{"id":3217,"date":"2008-12-10T10:50:20","date_gmt":"2008-12-10T10:50:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/12\/10\/teachers-quarterbacks-and-mark\/"},"modified":"2008-12-10T10:50:20","modified_gmt":"2008-12-10T10:50:20","slug":"teachers-quarterbacks-and-mark","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/12\/10\/teachers-quarterbacks-and-mark\/","title":{"rendered":"Teachers, Quarterbacks, and Markets"},"content":{"rendered":"

Will Wilkinson has some comments about an article by Malcolm Gladwell<\/a> from The New Yorker<\/cite><\/a>. I basically agree with him about Gladwell, but I’m bothered by the last paragraph:<\/p>\n

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Now, there’s no point in saying things that will make your readers think you are an evilcrazy person, so I can understand why Gladwell wastes words on quarterbacks instead of on the deeper mechanisms at work here. But why is it<\/i> that “society devotes more care and patience to the selection of those who handle its money than of those who handle its children?” The obvious answer is that care and patience are in greater supply when care and patience pay. When the provision of education was made a predominantly public, not-for-profit affair, “society” basically ensured that teacher selection would receive far less care and patience than money-handler selection. Maybe we should do something about that. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This strikes me as the sort of obligatory “markets uber alles<\/i>” stuff that libertarians throw out without thinking about it too much. Refreshing as it is to hear someone of a libertarian persuasion admit that teachers ought to be paid more, I don’t think he’s really thought through the implications of this.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The problem with education funding isn’t that capitalism hasn’t been allowed to run rampant. Schools are underfunded precisely because people get to vote on how much they pay for it, in the form of school taxes.<\/p>\n

The school budget vote is a regular feature of life, at least here in the Northeast. And every time the budget comes up for a vote, teachers and school administrators work really hard to get out enough “yes” votes to counter the people who reflexively vote against anything using tax funding. And when budgets come up for a vote one piece at a time (as sometimes happens), there are a really depressing number of people who will vote “yes” on funding sports programs, and “no” on books for the library and salaries for the teachers.<\/p>\n

Now, it’s true that there are people out there who are willing to pay large sums of money to have their children educated by exceptional teachers. That’s pretty much the whole business model of my alma mater and current employer. There aren’t enough of these people to support good teaching at a broad enough scale for the current level of general public school education. Particularly in rural areas, there just isn’t the base to support a good educational program.<\/p>\n

“So what,” you say, “If they don’t want to pay to educate their kids, why should they have to?” That’s fine, as long as you’re willing to be honest about the consequences, which will disproportionately fall on poorer children, and children of less educated parents. Education is one of the keys to upward mobility, and the people most in need of it would be least able to afford it in an all-for-profit educational system. You’d be locking in a class system, even more than we do now.<\/p>\n

I suppose you could argue that the market will take care of it, but I’m highly skeptical to say the least. The negative consequences of poor schools aren’t immediate, but fall on the next generation. Short-sighted parents can make an immediate gain by skimping on their kids’ education, but it’s the kids who will suffer the long-term negative effects. Straightforward market mechanisms are unlikely to push people to educate their children properly for the same reason that the market has thus far failed to deal with pollution or global warming– profits are short term, consequences are long term.<\/p>\n

You can perfectly well advocate a profit-driven all-private education system, and it would probably have some benefits for affluent, educated people near major urban centers. For the country as a whole, though, it would be a disaster.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Will Wilkinson has some comments about an article by Malcolm Gladwell from The New Yorker. I basically agree with him about Gladwell, but I’m bothered by the last paragraph: Now, there’s no point in saying things that will make your readers think you are an evilcrazy person, so I can understand why Gladwell wastes words… Continue reading Teachers, Quarterbacks, and Markets<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,49,47,13,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3217","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-class_issues","category-economics","category-education","category-politics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3217","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3217"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3217\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}