up to a year off (as they
| can in Canada for example), which is incredibly disruptive
| to business, then companies are not going to want to hire
| them. This is not going to take the form of explicit 'no
| parents allowed'. But rather, all incentives ultimately
| 'leak' -- incentives are a leaky abstraction.
|
| At some point the additional loyalty and hard work one gets
| from parents is going to be balanced off by the risk that
| you may have to give them one year off. Companies do not
| need to explicitly fire parents for this to shake out in
| the market. Parents are going to internally police
| themselves as well. Due to how much of a benefit being able
| to take a full year off is, parents are going to succumb to
| the natural social pressure of not demanding too much of
| society. If every kid is an excuse to take a year off, it's
| not long before parents with lots of kids are seen as
| welfare queens. We already see this in places like France,
| where President Macron has made remarks about how ambitious
| women don't have lots of children.
|
| This also leads to an incentive to not have kids because
| those that put in that extra year that a parent may take
| off accelerate their promotions at a faster speed. Thus,
| kids grow up seeing that the childless are the most
| successful and then want to emulate that path.
|
| I feel this pressure currently. With the birth of a new
| baby pending, and the likely addition of another child a
| few years after, if I were to take 12 months off as some
| european countries allow, I'd soon develop the reputation
| of that guy who takes years off at a time. Work one year,
| then leave the other. Already, it's common in the quiet
| recesses of the break room for child-free colleagues to
| complain about having to cover for the mom/dad having
| another kid. This sort of resentment will never go
| unheeded; the effect is just subtle. Ultimately, this will
| have the effect of making parents feel guilty, thus making
| them reconsider having a kid. I already feel guilty about
| taking time off for my next baby.
|
| So, I believe these three effects -- the self-policing of
| parents who don't want to be seen as leeches, the natural
| advancement of the childless/those with fewer children over
| those with more, and the subliminal incentive to hire
| workers who are not going to take long, disruptive breaks
| every few years -- leads to a society in which only having
| some X number of children is really acceptable. In
| contrast, in American society, there is less incentive to
| be nosy in people's childbearing lives. Whether someone has
| six or ten, since society provides comparatively less to
| the kids, as long as the parents can provide for them, many
| people see childbearing as a personal decision. In a more
| collectivist society, where government does provide a lot
| of benefits, then having 'too many' children can become a
| source of social shame much in the way that the title
| 'welfare queen' carries a stigma of being on government
| benefits.
|
| I don't believe such constraints can be overcome by more
| government regulation. Or if they can, I haven't seen
| anywhere that does so successfully. The effects are
| natural. Imagine if a 20 year old woman got a nice job in a
| Canadian company. Then at age 22, after two years of
| exemplary service, got married and had a baby every year
| until 40. This is a bit extreme, but certainly within
| possibility if she wanted it. Now she requests one year off
| each time. That woman is 'entitled' to twenty years off.
| Don't you think she'll face lower career prospects, less
| advancement, and less employment? Now, imagine she just
| takes every other year off or every fourth year off, etc?
| It seems to me these negative effects scale linearly and
| they do so simply because each child represents time taken
| out of the workforce, while your childless / less fruitful
| colleagues are advancing freely.
|
| Back to my personal observations. I have a few
| acquaintances who are also having big families. guess what?
| Their paternity/maternity leaves are much shorter. They
| realize that if they took the full benefit, they will have
| less career advancement, less prestige, and reduce their
| chances of employment. Thus, they take less. In America,
| where it's normal to take a short paternity break (or
| maternity of only a few months), this carries little
| stigma, and they're just seen as hard-working. In places
| where most parents take many many months off, then these
| parents would be seen as bad parents.
|
| Kind of a brain dump, sorry.
| sparrc wrote:
| I'm not sure you're talking about exactly the same thing this
| article is talking about.
|
| Social safety nets provide basic access to essentials and
| (mostly) equalize access to things like healthcare, but don't
| really do anything to help someone go from "poor" to "middle-
| class", or any other trip up the social ladder.
|
| That person needs to do something to increase their earning
| potential beyond what their parents had.
| ipaddr wrote:
| You think in Europe people are more free to take chances than
| the US? There is less of a need to take a chance so people play
| it safe. Why risk it all or anything when your needs are met
| and money gets taxed highly at the upperend.
| yoz-y wrote:
| There is that, and also less funding and more regulation.
| LightG wrote:
| Sorry, education is very important. But more important is who you
| know ... however that came to be. Might be family, chance, lucky,
| fortune. But it's true. I hate that it's true, but it is true.
| Hence, education is not the great equalizer, it is the mildly
| helpful stabiliser.
|
| Don't believe me? Look around ... many good examples of educated
| people making it, but many more people of educated people who
| knew "someone" making it. Worse, many uneducated people matching
| or exceeding that performance.
| twiddling wrote:
| https://www.manhattan-institute.org/educational-pluralism-in...
|
| "In reality, the U.S. is an outlier. Educational pluralism--a
| school system in which the government funds and regulates, but
| does not necessarily provide, public education--is the democratic
| norm around the world. The list of educationally plural systems
| is long, and it includes the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, Belgium,
| Denmark, Indonesia, Israel, Sweden, and France."
| foolinaround wrote:
| one root cause for poor education that does not seem to be
| discussed in the thread is the absence of fathers - or even the
| attention spent by parents of the child.
|
| If this is factored out, one could see more uniform outcomes.
| neartheplain wrote:
| Interesting to see this on the front page right next to "Software
| Developer Shortage Is Coming":
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27606393
|
| Can't speak to other forms of higher education, but my degree in
| computer science has more than paid for itself and acted as my
| ladder to the upper-middle class.
| aroundtown wrote:
| It was only a way to move up into and through the middle class.
| It was never a ticket to any place else. The reason is simple,
| lack of opportunity. Sometimes opportunity is money, privilege,
| or luck. Sometimes it's being at the right place at the right
| time, befriending the right person at a party, or working
| together on a group project.
|
| Every entrepreneur that I have known has come has some sort of
| privilege to get them where they are. One, not only had
| moderately wealthy parents, but those parents raised him inside
| of a successful store. From a young age he was taught how to make
| a venture work, he had a fall back if he failed, and he had
| people to call if he needed advice. Because of the opportunities
| they had in life, they believe that it was all hard work and
| intelligence that got them there.
|
| My best friend from grade school was very wealthy. My friend has
| had more opportunities in life, just because their parents could
| float them while they took unpaid internships, complete graduate
| school, and buy them a nice big house so they could settle down
| and start a family.
|
| If you want a 'great equalizer' you have to provide opportunity
| to those that don't have it. You have to check your privilege at
| the door and consider for a moment that some people don't have it
| as good as you. You have to give people a chance to prove
| themselves.
|
| Even in the US and in Tech, if you were raised or live outside of
| a major metro, you are at a significant disadvantage to those who
| had the luck to living in one. If we want to fix this, we have to
| prioritize giving more opportunities to those who don't have
| them.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Is the education the new to education people on the bottom level
| are getting really the same?
|
| We have heard plenty of stories of grades watered down to meet
| graduation targets, students being unable to get less than 50%,
| the proliferation of crappy for profit schools like Corinthian,
| and students being piped into college just to take tons of
| remedial courses.
| synergy20 wrote:
| In public education, it's no longer 'equal opportunity', the no-
| child-left-behind has evolved into 'equity result', i.e. the ISD
| and teachers are rated based on how all students' scores are the
| same.
|
| in high schools I know ,the tests are designed so easy that many
| can score 90+, so you see the whole class are all squeezed into
| the 90~100 range, everyone is happy and feeling justice and
| fairness, except that they will fail in college so we will need
| increase H1B cap more.
|
| these I feel are not good for the future of the country, good
| intentions do not necessarily mean good result, quite the
| opposite.
| blakesterz wrote:
| This one seems kind of tough to quickly summarize, since it
| covers so much. I guess the final paragraph does a decent job:
|
| Education, training in cognitive and noncognitive skills,
| nutrition, health care and parenting are all among the building
| blocks of human capital, and evidence suggests that continuing
| investments that combat economic hardship among whites and
| minorities -- and which help defuse debilitating conflicts over
| values, culture and race -- stand the best chance of reversing
| the disarray and inequality that plague our political system and
| our social order.
|
| https://archive.is/gggnc
| rayiner wrote:
| Part of the conflict over "values and culture," however, is
| over things that affect human capital.
|
| As a Bangladeshi immigrant who married into a white American
| family, it's really hard for me to not notice the devastation
| mainstream American culture has racked on the ability to
| develop human capital. My younger siblings in law, who are in
| their early 20s live in towns (these are mainly white, working
| to middle class towns) where everyone's parents are divorced,
| drug use doesn't get you a beating from your dad (who often
| isn't there), etc. Kids can't get their feet under them because
| their home situations are always changing. For boys this is
| particularly bad, because their natural inclination is to cause
| trouble and the only thing that can keep them in control is a
| network of older men. (My dad grew up in a village in
| Bangladesh and remarked that he couldn't do anything anywhere
| in the village without word getting back to his father.)
|
| Money can paper over a lot of problems, I'll give you that. But
| it seems to me that if Americans were as poor as Bangladeshis,
| their society would totally collapse. The culture isn't suited
| for survival or upward mobility.
| lappet wrote:
| I think this is the main con of American individualism. The
| alternative is the culture in Asian societies and perhaps to
| some extent in European ones as well - there is always an
| Uncle or Aunty who is watching out for you. Of course that
| has cons where you can't do things that are unconventional,
| but at the very least you have a stop gap to help young
| people who are lost.
| wyager wrote:
| The greatest and most rapid creation of wealth in human
| history occurred in the US under an even more extreme form
| of American individualism than exists today. Europe is
| quite poor relative to America precisely because its anti-
| individualism prevents the formation of economic-political
| environments conducive to wealth creation.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| And yet that same sort of "village culture" of adults in
| a neighborhood looking after the kids collectively was
| very common in America throughout much of its history;
| co-occurring with individualism.
| rayiner wrote:
| I don't think that's quite accurate. Economically, there
| was less government imposed communitarianism. But
| American society itself wasn't all that individualistic
| at the community level.
| bhupy wrote:
| One could argue that this historic wealth creation also
| coincided with a high degree of Judeo-Christian
| religiosity. We're yet to see if the same success can be
| replicated under an equally individualistic culture, but
| one without a unified moral fabric via religion. And I
| say this as an Asian who was raised a Hindu and is now an
| atheist.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| >We're yet to see if the same success can be replicated
| under an equally individualistic culture, but one without
| a unified moral fabric via religion.
|
| Isn't China an example of that?
| temp8964 wrote:
| Sounds amazing. So the group of kids with 70% fatherless can
| achieve the same as the group of kids with 30% fatherless! Wow.
| pedro2 wrote:
| Yes! Forbid procreation, import people from overpopulated
| countries!
| Ensorceled wrote:
| What does this even mean? What in-group jargon is this?
| im3w1l wrote:
| I think he says that 70% of kids in one group are
| fatherless, and 30% of kids in another group are. And then
| saying that there must be an achievement gap because of
| this difference.
| temp8964 wrote:
| See data here:
| https://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/line/107-children-
| in-s...
| fatsquirrel wrote:
| 30% of white and Asian kids are born of divorced parents
| while it's 70% for Black and Latinx kids.
| dalbasal wrote:
| >>ongoing debate over what kind of investments in human capital
|
| If we start by adopting the "human capital" frame, we've already
| biased the discussion. The premise of this frame is that earnings
| are all to be understood as returns on capital. Earnings that are
| not returns capital are evidence if some sort of dark capital.
|
| A related frame is a supply/demand understanding of executive
| pay, or lawyer salaries... it's hard to square observations with
| theory, resulting in some pretty weird conclusions.
|
| If we want to explore new ideas, imo, it's best to avoid
| rhetorical or theoretical frames that yielded the old ones.
|
| This article is a perfect case in point. Models of parenting
| "types" as causal to earnings. What bollocks.
| [deleted]
| yzombinator wrote:
| Why is a gap between different socio-economic strata amazing? Do
| people really assume parents have absolutely nothing to add to
| the table? Only government? Of course they do!
|
| Which means, a gap must by definition exist. That gap is the
| reason people want to move up a class.
|
| Any program that the state adopts as policy will have a weak
| implementation. As a family will surely see the stakes and
| counteract/use it.
| arminiusreturns wrote:
| The oligarchs have been working to detroy the middle class for a
| long time now (see the Norman Dodd interview or The Leipzig
| Connection), and education is a key piece of that work, because
| it truly can be a great equalizer. You will notice not just
| different curriculum, but entirely different methods being used
| at a posh place for the elite like Eton, vs a (US) public school
| or even most upper middle class private schools.
|
| Class war is real, the rich are winning, and education is a key
| part of that war.
| wyager wrote:
| You're making the same exact mistake that education activists
| have made for the last 60 years.
|
| Education does not significantly improve outcomes. Period.
|
| What people observe is that people who went to top-tier schools
| end up being very successful, and make the (totally false)
| inference that top-tier schools make you successful.
|
| In reality, the people who were almost certainly going to be
| successful anyway get into the top-tier schools, partially on
| merit and partially because this is the legitimation process
| for the upper class in the US.
|
| If you stuff a million poor people into the top-tier schools,
| this won't actually fix anything, because A) those people are
| much less likely to succeed no matter what B) you can't
| actually have a million people in the upper class.
|
| We're currently in the throes of dealing with B). Turchin calls
| this "elite overproduction". You have millions of people who
| (think they) went through the process to become upper class
| (going to college), but it turns out that was just a signifier
| - a signifier that's been totally destroyed by the push to send
| everyone to college.
| Cybotron5000 wrote:
| https://www.gov.uk/government/news/elitism-in-britain-2019
| oezi wrote:
| I agree about the signifier, but still think education has a
| real value outside the pure signalling. You need experts and
| for that you need schools/colleges because in most jobs you
| will not learn wide enough nor deep enough (exceptions are
| possible).
| wyager wrote:
| Yes, you need experts, but the people who are going to
| really benefit from expert-level training were probably
| already going to go to college anyway. Doctors, lawyers,
| scientists, etc are part of the upper class in one way or
| another.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I won't dispute the existence of class war (though I don't
| think it's about "middle class" and more about "working class"
| and I don't think this process is deliberate, more
| systemic)....
|
| But I would quibble about the role education _content_ plays.
| Canada doesn 't have the same kind of tiered education system
| that the US has. Public schools are funded out of pooled
| revenue not local taxes for example so poor neighbourhoods
| don't get poorly funded schools (though that doesn't rule out
| what happens with "fundraising" but that's another issue). And
| universities are more affordable and don't generally get
| 'elite' status and name branding. Universities are generally
| all of high quality and most sane employers wouldn't sneer
| based on where your CS degree came from, etc.
|
| But we have similar income inequality issues to the US. Because
| it's not the curriculum, it's the ongoing class structure,
| that's the problem.
|
| Now, there's definitely different levels of education quality,
| but I have yet to see evidence that curriculum content is the
| problem. I'd argue the chief value of private schools and elite
| universities is the network of other wealthy people (am I
| allowed to use the word 'bourgeois?) you'll meet there. It's
| connecting with people of your own class.
|
| When I worked at a startup here I quickly realized that most
| founders and investors I met knew each other or knew of each
| other through the private school circuit. But it was the
| exclusiveness of the networks they got through there that
| benefited them, not the quality of the education. They weren't
| any smarter than me, just better acculturated into the world of
| investment, finance, etc. by nature of who they knew, what
| resources they had, and whose kids they were.
| arminiusreturns wrote:
| I disagree strongly about curriculum. Just to give an
| example, here is an exerpt about the language curriculum at
| Eton from a modern (90s) graduate:
|
| "Everyone must learn Latin and French for the first two
| years. Most boys have studied Latin and French for a couple
| of years before they arrive at the school. The cleverer boys
| also do Ancient Greek. There are many more languages offered
| besides these ones. The additional foreign languages are
| Russian, Spanish, German. Chinese, Japanese, Italian and
| Arabic. Those who are not good at languages need do only
| French and Latin." - Calers (1)
|
| To me this is just one of a myriad of examples that highlight
| the kind of difference in actual education curriculum between
| the oligarchs and the rest of us. I would argue much of this
| is about quality of life instead of "success outcomes", and
| generally about having a strong liberal arts background being
| a key component of _ANY_ education worth anything. Which is
| also why I strongly disagree with those who advocate for
| sending students straight to vocational schools, and that
| whole general line of reasoning, for example.
|
| How many of your referenced founders and investors knew Latin
| and French before the age of 13?
|
| 1. https://gcalers.wordpress.com/2014/11/06/what-makes-eton-
| so-...
| erik998 wrote:
| Actually, Mark Zuckerburg went to Phillips Exeter Academy.
|
| "At Ardsley High School, Zuckerberg excelled in classes.
| After two years, he transferred to the private school
| Phillips Exeter Academy, where he won prizes in
| mathematics, astronomy, physics, and classical studies."
| [no coding classes, hmm?]
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_Exeter_Academy
|
| The facebook idea came from the booklet tey give each class
| with a picture of the student's face and location.
|
| https://readwrite.com/2009/05/10/mark_zuckerberg_inspiratio
| n...
|
| Many other founders went to similar schools. I was not
| aware of this until I did policy debate and met these types
| of students. They do live in a bubble and have no idea how
| to relate to the rest.
|
| In fact, a good thing to do is always check the high school
| of these "founders." Check their curriculum...
|
| When I see trade school students doing billion dollar
| startups, I will believe education is no longer a great
| equalizer. At the same time, I believe if you want to
| participate in the American oligarchy or compete with them,
| you need to become familiar with where they get their
| training.
|
| It's not always the case but most times if you delve into
| their background you will find this to be the case.
| arminiusreturns wrote:
| "At the same time, I believe if you want to participate
| in the American oligarchy or compete with them, you need
| to become familiar with where they get their training."
|
| Well observed! This has also been my conclusion, but I
| have to admit a curious line of thinking it spurred. With
| modern technology, it should be possible to spread this
| training to the public. If that happened though, what
| would be the impact? An oversaturated world of elites?
| Some new faction of elite that would then headbut the
| old-guard? It's a fun though experiment at least.
| wutbrodo wrote:
| I believe the gap between private schools and public schools,
| because I've seen it (a good friend of mine had to repeat a
| grade coming from his rich-area public school to our private
| school). But is there any evidence of a gap in instructional
| quality between (eg) Eton and upper-middle-class private
| schools? I don't know a ton about the topic, but this would be
| pretty surprising given my current low-confidence
| understanding.
|
| I believe that there's a success gap, but that's plausibly down
| to the inescapable networking advantages of concentrating
| elites, and isn't relevant to the specific claim you're making.
| derbOac wrote:
| Even here on HN I've seen "looking to hire" posts where they
| basically come out and say they will only consider people
| from elite colleges and universities. It's hard to see stuff
| like that, so blatant, and not conclude there's a signaling-
| networking phenomenon going on. It comes up in other things
| I've seen too, where I know some idea has been floated over
| and over again by various groups, and then some deal is
| announced in the news where some institution (university or
| corporation) is given the grant or funding or whatever, for
| the same thing as all the other proposals, and it's obvious
| it's a rich get richer phenomenon.
|
| These issues are always so complicated because they don't
| operate in any of the ways that people assume
| stereotypically. One person will be hit by circumstance
| positively or negatively in a way that's idiosyncratic to
| them, and privilege operates in subtle ways sometimes.
|
| As for your question, a few years ago there was a blog post
| making the rounds showing that across colleges, students
| improve across their undergrad years on standardized testing,
| but it's pretty much uniform across colleges. More selective
| colleges have higher means (and in some studies lower
| variance) but the rate of learning isn't any different, and
| there's huge overlaps in distributions between institutions.
| I've tried to find it but haven't been able to from where I'm
| at at the moment.
| 8note wrote:
| Those posts give me the sense that those companies are
| looking for investors (the rich parents) rather than
| somebody to do work
| rkk3 wrote:
| Google famously only hired people with elite education
| credentials in the beginning.
|
| "We also didn't want to hire anyone from what were
| considered lesser universities" Eric Schmidt
| https://youtu.be/hcRxFRgNpns?t=1756
| BobbyJo wrote:
| I hear this a lot and I have a hard time believing it. What is
| something _the rich_ have done with the intent to destroy the
| middle class?
|
| Your example with public vs private schools has less to do with
| diminishing public schools and everything to do with their
| maximizing their own children's education. If we end private
| schools, do we still allow paid tutors? If so, I don't see how
| that field gets levelled.
| luffapi wrote:
| > _What is something the rich have done with the intent to
| destroy the middle class?_
|
| https://www.fastcompany.com/90642878/worker-pay-went-up-
| just...
|
| And that's not even starting on lobbying and policy.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| So the rich _made stocks go up_ because _they want to
| destroy the middle class_?
| luffapi wrote:
| As per the source I linked: the rich captured all the
| gains and failed to increase everyone else's pay to even
| match inflation.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| As per the source, the rich are paid in stock, and they
| made more because stocks grew in value. You're making it
| sound like a scheme when it's a paycheck. Everyone in the
| US is free to convert all of their money into stock
| whenever they like. The reason the CEOs get paid in stock
| to to tie their compensation to the value of the company,
| not to disenfranchise the poor.
| luffapi wrote:
| Nowhere in that article does it talk about executive
| compensation coming solely from stock. Mismatched equity
| grants are one of the levers, but so is regular salary.
|
| Regardless, the fact is executive pay has been rising
| while worker pay has been stagnant for decades. That's
| not even up for debate, it's a fact.
| throwaway2048 wrote:
| You are not free to convert money you need to live into
| stocks.
| fungiblecog wrote:
| Duh, the poor have to spend money to live, they can't
| just buy stock and wait for it to increase in value. And
| at the volumes they can afford the transaction fees would
| kill any profit.
| 8note wrote:
| Moving to areas with "good schools" is one.
|
| Only schools where wealthy people live get good funding, so
| when they concentrate where they live to one place,
| everywhere else suffers
| BobbyJo wrote:
| Wealthy people choosing to live near each other, and thus
| their local community having more taxes per child, does not
| demonstrate to me intent to destroy the middle class.
| wyager wrote:
| The US has some of the best-funded public schools in the
| world and some of the worst outcomes in public schools.
| "Funding" is a red herring at best and an excuse for
| extractive politics in reality.
|
| It turns out that life outcomes have approximately nothing
| whatsoever to do with how much money your childhood schools
| got.
|
| It also strikes me as quite perverse to blame people who
| are able to move their children out of schools that have
| become terrible (through no fault of their own).
| dwater wrote:
| Yes, the problem is not school funding but school
| segregation. It takes more than money to help high needs
| students, it takes attention and support. If your child
| needs attention and support and they go to a school where
| the majority of their peers have the same needs, none of
| them will get it.
| wyager wrote:
| Hold on... your claim is that students are not having
| their special needs met, and your solution is to put them
| in a school that's even _less_ equipped to handle their
| special needs? Schools absolutely should be segregated,
| as much as possible, by things like academic ability.
| That's the only way schools can effectively meet students
| where they're at. It takes a totally different strategy
| to help a low-performing student catch up vs helping a
| high-performing student excel. By forcing those kids into
| the same classroom, you're not helping either of them.
| dwater wrote:
| My claim is that more of the students that attend schools
| in impoverished areas need significant support beyond
| being presented instructional content than students in
| affluent areas, and that when students with those high
| needs are concentrated they are less likely to have them
| met.
|
| My experience as a secondary school teacher in multiple
| Title 1 schools was that when you are responsible for a
| classroom of 30 students, once you have more than a few
| with high needs (3-5 in my experience) you are unable to
| provide any of them the support they need. When I taught
| in an affluent school, I saw that students who were in
| Special Education programs were given a lot more personal
| attention and support, which provided them the structure
| they needed to be successful. Students where those needs
| are concentrated don't get the attention and support and
| as a result are very, very unlikely to be successful
| academically.
| water8 wrote:
| > It also strikes me as quite perverse to blame people
| who are able to move their children out of schools that
| have become terrible
|
| How do some schools become terrible if they are public
| and well funded?
|
| They become terrible because funding is not distributed
| evenly.
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| I live in a median income neighborhood that is next to a
| low income neighborhood. The school is funded just fine,
| and we passed a local bond measure to ensure the school
| could build and grow. The student population is pretty
| mixed. The only thing holding this school back is the
| people that run it. I moved my kids to private school so
| they could actually get an education instead of just a
| babysitter.
| arminiusreturns wrote:
| First, the bar you set is probably too high. Intent is
| notoriously hard to prove, even with deductive evidence, much
| less inductive evidence.
|
| Also, I never advocated for ending private schools. You are
| strawmanning that one, and it's a perhipherial point to the
| topic anyway.
|
| Since you asked though, how about the Fed's endless bailouts
| of the rich that are still ongoing? Those same bailouts that
| then get turned around into lobbying dollars to rewrite the
| laws to favor corporations over people (or stock buybacks, I
| could go on)? Like I said, intent is hard to prove, but there
| is a lot of inductive evidence pointing towards it being of a
| high probability.
|
| "Empires are even sometimes represented as unintentional.
| That's when it really starts to get cute. This should have
| been called maybe the funnier myths of empire, this part of
| it. The product of unconcious circumstance. When I was a
| youth, ... I used to hear that the British Empire was put
| together in a fit of absent mindedness. ... In fact, ladies
| and gentlemen, I think a moments reflection would tell you
| that empires are products of deliberate contrivance, of
| deliberate confection, planning, calculation, and
| manipulation. No social order can maintain itself in the long
| run, no social order can maintain itself without concious
| human agency. In fact that's why you have a state, the state
| is the concious human agency of coercion to maintain that
| particular set of interests and order, which don't
| necessarily always look out for _our_ interests. " - Michael
| Parenti
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOF56wYTl1w
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| >What is something the rich have done with the intent to
| destroy the middle class?
|
| Vigorously target labor unions. Lobby for substantial
| decreases in state and Federal taxation, reductions that have
| in turn necessitated major reductions in education spending
| and substantial tuition increases that hit middle class
| families [1]. Attempt (so far unsuccessfully) to privatize
| social security. Strongly oppose healthcare reform proposals
| that might reduce out-of-pocket spending.
|
| PS The above examples are a very small part of the story.
| It's honestly shocking to me that the question even gets
| asked, or has to be answered.
|
| [1] https://www.cbpp.org/research/state-budget-and-tax/state-
| hig...
| qqtt wrote:
| Those examples aren't really "the rich".
|
| Business tax cuts benefit shareholders, and globally there
| has been a race to the bottom to pit locations against each
| other to try to drive profit margins. These things have
| largely affected manufacturing - manufacturing itself being
| marginalized in the greater business landscape as other
| more profitable industries have gained favor. Note that
| "the rich" are not all that intertwined in the minutiae of
| manufacturing.
|
| Opposing health care reform is also a niche issue dominated
| by well-connected insurance companies. Many other
| industries would like nothing more than the government to
| take over health care costs and lower their own burden
| (including tech companies who end up paying exorbitant
| amounts to fund these benefits against other competitors).
| The health insurance companies (and related industries
| which benefit from price gouging in the health care
| industry) are entrenched in lobbying and congress and have
| the clout to block these efforts. Insurance companies
| aren't "the rich" they are simply well connected with
| government.
|
| Much of the talk about "the rich" trying to "destroy the
| middle class" really come down to two large buckets:
|
| * Company shareholders benefiting from profit margins
| (outsourcing, manufacturing, lowering cost without
| oversight or regulation) - this benefits "the rich" is so
| far as "the rich" are shareholders of these companies
|
| * Niche industries having disproportionate influence in our
| political system - such as private prison lobby, health
| insurance lobby, etc. - these players have in turn
| disproportionate impact on our legislative process because
| they are entrenched and intertwined with members of
| congress
|
| It doesn't benefit "the rich" to have a poor population, if
| anything it makes the rich more vulnerable. What we are
| seeing play out is actually unintended consequences of
| greed and plain as day corruption which continues without
| oversight and regulation.
| [deleted]
| donezo wrote:
| Surely it still is the great equalizer. Everyone I know claiming
| to be educated is certainly the same.
| slumdev wrote:
| The first statistic in the article (high school completion rate)
| is not an appropriate measure.
|
| There's a growing body of evidence that high school seniors are
| being graduated whether they're capable or not, so a diploma in
| 2016 means much less than a diploma from 1976:
|
| https://www.uschamber.com/above-the-fold/high-school-seniors...
| ignJack188 wrote:
| Unfortunately, education in the US is becoming really expensive.
| The cohort based learning is the way to go! sites like Maven are
| the future.
| asdff wrote:
| Going to school in state is still cheap for most Americans.
| UCLA is 13k a year in state, CSULA is 6k a year in state. USC
| gives you a full ride if your household makes below a certain
| amount. It's no small chunk of change but its possible to put a
| dent in it if you work long hours in the summers between
| classes, and have roommates or live with family.
| naturalauction wrote:
| The oped touches on one thing I noticed during my time at the
| University of Cambridge. Almost everyone I talked to there had
| parents who invested heavily in them either monetarily (hiring
| nannies, intensive pre-school/after-school care/private school)
| or time wise from a young age. Increasing access to early child
| education as argued for by the author seems like no-brainer to
| bridge some of the gap between children of parents who invest
| more in their kids' future and children of parents who either
| can't or don't want to.
| aroundtown wrote:
| Improving access to education is not enough.
|
| You have to improve opportunity.
|
| For example, I grew up extremely poor, and went to a small
| school. The most my parents knew about college was that I was
| going to go to one. Now I had the intelligence to get into just
| about any school I wanted, but I had no idea what/where those
| schools were. I also was unaware of how scholarships worked, or
| that I could have afforded most schools because we were poor.
| So I didn't apply to the few dream schools I knew of (MIT,
| Harvard, and Yale were the only big schools I knew about).
|
| I applied and was accepted to two state schools in my region
| and went to one of those. My partner is appalled at the lack of
| opportunities I had growing up. No amount of money at the time
| would have fixed the situation, only moving to an area with
| better opportunities for me would have.
| jhoechtl wrote:
| For Austria it has been an equalizer in the 1970 to the 1990 when
| Socialist parties guaranteed free quality education for everyone
| and parental leave (for woman back then) of more than a year.
|
| Since then the educational system has been largely privatized,
| education by means of sheer oversupply completely devalued and
| turned into a money game. The more money you are willing to pay,
| the easier it will become to get a degree, mostly unaffected by
| the cognitive ability of the student. As this fact is
| increasingly tickling into society, the effect is that education
| is no longer an equalizer.
| [deleted]
| Applejinx wrote:
| A lot of people here need to talk to some entrepreneurs.
|
| It doesn't matter how good, or how well funded, the school system
| is: if the family is poor, you're not going to be able to float
| rent on the storefront you need, or purchase initial inventory of
| whatever you're making, much less soak up a few false starts,
| much less take out a bank loan to do any of these things.
|
| Period.
|
| This does not in ANY WAY mean there shouldn't be good school
| funding across the board.
|
| It means that anybody who thinks 'the schools are now funded, so
| the kids from poor families are now equally able to start a
| business' is high... or disingenuous.
|
| Let's assume these kids are hungrier, more motivated, and just
| generally better than most people. If you expect them to simply
| get busy competing with lazier and less capable kids from wealth
| and privilege, because they ARE better than the lazy rich, you
| are overlooking the role of generational capital and access to
| capital. It would not matter if you were in fact significantly
| better, smarter and more motivated: banks want collateral, and
| entrepreneurial exploits don't always bootstrap up from zero. I
| think it's far more common to prime the pump, sometimes to the
| tune of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars each time.
|
| By all means educate, but don't con yourself that it will matter,
| in the absence of any other changes.
| borodi wrote:
| As always, the easiest way to be successful is to be born in a
| successful family
| tclancy wrote:
| The best way to make a small fortune is to start with a large
| one.
|
| And then buy a boat.
| water8 wrote:
| Its better to be born in the 95th percentile in intelligence
| vs the 95th percentile in wealth in terms of where you will
| actually end up.
| moate wrote:
| Citations[1] Needed[2] Please[3].
|
| 1-https://users.nber.org/~denardim/research/Wealthsurvey.pd
| f - 2https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/68507/13/Karagiannaki_Effect
| %20of%... 3-https://ifs.org.uk/publications/14954
| bernulli wrote:
| Not that I'm a fan, but Malcolm Gladwell wrote a whole book
| (Outliers) about how this is not true.
| syops wrote:
| Do you have evidence for this? My impression is the
| opposite but I have no evidence that I'm right or wrong.
| It's just an impression that I have.
| dwater wrote:
| I'm going to need a reference to support that claim. I did
| some searching and the closest I could find was a 2019
| Georgetown study that said it was better to be affluent and
| in the bottom 25% of test scores than poor and in the top
| 25%.
| bsder wrote:
| Agreed. Bill Gates was smart, but:
|
| 1) He had access to a computer via his prep school in _1968_.
| This is _way_ ahead of the vast majority of people in the
| world. Money bought him 5-10 years of advance knowledge.
|
| 2) Gate's mother had direct access to the IBM CEO
|
| 3) Gate's father could cut a sudden check to the tune of
| $50,000 to back his son's business venture
|
| Kildall was just as smart as Gates, but didn't have the
| advantages.
| hodgesrm wrote:
| It's not clear what Gary Kildall has to do with this
| argument. He had a Ph.D. in computer science and developed
| one of the first successful operating system for
| microcomputers. It's really hard to see him as disadvantaged.
| The legend of course is that he whiffed one of the biggest
| business opportunities in the history of computing, but lots
| of people have blown it in business. [1] The IBM story was
| interesting because Kildall was _already_ successful.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Kildall
| grumblenum wrote:
| Here I thought I was underachieving because I was reading HN
| comments instead of doing anything productive. Now I see that
| the world, or at least subsets of the population I'm allowed to
| blame for my problems, has wronged me, which appeals to my
| petty sense of envy and bitterness and assuages the guilt I had
| about not actually trying. Perhaps this inequality is actually
| a grand conspiracy. I wish the press, academia, and the boards
| of basically every major company were woke to this crisis.
| Applejinx wrote:
| Don't get it twisted. By all means DO stuff.
|
| It's not going to wind up making you rich unless your family
| was rich, and if you're not rich, you're not going to be able
| to buy your way into mainstream attention, either.
|
| Go ahead and DO stuff.
|
| If you're the kind of person where it doesn't matter unless
| you can 'scale' and get real competitive with all the other
| heavy hitters, I guess don't bother?
|
| I would humbly suggest that the best recipe for making it big
| is having the resources to support your attempt, AND doing
| something that you would still care about if you were just
| small time. Just saying.
| afarrell wrote:
| Different goals for different conversations.
|
| Your therapist or coach should be talking to you about the
| importance of taking care of yourself and getting after your
| own individual goals.
|
| Your school board and legislature should be talking about
| solving systemic problems.
|
| Don't spitefully wait for your legislature to act before you
| start exercising self-discipline.
|
| Don't get in the way of people trying to solve systemic
| problems because they make your self-discipline less needed
| in some way.
| fatsquirrel wrote:
| The article is paywalled so I can't read it, but I think it's
| about degree inflation and watered down education.
|
| Kids aren't learning valuable career skills, but merely that
| mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell.
| omgwtfbbq wrote:
| Colleges and Universities were never meant to be a Job Training
| program, I never understood people who think of them that way.
| Corporations have somehow passed the buck for on the job
| training to colleges while simultaneously complaining that
| grads aren't ready for the job. If they want trained employees
| they should be training them or we need a completely separate
| system of credentialing "trained" workers, the College and
| University system was never meant for this.
| ineedasername wrote:
| I don't think you can separate the concept of education as an
| "equalizer" from the realities of the supply & demand for
| educated workers. As more educated workers entered the workplace,
| the minimum education requirements increased.
|
| As an example, my father, without an college degree, moved up
| from an entry level labor worker in the early 70's to the VP of
| operations for the entire company, something nearly impossible
| today with low-level management positions gated by a degree
| requirement. Because when most candidates have a degree, finding
| someone both qualified & with a degree is less of an obstacle.
| All else being equal, two identical resumes except for the
| "Bachelors Degree" on one of them, the later is more likely to
| get an interview and the job. Absolutely this might not always be
| ideal, the signal of having degree does not always actually
| predict capabilities, but that was the case when HS education was
| the minimum standard as well, and so long as companies need a
| low-pass filter to narrow the pool of candidates, this isn't
| likely to change. Whether or not it's _fair or accurate_ is
| somewhat irrelevant.
| John23832 wrote:
| Two parts:
|
| First, I think the ability to DO THINGS is the great equalizer at
| this point. Being a do-er lifts you out of poverty (or at least
| out of poverty's worst resting state). Being a do-er expands your
| network. Being a do-er prolongs your life (people with jobs/daily
| activities tend to live longer healthier lives). The best part
| about this is that technology has made it easier to become a do-
| er. You don't need as much specialized education or tools, and
| trial and error is free.
|
| Secondly, education's place as the great economic equalizer has
| weakened because we have weakened the education. In public
| schools (the most widely used education institutions in the US),
| kids are just shoveled through. Why? We put an emphasis on
| standardized testing and graduation rates while also chronically
| underfunding schools. That leads us to lower quality/quantity of
| teachers who are told to march to the drum of hitting numbers.
| The emphasis on "just graduating" pushes teachers to push kids
| through, event when they have not actually learned anything. That
| same philosophy then propagates to college, where TA's want to
| research for their Masters/PHDs, not teach. You then get a
| "working class" with no real skills/education/ambition... they do
| not "do", which leads back to my first comment.
| fidesomnes wrote:
| > while also chronically underfunding schools.
|
| The myths that workers with three months of paid vacation a
| year tell the rest of us.
| only_as_i_fall wrote:
| >First, I think the ability to DO THINGS is the great equalizer
| at this point.
|
| How do you define that though?
|
| Do you consider someone working a minimum wage job full-time to
| be in this category? Someone making $15-20 an hour but without
| any real opportunity for advancement?
|
| I don't understand the criteria.
| mathgladiator wrote:
| This speaks towards hustle culture. As a kid, I was making
| $20/hr plus by going door to door raking leaves. The
| narration of 'get a job ' is not for doers, but rather 'go
| produce value for others'.
| pnutjam wrote:
| Ask me how I know you grew up in a wealthier neighborhood.
| shados wrote:
| It's probably oversimplified but the idea is there. Maybe it
| would be better put as "the ability to do things the person
| next to you can't or won't do".
|
| Being a cashier for a fast food joint on night shift is
| absolute hell on your mental and physical health, it takes a
| ton of endurance, and is all around not very pleasant. But a
| lot of people have that endurance and the ability to power
| through it. Being a cab driver takes a ton of time and hours
| and puts your safety at risk continually...but a lot of
| people know how to drive and risks is something anyone can
| take (even if they, rightly so, would rather not to).
|
| Building a web app in a cushy office (or working from home!)
| is honestly not that hard and rather enjoyable, but right now
| not that many people can do it, so it pays well. As tools
| become friendlier and the knowledge spreads though, it very
| well might end up paying less for the simpler roles than the
| cashier or driver is. (like in the dot com crash).
|
| It's always been about being able to do what others can't.
| Education, connections, capital, they're all means to that
| particular end. Shuffling assets in a fidelity account to set
| up a 3 fund portfolio isn't rocket science and will make you
| a lot of money, but most people can't do it because they lack
| the capital.
|
| Thus, the ability to "DO THINGS". Some of those abilities can
| come from hard work, some come from luck, some from who you
| know, some because you were born to rich ass parents.
| seoaeu wrote:
| Amusing this definition of "the ability to do things the
| person next to you can't or won't do" basically contradicts
| the idea that DO THINGS can possibly be a great equalizer.
| Any equality that only some people can have, is pretty much
| by definition not equality.
| beerandt wrote:
| Then the do-ing in this case would be quit working the dead-
| end job and finding another one.
|
| If what you're doing now hasn't presented an opportunity for
| advancing, don't keep doing the same thing and expect
| different results.
| mnowicki wrote:
| Have you ever met a person who eats rice and ramen and
| whatnot all week so they can make it to their next
| paycheck(s), and eats next to nothing before pay day
| because they literally just don't have money to buy food to
| eat. You want them to quit their job(s), and what, figure
| out something else in ~4 days before they have 0 dollars
| left for food & electricity & rent & internet(if they have
| it at all).
|
| I know a couple people like this, and I know there are many
| out there in this situation with several kids to worry
| about. Maybe your aware of this and were referring to
| people with disposable income and savings, but those people
| don't really need to do something else because apparently
| things are working out for them better than the vast
| majority of people. I don't want to assume too much but
| this comes off sounding really badly.
|
| Never-mind the fact that these low-paying jobs exist and
| someone will have to do them, therefore some percentage of
| the population will be in this situation, often despite
| working several jobs and dealing with a lot more than most
| of us have to on top of that. I don't see how anyone can
| have this view without also implicitly stating that some %
| of the population are necessarily just not good at doing
| things and deserve to live through that kind of struggle
| because of it.
| beerandt wrote:
| Yes, I've been there. And I've worked plenty of jobs that
| sucked, but were always experience builders.
|
| 1) There's no reason you can't look for a job before
| quitting your current one. In fact, you should always be
| looking for better opportunities, no matter how much you
| like your current job.
|
| 2) Is it harder for parents, single or not? Yea. Yet
| these are the people you most often see make the change.
| They have the right motivation, moreso than singles their
| age without kids.
|
| 3) The fact that the low paying job exists, and will
| always exist, doesn't mean you have to be the one to do
| it forever. Or anyone else.
|
| You get a job, you get experience, you move on to a
| better job, and someone with less experience takes over
| your old job. The world turns.
|
| >some percentage of the population will be in this
| situation
|
| Yes- entry level workers, kids, and maybe some people
| that are rebuilding their life. They're not meant to be
| careers.
| wayoutthere wrote:
| Holy hell dude, are you calling the working class lazy and the
| professional class hard-working?! This tells me you don't have
| a lot of contact with the working class. The working class
| busts their asses while most software devs I know work about 2
| hours a day from their couch in pajamas.
|
| Someone who works at a warehouse or fast food joint is a much
| harder worker than a software architect. Probably also working
| 60-80 hours a week across a couple jobs just to pay rent.
| Meanwhile I just spout bullshit all day and play corporate
| politics without really knowing anything nor having much
| ambition, and I'm somehow worth 20-40x what someone at an
| Amazon warehouse is.
| iammisc wrote:
| Americans glorify hard work while undervaluing efficiency.
|
| For example, I often hear fellow Americans brag about how
| many hours they put in or how intense their work is. This is
| true all the way from the blue collar trades to the most
| white collar (management consultants are notorious for this).
|
| In reality, it's better to use fewer hours to accomplish the
| same goal. There is no inherent value in applying more time
| to something.
|
| The truth is the SW architect, the CEO of many corporations,
| etc are more efficient than the lowest level workers. I know
| this is not popular, and it makes many uncomfortable, but it
| is undeniably true. This is because both the SW architect and
| the CEO and the management consultant and the operations
| manager, etc, are all into _automation_ , which is an
| efficiency increasing process.
|
| This is not just automation in terms of building robots
| (which maybe a SW architect is involved with), but also
| automation in terms of making the lowest level workers
| replaceable by developing corporate policy, procedures, etc.
| The CEO provides the service of automating investment returns
| to his/her company's shareholders.
|
| In this light, it is obvious why certain professions earn
| more. They are way more efficient with their time.
|
| > I'm somehow worth 20-40x what someone at an Amazon
| warehouse is.
|
| Because your work is quite a bit more efficient. I mean, like
| many here, I write software for a living. Once my software
| component works, it works. It will work forever with minimal
| maintenance once it stabilizes, and will provide the company
| with many many years of value, even if I and my team were to
| drop dead. In other words, we are automators. The automators
| are always going to do better.
|
| Anyway, going back to the lazy/hard-working dichotomy. These
| terms are used with unnecessary moralistic overtones. There
| is nothing wrong with working two hours a day, and there is
| nothing inherently good about working 14 hours. We need to
| stop acting as if those who work more have some inherent
| virtue. This leads to all sorts of social pathologies such as
| the toxic version of the bootstrap mentality.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Thank you. This glorification of hours worked is a
| completely pathological mode of operation.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > The truth is the SW architect, the CEO of many
| corporations, etc are more efficient than the lowest level
| workers. I know this is not popular, and it makes many
| uncomfortable, but it is undeniably true. This is because
| both the SW architect and the CEO and the management
| consultant and the operations manager, etc, are all into
| automation, which is an efficiency increasing process.
|
| I don't think this has anything to do automation, it's more
| likely due to their ability to _delegate_
|
| And I don't mean their skill with delegating I mean the
| fact that they are in a position where they can tell other
| people to do their work for them.
|
| It's easy to appear super productive if you are in a
| position to claim the productivity of other people as if it
| were your own.
| mathgladiator wrote:
| its not just delegation, but the importance of strategy.
| In large orgs, things go fairly slow but wide. It is
| beyond importance that the direction set is a good
| direction. This requires talking to people, understanding
| the market, understanding trends, and the boiling it down
| into what the org should focus and do versus stop doing.
| wittycardio wrote:
| Uh I don't know what management consultants you've met but
| as an industry it is the opposite of efficient. It's an
| industry that's built on stealing value from the productive
| bits of society by leveraging the social status of it's
| employees. Some software is certainly very efficient and
| productive but after many years in software I can tell you
| that a lot of software work is repeated broken window
| fixing. It's not about lazy / hardworking it's about those
| with social capital and those without. Those with it
| prosper and those without it flounder.
| iammisc wrote:
| I used to be a management consultant, so I have a lot of
| experience and a lot of insider knowledge.
|
| Management consultants automate away the explanations a
| CEO or executive has to give. They can just point to
| their superiors and inferiors and say 'Bain said to do
| blah'. No one's going to get fired for buying Microsoft,
| or listening to McKinley.
|
| Inside the industry itself, the actual consulting is
| heavily automated. Consultants are mainly glorified data
| entry technicians, inputting numbers into pre-built
| models and using pre-made assets to assemble a good-
| looking presentation. There's some skill to it in terms
| of speaking, but the process is heavily automated to make
| it extremely efficient.
|
| It definitely saves the executives time, which is why
| they'd hire them.
|
| > Some software is certainly very efficient and
| productive but after many years in software I can tell
| you that a lot of software work is repeated broken window
| fixing.
|
| There is a common fallacy I see often when driving on the
| freeway during rush hour. Some people seem to believe
| that if they just took the surface streets, they would
| get to their destination faster. That is because they are
| spending more of their time moving on the surface
| streets, but on average they're still going slower than
| the freeway people. In short, they trade a large variance
| in a higher average speed on the freeway for a lower
| variance in a lower average speed on the roads.
|
| This analogy extends to hard work. Americans glorify the
| worker taking the surface streets -- i.e., the one
| actively "doing" something even if the amount of work
| being done per unit time is very small -- rather than the
| one in the stop-and-go traffic -- the architect who works
| two hours a day intensely, and then takes time off, or
| the SW engineer who works for 30 minute stretches and
| then rests to compile his software. In reality, the
| latter two get to their destination faster, even if it
| seems like they're doing nothing most of the time. For
| some reason, the steady work is valued more than the high
| acceleration/high deceleration work.
|
| That is to say you identify frustrations with software
| (repeated broken window fixing) which certainly exist,
| but they do not detract from the fact that the automaton
| enabled by software is still incredibly valuable. I don't
| see how this is even debatable. The increase in
| productivity directly attributable to software is
| undeniable.
|
| EDIT; I'll point out that I ran away from management
| consulting. I hated it, and I have little good to say
| about the industry. But it's undeniable they automate
| away the decisions of executives to the point people are
| willing to pay.
| John23832 wrote:
| I did not. Reading comprehension is key.
| wayoutthere wrote:
| > You then get a "working class" with no real
| skills/education/ambition... they do not "do", which leads
| back to my first comment
|
| This you?
| John23832 wrote:
| > a "working class"
|
| ^ This references a segment or variation of the "working
| class". In my inference, a portion of the working class
| that isn't actually working, because they do not "do".
|
| > the "working class"
|
| ^ This is what you're trying to run with. This references
| the working class as a whole entity. I did not say this.
|
| Again, reading comprehension is key.
| EliRivers wrote:
| _Again, reading comprehension is key._
|
| If there's a repeating pattern of people not
| understanding what you're writing, why not write more
| clearly? It will make everything better.
| wayoutthere wrote:
| So are writing skills.
| tmotwu wrote:
| Sorry, no. I was with you on your comment on doing.
| However, "working class" is an actual term [1] that does
| not fit your intended message.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_class
| drewcoo wrote:
| Perhaps the refrain "reading comprehension is key" is a
| sign that comprehensible writing is in order.
| dougmwne wrote:
| I am actually unclear on what you mean by "Do". You seem to
| be using it in a very general sense, as in people who do
| something, anything, are better off than people who do
| nothing. That seems pretty obvious, movement is the very
| definition of work after all. However, the very vague way
| in which you talk about "Doing" creates a kind of Rorschach
| test where your readers can take any meaning they would
| like. So what is it, exactly that you mean? What sort of
| specific actions should a person take to raise their
| station in life? What about people not "doing"? Can you
| describe their life?
| shawnz wrote:
| I agree with their interpretation. "Be more ambitious"
| isn't a solution to poverty. There are plenty of ambitious
| people to compete with at every income level.
| John23832 wrote:
| Your (and the above's) interpretation of things unsaid
| are weird.
|
| I said "do", as in "to perform an action". Ambition might
| lead you to do things, but that's not what I address.
| UK-Al05 wrote:
| The working class perform a lot of action. They work
| incredibly long hours and are still poor.
| shawnz wrote:
| Consider this thought experiment. Think of the people
| working at your place of employment in low-level
| positions who make less money than you. Do you think they
| are on average doing less productive work than you, or
| less likely to be "doers"? I am guessing you feel the
| answer is yes.
|
| Now think of the people in high-level positions who make
| more than you. Do you think they are on average doing
| more productive work than you? I am guessing you feel the
| answer is not so obvious with this question.
| username90 wrote:
| It is better to use a peer instead of yourself to reduce
| bias. Do you think your tech lead does more valuable
| things than your average peer? Probably yes.
| imtringued wrote:
| Seller market = high wages, buyer market = low wages.
|
| That is all there is to it.
|
| The irony about hard work is that everyone can be a hard
| worker so you are more likely to end up in a buyer market if
| that is your selling point.
| xwolfi wrote:
| I think you're wrong. Doers have always been able to progress
| better than parasites, across social classes. Since the
| beginning of time.
|
| What "changed", is that before, imagination and creativity were
| unnecessary for the mass. You had the field, the factory, your
| dad's craft or utility store, the army, the navy etc etc.
| Things were predictable, sorted by first level need.
|
| Now hum you're a data analyst in a crypto exchange, what's the
| public school doing to make others armed to reach this social
| function?
|
| I had a french education, very wide and messy, strict and deep,
| in a safe and rich private school, and I find that lack of
| desire to focus on easy equalitarian checkboxes gave me the
| flexibility to accept there's no purpose or goal to life and
| you have to adapt. In the Hong Kong bank I work at now, I see
| an enormous over-representation of french people and I wonder
| if that's a tell... but maybe it's just we learned english and
| flee the country.
|
| So weirdly, I think before people did stuff and today you have
| to create stuff, education cannot be simple and follow premade
| receipes to teach peasants how to read to be the equal of
| factory workers. It has to go deep, focus on building a dynamic
| intelligence.
|
| Or in not so many words: maybe equality isn't as useful to
| teach or reach as adaptability.
| kungito wrote:
| I feel like the US has to split into separate countries and
| maybe adopt a system like EU. Everything in the us gets so
| generalized no one has any agency over it except companies with
| enough money to push a narrative across 300 mil people. Either
| that or the way you think about US has to change. I find it
| hard to believe every state does things the same way but still
| you say "US" has a problem and not Georgia or California. Why
| not think locally to your state which has a lot of independance
| in how it does things? Maybe then it would be easier to push
| reform
| xyzzyz wrote:
| That's exactly how the USA was originally designed to work,
| and how it originally worked up until early-to-mid 20th
| century. It was only then when a bunch of power grabbing
| politicians, along with a bunch of complicit elements in the
| judicial apparatus, have twisted the US into completely
| different system that we now get to suffer from.
| renewiltord wrote:
| It's not just power-grabbing politicians. It's what the
| populace desires. Look at the overwhelming support for
| something like universal health care. That is a massive
| expansion of federal power.
|
| A large number of Americans desire massive federal power.
| beerandt wrote:
| Don't conflate the desired political goal with the
| political source.
|
| There's no reason states couldn't implement it if they
| wanted to. And some did.
|
| Which is part of why it's such a power grab. The
| "universal" part of it goes against the entire concept of
| tiered / federated / rupublic type of government.
|
| It's dogmatic. Politics has become religion, especially
| to the non-religous, and most don't realize it.
|
| "Catholic" means "universal". We can't allow States to
| have their own laws, when they might not align with the
| Truth. Praise Science!
| bhupy wrote:
| > A large number of Americans desire massive federal
| power.
|
| It's complicated.
|
| A 2016 Gallup poll
| (https://news.gallup.com/poll/27286/government.aspx)
| revealed that 55 percent of respondents preferred power
| to be concentrated in state governments; 37 percent
| preferred the federal government.
|
| Another group of surveys (https://www.cato.org/sites/cato
| .org/files/pubs/pdf/pa759_web...) shows that Americans
| strongly prefer state and local governments to lead on
| health insurance (62 percent, versus 38 percent
| preferring federal leadership), welfare (68/31 percent),
| unemployment (55/26 percent), education (75/25 percent),
| pre-kindergarten education (71/25 percent),
| transportation (78/22 percent), law enforcement (73/20
| percent), job training (75/20 percent), housing (83/18
| percent), and paving roads (77/9 percent).
|
| The problem with the universal health care polls is that
| 1) "universal healthcare" is such a broad term that can
| mean anything from NHS style single provider to
| Switzerland style universal privatized systems, and 2)
| it's entirely possible to favor a "universal healthcare"
| system that's administered and funded at the State level
| _as opposed to_ the Federal level.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| You could easily implement universal healthcare on a
| state-by-state basis. This is just another excuse for
| federalization by power-grabbers.
| dlp211 wrote:
| At great cost, yes you could. This is one of the reasons
| everything costs so much in America, because we insist on
| making 50 independent systems.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| Then why healthcare isn't greatly expensive in Europe,
| with, you know, 40+ independent countries?
| dlp211 wrote:
| Because you pay your taxes to the central entity that is
| running those programs. In the US, the majority of taxes
| go to the Federal gov't, not the states.
| bhupy wrote:
| In Canada, the single payer healthcare system is
| Provincial, not Federal, and yet the income tax brackets
| at Canada's Federal level are roughly equal to those in
| the US (in fact are actually higher for some earners).
|
| If we wanted to take Canada's cue, there's plenty of room
| to increase State tax rates even if we did nothing about
| Federal taxation. Or we could take Switzerland's cue and
| totally flip the distribution, where Cantonal taxes far
| exceed Federal income tax.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| The federal government should then stop levying those
| taxes, so that states could then collect more and run
| their own programs. The federal Medicare tax is already
| so high that the federal healthcare spending per capita
| is already exceeding healthcare spending per capita in
| almost all European countries, yet Medicare/Medicaid only
| cover a fraction of the population. Seriously, with the
| same amount of money (in per capita terms) that US
| government _already_ spends on healthcare, UK or France
| are able to provide universal coverage. If the federal
| government is too inept to do the same, it should give up
| trying, and instead make space for states to do that
| instead.
|
| Most European countries are of the size of US states. If
| they can run their healthcare just fine, it only makes it
| dumber idea to try to centralize it in US at the federal
| level.
| Jcowell wrote:
| You should find it hard to believe that every state does
| things the same way because they don't. That's the point.
| rayiner wrote:
| We already are, and Democrats keep trying to nationalize
| everything.
| kungito wrote:
| Like what?
| disposekinetics wrote:
| The big one in the news right now is voting, but Jimmy
| Carter formed the department of education at a federal
| level.
| rayiner wrote:
| Elections? Healthcare? (Continuing to push Medicaid
| expansion onto states that don't want it?) Child care?
| Education?
| Jcowell wrote:
| Honestly the first two should be a federal thing. I just
| don't understand how a federal election has 50 different
| ways of doing and qualifying things and not one way for a
| position that affects the whole country. If we were to
| pull up on a Alien planet and see this kind of election
| style we would ridicule the ridiculousness that is the US
| election system.
|
| Don't get me started on how it makes any sense that we
| don't leverage the power of the government for something
| as crucial as life. Why in the god damn fuck is giving
| birth in this country not free?
| rayiner wrote:
| We're 50 different states that are, in theory, supposed
| to be quite independent of each other. (In some ways,
| even more so than the EU. For example, the EU has no
| equivalent of our anti-commandeering principle. The EU
| can direct national administrative organs to carry out
| task, while the U.S. federal government can't direct
| state administrative units.
|
| The issue of why taxpayers won't pay doctors to deliver
| children is orthogonal to the point I'm making. If
| taxpayers in California or New York want to do that, they
| should do it.
| bhupy wrote:
| > I just don't understand how a federal election has 50
| different ways of doing and qualifying things and not one
| way for a position that affects the whole country.
|
| This is how it works in the EU as well, and per the GGP
| commenter, the prescription was for the US to be more
| like the EU, which is how it was set up in the first
| place anyway per the GP comment.
|
| > Don't get me started on how it makes any sense that we
| don't leverage the power of the government for something
| as crucial as life. Why in the god damn fuck is giving
| birth in this country not free?
|
| Except there are several different viable ways of
| providing universal healthcare. You can have a single
| payer system like Canada/Denmark/American Medicare, you
| can have a single provider system like the UK/Veterans
| Administration, you can have a purely private non-
| employer funded system like Switzerland or the
| Netherlands, you can have a public-private mix like
| Germany, or only universal catastrophic coverage like in
| Singapore. Each approach has its own trade-offs, and
| those trade-offs are political in nature, where some
| States might prefer one set of trade-offs and others may
| not.
|
| This is exactly how Canada's single payer healthcare came
| about. Saskatchewan was the first Province to offer
| single payer in 1947, followed by Alberta in 1951, etc.
| By 1961, all Provinces had some form of a single payer
| healthcare system. To this day, Canada's single-payer
| system is Provincial, not Federal. The Federal government
| provides supplemental funding, but that only happened
| after each Province independently developed its own
| system, and only after all Provinces unanimously agreed
| to the Federal health transfer. As of 2020, Federal
| transfer payments in Canada only amount to 22%
| (https://www.cmaj.ca/content/192/45/E1408).
| beerandt wrote:
| >leverage the power of the government
|
| Because people get paid to do those jobs, and the
| government mandating that they do it for free, or for
| some reduced price is theft of labor. We've already
| fought that war.
| andechs wrote:
| In order to send representatives to the European
| parliment, the EU requires that representatives be
| elected in fair elections: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
| 2019_European_Parliament_elect...
|
| Part of being a member state of the EU requires having
| access to some sort of public healthcare system: https://
| en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Health_Insurance_Card
|
| This isn't "over reach of federal government" - it's
| ensuring that the citizens of anyone who wants to be part
| of a certain association have certain basic rights.
| bhupy wrote:
| > In order to send representatives to the European
| parliment, the EU requires that representatives be
| elected in fair elections
|
| And the US Constitution requires that its member states
| have a republican (small r) form of government.
|
| > Part of being a member state of the EU requires having
| access to some sort of public healthcare system
|
| First of all, that's not even true; the only requirement
| is that the member states accept the European Health
| Insurance Card regardless of how the healthcare is
| financed (publicly or privately). The Netherlands, for
| instance, gets its healthcare primarily through private
| health insurance. An EU-like approach to healthcare in
| the US would be for the Federal government to establish a
| common standard that can apply across disparate health
| insurance systems that are implemented, funded, and
| administered by the States, but that's not really what
| the D party is selling (as far as I know).
| [deleted]
| iammisc wrote:
| Environmental Policy (EPA). Family policy (gay marriage,
| transgenderism, etc via the Supreme Court). Healthcare
| (Obamacare). Education (no child left behind, the dept of
| education). Higher education (federal backed guarantees).
| We can go on...
| rackjack wrote:
| Nixon founded the EPA and George W. Bush established no
| child left behind...
| iammisc wrote:
| I mean... duh. I'm just pointing out the general trend
| towards nationalizaton. It's not just a matter of
| democrats. Republicans do it all the time against their
| own values.
| hobs wrote:
| This has been one of the least informed comments I have
| read recently - most of the things you are attributing to
| democrats are were actually republicans.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Environmental
| _Pr... President Richard Nixon proposed the establishment
| of EPA on July 9, 1970
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordable_Care_Act#Legisla
| tiv... The ACA was championed by republicans until it
| became a political talking piece.
|
| The concept of an individual mandate goes back to at
| least 1989, when The Heritage Foundation, a conservative
| think-tank, proposed an individual mandate as an
| alternative to single-payer health care.[121][122] It was
| championed for a time by conservative economists and
| Republican senators as a market-based approach to
| healthcare reform on the basis of individual
| responsibility and avoidance of free rider problems.
| Specifically, because the 1986 Emergency Medical
| Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) requires any
| hospital participating in Medicare (nearly all do) to
| provide emergency care to anyone who needs it, the
| government often indirectly bore the cost of those
| without the ability to pay.[123][124][125]
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Child_Left_Behind_Act
| NCLB was totally a Bush thing.
|
| It was coauthored by Representatives John Boehner (R-OH),
| George Miller (D-CA), and Senators Ted Kennedy (D-MA) and
| Judd Gregg (R-NH). The United States House of
| Representatives passed the bill on December 13, 2001
| (voting 381-41),[8] and the United States Senate passed
| it on December 18, 2001 (voting 87-10).[9] President Bush
| signed it into law on January 8, 2002.
| iammisc wrote:
| I'm not sure how to respond to this comment. The comment
| I responded to asked for examples of things the federal
| government nationalizes, with the support of democrats.
| You seem to believe that a policy being championed by a
| republican president means that it is somehow 'not
| democrat'.
|
| This is similar to how people make out Iraq to be a
| republican war even though in enjoyed broad bipartisan
| support.
|
| The facts you mentioned here are obvious. I didn't think
| they needed much spelling out for moderately educated
| Americans.
|
| If the question is 'do republicans nationalize things'?
| The answer is... yes. All national politicians do.
|
| I hate how we literally split everything, including
| bipartisan things up, into neat little
| democrat/republican boxes.
| tshaddox wrote:
| While a lot of that is true, it's also pretty pointless
| to argue about what political labels people used decades
| ago as if that is relevant to the merits of political
| groups today with those same labels. Political parties
| and other such labels drift significantly over time. You
| might as well argue that the GOP is great because John
| Milton was a "republican."
| omginternets wrote:
| Wasn't "No Child Left Behind" a Bush thing?
| triceratops wrote:
| > Family policy (gay marriage, transgenderism, etc via
| the Supreme Court).
|
| If it's via the Supreme Court, can you really blame
| "Democrats"?
|
| The Supreme Court upheld gay marriage on the basis of
| equal rights to all. States can't pass laws that violate
| the US constitution.
| iammisc wrote:
| You're not wrong, but the democrats championed gay
| marriage as well. I don't see how you can deny that.
| harimau777 wrote:
| I'm not sure how that would work without allowing the
| individual states to act like separate countries. E.g. by
| being able to put tariffs on other states, sue them for their
| externalities, place restrictions on people who don't live
| and work in the state, etc.
|
| At that point, I'm not sure what you gain by not being
| completely separate countries.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| What you could do is to enumerate powers of the federal
| government, and one of those powers would be to "to
| regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the
| several States", with the understanding among the authors
| of the document that "regulating commerce" means regulating
| trade and tariffs, so that nobody then can misinterpret it
| as giving the federal power to regulate anything they want
| by arguing it affects interstate commerce.
| viscanti wrote:
| The US could create an amendment to say something like
| "powers not delegated to the United States by the
| Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are
| reserved to the States respectively, or to the people". Which
| would give individual States the right to control a lot of
| things. Is that kind of what you're thinking?
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| The interstate highway system and the freedom of movement
| between the states greatly restricts the ability for states
| to have meaningfully different policies from one another. A
| popular policy that works for the current population of the
| state may become an economic disaster once residents of
| other states move in to join the action.
| dantheman wrote:
| That's why it's the Eisenhower interstate system. They
| could have passed an amendment, but instead they jammed
| it in as part of national defense.
| cindarin wrote:
| I originally assumed you were a dumbass here, not a
| smartass. well played.
| autocorr wrote:
| To anyone who does not get the irony in the above, this
| already exists as the Tenth Amendment. It is effectively
| ignored because it is considered legally redundant with the
| Constitution itself.
| Jcowell wrote:
| I disagree if it was effectively ignored, a lot of things
| would be better and alot of things would be worse. While
| the lines between state and federal power has even
| diminished, it's very much still there.
| iammisc wrote:
| The US was envisioned as a union of separate countries, like
| the EU. The EU is sliding towards US-style centralization.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > union of separate countries
|
| Hence "United _States_. "
| dfxm12 wrote:
| Having the ability to do something and being a do-er are not
| one in the same, but based on your comment you are treating
| them as such.
| afpx wrote:
| I think my kids would look at me strangely if, after asking me
| what to do in life, I said, "DO THINGS." I think more specifics
| are in order. Like, do what? Or, what are the things worth
| doing? There's just not enough information available on what
| things have ROI.
| adverbly wrote:
| This is a great take and is simultaneously optimistic and
| pessimistic. I think you're optimistic about the right things
| though in that getting stuff done at an individual level has
| never been more valuable. Likewise, learning facts in an
| academic setting has never been less valuable. School teaches
| and kids learn, but it doesn't teach the right stuff anymore.
| slg wrote:
| >First, I think the ability to DO THINGS is the great equalizer
| at this point. Being a do-er lifts you out of poverty (or at
| least out of poverty's worst resting state). Being a do-er
| expands your network. Being a do-er prolongs your life (people
| with jobs/daily activities tend to live longer healthier
| lives). The best part about this is that technology has made it
| easier to become a do-er. You don't need as much specialized
| education or tools, and trial and error is free.
|
| This is just the same "pull yourself up by your bootstraps"
| rhetoric that has been repeated for generations. The truth is
| that "trial and error" is not free because some people need to
| spend all their energy and resources treading water just to
| stop themselves from drowning. Having the safety net under you
| to catch you when you fail is not a universal truth in American
| society. This restricts certain classes of people from ever
| even attempting to "DO THINGS".
| pnutjam wrote:
| Thank you, this whole discussion seems to have turned into a
| circle-jerk to prove how hard working and deserving wealthy
| people are, when then simple fact is they are all born lucky.
| [deleted]
| asoneth wrote:
| I agree with your second point that we have over-fitted
| education to optimize standardized test scores to the determent
| of encouraging intelligence.
|
| But at least from my personal network developed from growing up
| in a working-class town and eventually living in extremely
| wealthy neighborhoods in extremely wealthy cities I have not
| noticed a strong relationship between "the ability to DO
| THINGS" and someone's social or economic status.
|
| I've known working class people who grew up poor and who had
| amazing hustle and through a combination of intelligence, luck,
| and hard work they clawed their way into the lower-middle class
| and set up their kids for even further success. I know even
| more rich people who inherited companies that they weren't
| interested or competent enough to run, or who got positions
| that didn't really require much DO-ing on their part by
| leveraging family connections. So when I picture someone with
| no real skills or ambition ambition I usually imagine a
| neighbor who grew up in the "owner class" and when I picture a
| "do-er" I always picture someone who grew up "working class".
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| >I have not noticed a strong relationship between "the
| ability to DO THINGS" and someone's social or economic
| status.
|
| Are we talking status relative to others or relative to the
| starting position?
|
| There will always be the deadbeat child of someone wealthy
| who's still wealthier than you but all the "doers" I know
| have climbed the socioeconomic ladder at least a couple rungs
| in their adult lives.
| EricE wrote:
| "Are we talking status relative to others or relative to
| the starting position?"
|
| And what of it? There has never been a time in human
| history where starting position has mattered less. NONE!
|
| Don't just take my word for it
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOiQgleiRtU
|
| Also - think of what a better place it would be if that Don
| Lemon who was tired of race bating had survived and had got
| his wish? How sad we are where we are today - and
| ironically he's one of the front line contributors to it
| too!
| asoneth wrote:
| The quoted statement was referring to absolute
| socioeconomic status.
|
| I agree that relative movement is possible and I also know
| a lot of extremely hard-working people (both rich and poor)
| who have been successful and climbed a rung or two in their
| lives.
|
| My point was more that the average wealthy person I know
| doesn't seem to have a particularly greater or lesser
| "ability to do things" compared to the poor people I know.
| Whereas if the "ability to do things" was really a
| substantial socioeconomic equalizer then I would have
| expected that DO-ers would be over-represented the higher
| up the socioeconomic ladder you climb instead of evenly
| distributed at each level. Perhaps it's different at the
| very top and the very bottom?
|
| (As a contrast, in the military I found a positive
| correlation between an officer's rank and their ability to
| do things. Most of the colonels I worked with had an
| impressive intellect and drive, and even moreso with the
| generals I met.)
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| "Equalizer" was probably the wrong word. It's probably
| more like, you start somewhere, and do-ing is one of the
| biggest components in the delta between where you start
| and where you end. That doesn't mean that in one
| generation you overcome someone else's head start. But
| it's still a good, beneficial thing to strive after.
| asoneth wrote:
| I would agree that do-ing is a major component of the
| delta, along with ability and a fair bit of luck. I guess
| my mental model would be that someone's socioeconomic
| status often comes down to:
|
| starting point + (hard work * ability * luck)
|
| (where any one of those may be positive or negative)
| vinceguidry wrote:
| The real problem with this line of thinking is this
| conversation needs to revolve around things we can put on a
| political agenda, and there's no way to put "make more kids
| that do things" on a political agenda. We can put access to
| education on that agenda, and did, back in the 90s.
|
| I don't know what the next societal band-aid will be, but
| it probably won't get us any closer to actual equality of
| opportunity. Still doesn't mean we shouldn't try.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| Access to capital? The small business loan system could
| be modernized to support a wider variety of businesses,
| could incorporate grants, could be more generous -
| especially if we wanted to advantage certain groups -
| like first time entrepreneurs.
| hyperpallium2 wrote:
| OP said it's the great equalizer, which I take to mean
| tending to make equal, not make equal - any more than
| education ever did.
|
| Class still exists with its advantages, from BS (e.g. who you
| know) to real (e.g. security to invest in yourself long-
| term).
| [deleted]
| kansface wrote:
| Intelligence, conscientiousness, affluence/social capital-
| pick any two and you get success on average. That's about all
| there is to it. Success could look like making a bunch of
| money, starting a business, doing research, making
| interesting art. The point is a smart, hard working person
| can pretty much choose to do anything and an intelligent
| person will do fine with an infinite runway regardless of
| work ethic, etc. To the extent that college used to be a
| strong signal for those attributes it was also a strong proxy
| for success. Continually expanding college weakens the signal
| and the proximate worth of a college degree. In so many
| words, college for everyone confuses cause for effect -
| cynically, it's not universities that make people successful,
| it's that people who will succeed in life are overwhelmingly
| selected by and go to college- moreover, better colleges tend
| to matriculate people with greater quantities of those
| attributes. If college ceased to exist, the same cohort would
| still come out on top. See also, the vast majority of
| graduates don't work in their major (education as a signal).
|
| This is painting a bit too broadly - a degree still shows
| that you can jump through pointless hoops which is valuable
| to employers and some degrees are valuable in and off
| themselves because they gate professions that are necessary
| for society (medicine/engineering). I'd also point out that
| colleges historically ignored large pools of candidates from
| certain demographics for political reasons. I suppose there
| is probably some learning that manages to happen once in a
| while too, which is worth something if not the cost to
| society of fueling the higher ed apparatus.
| asoneth wrote:
| > Intelligence, conscientiousness, affluence/social capital
|
| Agreed that these are important factors in success, but in
| practice they don't seem to be equivalent in importance.
|
| An unsuccessful person who lacks intelligence or
| conscientiousness but was born into affluence in the US is
| more likely to remain higher on the socioeconomic ladder
| than a successful person who has both intelligence and
| conscientiousness but was born poor.
|
| That said, I believe that with hard work and intelligence
| it is possible for someone to move up no matter their
| starting point and we should celebrate the famous outliers
| who lept up the ladder. But it's also responsible to
| acknowledge that they are famous because they are outliers
| and that most people seem to end up within a rung or two of
| their parents.
| gotoeleven wrote:
| Your anecdotes not withstanding, it is a myth that most rich
| people inherited their wealth.
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/26/majority-of-the-worlds-
| riche...
|
| Maybe you don't trust this source but there are many others
| like it.
|
| This bizarre push to make everyone think that there's no
| meritocracy, which I guess goes hand in hand with the
| fashionableness of being a victim, is cynical poison being
| driven by people with radical political agendas.
| robocat wrote:
| Your example is like saying playing NBA basketball makes
| you taller.
|
| His point was that there are plenty of people that don't
| become wealthy even though they work hard and have hustle.
| And there are plenty of wealthy people that didn't need to
| work hard to get it.
|
| Looking at the self-made wealthy will select for people
| that "do", but that does not imply that "do" makes you
| wealthy.
| gotoeleven wrote:
| Im not sure what your point is. Your statement
|
| >>> His point was that there are plenty of people that
| don't become wealthy even though they work hard and have
| hustle. And there are plenty of wealthy people that
| didn't need to work hard to get it.
|
| is a trivially correct, banal point. The parent comment
| was implying with his "I know even more people who are
| rich and lazy" comment something that, while it may be
| true for the people he encounters, is not true for
| society at large.
| mcguire wrote:
| " _The parent comment was implying [...] something that,
| while it may be true for the people he encounters, is not
| true for society at large._ "
|
| Do you have a source for that?
| robocat wrote:
| You said "it is a myth that most rich people inherited
| their wealth", which _you_ introduced as a subject, and I
| don't think his comment was trying to say anything about
| your point exactly, either way. He said he was talking
| anecdotally, i.e. he was explicitly talking about his
| experiences which are true by definition, and not
| generalising to what your experience might be.
| sokoloff wrote:
| For any given individual "do" is almost surely better
| than "not do". That's the choice facing an individual as
| they contemplate how to live their life.
| robocat wrote:
| I have just decided to be four inches taller than I am
| /s.
|
| I have depressed friends that I believe can't reasonably
| be expected to just decide to "do", and I have other
| friends that seem to naturally have an abundance of "do".
|
| Yes, we can learn the skill, or we can be taught the
| skill, but otherwise your statement seems unrealistic to
| me.
| andrewjl wrote:
| IMO both you and GP are correct, ultimately whether the
| decision to "do" helps or not relies on individual
| circumstance and context plus on chance factors.
| shadowoflight wrote:
| I think one important thing that we, as a society, need
| to respect is that the amount of "do" it takes a given
| person to do a given task is very different from the
| amount of "do" it takes another person to do that same
| task.
|
| For example, it may take somebody who's depressed the
| same amount of "do" to get out of bed and eat a yogurt as
| it takes a go-getter, "neurotypical" [0] person to get
| up, cook a healthy breakfast, go to the gym, take a
| shower, get to work, and get through their first couple
| tasks of the day.
|
| [0]: I put "neurotypical" in scare quotes because I'm not
| sure neurotypical is even really a thing, it's just the
| term we use for people whose mental makeup fits well into
| our society and work culture.
| asoneth wrote:
| I completely agree. But I there's a middle ground between
| "nothing you do matters" and "you can accomplish
| absolutely anything if you put your mind to it". People
| at either extreme of the spectrum are more likely to end
| up disappointed with their lives than someone in the
| middle.
| mcguire wrote:
| Would you please define "self-made"?
|
| From your link: " _"As our society has become more
| meritocratic, we've simply replaced an aristocracy based on
| title, class, race and gender with a new and equally
| persistent aristocracy based on genes, education and
| parenting," Pearlstein continued. "Unless we are prepared
| to engage in extensive genetic reengineering, or require
| that all children be brought up in state-run boarding
| schools, we must acknowledge that we can never achieve full
| equality of opportunity."_ "
| asoneth wrote:
| I have only met one of the "world's richest people" on the
| list you linked and he is very hard working but I think the
| conclusions drawn from extreme outliers may not be
| applicable more broadly.
|
| I think perhaps we're talking about different things? I
| don't think it's fashionable to be a victim or that people
| have no control over their fate. Hard work (along with
| intellect and luck) generally helps people move up in life,
| and the people I know who have moved up the most in their
| lives are generally also the smartest and hardest working,
| so it would make logical sense that most people at the very
| top have worked hard to get there. After all, not many
| people out there can fall down a couple rungs and still be
| at the top of the ladder, right?
|
| But beyond those extreme outliers, most people in the US
| (which ranks 27th in social mobility according to the world
| economic forum[1]) seem to end up within a rung or two of
| where they were born. So I suppose how "meritocratic" the
| US is probably depends on what you mean by the word.
|
| [1] http://reports.weforum.org/social-mobility-
| report-2020/socia...
| kenjackson wrote:
| > it is a myth that most rich people inherited their
| wealth.
|
| No one here has said that. More importantly, your link
| doesn't dispute that either. It simply says that
| billionaires, who are on the extreme, don't inherit most of
| their wealth -- despite the fact that 45% of them at least
| partially did so.
|
| I've long argued that until we send all kids, rich and
| poor, to academies at birth with no further contact or
| tracing to their parents, we won't really understand the
| full impact of advantages bestowed by wealthy parents.
| bryondowd wrote:
| These studies almost always point to a very limited set of
| the "wealthiest" for their study. And if you think about
| it, it's obvious that the very top of the pyramid will
| mostly have people who were able to concentrate wealth
| somehow, rather than inheritors. Often, inheritance is
| split between more than one person. That alone would
| account for a lot of inherited wealth not meeting an
| arbitrarily "wealthiest" category. So naturally there's
| going to be a lot of churn at the top.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > while also chronically underfunding schools
|
| Schools are not underfunded in the U.S., they waste money. Big
| difference.
| John23832 wrote:
| Sure. I can agree with that. The point being that, with the
| current schooling infrastructure, the amount of money needed
| to do what needs to be done isn't there.
| marcinzm wrote:
| No amount of money will fix a broken system from the inside
| since the money will go to those who broke the system in
| the first place.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Schools are not underfunded in the U.S
|
| Most first world countries are well above the US's 5% GDP in
| public education expenditures; schools absolutely are
| underfunded in the US.
|
| It may _also_ be unusually poorly administered, but this isn
| 't like healthcare where US public spending is on par, as a
| share of GDP, with other developed countries despite doing
| far less with it.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| I tend to think they're underfunded _and_ poorly
| administered with a lot of overhead.
| whatshisface wrote:
| I am not sure if percent GDP the right metric to use,
| although perhaps dollars per student does not adjust for
| cost of living differences.
| aeternum wrote:
| We're also still using the same educational model we were
| in the 1700s. We know a lot more about learning now, and
| that model makes no sense.
|
| We know young kids learn through play yet we continually
| force them to learn through the equivalent of lectures.
|
| For older students that can learn through lectures, we
| insist on giving in-person lectures. This means that 99.9%
| of students are taught by sub-par lecturers. Highschool and
| college students are foolish to attend lectures person.
| Instead they should just watch the best in the world on
| opencourseware/youtube.
|
| Hands-on lab experience and group work is useful and
| difficult in a remote setting but a very small amount of
| HS/college time is spent on that. I'd argue pretty much all
| in-person HS/college time should be spent on that.
|
| We still attempt to teach the mechanics / tools first, like
| math and calc before the motivation. We do this even though
| we know that the human brain generally ignores information
| without utility. We should instead provide students a long-
| term goal they are interested in and introduce math / calc
| / physics as a means to achieve that goal.
| marcinzm wrote:
| Yup, from what I can tell the US has one of the highest per
| student spending amounts for primary and secondary schools.
| paulpauper wrote:
| That can be explained in part by compulsory schooling and
| individual education programs
| Ensorceled wrote:
| As with health care, the US spends near the top[1] per
| student and ranks among the worst for results.
|
| [1] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd
| dlp211 wrote:
| The fundamental problem with these types of analysis is
| that it is the aggregate and average of a large mostly
| sparse country with a large population. Between Federalism,
| local & state politics, wealth concentration, and
| geographic constraint leads to some interesting and costly
| quirks to our school systems.
|
| It turns out that wealthy public school districts are
| extremely good and compete at the top of the world stage,
| and poor school districts are really, really, terrible and
| underperform on the world stage by a substantial margin.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| But we are top of the charts in percent overhead. USA! USA!
| ARandumGuy wrote:
| Funding in U.S. schools is super unequal. Most school funding
| in the U.S. comes from local property tax. But if a district
| has a lot of poverty, then revenue from property tax is low.
| That means low funding for the local school, which lowers the
| quality of education for students, which makes it harder for
| the students to get out of poverty, which keeps the
| district's poverty level high. It's a self reinforcing cycle,
| which need to be fundamentally re-structured.
| treis wrote:
| >Most school funding in the U.S. comes from local property
| tax. But if a district has a lot of poverty, then revenue
| from property tax is low
|
| This is a common myth but it's not backed up by the
| numbers. Poverty is (mostly) concentrated in inner cities
| and those inner cities typically contain large office
| builds which pay lots of real estate taxes but send no kids
| to schools. If you look around different states the highest
| per pupil spending is by far in the cities. As an example,
| Atlanta public schools spends $15k per pupil while the
| surrounding suburban counties are 8-10k per pupil.
| mcguire wrote:
| " _Poverty is (mostly) concentrated in inner cities..._ "
|
| False. (https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/int
| eractive/20...)
|
| Atlanta Public Schools, per student: $16,402, $8,923
| instructional
|
| Fulton County Schools, $11,619, $7,021 instructional
|
| Buford City Schools, $11,299, $7,271 instructional
|
| Douglas County, $10,271, $6,577 instructional
|
| Clayton County, $10,472, $6,379 instructional
|
| State Charter Schools- Georgia Cyber Academy, $6,294,
| $5,224 instructional
|
| This is fun! https://nces.ed.gov/ccd/schoolmap/
| treis wrote:
| >False.(https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/int
| eractive/20...)
|
| You're looking at county levels. If you look at the parts
| of cities with poor schools they will have nearly 100% of
| their students in poverty.
| mnowicki wrote:
| that's interesting to hear, and I'll have to take your
| word on it for now, but I'm curious why(unless things
| have significantly changed in the past 6-7 years) inner-
| city schools are still horrendously bad. I've experienced
| schools in both the worst parts of Philadelphia as well
| as in middle-class suburbs of Philly, and the contrast is
| even more exaggerated than they make it seem on TV
| shows/movies that depict these types of schools.
|
| Obviously the students who are raised in these high-crime
| areas and surrounded by a community that's significantly
| harsher are going to be harder for teachers to manage,
| and I do think this is a very big part of it, but there
| are some things that clearly aren't related to that(such
| as equipment and the quality/quantity of staff)
| moduspol wrote:
| > I'm curious why [...] inner-city schools are still
| horrendously bad.
|
| I encourage you to follow this train of thought. It may
| bring into question some fundamental assumptions in one's
| world view.
| treis wrote:
| What we think of as school quality is mostly the quality
| of the students. Richer districts have, on average,
| students of high SES with parents that are more willing &
| able to help their kids succeed in school. Poorer
| districts have, on average, lower SES kids with terrible
| living situations and parents.
|
| Having disruptive kids also makes educating them much
| more expensive. Discipline issues chew up a lot of
| resources and disrupt learning for other students. So you
| have to spend more to provide equal quality instruction.
|
| And, of course, just because they spend more money
| doesn't mean they spend it on things that help educating
| students.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| This might have been true at some point in the past, but it
| is very much false now, and has been false for at least a
| decade or two. If local property tax revenues are low, the
| shortfall is made up for with state and federal funds. Just
| look at the data: worst performing urban schools often have
| more funding than better performing ones in rural areas or
| in smaller towns. If you don't believe me, just show me a
| few examples, it shouldn't be too hard to come up with, if
| the pattern is as strong and casually important as you
| suggest it is.
| coryrc wrote:
| To supplant your point:
|
| Detroit Public Schools per-pupil funding: $15,891
|
| Average Michigan per-pupil funding: $13,457
|
| https://www.michigancapitolconfidential.com/underfunded-
| detr...
| mcguire wrote:
| "Does School Spending Matter? The New Literature on an
| Old Question"
| (https://works.bepress.com/c_kirabo_jackson/38/)
|
| " _All but one of the several multi-state studies find a
| strong link between spending and outcomes -indicating
| that money matters on average. Importantly, this is true
| across studies that use different data-sets, examine
| different time periods, rely on different sources of
| variation, and employ different statistical techniques.
| While one can poke holes in each individual study, the
| robustness of the patterns across a variety of settings
| is compelling evidence of a real positive causal
| relationship between increased school spending and
| student outcomes on average. However, an examination of
| single-state studies suggests that,on average, money
| matters, but that this is not always so in all settings
| or in all contexts._ "
|
| Also see "It's not nothing: The role of money in
| improving education"
| (https://www.brookings.edu/research/its-not-nothing-the-
| role-...) and "How Money Matters for Schools"
| (https://learningpolicyinstitute.org/product/how-money-
| matter...).
| ARandumGuy wrote:
| The amount of local funding for public education varies
| wildly from state to state. In New Mexico in 2018, only
| 15% of public school revenue came from local sources.
| However, during the same year in Nebraska, that number is
| 53%.
|
| So yes, in some states differences in local property tax
| has a minimal effect on school funding. But in other
| states, the issue is still a significant issue.
|
| Source:
| https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cma?tid=4
| xyzzyz wrote:
| And in Nebraska, can you find a strong correlation
| between funding levels and schools performance? I asked
| you for examples, can you find any?
|
| Importantly, if in many states the school funding is
| equalized, and yet we still have wide difference in
| performance between good and bad schools, why would
| anyone expect that changing funding structure in Nebraska
| would change school outcomes in a significant way? If
| school funding levels in Michigan are similar across the
| board, with worse performing schools getting _more_ , not
| _less_ funding than better performing ones, clearly
| something else than funding is responsible for these
| disparities, isnt it? Lastly, as funding disparities have
| been equalized in many places in past decades, have we
| ever observed lower funded schools catch up to better
| funded ones?
|
| The school funding differences are quite obviously not
| responsible for disparities in school outcomes, and it is
| beyond clear to me that the entire goal of this narrative
| is not to improve schools, but instead to funnel more tax
| funds to politically allied groups, using children as a
| cover.
| robocat wrote:
| > can you find a strong correlation between funding
| levels and schools performance
|
| In New Zealand there is a negative correlation.
|
| The performance of schools in New Zealand is very
| strongly correlated with "the decile" which is how
| wealthy the area where the school is located (i.e. how
| well off the parents are correlates with how well their
| children do academically).
|
| The schools in areas of poverty get more state funding,
| but the results at those schools are very poor, because
| the parents are poor, and poor parents often cause poor
| students (edit: cause is the wrong word here, sorry).
|
| Our government otherwise funds schools per student at a
| fairly flat per capita rate, so there is not the
| variation in school funding (ignoring private schools)
| like that which occurs in the US.
|
| I am just pointing out that in New Zealand the main
| correlation for average student ability is their home,
| not their school.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| > I am just pointing out that in New Zealand the main
| correlation for average student ability is their home,
| not their school.
|
| Right. Whatever the casual mechanism is at play,
| increasing funding of schools is not going to make much
| of a difference for the kids -- it will, though, for
| employees of the school systems.
| bluGill wrote:
| Maybe, but I went to one of the worst funded schools in my
| state (MN at the time) and got a great education. We were a
| rural area with only a small tax base, but everyone cared
| that we got a good education and so the money was carefully
| spent to give us a good education with the limited money.
| In fact as a kid I commented that it didn't seem like we
| had poor funding as we had a lot of activities and great
| education. Then it was explained that the historical mining
| areas of the state had a much better tax base, as did the
| inner city schools (they got the taxes from expensive
| downtown properties), and even suburban districts had
| industrial areas to tax.
| larrymyers wrote:
| For what we expect of schools they are underfunded. Schools
| provide before and after care outside of normal hours, they
| provide all 3 meals to many students. Counseling, social
| services, health care ... it's not just teachers in the
| classroom.
|
| Now, if the US wanted to actually fix poverty and inequality
| dealing with the symptoms wouldn't roll down to the schools
| to deal with.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| We do all of that in Canada, for 3K per student less AND
| get much better results (at least on average).
| ipaddr wrote:
| Why do you think Canada gets a better results?
| Ensorceled wrote:
| To be clear, the results aren't great. We pay teachers
| more, we have pretty much no focus on elite athletics,
| less political mucking around in the actual education
| process.
| connectsnk wrote:
| Probably can be attributed to huge asian and south asian
| immigrant population who put a very big emphasis on
| education in their families
| nick__m wrote:
| Your theory doesn't explain Quebec scoring so high1 in
| math in the 2018 PISA2 test.
|
| https://www.schoolofpublicpolicy.sk.ca/research/publicati
| ons...
|
| https://www.oecd.org/pisa/PISA-results_ENGLISH.png
| dzdt wrote:
| Exactly. The biggest problem with US schools is poverty. It
| isn't anything directly to do with the school system, but
| the school system is tasked with "leaving no child behind"
| when the thing holding many children back is poverty of
| their families.
| Mary-Jane wrote:
| Negatory. Us shovels more funding per student into its
| public schools than almost any other country. That funding
| is spend poorly, mostly on administrative functions that no
| doubt demonstrate in great detail how great each school is.
|
| https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd
| Retric wrote:
| Comparing countries by PPP doesn't account for the cost
| of education between countries. A collage educated worker
| in Mexico is much cheaper than a collage educated worker
| in Luxembourg even accounting for PPP.
|
| In fact if you compare countries by Median household
| income PPP. You find a familiar ordering, Luxembourg
| 52,493, Norway 51,489, Sweden 50,514, Australia 46,555,
| Denmark 44,360, United States 43,585.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income
|
| Differences in scope between each country such as what
| pays for school lunch programs explains much of the
| difference.
| flavius29663 wrote:
| But still, there isn't a lack of funding in the US, not
| when you compare it with every other developed country.
| Switzerland is not a cheaper country than the US, far
| from that. Still, being a teacher there is a highly
| respected profession, and a high school teacher can make
| 7-8000 per month (last time I spoke with a Swiss). They
| still pay less per student than the US.
|
| If you ask me, I'm going to guess that building large
| football practice fields with nigh lighting, driving
| buses on all the hills twice a day, paying 200k to non-
| teachers, these things all add up.
| rejectedandsad wrote:
| Admin bloat is very real but as the wealthiest country it
| makes sense we spend more on public education because we
| spend more on nearly everything.
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| It's remarkable how much the per capita, inflation corrected
| cost per pupil in California has gone up in 50 years.
|
| My own elementary school (not in CA), has double the amount
| of staff with the same pupil head count, plus I don't doubt
| that the salaries have risen faster than inflation and/or GDP
| improvements. OTOH, teachers were famously poorly paid in
| days of yore.
| subsubzero wrote:
| I have a friend that was a teacher in palo alto at a public
| school, she taught special ed and was making 86k, not
| exactly poor but I could imagine a teacher at middle school
| or high school making more.
| j_walter wrote:
| You say paid poorly, but exactly how poorly? Usually the
| upfront pay was offset by a good pension, medical benefits
| and having the summer months off was a huge benefit.
|
| Teachers around here now make the average staring salary
| for a Bachelors Degree and still get the good benefits and
| time off.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| >>It's remarkable how much the per capita, inflation
| corrected cost per pupil in California has gone up in 50
| years.
|
| Is that adjusted for national or local price levels?
| shados wrote:
| Yup. Having an education doesn't do anything (as in diplomas).
| Being educated does. The quality of the public schools matter a
| lot.
|
| As for college... It was a differentiator, not an equalizer.
| When so many people have college degrees, they're just an
| expectation and all of a sudden you raised the bar, so people
| who don't have them are even more screwed.
|
| The analogy I always like is MMORPG expansions/level cap raise.
| Every time the level cap raises, new players to the game take
| that much longer to catch up. The developers then need to add a
| bunch of "catch up" mechanics to artificially close the gap.
| bshoemaker wrote:
| Being a do-er... what a nice, simple, seemingly intuitive
| concept.
|
| I grew up in a rich area; all of my friends (even the
| screwballs) are in white-collar jobs, they are all "senior
| this" and "lead that". I'm 30. Even the people who were serious
| screw-ups, getting in trouble, drugs, rehab, etc. are doing
| relatively well - they just had unlimited re-tries.
|
| On the contrary, my wife is from a relatively poor area. Most
| of the people she knew are poor, have a number of kids, and are
| just struggling to make ends meet in blue collar jobs.
|
| I don't think my rich kids group had "the ability to DO
| THINGS". They just had every advantage & their failures were
| just setbacks in a nearly inevitable path to success.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > chronically underfunding schools
|
| In Washington State, for decades there was a big push to "fully
| fund" the schools. They finally got their way a couple years
| back, i.e. just about everything they wanted.
|
| There has been zero improvement in results.
|
| There has been no further mention of "fully funding" the
| schools in the press since, but the demands for more and more
| money for the schools have not abated at all.
|
| Edit: the fully funding was in place in 2018
|
| https://www.washingtonea.org/ourvoice/mccleary-school-fundin...
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| I'm not sure you can tell much after only 3 years and one of
| those years schools were shut down for covid. Let's check
| back in about 3 or 4 years and see how they're doing.
| jltsiren wrote:
| Institutional changes take time. Even with all that
| additional funding, it's still the same teachers teaching the
| same kids in the same schools. If the level of funding
| remains stable and the society gives the schools and the
| teachers sufficient autonomy, you may expect results in 20-30
| years.
| tut-urut-utut wrote:
| Do you really expect that the effect of ,,fully funded"
| schools is measurable after only a couple of years.
|
| It takes decades for any society scale effect to become
| evident.
| UnpossibleJim wrote:
| https://www.washingtonpolicy.org/publications/detail/school-.
| ..
|
| That, not unlike a lot of college misspending, was an
| administration issue, not a teacher issue. I, like most
| people don't mind paying taxes, but I want an itemized bill
| for my purchases and some redress when the money is misspent
| (I also live in WA... and the Seattle area is notorious for
| these types of shenanigans).
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| I think the real reason is buried deeper: most Americans have
| instilled into them that governments are not to be trusted.
| It's why government salaries suck, it's why it's largely
| filled with people that couldn't find jobs in the private
| sector (sad but true). This sentiment bleeds over into
| education, with nonsense talk of "leftist indoctrination",
| teachers being stereotyped as money-hungry and lazy because
| of their unions, and so on.
|
| This isn't that far-fetched; the country was basically
| founded by rich conspiracy theorist farmers that didn't want
| to pay taxes.
| yardie wrote:
| A couple years back is 2019. I'm not sure you know how
| schools work but suddenly pumping money in doesn't
| dramatically increase test scores the next fiscal quarter. I
| think nearly everyone agrees public schools could use more
| funding, the debates tend to be about "on what and how much."
| WalterBright wrote:
| I looked it up, it was fully in place by summer 2018.
|
| P.S. I didn't say "dramatically". I said "zero"
| improvement. Doing better than zero is as _low a bar as
| possible_. I fail to see that as unreasonable. There isn 't
| even a plan for success.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| But note that 2020/2021 school years where heavily
| disrupted by covid. Let's take a look back in a few years
| to see how they're doing, I'm not sure we can make many
| inferences from the limited data so far.
| WalterBright wrote:
| There's not even a progress report after it being fully
| in place for 1.5 school years.
|
| Nothing at all has changed.
| yardie wrote:
| What exactly were you expecting? I assume you aren't an
| educator.
|
| Education is a process with a decade long pipeline.
| Simply doubling the budget doesn't turn into 2x brighter
| kids.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| There are good schools and there are bad schools. Pumping
| money into bad schools doesn't help, as many urban areas have
| found out.
|
| Schools are institutions and have all the inertia that any
| other institution has. Send a good kid to a bad school and
| they'll perform on that level. Send a good teacher to a bad
| school and they'll half-ass it long enough to get the
| experience on their resume and move on.
|
| If you wanna make a bad school good you break it up and
| sprinkle the students teachers and administrators among
| schools that are doing alright. Those people mostly then go
| on to perform at the same level as those around them.
|
| People vote for shoveling money at the schools because it's a
| feel good measure and doesn't require doing anything
| difficult.
| mcguire wrote:
| " _Edit: the fully funding was in place in 2018_ "
|
| How fast do you expect results?
|
| The Washington Supreme Court decision:
| http://www.courts.wa.gov/opinions/pdf/843627.opn.pdf
|
| " _The State has failed to meet its duty under article IX,
| section 1 by consistently providing school districts with a
| level of resources that falls short of the actual costs of
| the basic education program. The legislature recently enacted
| sweeping reforms to remedy the deficiencies in the funding
| system, and it is currently making progress toward phasing in
| those reforms._ "
|
| Apparently the state was calling for a level of funding, but
| not providing the money and requiring local taxes to make up
| the difference. (Hence "fully funding".)
| WalterBright wrote:
| It was fully implemented in the summer of 2018. See my
| cite.
| mcguire wrote:
| You cannot produce a baby in one month by getting nine
| women pregnant.
|
| Summer of 2018 is too late for the 2018/2019 year. That
| gives them 2019/2020 (half messed up due to the pandemic)
| and 2020/2021 (half messed up and ongoing).
|
| Since this seems to be yet another issue of a state
| screwing low income districts, one wouldn't expect any
| change in high income districts, either.
| AlexTWithBeard wrote:
| Things like that puzzle me.
|
| Baltimore, MD high school graduation rate is under 70% [1].
|
| They spend $18k per student [2] - more than 45 other states
| on average [3]
|
| Citizens of Baltimore even elected a black grassroot mayor
| who understands needs of the community [4] and Maryland's
| police brutality is among the lowest in the country [5].
|
| Yet something doesn't work.
|
| WHY?
|
| [1] https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-
| baltimore/baltimore-ci...
|
| [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/03/30/
| bal...
|
| [3] https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-
| statisti...
|
| [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandon_Scott
|
| [5] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1123317/rate-people-
| kill...
| tomschlick wrote:
| > WHY?
|
| Because no matter how much better the schools /
| administration of it get, it all falls down if the kids
| don't have a culture at home of valuing education.
|
| My sister taught in a few different low income school
| districts and each time it was the same thing. Probably 75%
| of the parents just don't care if their kid is misbehaving
| or straight up not attending at all. Discipline of those
| kids was met with accusations of racism by both the kid and
| the parent as a tool to stop the conversation all together.
| Phone calls home about performance were generally met with
| "its your job to teach them not mine". Almost no one showed
| up to parent teacher meetings. Kids who did want to learn
| were made fun of by other kids as "acting white".
|
| All of this leads to administrations and teachers pushing
| under-qualified students through to get them out of the
| way. There is little incentive for them to personally
| invest in kids when there is no investment at home.
| Something has got to give.
| mcguire wrote:
| https://drive.google.com/file/d/1h9mp8cWP7GQfrthZ1A4ccTfrHl
| x...
|
| Looks like Baltimore bit big into the charter school idea,
| where the cost-per-student at the school level is
| apparently somewhat higher (30%, $10,000 vs $7,900 judging
| by the first couple of pages of the per-school table).
| Administration is about 11% of the expenses. Interestingly,
| the City Schools' "District Offices" average $174,000 per
| "Full-Time Equivalent" for whatever that's worth.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| It's not really clear to me that being a "black grassroot
| mayor who understands the needs of the community" is a
| benefit without any kind of experience managing and
| operating large organizations.
|
| The operating budget of Baltimore is approximately
| $4B/year. I can't imagine many companies with that kind of
| budget that would hire a CEO/COO with Scott's resume to run
| it.
| AlexTWithBeard wrote:
| The sky will fall before a greedy fat cat corporate CEO
| will be elected as a public official - no matter what his
| track record in managing other people's money is.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Sure - I wasn't saying a corporate CEO would even be the
| right person to run a large city(though Bloomberg did
| pretty well relative to the expectations of a NYC mayor),
| but merely pointing out that businesses with operating
| budgets of a similar size are _much_ choosier with who
| they put in charge.
|
| In Baltimore, the democratic mayoral candidate is a shoe-
| in. So the Democratic mayoral primaries are actually the
| real election. And Scott bested his opponents in that
| competition with ~45,000 votes total.
|
| So really only about 7% of the city(pop 620,000) voted
| for him, but that's just how the system works.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Would you expect a measurable improvement in results in 2
| normal years, to say nothing of two COVID-impacted school
| years?
| WalterBright wrote:
| It was fully in place for the 2018-2019, and 2019-2020
| school years. So yeah, I expect measurable improvement in
| results.
| sokoloff wrote:
| For a student who was educated for 10 years under funding
| level A and where funding level B was available for 1
| full school year (2018-2019), resulting in some changes
| in the classrooms in the districts only after some time
| delay after funding was approved, I'd expect to see
| almost no change in the spring 2019 testing. Spring 2020
| testing was impacted by COVID. It's fine that we have
| different expectations, though.
| WalterBright wrote:
| The thing is, the "fully-funding" issue has completely
| vanished from the agenda. It is never discussed anymore.
| It's back to the same old "we need more funding to make a
| difference" rhetoric.
|
| In fact, I recall the _very day_ the legislation passed,
| the same advocates were demanding even more money.
|
| I've lived in Seattle for over 40 years now. Long enough
| to see innumerable funding increases based on demands
| that "this time it'll fix the schools". Nothing has moved
| the needle.
|
| One of these is wrong:
|
| 1. the way the school system is set up and run
|
| 2. our expectations of what the schools can accomplish
|
| Money is just not the problem.
| mcguire wrote:
| " _The thing is, the "fully-funding" issue has completely
| vanished from the agenda. It is never discussed
| anymore._"
|
| The state was failing to provide funding to _all_ of the
| school systems in the state. The legislature came up with
| a plan to fix that and the state Supreme Court agreed
| with it. There isn 't much else to say there.
| WalterBright wrote:
| What is the plan on how to spend the money to improve
| results?
|
| There is none.
| romwell wrote:
| This is akin to expecting improvement of a building
| constructed on shaky foundation after increasing funding
| when the construction reached the 8th floor.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| And then when they got to the 9th & 10th floors there was
| a pandemic.
| kenjackson wrote:
| You do realize this is about where the money was coming from.
| The state had a constitutional mandate to fund education at a
| certain level and weren't doing so. Local and federal funding
| was making up the gap.
|
| You won't see any impact to education because there isn't
| more money coming to education as a result of this ruling.
| Rather more money can flow from federal and local gov't to
| other programs (or in theory taxes could be lowered). This
| case is about funding sources more than funding amounts.
| Bostonian wrote:
| Education is a multiplier of IQ, not an equalizer. Many people,
| although policymakers won't admit it, don't have the IQ to study
| at the high school level, for example learning algebra. Even more
| people don't have the IQ to study at the college level, for
| example studying calculus and writing a coherent, footnoted term
| paper. And only a small fraction of the population has the IQ to
| do significant research and earn a PhD. Charles Murray has
| discussed the IQ prerequisites of educational levels in his book
| Real Education.
|
| The article says, "In the U.S., the big achievement gaps across
| lines of race or social class open up very early, before
| kindergarten, rather than during college."
|
| Race and class differentials on IQ tests have been well
| documented but are in Paul Graham's category of What You Can't
| Say.
| tester34 wrote:
| what is "many"?
|
| 20 000 people? 30% of country? 70% of country?
| benrbray wrote:
| In my own perhaps limited experience, I've never really
| encountered anyone who is simply incapable of deep thought /
| critical thinking. I've met plenty of people who have a learned
| helplessness when it comes to, say, math. I've studied
| alongside classmates who could't spend as much time studying as
| me, simply because they had to support themselves with part-
| time or full-time work just to keep their head above water.
| I've met plenty of people who are more or less happy with their
| current job, and spend time thinking critically about their
| hobby or other non-academic things.
|
| Sure, all other things held equal, maybe inherent intelligence
| is the limiting factor. But that's the point -- not everything
| else is equal. There are barriers other than IQ preventing
| people from achieving more, and I think we'd all be better off
| helping them overcome those barriers.
|
| Besides, IQ tests are a pretty phony measure of intelligence.
| They're about as reliable as lie detectors.
| usaar333 wrote:
| In these discussions, there's often conflation between
| absolute improvements across society and ability of society
| to alter the rank ordering of students (or cut variance
| between students). Various environmental improvements have
| improved the former over time; not so much the latter
| (assuming that's the goal).
|
| See https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/education-doesnt-
| work for a deep discussion on this.
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| > I've met plenty of people who have a learned helplessness
| when it comes to, say, math.
|
| That strikes me as an insightful point.
|
| I'd say that the main point of math, considering how little
| the average person actually uses it beyond the elementary
| school level, is to teach people to learn and to approach
| problems in a different way. It has the same value as
| learning Latin or simple computer programming for a non-
| specialist.
|
| Also, the learned helplessness applies across society. A time
| and place filled with the self-employed (mostly farmers) has
| been replaced with worker bees. For various reasons normal
| skills sets now lack construction, vehicle repair, clothing
| fabrication, food production but are big on increasingly
| arcane theories of software development.
|
| It seems to me that learned helplessness is the largest
| single change of modern times.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > I've never really encountered anyone who is simply
| incapable of deep thought / critical thinking
|
| Well, hang on - there are actually learning disabled people
| who are incapable of learning to tie their own shoes. That's
| an extreme outlier, of course, but it suggests that there are
| two possible interpretations for "intelligence": one, that
| everybody has an upper cognitive limit that they'll never be
| able to surpass, and the mentally disabled are just struck
| with a very unfortunately low limit. The other is that being
| mentally disabled is like being crippled: you either are able
| to walk/run (learn) or not, and it's just a matter of how
| much effort you expend in improving it if you have it. Even
| then - we know that some people learn much _faster_ than
| others, so that would define intelligence as a measure of how
| quickly you can absorb new concepts. You seem to be leaning
| toward the feel-good, but very provably wrong, "everybody is
| as smart as everybody else" (captured by the Facebook-popular
| "everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability
| to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that
| it is stupid" quote falsely attributed to Einstein), but
| you're not doing anybody any favors suggesting that it's
| going to be as easy for them to learn calculus (if they can
| learn it all) as it was for you.
| jordan_curve wrote:
| Hey this was me!
|
| When I was a child, my parents tried very hard to teach me
| how to tie my shoes, but I could not figure it out. To this
| day, I just tie them in knots and then make loops to make
| it seem like I tied them properly.
|
| I now have a PhD in mathematics and work at a top tech
| company.
|
| It turns out that I have pretty severe dysgraphia (I have
| difficulty with cognitive tasks requiring fine motor
| skills). I think people only noticed because I couldn't tie
| my shoes.
| beforeolives wrote:
| > In my own perhaps limited experience, I've never really
| encountered anyone who is simply incapable of deep thought /
| critical thinking.
|
| I don't know how we're defining deep thought and critical
| thinking but it's important to recognise that people have
| limitations to their intellect and for some people that
| ceiling is very low. If we assume that you have some kind of
| software job since you're on HN - there are many people out
| there whose brains don't have the computational power to do
| your job. And for a subset of those people keeping _any_ job
| would be a challenge. That 's not something that they control
| or that anyone can change. If human intelligence is
| continuous and somewhat symmetrical, for every outlier that
| you meet on the high end of intelligence there is someone out
| there who can barely function in modern society (or maybe
| they can't).
| benrbray wrote:
| I don't think it's really about computational power -- it's
| about practice and experience. It's about how hard those
| people choose to work and what things they choose to put
| effort into over their lifetime. All those choices
| accumulate over a lifetime, to the point where I agree,
| yeah, it'd be really hard for someone who has worked as a
| nurse their entire life to suddenly start over and start
| writing software. Just like it would be an insurmountable
| task for me to start over and go into medicine, or work on
| a construction site.
|
| I disagree with the idea that somehow, innate intelligence
| sets the bar so low. There's definitely a bar somewhere,
| but I'd argue that most of our jobs (even in tech) don't
| come anywhere close to reaching that limit.
|
| I'd argue that most of us here are of pretty average
| intelligence, it's just that our life circumstances have
| pushed us into a role where we get to exercise our brain
| muscles.
|
| One thing is that having good teachers helps immensely. For
| a a lot of people I meet, when they reflect on their high
| school math and programming classes, the story is always
| the same: They had a lousy teacher that had them do
| everything by rote memorization, without explaining the
| underlying principles. They got the impression that that's
| what the whole field is like, and that they weren't smart
| enough, so why even bother. Occasionally, they'll be
| interested in hearing me explain what I do, and their
| response is always the same: "Wow. I wish someone had it
| explained it that way to me before."
| beforeolives wrote:
| I don't think that my point is getting across because
| you're focusing on the people that you have most commonly
| observed in the environment around you. Sure - people can
| work harder, most of us are average and we don't need to
| get close to our limits in our jobs. That's not who I'm
| talking about. I'm talking the extreme outliers on the
| lower end of the intelligence distribution. Those are the
| people for whom the innate intelligence limit _is_ low,
| by definition.
|
| People with IQ below 75 can be classified as having a
| mental disability. That's just under 5% of the
| population. Do you think those people can take your
| advice and just put in more effort? What about the people
| who score just above that threshold? Do you think they
| could do your job only if they had better teachers? I
| don't think they could.
|
| We all have natural limitations - it's much better to
| recognise that some people's limitations are holding them
| back so much that they can't function normally in modern
| society. That seems healthier to me than pretending that
| people just need to apply themselves more.
| benrbray wrote:
| Strictly speaking, yes, you're right that some people
| _are_ mentally deficient. But no one is disagreeing with
| the fact that people with mental disabilities exist.
|
| So I'm focusing instead on otherwise productive members
| of society who just don't happen to be scientists or
| engineers. Those people are definitely in a position to
| benefit from better educational opportunities.
|
| My intent was to argue against what I read between the
| lines of the original comment I responded to -- the
| insidious implication that certain races or certain
| classes of people have innate mental deficiencies, and
| that we should use that observation to allocate resources
| in society.
|
| Further, some technical people unfortunately have the
| mindset that somehow what we do is special, on a
| completely different level from what "normal" people do,
| and that "anyone who works in a non-technical position is
| mentally deficient". This thinking is absurd -- I've
| known people who sure, couldn't sit down and compose a
| 30-page essay, but they can strip a car down to its bare
| parts and reassemble it, no problem. I'd disagree with
| anyone who tries to say that's not real intelligence.
|
| Maybe none of this is what you had in mind when you
| replied to my comment, so forgive me if I misinterpreted
| you. I responded in the context of the OP.
| Bostonian wrote:
| "My intent was to argue against what I read between the
| lines of the original comment I responded to -- the
| insidious implication that certain races or certain
| classes of people have innate mental deficiencies, and
| that we should use that observation to allocate resources
| in society."
|
| Of course people should be judged as individuals, not
| members of their race or class, when applying to college
| etc. But differentials in IQ tests are mirrored on the
| SAT and ACT, on AP exams, on NAEP, and on state
| achievement tests. It has been shown that the SAT does
| not underpredict the college grades of black and Hispanic
| students or of lower-income students. If you evaluate all
| college applicants based on SAT and AP exam scores, you
| will end up "allocating resources" such as seats at
| selective colleges unevenly by demographic group, even
| though the process is race-blind. I think this is just,
| but advocates of equity do not.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| I.Q. is overrated because it lets failing educators and failing
| educational methodologies ("let the kids discover all the math
| by themselves! See, no need to teach!") off the hook. I'm
| willing to bet that even a random kid with no more than a room
| temperature I.Q. can learn all the algebra they need for school
| by playing some DragonBox.
| omgwtfbbq wrote:
| I think it's been well established that a low IQ White child
| from affluent/high class parents will out-achieve a high IQ
| Minority Child from poor/low class parents on average and that
| this is basically universal across racial groups. So I don't
| think your conclusion is relevant.
| onei wrote:
| I struggle to believe that intelligence is fundamentally
| limited, but I often wonder if the child brain is super
| susceptible to negative effects based on their environment.
| Anecdotally, if your parents did not do well in school, and you
| were born into relative poverty, chances are you aren't going
| to be an Oxford professor. But if your parents are well
| educated professionals, it's more likely you're going to follow
| in their footsteps.
|
| I think education is the great equaliser, but it needs to be
| nourished early and often or you quickly lose out.
| rejectedandsad wrote:
| I'm skeptical of tabula rasa myself (Speaking as someone on the
| less capable/"inferior"/low IQ side of the curve) but if true
| this will have to be remedied with a a robust safety net,
| right? Somehow Murray doesn't seem to agree - as a set of
| policy prescriptions, it feels to me that the message is people
| like me should just starve.
| usaar333 wrote:
| There's leftists out there who argue just that.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Cult-Smart-Education-Perpetuates-
| Inju...
| Bostonian wrote:
| Murray has never said that. He supports deregulating the
| labor market, de-emphasizing educational credentials so that
| lower-IQ people are not locked out. He also supports a basic
| income https://basicincome.org/news/2020/06/review-of-
| charles-murra... .
| mgh2 wrote:
| Education is worthless if there are no opportunities. In
| Argentina, there are PhDs as cab drivers.
|
| Opportunities are correlated to how well authorities run the
| country.
|
| There is some data trying to pinpoint relationships with other
| factors:
|
| GDP, corruption, and religion, etc. https://m-g-h.medium.com/in-
| data-we-trust-2978dacc8c22
| basementcat wrote:
| I had a tow truck driver who had a Ph.D in mechanical
| engineering. He worked for an engineering company for a few
| years before he decided to move back to the mountains. I
| learned so much about control theory riding with him in the cab
| of his truck.
| nnadams wrote:
| People like that resemble modern day "wise men" or sages to
| me. Our middle school janitor was a math PhD who left
| academia, became a farmer for decades, and eventually our
| janitor.
|
| He rarely told anyone his credentials. Most people thought he
| was just some old man. I watched parents and teachers be rude
| to him, but he'd always smile and be polite. Some of us used
| to help him from time to time. He was very kind and would
| always listen to our kid-sized problems while we worked.
| sc68cal wrote:
| Don't forget that Argentina's economy was the brainchild of the
| right wing in the United States, and specifically the Chicago
| School of economics.
|
| They overthrew a democractically elected government and
| installed a military dictatorship, in order to push their
| preferred economy
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| Argentina was always high on Peronist kool-aid, it has
| nothing to do with the Chicago School of economics.
| pepperonipizza wrote:
| Don't you mean Chile? Argentina is a textbook about how not
| to implement populist left wing economic policy.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Yup, that's ironic. Argentina was the brainchild of the
| populist economic _left_ , Chile of the non-populist economic
| right. Neither of the two, to be fair, caring all that much
| about freedom for the populace. Finding out which is doing
| better at present is left as an exercise for the interested
| reader.
| randdusing wrote:
| Did you mean Chile? Chile is doing well compared to other
| Latin American countries.
| anoncake wrote:
| So well an overwhelming majority voted to replace their
| pro-capitalist constitution.
| hpoe wrote:
| I looked through your link and apart from a handful of sources
| linking to random Guardian articles and Wikipedia it didn't
| actually cite the source it used as it's central claim and then
| proceeded with rather disjointed points each poorly supported
| and ended with some sort of vague platitude about how we need
| to look at data despute never actually making a conclusion.
| mgh2 wrote:
| The conclusion is that there might be a correlation between a
| country's culture, largely shaped by its majority religion,
| to its GDP over time. It is too complex to explain so the
| article is just an inquiry into an overlooked factor, often
| ignored by economists.
| scotuswroteus wrote:
| In America, there are PhDs as cab drivers. We call it Uber.
| C'mon.
| miohtama wrote:
| In Finland, a suburban pizza entrepreneur was called a doctor,
| because he had a PhD in nuclear physics from Iran.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| Did you ask these cab drivers why did they pursue a PhD with
| the associated cost in time and money if they knew in advance
| there is no opportunity to use it? Most people that I know with
| a PhD working outside universities did it for status or for
| spending some more years studying and not working, not because
| they needed it.
| Kenji wrote:
| It still is, but you no longer get educated at school ;)
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.is/gggnc
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| You have to ask if the majority of 'educated' people actually do
| things of value. Perhaps we should simply follow a Lysenkoist
| approach of simply handing out a diploma to one and all.
|
| Forgive me for the old man moment, but I was just musing about
| how little my life has changed since the 1970s. Noticeable
| differences: TVs have more pixels, airliners look the same but
| are slower, you can order manufactured goods from your house
| without using the mail system, improvements in medicine where
| they can see what they are doing (surgery),these kids music it's
| all noise. Digital music and arguing on a communications network
| have been around since the 1980s.
|
| After all the fuss and fury, it's really all on the margin. You
| have to wonder what all these newly minted degree holders
| actually do. The growth of the FIRE industry is one answer.
| ipaddr wrote:
| A degree holder in any field in 1970 could open many doors.
| Today a degree by itself could land you at Burger King. You
| need more education to obtain less now.
| beerandt wrote:
| It doesn't help that any student can get a loan to study
| whatever they want, often without any regard for future
| income potential.
|
| Most STEM majors don't have problems finding jobs.
|
| The days of an Art History degree being enough to qualify you
| as a "college graduate" for a 9-5 desk job in an unrelated
| field are certainly over.
|
| Which makes sense, economically. More college graduates means
| more specialized degrees to fill niche jobs, which generally
| pay better. Bushiness have a better chance of getting someone
| who's degree matches the job position, and don't need to
| settle for "college graduate" in unrelated field.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| The problem with this, from the angle of the employee, is
| that if they want to move from an HR position to something
| else they have to entirely retrain and acquire a new
| degree. Gets cost prohibitive quickly and puts even more
| emphasis on getting that choice right the first time.
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| I expect that the main value was in proving you could sit at
| a desk for eight hours a day.
| username90 wrote:
| Doesn't even prove that, many college degrees are easier to
| pass than high school.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| whb07 wrote:
| Controlling education is a political life source for the
| Democratic party in the U.S. One of the largest, if not the
| largest, unions is the teacher's and they are a major donor to
| the Democratic party.
|
| Thankfully, the one good thing about the shutdowns has been the
| ability for parents to observe a couple things:
|
| * how little the school system cares about the child
|
| * the indoctrination and political ideas being passed to children
|
| There are a number of states that have passed a "school choice"
| this year and its a rapidly growing movement. The idea is
| primarily to tie the funding money to the child rather than to
| the land. It generally means that if you move your child from
| school A to B, without school choice, school B wouldn't receive
| the money because it was bound to A.
|
| Heres an article from Reason talking about West Virginia passing
| the school choice:
|
| https://reason.com/2021/03/23/school-choice-is-coming-to-uni...
| doytch wrote:
| I'm not American, but the core flaw that I've never had
| explained away for me in voucher or "school choice" systems is
| how "bad" schools get better.
|
| E.g., school in my district is bad. They don't have enough
| resources, or their teachers are bad. People begin taking their
| kids out of the school which means the school now has less
| money. Assuming they could fire teachers at will, they can't
| even now afford the "better" teachers who would likely cost
| more. They definitely can't afford more learning resources or
| an expansion to lower class sizes.
|
| So how do you prevent schools either going into a vicious or
| virtuous cycle?
| refurb wrote:
| I mean, take a look at how the non-voucher system works in
| SF. Lottery system and if you end up with a crappy school,
| you either put your kid in a private school or try and game
| the system to get them switched. The parents who are poor
| don't have the bandwidth or knowledge to do it so they just
| get stuck with whatever school. So you end up with the same
| problem. Crappy schools have kids of parents who don't value
| education or parents who don't have an option.
|
| At least with vouchers the parents, rich or poor have a
| choice where their kids go.
| rejectedandsad wrote:
| What exactly makes a crappy school? I went to the school
| dictated by my geography my whole life which online
| rankings don't indicate as anything special - is this just
| a thinly veiled proxy for SES?
| nemo44x wrote:
| I went to both what people would consider "Crappy
| schools" and "good schools".
|
| Crappy schools have an awful student body, many of which
| don't want to be there, are further behind in their
| learning than their grade indicates, are disruptive, and
| teachers have to spend large amounts of time calling
| security to have students removed or disciplining
| students. Often, the parents blame the schools and
| teachers for all their kids' problems.
|
| In my experience, some of the teachers were still trying
| their best (usually young ones that weren't made cynical
| yet) but others were too burned out to care much since
| you only had to look around and see it was mainly
| hopeless.
|
| The crappy school had fights every day in classes and in
| the hallways and were fairly violent places.
|
| In the good school (last couple years of school) I wasn't
| sure the teachers were any more talented but the students
| showed up on time, listened, did their assignments, and
| were not violent or disruptive. Honestly, it was really
| strange to me the first few months and felt probably like
| when a prisoner is put back into society and they don't
| quite know how to act at school yet. Any slight I'd meet
| with threatening behavior to defend myself and
| intimidate, but I found it wasn't necessary after some
| time. I hated that school too but I think it was more I
| disliked a lot of the people there and the reason why was
| because I was initially resentful of their comfortable,
| happy life and civility, and just how functional things
| were. People listened to their teachers and wanted to
| succeed. I know that sounds crazy, but I was used to
| going to an insane asylum every day year after year and
| this was different. The friends I made at the crappy
| school are the best friends I've had but as the years
| have gone on many of them are dead from suicide or drugs
| or have had a really difficult go of it as adults. It all
| catches up.
|
| I spent my entire school life in the public school system
| of a large city and I would never send my kids to those
| schools. It's not really that the schools that are "good
| or bad" per-se - it's the student body that determines
| that and that is largely decided by the parents and
| communities of those children. So much money has to be
| spent on security (my HS had 10 full-time staff) and
| discipline that there's not money for "nice things". But,
| the administration knows they need to hit numbers so kids
| are passed along if they show up and I knew more than a
| few kids who graduated and couldn't read past a 5th grade
| level.
| coryrc wrote:
| Percentage of time teachers spend on crowd control
| instead of teaching would be one good measurement, along
| with percentage of children performing at grade level.
|
| In crappy schools, little learning occurs as the
| classroom resembles a zoo, and many/most students are
| several grade levels behind.
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| >So how do you prevent schools either going into a vicious or
| virtuous cycle?
|
| I expect that you have to try it and add controls as
| necessary. Not only are these systems too complicated to
| model in any simple way, but have multiple players each with
| their own demands. It's a strategy problem as much as simply
| channeling some money.
|
| It seems to me that the end game always becomes one of
| segregation of 'good' vs. 'bad' students. The teaching part
| isn't purely an aside, but matters less than you might think.
| So, you have to ask how important it is for the good to drag
| along the bad (or visa versa) and how detrimental it is to
| produce schools that are, in essence, jails.
| ModernMech wrote:
| You haven't gotten an explanation because people who advocate
| for "school choice" systems don't want the bad schools to get
| better. They just don't want their kids to interact with
| people who go to the bad school.
| mbg721 wrote:
| That describes why people pay for private school more than
| it describes why people would support vouchers. The theory
| is that "school choice" would mean _everyone_ would flee
| the worst schools and they 'd be compelled to clean up
| their act or dissolve.
| techrat wrote:
| Ah, you mean like how the "free market" would police
| itself if they just got rid of those pesky regulations?
| mbg721 wrote:
| I don't exactly see how that's similar; no one is
| complaining that their school district is lousy because
| it's overregulated, they're complaining that it's
| mismanaged or corrupt and that without something like
| vouchers, only the wealthy can opt out, and poorer kids
| get trapped.
|
| Ultimately I think pure free-market school choice in
| practice would fail not so much because of regulatory
| capture or a cash-grab, but because changing schools is
| disruptive and won't fix the problems of students with
| dysfunctional home lives.
| refurb wrote:
| Better than the current "sunk cost mentality" of public
| schools where poor schools have more money thrown at them
| until someone finally realizes its not a money issue.
|
| It's literally the opposite of efficient use of funds.
| You want to shift more money to the better run schools
| not the worst run schools.
| techrat wrote:
| Decades of Republican ratfucking the education system
| isn't a reason to add more overhead to a starved system
| by privatizing it.
|
| > Better than...
|
| We know what deregulation does. Texas' energy issues is a
| great example.
|
| People forget that regulations don't just magically exist
| to inconvenience the glorious free market...
|
| _Regulations are written in blood._
| renewiltord wrote:
| Haha no. Lots of regulations are just written in
| vegetable oil. The US regulated marriage between races
| using anti-miscegenation laws. Written in blood my ass.
|
| There are two kinds of great fools in the world: those
| who say regulations are always good and those who say
| regulations are never good.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The failing schools will also get fewer students going for
| them. Money per student will be the same as it always was,
| and quite often with a better student/teacher ratio as well.
| dwater wrote:
| No. Schools benefit from economies of scale like almost
| everything else. If you have a school building designed for
| 2000 students and you have 600 attending, do you think it
| will be cheaper, the same, or more expensive per student to
| operate the building?
|
| It will cost more per student, which leaves less money
| available for teachers so the student/teacher ratio would
| get worse. The facilities will not be kept up as required.
| Programs will be cut.
|
| Also ignored in your analysis is that generally when school
| choice is available, the students most likely to leave a
| school are the high performers and the most likely to stay
| are the low performs and students with special needs, who
| are more expensive to educate and were previously
| subsidized by the high performers. If you compare the
| services provided to special needs students at a school in
| a wealthy area to the services provided to special needs
| students at a school in a poor area, there will be a
| massive difference in quality.
| whb07 wrote:
| Yes because this is exactly what's been happening for 50
| years.
|
| I'd understand this argument say in 1975, but in 2021
| your argument needs some deeper analysis
| [deleted]
| renewiltord wrote:
| You don't. You kill the school at some point. Some
| organizations become so dirty they cannot be cleaned. So you
| allow people to select into better organizations and you let
| these die. Then you ensure that those administrators don't
| all end up together in a new school.
|
| Schools suffer from the same Too Big To Fail. We have to let
| them fail and let parents have free choice.
| techrat wrote:
| Alright. You rendered your entire point to "hurr, left wing
| bad" but with just many more words.
|
| For anyone else, take a look at who keeps cutting funding to
| education and funneling funds to _profit oriented companies_
| before you let this guy play this kind of disingenuous game
| here.
|
| Especially as Reason's positions often carry the Libertarian
| bent of "fuck you, got mine" as the motivation to further erode
| the equal playing field that education was supposed to be...
| often this is in the form of distance gating "good" schools
| away from the "bad" ones, and by proxy, the "bad"
| neighborhoods... whatever the cloak term of choice is these
| days, eg "underperforming", challenged, ghetto, etc...
| donezo wrote:
| The left wing is bad.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| The current system is not producing the equal playing field
| that education was supposed to be. So, you whine about those
| suggesting school choice, but _what 's your solution_?
| Because the current system isn't working, and doesn't look
| like it's going to start working any time soon.
| whb07 wrote:
| No, they "f** you I got mine" attitude is exactly what a
| person like myself hates to see. It's the same thing as FB
| pushing for social media/internet regulations, it makes you
| wonder why they are pushing for it.
|
| When you create a department of X, the actual incentive is
| for that department to make things worse so they can get more
| funding.
| dwater wrote:
| Schools are controlled primarily by state and local
| governments, which are not universally controlled by Democrats
| but split along typical red state/blue state lines:
|
| https://www.ncsl.org/research/about-state-legislatures/parti...
|
| Republican legislatures have shown they are quite capable of
| passing legislation about education that serves little purpose
| beyond a political agenda, as this year's crop of bills banning
| critical race theory shows (critical race theory being a
| graduate level discipline that is not taught in public
| secondary schools).
|
| https://www.chalkbeat.org/22525983/map-critical-race-theory-...
|
| And bills like the voucher program you describe have been shown
| to have mixed results at best. If you live at the poverty line
| that West Virginia bill does not provide you any additional
| choice in your child's education, unless there are numerous
| private schools in West Virginia that charge $4600 or less in
| tuition, which I would not expect. Otherwise it's simply a
| transfer of funds away from public schools to middle and upper
| class families who were already leaning away from public
| education and the private (largely religious) institutions they
| prefer. If the intent was truly to provide school choice to
| all, they could end enrollment based on residence and allow low
| income families to choose to place their children in high
| performing schools in high income areas, but that kind of
| choice is not the intent of these programs.
| iammisc wrote:
| > unless there are numerous private schools in West Virginia
| that charge $4600 or less in tuition, which I would not
| expect.
|
| There seem to be quite a few:
| https://www.privateschoolreview.com/tuition-stats/west-
| virgi...
|
| In general, Catholic school is per capita cheaper than
| public. In fact, according to
| https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-private-school,
| $4600 would be enough to cover the average Catholic
| elementary school in the US _as a whole_.
|
| > Otherwise it's simply a transfer of funds away from public
| schools to middle and upper class families who were already
| leaning away from public education and the private (largely
| religious) institutions they prefer.
|
| That's not true. Vouchers are more popular with minorities:
| https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/02/24/voters-
| str...
|
| I also notice you use religious as a pejorative. There is
| little reason to do so. Catholic schooling for example
| provides better outcomes for low-income minorities than
| public schools, including when adjusted for poverty, parental
| behavior, etc. Thomas Sowell goes in depth in his book
| "education in america".
|
| > If the intent was truly to provide school choice to all,
| they could end enrollment based on residence and allow low
| income families to choose to place their children in high
| performing schools in high income areas, but that kind of
| choice is not the intent of these programs.
|
| Low income families do not want to place their kids in high
| performing schools in high income areas. That doesn't
| actually work. This typically leads to ostracization of the
| poor kids in school and the creation of two separate tracks.
|
| My wife and I are in the best high school in our city ... if
| you're white or rich. If you're black it's the worst. It's in
| an extremely rich area, but it also includes a predominantly
| black poorer inner city neighborhood.
| teachrdan wrote:
| > I also notice you use religious as a pejorative. There is
| little reason to do so.
|
| While I tend to agree that Catholic schools are good at
| teaching science (except for reproductive science!),
| evangelical schools often teach against evolution, climate
| change, etc. A popular Christian textbook refers to the
| theory of evolution as "a wicked and vain philosophy." And
| many of these schools accept vouchers! That means taxpayer
| funds set aside for education are actively being used, by
| religious schools, to make students dumber, in an explicit
| attempt at religious and political indoctrination.
|
| https://www.politico.com/story/2014/03/education-
| creationism...
| iammisc wrote:
| > except for reproductive science!
|
| People claim this with little evidence. At my
| conservative Catholic school we discussed contraception
| in great detail. More than my public school classmates.
| We learned about all the available options, how they
| worked at the chemical level, and why they were morally
| unacceptable. In fact, we had a whole full-semester class
| on this and on abortion. We learned about the various
| drugs used to induce abortion. The various methods of
| abortion. Our first sex ed curriculum was in the fourth
| grade. And yes, this was a very conservative catholic
| elementary school, with a very strict orthodox Irish nun
| for principal.
|
| The real complaint here isn't that Catholic schools don't
| teach contraception, abortion, etc. It's that they teach
| that they are _immoral_. The morality of contraception
| and abortion is not a scientific argument.
|
| Another complaint I hear about 'conservative' sex ed, is
| that they don't talk about sex as fun, but I literally
| never experienced this at my catholic school. We had our
| married teachers be incredibly candid about pleasure. In
| my all boys high school, I remember one in particular
| pointing out that sex without a condom felt way better.
| And guess what... he was right... thanks Mr Tory.
|
| The last thing I'll say is my own experience as a
| newlywed. My wife when we first married had irregular
| cycles. She went to public school. She accepted this as
| normal (which it is certainly, but not the way she was
| having them.... 100 day long cycles followed by 20 day
| ones). I went to all boys Catholic school, where we
| learned about natural family planning. By the time we
| married as 21 year olds, I knew that the church taught a
| system of menstrual tracking that could be used to avoid
| or achieve pregnancy and fix cycle issues.
|
| I encouraged us to sign up for an NFP class. My wife
| wanted to use the pill. I told her that based on her
| history of migraine, the pill may cause blood clots and
| lower libido (which newly wed wants that...). Anyway, she
| went on the pill and had all the typical reactions one
| would expect. She decided in frustration to take an NFP
| class.
|
| Anyway, we did that, and my wife learned so much about
| her cycle. She said she wished she had learned it in
| school. Guess what? The girls at our all girl sister
| school did learn about it. Via NFP tracking, she learned
| her cycles were likely off due to her thyroid. A trip to
| the doctor later, she had normal cycles. Then we had a
| series of miscarriages, including some late ones. We
| visited a Catholic doctor who took her full history and
| looked at her menstrual charts. She immediately saw some
| more discrepancies that indicated some hormone things,
| but she also noted that her migraines could be a blood
| clotting problem, especially given her reaction to the
| pill. Anyway, some tests later, and some blood thinners
| and some supplemental progesterone, we had our first
| child after seven miscarriages. Now, after successful
| pregnancies, we know that it's likely a blood clotting
| problem. Man... if only she had learned that a bad
| reaction to the pill and a history of migraines is often
| indicative of blood clotting problems, she would have
| avoided all that unnecessary suffering. Thank goodness we
| learned about it in Catholic school.
|
| That is to say, I credit my own Catholic high school
| education for being able to see what was obviously ailing
| my wife and she and I both wish she had had access to the
| same education in high school. It would have saved her a
| lot of unnecessary inconvenience over having an irregular
| cycle, and us a lot of grief over having lost those
| babies. Frankly, our experience of the science taught by
| the church, turned us from lukewarm Catholics (I had
| learned a lot of facts but disagreed with the church over
| its moral teachings) into pretty traditional ones.
| whb07 wrote:
| Well a couple things to note:
|
| 1. An entrepreneurial teacher/teachers could provide a
| service for these suddenly flush parents at $4600 per child.
|
| 2. Most politicians, from either side are either corrupt or
| incompetent, so these labels don't matter much to me. But if
| you actually look at the people running most say
| schools/admins and even large chunks of the government
| bureaucracy it's people who believe in large government and
| like that lifestyle. This is true even in deep red areas.
|
| Finally, the argument "more money"/resources needed to
| improve the bad quality is something that has been going on
| for 50+ years and it's gotten worse over time. At what point
| do you say, "geez guess more money isn't the answer!"
|
| I think Thomas Sowell said once something along the lines
| that the black schools in DC at about late 1800s-early 1900s
| was OUTPERFORMING those of the white schools in the region.
| If one is to look at the present day schooling in the same
| region, those children/teens are functionally illiterate.
|
| So what needs to be done, is to give a voucher to every
| parent to decide where to go. Right now the system sends MORE
| money to a school if it's failing, and or they allow the
| failing school to survive.
| iammisc wrote:
| > I think Thomas Sowell said once something along the lines
| that the black schools in DC at about late 1800s-early
| 1900s was OUTPERFORMING those of the white schools in the
| region. If one is to look at the present day schooling in
| the same region, those children/teens are functionally
| illiterate.
|
| There's a lot of quiet stereotyping going on where people
| assume that blacks have always underperformed whites in
| schooling, economic growth, etc.
|
| In reality, this is a recent phenomenon. Well into the
| 50s/early 60s, black incomes were growing much faster than
| whites.
| whb07 wrote:
| Yup! They assume today's bad situation and apply it
| backwards, when in fact as time progresses, things have
| gotten worse not better.
| techrat wrote:
| > So what needs to be done, is to give a voucher to every
| parent to decide where to go.
|
| So, we just say 'fuck all the kids who were born in the
| wrong zip code' and can't overcome the distance gate to go
| to a better school with the voucher?
| whb07 wrote:
| Well seeing as how the biggest failing schools are in
| large metros this argument doesn't hold much does it?
|
| One of the biggest school system is in NYC and the
| average student graduating high school is reading at a 10
| year old level or less.
|
| One could also imagine some sort of large vehicle whose
| sole purpose is to provide rides for students to attend
| the schools.
|
| Let me see if I can do some more research on such a
| scheme. Perhaps, one could paint them a vivid color, so
| that people could know they are "educational vehicles".
| Maybe yellow? I think I've seen such a system before...
|
| Lastly, right now you're saying:
|
| "Born in the wrong zip? And the school is failing? Sucks
| to be you! Not my problem"
|
| Or what am I missing? At least provide the opportunity
| for someone rather than force them to a particular
| outcome
| techrat wrote:
| > Lastly, right now you're saying:
|
| > "Born in the wrong zip? And the school is failing?
| Sucks to be you! Not my problem"
|
| No. That's the logical outcome of a voucher system that
| only rewards the most successful schools instead of
| fixing the others.
|
| > Or what am I missing?
|
| Everything, apparently.
| iammisc wrote:
| It's a fallacy to think there are not good schools
| possible in poorer areas; they used to be quite common,
| and still are in many places: https://www.city-
| journal.org/html/irreplaceable-9836.html
|
| Rich elites, which almost everyone on this forum is,
| imagine that the poor people in the inner city who want
| vouchers want to send their kid to some swanky rich kid
| school where everyone wears a blazer.... they don't. They
| want to send their kids to the ordinary private schools
| that would exist in their communities if they were able
| to afford non-public education.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| > Schools are controlled primarily by state and local
| governments, which are not universally controlled by
| Democrats but split along typical red state/blue state lines
|
| Fine, but the claim was about the teachers' union. In a red
| state, who does the teachers' union campaign for? I'd bet
| that there are few examples of the teachers' union
| campaigning for Republicans, even in a red state.
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| > Schools are controlled primarily by state and local
| governments, which are not universally controlled by
| Democrats but split along typical red state/blue state lines:
|
| Looking at the uproar about Critical Race Theory, it appears
| that even the deepest red states have school hierarchies run
| by the blue. In addition, the Department of Education and
| other federal agencies are a thing.
| handrous wrote:
| > it appears that even the deepest red states have school
| hierarchies run by the blue
|
| This is definitely not the case. Consider: unless
| consistently-"red" legislatures and governor's offices are
| putting "blue" people in charge of their educational
| departments, it _couldn 't_ be the case. Further, in many
| states, individual districts play a major role in deciding
| the course of education, so even if that were the case,
| "red" school districts would have to be electing "blue"
| school boards, and I can 100% confirm that, as one might
| expect, they do not do this, generally.
|
| [EDIT] further--and I'm heading into speculative territory
| here, I admit--I'd _guess_ that people holding school
| administration PhDs--so, qualified for superintendent-type
| roles--identify, on average, as farther right than the
| average of PhD holders, and probably than most individual
| PhD areas of study except maybe business-related ones.
| There are _lots_ of very conservative school administrators
| out there.
| kansface wrote:
| I don't buy this argument for a couple of reasons. The
| first is that you have to look at the percentage of
| candidates for the job from each tribe. Just like really
| blue cities are inevitably at odds with their really red
| tribe police officers who inevitably live in the suburbs.
| Similarly, public universities in red states have no
| choice but to hire really liberal professors because like
| 95% of professors vote Democrat and the remainder vote
| libertarian or green, etc. You could try convincing the
| professors to go be police officers and vice versa, but
| neither is actually interested in the other job.
|
| Secondly, these sorts of policies often come from the
| bottom up, from students or teachers. Administrations
| often roll over out of self preservation or apathy.
| handrous wrote:
| Ah, higher ed. Yes, that may have a different dynamic. My
| comment was from the POV of primary and secondary
| education. For instance, it's definitely not the case
| that this:
|
| > Secondly, these sorts of policies often come from the
| bottom up, from students or teachers. Administrations
| often roll over out of self preservation or apathy.
|
| Is happening in any widespread or common way in k-12
| school districts, with admin hired by "red" school boards
| elected by "red" voters capitulating to most any "blue"
| political inclinations of teachers. As for the students
| in those age ranges, for most of that span they have a
| strong tendency to _very_ closely follow the political
| views of their parents, so that 's mostly irrelevant as
| far as pressure goes.
| asdfg-2021 wrote:
| >Republican legislatures have shown they are quite capable of
| passing legislation about education that serves little
| purpose beyond a political agenda, as this year's crop of
| bills banning critical race theory shows (critical race
| theory being a graduate level discipline that is not taught
| in public secondary schools).
|
| Your statement about critical race theory is misinformed; the
| legislation you refer to may be misguided, but the effects of
| this ideology have spread well beyond the university. For a
| good primer, I'd recommend this article by Columbia linguist
| John McWhorter:
|
| https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/you-are-not-a-racist-
| to...
|
| (edited for link to written version of article vs. podcast)
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