January 2, 2019
Dear Friends and Family,
Having grown up in a small rural town with its own School Board and later in life serving on a local School Board also in a rural area, I never thought of Public Schools as being socialistic. Even after reading a couple of books on the subject for this series, I could not comprehend it. So, I bought some additional books on educational reform of inner- city public schools. After reading them, it became clearer to me, so I went back and reread the initial books from a different perspective, and I started to agree with the assertion.
My hang-up was on the implied intent to make U.S. Public Schools socialistic. When I read “Reinventing America’s Schools” by David Osborne (one of the later books) it became much clearer. U.S. Public Schools evolved into socialism as the excerpts delineate. Then I began to understand how central planning came into vogue for public-schools, particularly in urban areas; how the system became rigid, regulated and focused on rote learning; how the system stifles teacher innovation and creativity; how and why parents are denied the right to select the public school of choice for their children; how the teacher incentive system grew to the detriment of children learning and effective financial efficiency; and why the system is stuck in its old paradigm versus leveraging the opportunities the Information Age presents to radically improve academic performance and student learning.
The nature of socialisms grip on the public school system really crystalized when I read about the immense difficulties reformers have changing the ingrained socialistic structure of public schools which will come to light in Segment 10. But the “icing on the cake” for my understanding of socialism in the public school system was the success of charter schools in terms of academic performance, student learning, and parental satisfaction. You will get some understanding of that in Segment 10, but it will be enhanced in Segment 11 which is totally focused on Charter Schools. Of course, no-where, in the segment 10 or 11 excerpts is the word “Socialism” interjected, because of its negative connotation when the books were written.
Of the entire 20 segments of this series, I personally learned the most about socialism in the Healthcare segment (#8) and the three Education segments (#9, 10, & 11).
Next:
The next segment will focus on four different efforts to reform large city public schools – New Orleans, Washington D.C., Denver, and Newark.
Happy Learning,
Harley
Dear Friends and Family,
Having grown up in a small rural town with its own School Board and later in life serving on a local School Board also in a rural area, I never thought of Public Schools as being socialistic. Even after reading a couple of books on the subject for this series, I could not comprehend it. So, I bought some additional books on educational reform of inner- city public schools. After reading them, it became clearer to me, so I went back and reread the initial books from a different perspective, and I started to agree with the assertion.
My hang-up was on the implied intent to make U.S. Public Schools socialistic. When I read “Reinventing America’s Schools” by David Osborne (one of the later books) it became much clearer. U.S. Public Schools evolved into socialism as the excerpts delineate. Then I began to understand how central planning came into vogue for public-schools, particularly in urban areas; how the system became rigid, regulated and focused on rote learning; how the system stifles teacher innovation and creativity; how and why parents are denied the right to select the public school of choice for their children; how the teacher incentive system grew to the detriment of children learning and effective financial efficiency; and why the system is stuck in its old paradigm versus leveraging the opportunities the Information Age presents to radically improve academic performance and student learning.
The nature of socialisms grip on the public school system really crystalized when I read about the immense difficulties reformers have changing the ingrained socialistic structure of public schools which will come to light in Segment 10. But the “icing on the cake” for my understanding of socialism in the public school system was the success of charter schools in terms of academic performance, student learning, and parental satisfaction. You will get some understanding of that in Segment 10, but it will be enhanced in Segment 11 which is totally focused on Charter Schools. Of course, no-where, in the segment 10 or 11 excerpts is the word “Socialism” interjected, because of its negative connotation when the books were written.
Of the entire 20 segments of this series, I personally learned the most about socialism in the Healthcare segment (#8) and the three Education segments (#9, 10, & 11).
Next:
The next segment will focus on four different efforts to reform large city public schools – New Orleans, Washington D.C., Denver, and Newark.
Happy Learning,
Harley
SOCIALISM – SEGMENT 9
EDUCATION: THE U.S. PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM – EXCERPTS
IS SOCIALISM THE BEST WAY TO ORGANIZE SCHOOLS? Government-run public schools suffer the same problems as any other socialist enterprise. A private school has to compete for students. If a private school fails to serve the needs and expectations of its customers (parents), it loses money, it loses market share, and it could eventually go out of business. A government-run school enjoys a virtual monopoly, especially among the poor, who can’t afford a private school; and as with all monopolies, the convenience of administrators and employees comes before the needs of the customers, because the customers will always be there. They have no choice. As with all government enterprises, the incentives are perverse: the worse the job they do in teaching children, the more money that is typically given to the school, because everyone wants to “improve education.” Affluent areas have better public schools than poor areas not because the former have more tax money than the latter, but because affluent parents can afford to send their children to private schools. That mere threat of competition forces public schools in affluent areas to do better. As with so many socialistic schemes, the public school near-monopoly on education hurts the poor most of all.
No more than half of all the increased taxpayer funding for public schools ends up in the classroom (teacher’s salaries, instructional materials, and so on). The rest is eaten up by layers and layers of bureaucracy, not to mention all the capital spending on buildings and facilities. Government-run schools are increasingly weighed down by bureaucratic mandates imposed by government at all levels, including the federal government, which is becoming an ever larger, source of taxpayer funding of government schools. Mandates like Common Core, supported by the federal Department of Education, of state mandates like California’s Fair Education Act (popularly known as the “gay rights bill”) are imposed in the name of “standards” or “fairness,” but in fact they are often shackles on how and what teachers can teach, and students can think. They can do this because schooling is compulsory, because many parents consider that they don’t have a choice of schools, and every mandate, strips parents of control of their schools, putting more power in the hand of the bureaucrats. Among the virtues of a free market in education would be not just competition on price and performance, but competition for best suiting the needs and interest of parents and students, as the customers. Schools would be in the business of best serving parents and their children or going bust. The never-ending quest for uniformity, common cores, and “equality” destroys independent thought, almost by definition.
Source: The Problem with Socialism by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
It would be difficult to find in the U.S. any profession so dedicated to socialism as that of educators, and difficult to find any argument for socialism as popular as the cause of public education. The public schools constitute one of the most popular instantiations of socialism in American life. But popular with whom? Certainly, the educators and administrators who run the system are largely pleased with it, as they should be; the noncompetitive nature of government-run education provides them with salaries and benefits far exceeding what they plausibly could earn in the private sector. Some parents and property owners are very happy with the public schools as well. The well-off and well-connected tend to enjoy reasonably good public schools, which help sustain high residential real-estate values in the largely suburban communities that host them. But other Americans are much less pleased with their government schools, particularly the poor, non-whites, and those living in inner cities. Writing in 1973, Murray Rothbard understood that this was a socialist central-planning problem.
EDUCATION: THE U.S. PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM – EXCERPTS
IS SOCIALISM THE BEST WAY TO ORGANIZE SCHOOLS? Government-run public schools suffer the same problems as any other socialist enterprise. A private school has to compete for students. If a private school fails to serve the needs and expectations of its customers (parents), it loses money, it loses market share, and it could eventually go out of business. A government-run school enjoys a virtual monopoly, especially among the poor, who can’t afford a private school; and as with all monopolies, the convenience of administrators and employees comes before the needs of the customers, because the customers will always be there. They have no choice. As with all government enterprises, the incentives are perverse: the worse the job they do in teaching children, the more money that is typically given to the school, because everyone wants to “improve education.” Affluent areas have better public schools than poor areas not because the former have more tax money than the latter, but because affluent parents can afford to send their children to private schools. That mere threat of competition forces public schools in affluent areas to do better. As with so many socialistic schemes, the public school near-monopoly on education hurts the poor most of all.
No more than half of all the increased taxpayer funding for public schools ends up in the classroom (teacher’s salaries, instructional materials, and so on). The rest is eaten up by layers and layers of bureaucracy, not to mention all the capital spending on buildings and facilities. Government-run schools are increasingly weighed down by bureaucratic mandates imposed by government at all levels, including the federal government, which is becoming an ever larger, source of taxpayer funding of government schools. Mandates like Common Core, supported by the federal Department of Education, of state mandates like California’s Fair Education Act (popularly known as the “gay rights bill”) are imposed in the name of “standards” or “fairness,” but in fact they are often shackles on how and what teachers can teach, and students can think. They can do this because schooling is compulsory, because many parents consider that they don’t have a choice of schools, and every mandate, strips parents of control of their schools, putting more power in the hand of the bureaucrats. Among the virtues of a free market in education would be not just competition on price and performance, but competition for best suiting the needs and interest of parents and students, as the customers. Schools would be in the business of best serving parents and their children or going bust. The never-ending quest for uniformity, common cores, and “equality” destroys independent thought, almost by definition.
Source: The Problem with Socialism by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
It would be difficult to find in the U.S. any profession so dedicated to socialism as that of educators, and difficult to find any argument for socialism as popular as the cause of public education. The public schools constitute one of the most popular instantiations of socialism in American life. But popular with whom? Certainly, the educators and administrators who run the system are largely pleased with it, as they should be; the noncompetitive nature of government-run education provides them with salaries and benefits far exceeding what they plausibly could earn in the private sector. Some parents and property owners are very happy with the public schools as well. The well-off and well-connected tend to enjoy reasonably good public schools, which help sustain high residential real-estate values in the largely suburban communities that host them. But other Americans are much less pleased with their government schools, particularly the poor, non-whites, and those living in inner cities. Writing in 1973, Murray Rothbard understood that this was a socialist central-planning problem.
Bureaucratic convenience has invariably led to the states to prescribe geographical public-school districts, to place one school in each district, and then to force each public- school child to attend school in the district closest to his residence. Children who, for whatever reason, would prefer to attend a school in another district are prohibited from doing so. The result is enforced geographic homogeneity, and it also means that the character of each school is completely dependent on its residential neighborhood. It is then inevitable that public-schools will be uniform within each district, and the composition of pupils, the financing of each school, and the quality of education will come to depend upon the values, wealth, and the tax base, of each geographical area.
The inner-city schools are a nightmare from coast to coast. Education spending has skyrocketed while educational outcomes have stagnated in many schools and declines in many others. The first state to adopt a mandatory public education program, Massachusetts, had a higher literacy rate in 1850 than it does today.
SOCIALIST EDUCATION AND THE PROBLEM WITH INCENTIVES: Socialism cannot serve citizens’ interests because central planners have no way of knowing what those interests are. Under democratic socialism, the main communicator of citizens’ preferences will be election results, but these are highly variable. Relatively few voters cast their ballot in schoolboard elections. The general population in any given community know very little about its school board, about its members and their policy agendas, or about how and why it makes decisions. Though the U.S. is a broadly capitalist country, primary-secondary education is conducted under an almost exclusively socialized model. About 90% of U.S. students attend government schools for primary and secondary education and practically 100% of taxpayers pay into the system.
The New York City public schools formulated a five-year plan in 2008. The teachers so dominated the process that the five-year plan was focused on a single central desire of the education managers: reducing class size. The educational-achievement literature shows little connection between class size and student achievement. But smaller classes mean much less work for educators – but not less pay – so reducing classroom headcounts has long been a key goal for educators and the education bureaucracies. Likewise, the teachers’ unions have long fought for the requirement of advanced degrees for many teachers, or for significantly higher pay for teachers holding advanced degrees. The research shows no relationship between teachers’ holding advanced degrees and student performance. But more advanced degrees mean higher aggregate salaries for educators – as well as for administrators – and, perhaps more important, significantly higher pension benefits, because pensions are directly related to salaries during the last years of a teacher’s career.
While real expenditures have been climbing, real educational achievement has flatlined in most cases, but in many cases has declined, and in some cases has declined radically. More spending for less output – that’s a good working definition of a socialist economic outcomes. The spending on U.S. education has been driven by three factors: educators’ salaries, reductions in classroom size, and spending on non-instructional expenses. That lattermost category includes things like administrative costs and the salaries of non-educator personnel such as counselors, assistants, nurses, and the like. But the overall picture is one of stagnating performance.
Compare our failing public schools with our cellular phones. Cell phones and cell-phone service are enormously competitive industries in which innovation and capital from around the world are channeled – with no five-year plans, to serve the needs of consumers. They have improved immeasurably over a short period of time. The socialist model of education is not designed to serve the students interests, while the private enterprise model, which must compete for customers and their money, has no choice but to serve its customers’ interests. The free-market model has its shortcoming, too, but in most cases a bad product or defective service is driven out of the marketplace by competition. Under a socialist model, there is no competition to drive out bad products and rotten services. Something as miraculous as the cellular-phone network lacked any coordinated national or global plan to do so. In fact, it is precisely the absence of a central plan that has allowed the industry to thrive and to innovate. If we had structured the provision of cellular-phone service the way we have education, the incentives would have been radically different: the guy selling the 1985 DynaTac would make the same profit as the guy selling the iPhone; consumers would have no choice between Verizon’s good network and AT&T’s spotty one, and would simply be assigned a network based on which street they live on. With no competition, there would be no incentive to drive down prices – in fact, there would be every incentive to drive up prices.
Source: The Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism by Kevin D. Williamson
HOW DID THE U.S. SCHOOL SYSTEM BECOME SOCIALISTIC? As late as 1890, 71% of Americans lived in rural areas, where one-room schools predominated. But over the next decade many cities tripled in size, as manufacturing boomed and immigrant labor poured in. A 19th century education system could not cope with the cities’ new needs, so reformers gradually developed a new model: large districts with one-size-fits-all schools. At the time, political machines controlled many urban school boards. To stop the machines from firing teachers of the opposite party and hiring their own party members – or otherwise discriminating against those out of political favor – reformers invented teacher tenure, strict pay scales, determined by longevity and protection for seniority. “Take schools out of politics!” was their battle cry. The progressives also sought to standardize public education, to fashion all primary and secondary schools form similar molds. By 1925, 34 state departments of education had managed to standardize their schools, using legislation and regulations. Accreditation agencies added muscle to the drive for uniformity. All the while, schools grew in size and their entire system grew increasingly bureaucratic. Regulations ballooned; in California the state education code took about 100 pages in 1900, in 1980 more than 2,600. By the 1960s New York City schools employed more administrators than the entire French education system. Then many public systems unionized, and the detailed labor contracts unions negotiated intensified the rigidity.
By this time, however, the schools’ customers were changing in important ways. African Americans had begun leaving the South for northern cities during World War II, and in the 1950s whites began moving to the suburbs. In 1950, roughly 90% of public-school students in our 14 largest cities were white. By the 1970s, only half were. The cultural rebellions of the 1960s and 70s brought new problems, including widespread drug use and the decline of the two-parent family. Meanwhile immigration picked up, doubling the percentage of public-school children from households that didn’t speak English from 10 to 20%. From there, the pace of change only accelerated. By 2014, a majority of public students were minorities. The emergence of a global marketplace and the shift from an industrial economy to the Information Age created a growing gulf between those with skills and those without, driving incomes down for many. At the same time, our Information Age economy radically raised the bar students needed to meet to secure jobs that would support middle-class life-styles. And computer technologies created enormous opportunities to personalize education, so each student could learn at his or her own pace. Held back by their traditional structures, rules and union contracts, our public-schools struggled to seize these opportunities and respond to these challenges. They failed to respond to drastically different conditions. Karen Fisher, a successful writer and parent of three, offers rare insight into how much “the Internet has shifted the education game.”
SOCIALIST EDUCATION AND THE PROBLEM WITH INCENTIVES: Socialism cannot serve citizens’ interests because central planners have no way of knowing what those interests are. Under democratic socialism, the main communicator of citizens’ preferences will be election results, but these are highly variable. Relatively few voters cast their ballot in schoolboard elections. The general population in any given community know very little about its school board, about its members and their policy agendas, or about how and why it makes decisions. Though the U.S. is a broadly capitalist country, primary-secondary education is conducted under an almost exclusively socialized model. About 90% of U.S. students attend government schools for primary and secondary education and practically 100% of taxpayers pay into the system.
The New York City public schools formulated a five-year plan in 2008. The teachers so dominated the process that the five-year plan was focused on a single central desire of the education managers: reducing class size. The educational-achievement literature shows little connection between class size and student achievement. But smaller classes mean much less work for educators – but not less pay – so reducing classroom headcounts has long been a key goal for educators and the education bureaucracies. Likewise, the teachers’ unions have long fought for the requirement of advanced degrees for many teachers, or for significantly higher pay for teachers holding advanced degrees. The research shows no relationship between teachers’ holding advanced degrees and student performance. But more advanced degrees mean higher aggregate salaries for educators – as well as for administrators – and, perhaps more important, significantly higher pension benefits, because pensions are directly related to salaries during the last years of a teacher’s career.
While real expenditures have been climbing, real educational achievement has flatlined in most cases, but in many cases has declined, and in some cases has declined radically. More spending for less output – that’s a good working definition of a socialist economic outcomes. The spending on U.S. education has been driven by three factors: educators’ salaries, reductions in classroom size, and spending on non-instructional expenses. That lattermost category includes things like administrative costs and the salaries of non-educator personnel such as counselors, assistants, nurses, and the like. But the overall picture is one of stagnating performance.
Compare our failing public schools with our cellular phones. Cell phones and cell-phone service are enormously competitive industries in which innovation and capital from around the world are channeled – with no five-year plans, to serve the needs of consumers. They have improved immeasurably over a short period of time. The socialist model of education is not designed to serve the students interests, while the private enterprise model, which must compete for customers and their money, has no choice but to serve its customers’ interests. The free-market model has its shortcoming, too, but in most cases a bad product or defective service is driven out of the marketplace by competition. Under a socialist model, there is no competition to drive out bad products and rotten services. Something as miraculous as the cellular-phone network lacked any coordinated national or global plan to do so. In fact, it is precisely the absence of a central plan that has allowed the industry to thrive and to innovate. If we had structured the provision of cellular-phone service the way we have education, the incentives would have been radically different: the guy selling the 1985 DynaTac would make the same profit as the guy selling the iPhone; consumers would have no choice between Verizon’s good network and AT&T’s spotty one, and would simply be assigned a network based on which street they live on. With no competition, there would be no incentive to drive down prices – in fact, there would be every incentive to drive up prices.
Source: The Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism by Kevin D. Williamson
HOW DID THE U.S. SCHOOL SYSTEM BECOME SOCIALISTIC? As late as 1890, 71% of Americans lived in rural areas, where one-room schools predominated. But over the next decade many cities tripled in size, as manufacturing boomed and immigrant labor poured in. A 19th century education system could not cope with the cities’ new needs, so reformers gradually developed a new model: large districts with one-size-fits-all schools. At the time, political machines controlled many urban school boards. To stop the machines from firing teachers of the opposite party and hiring their own party members – or otherwise discriminating against those out of political favor – reformers invented teacher tenure, strict pay scales, determined by longevity and protection for seniority. “Take schools out of politics!” was their battle cry. The progressives also sought to standardize public education, to fashion all primary and secondary schools form similar molds. By 1925, 34 state departments of education had managed to standardize their schools, using legislation and regulations. Accreditation agencies added muscle to the drive for uniformity. All the while, schools grew in size and their entire system grew increasingly bureaucratic. Regulations ballooned; in California the state education code took about 100 pages in 1900, in 1980 more than 2,600. By the 1960s New York City schools employed more administrators than the entire French education system. Then many public systems unionized, and the detailed labor contracts unions negotiated intensified the rigidity.
By this time, however, the schools’ customers were changing in important ways. African Americans had begun leaving the South for northern cities during World War II, and in the 1950s whites began moving to the suburbs. In 1950, roughly 90% of public-school students in our 14 largest cities were white. By the 1970s, only half were. The cultural rebellions of the 1960s and 70s brought new problems, including widespread drug use and the decline of the two-parent family. Meanwhile immigration picked up, doubling the percentage of public-school children from households that didn’t speak English from 10 to 20%. From there, the pace of change only accelerated. By 2014, a majority of public students were minorities. The emergence of a global marketplace and the shift from an industrial economy to the Information Age created a growing gulf between those with skills and those without, driving incomes down for many. At the same time, our Information Age economy radically raised the bar students needed to meet to secure jobs that would support middle-class life-styles. And computer technologies created enormous opportunities to personalize education, so each student could learn at his or her own pace. Held back by their traditional structures, rules and union contracts, our public-schools struggled to seize these opportunities and respond to these challenges. They failed to respond to drastically different conditions. Karen Fisher, a successful writer and parent of three, offers rare insight into how much “the Internet has shifted the education game.”
Most kids my son’s age, are deeply questioning the validity of formal classes past the fifth grade. He and his friends learn so much more and so much faster on their own. They wait through the school day with antique teachers and an antique curriculum, then race home and learn on YouTube. This is how education works: You have a problem or an inspiration, you ask someone who knows, they show you how, you do it. You fail, with no consequence except you didn’t achieve what you desperately wanted to achieve. The failure spurs you to seek more information. You do, and you learn it. Public school education does the exact reverse of natural education, which is why it doesn’t work. The people who make policy are twenty years behind.
Our leaders have tried to force change on a bureaucratic system built to resist it. Anything more than incremental change is almost impossible when school leaders can’t fire failing teachers because they have tenure and school boards can’t replace failing schools because employees and their unions retaliate at the polls. District reform efforts have run headlong into the limits of the old, centralized system. Principals have struggled to improve their schools when virtually all the important decisions about school design, teacher’s pay, and budgets are made at district headquarters. Teachers have struggled to help their students when they have no power to change what they teach or for how long, or how their schools work. We have inherited 20th century systems whose centralize control and vast web of rules repel innovation and frustrate innovators. In their place, we are attempting to build 21st century systems that not only reward improvement but demand it. They leave behind the old model’s insistence on one organization, one best way to run a school, and one correct curriculum.
Source: Reinventing America’s Schools by David Osborne.
THE IMAGE OF TODAY’S TEACHERS: MIGHT SOCIALISM BE PART OF THE CAUSE? One large review of practices within typical America elementary school classrooms found many children – and the majority of poor children – “sitting around, watching the teacher deal with behavioral problems, and engaging in boring and rote instructional activities such as completing worksheets and spelling tests.” Another study of over a thousand urban public-school classrooms found only a third of teachers conducting lessons that developed “intellectual depth” beyond rote learning. Today the ineffective tenured teacher has emerged as a feared character, a vampiric type who sucks tax dollars into her bloated pension and healthcare plans, without much regard for the children under her care. As a result, the public has gotten the message that public-school teaching – especially urban teaching – is a broadly failed profession. There are 3.3 million American public-school teachers roughly five times as many people in either medicine or law, and 50% of all beginner teachers choose to leave the profession within five years.
Source: The Teacher Wars by Dana Goldstein
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
Source: Reinventing America’s Schools by David Osborne.
THE IMAGE OF TODAY’S TEACHERS: MIGHT SOCIALISM BE PART OF THE CAUSE? One large review of practices within typical America elementary school classrooms found many children – and the majority of poor children – “sitting around, watching the teacher deal with behavioral problems, and engaging in boring and rote instructional activities such as completing worksheets and spelling tests.” Another study of over a thousand urban public-school classrooms found only a third of teachers conducting lessons that developed “intellectual depth” beyond rote learning. Today the ineffective tenured teacher has emerged as a feared character, a vampiric type who sucks tax dollars into her bloated pension and healthcare plans, without much regard for the children under her care. As a result, the public has gotten the message that public-school teaching – especially urban teaching – is a broadly failed profession. There are 3.3 million American public-school teachers roughly five times as many people in either medicine or law, and 50% of all beginner teachers choose to leave the profession within five years.
Source: The Teacher Wars by Dana Goldstein
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
| 9_soc_education_public_schools.pdf |