From my The Case Against Education:
When I argue education is largely wasteful signaling, most listeners yield. Popular resistance doesn’t kick in until I add, “Let’s waste less by cutting government spending on education.” You might think conceding the wastefulness of education spending would automatically entail support for austerity, but it doesn’t. The typical reaction is to confidently state, “Education budgets should be redirected, not reduced.”
Such confidence is misplaced. The discovery of wasteful spending does not magically reveal constructive alternatives. Prudence dictates a two-step response. Step 1: Stop wasting the resources. Step 2: Save those resources until you discover a good way to spend them. Not wasting resources is simple and speedy. Don’t just stand there; do it. Finding good ways to use resources is complex and slow. Don’t just do it; think it through. Remember: you can apply saved resources anywhere. Time and money wasted on education could pave roads, cure cancer, cut taxes, subsidize childbearing, pay down government debt before our Fiscal Day of Reckoning, or allow taxpayers to buy better homes, cars, meals, and vacations.
Suppose I prove your toenail fungus cream doesn’t work. I counsel, “Stop wasting money on that worthless cream.” Would you demur, “Not until we find a toenail fungus remedy that works”? No way. Finding a real remedy could be more trouble than it’s worth. It might take forever. Continuing to waste money on quackery until a cure comes into your possession is folly. Saying, “There must be a cure!” is childish and dogmatic. Maybe your toenails are a lost cause, and you should use the savings for a trip to Miami.
[…]
Are draconian education cuts really a good idea, especially for a society as rich as our own? Calling them “draconian” begs the question. If we’re not getting good value for our educational investments, we shouldn’t call deep cuts “draconian.” We should call the status quo “profligate.” Rich societies can afford to waste trillions. But why settle for that? Rich societies face countless opportunities. The trillions we spend boring youths might cure cancer, buy driverless cars, or end world hunger. Collective complacency seems harmless, but it kills by omission.
[…]
Human capital enthusiasts normally defend education as it is: existing schools greatly enhance students’ job skills. They accordingly perceive the signaling model as an attack on a system that enriches us all. In principle, however, a human capital enthusiast could accept the ubiquity of signaling, then cry out for reform. Instead of treating the human capital model as an accurate description of education, they could treat it as a noble prescription for education. Let’s transform our schools from time sinks to skill factories.
How can we make this happen? Finding better ways to teach students reading, writing, and math is the conventional path. Since an army of researchers and practitioners are already working on this problem, I have little constructive to add. Yet overall, we should be pessimistic about improving basic skills. Why? Because the goal has long been popular, the research has long been ample, yet basic skills remain mediocre. The logical inference is either (a) pinpointing ways to improve basic skills is elusive, or (b) schools spurn the methods that work. Intellectually, for example, the case for firing bad teachers is solid, but who expects it to prevail? While there are signs of academic progress, they mostly look like “teaching to the test.” Until uncoached adults score better on reading, writing, and math tests, we should presume basic skills remain static.
READER COMMENTS
Deepish Thinker
Jul 27 2020 at 11:43am
“While there are signs of academic progress, they mostly look like “teaching to the test.””
If the purpose of the test is to determine if someone has a useful skill then what is wrong with “teaching to the test”.
Or to put it another way, if “teaching to the test” is bad then is the test actually useful?
Idriss Z
Jul 27 2020 at 2:30pm
This, I believe, is the correct way of thinking about it. The analysis needs to be done for each individual test and it’s stated purpose For example, the actuarial exams are very useful for determining the and forcing actuaries to learn and apply probabilities and statistics necessary for their work; the BAR exam is a stupid racket. The SAT and ACT and other State proficiency exams adequately test the skills our education system seeks to foster or college readiness-so Mr. Caplan’s criticism is directly on point here.
Idriss Z
Jul 27 2020 at 2:32pm
**don’t adequately test** I missed a “don’t”
Idriss Z
Jul 27 2020 at 1:52pm
I feel like I’m missing a lot of the facts that would be in the book, but don’t schools/ the education system provide more than just, well, “education”? Like social skills, child care, food services, after school programs, fun, exploration of interest, local/civic pride, networks and opportunities toward helping us “pave roads, cure cancer, cut taxes, subsidize childbearing, pay down government debt before our Fiscal Day of Reckoning, or allow taxpayers to buy better homes, cars, meals, and vacations”?
I mean this is achieved to varying degrees of success, generally the more successful ones are the ones with more money per pupil. Sometimes something being wasteful means you increase consumption to get successful results. Examples include: finishing your antibiotics dosage even if you feel fine, buying stocks you own after an initial dip when price is low, all R&D/ patent development operates on this principle, a lot of threshold analysis goes this way, not half-butting something, etc. I mean if we compare successful education regimes to unsuccessful ones it seems the difference being budget -> the answer is spend more and reduce waste, no?
Mark Z
Jul 28 2020 at 1:50am
“I mean if we compare successful education regimes to unsuccessful ones it seems the difference being budget.”
I don’t think this is true that the difference between successful and unsuccessful is largely a matter of budget. It’s certainly not true across time: measured outcome has been stagnant over a period of time during which we’ve tripled education spending. Most states also spend more on poorer, usually lower performing districts than wealthier, usually higher performing ones (federal and state funds tend to cancel out disparities in property tax revenues). Even research finding that there are ways education could be improved (e.g. Duflo and Banerjee, or Heckman’s finding that daycare improves outcomes for children in terrible home environments) are fairly limited and the actual history of budget increases suggests it’s unlikely that actual budget increases would be spent in ways that would improve outcome, since they almost never are in practice.
Idriss Z
Jul 28 2020 at 11:18am
Hmmmm,
1- “I don’t think this is true that the difference between successful and unsuccessful is largely a matter of budget. It’s certainly not true across time: measured outcome has been stagnant over a period of time during which we’ve tripled education spending.” Mind referencing me the source?
2- “Most states also spend more on poorer, usually lower performing districts than wealthier, usually higher performing ones (federal and state funds tend to cancel out disparities in property tax revenues).” IZ- This is out of necessity and would be cruel if it was not true. I mean, can you define state for me- Is it just the capital government and it’s branches/administrations, or does it include the local governments that are creations of the state but not controlled by the state’s capitol? Public schooling is funded on the local level by property taxes -> more affluent districts have larger budget per student, are we understood on that?
3- “Even research finding that there are ways education could be improved (e.g. Duflo and Banerjee, or Heckman’s finding that daycare improves outcomes for children in terrible home environments) are fairly limited and the actual history of budget increases suggests it’s unlikely that actual budget increases would be spent in ways that would improve outcome, since they almost never are in practice.” I don’t think this is true, source please? See below article for some links, even if you want to argue the jury is out on the research, there are clear examples of success in many localities that can be identified on a qualitative level which may explain a lot of the discrepancy in the data <- the exact same argument Russ uses for charter schools, but there is more evidence of this being tried in public systems. Anyway, thanks for the perspective.
https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2019/06/05/student-outcomes-does-more-money-really-matter.html
But states are falling short in those efforts, according to a recent report led by Bruce Baker for the Albert Shanker Institute, which has among its goals boosting unions and public education. While states currently spend an average of around $13,000 per pupil in high-poverty school districts, states should be spending more than $20,000 on those districts, the study concludes.
“This is not rocket science,” Baker said. “The reality is, if you don’t have it, you can’t spend it. School officials can’t make the critical underlying trade-offs in order to improve results.”
In a working paper out of Ohio State University in April based on tax elections in seven states, a group of researchers found that when districts passed tax levies resulting in higher teacher pay, poor and minority students’ math and reading scores significantly improved.
And last December, Kirabo Jackson, an economics professor at Northwestern University, released a review of research showing that academic outcomes have improved when state and local governments invested more money in school facilities and teacher salaries and received more federal Title I money, which is directed at schools with disadvantaged students.
“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,” Jackson concluded.
More data on school spending and academic outcomes are expected to be released in the coming years under the Every Student Succeeds Act. And the federal Institute of Education Sciences will now require researchers to include in their analyses of districts’ academic interventions the costs involved, another clue into when and how money matters for America’s public schools.
At the same time, some conservative think tanks continue to sound a more skeptical theme. In March, the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, a libertarian law firm that frequently opines on education policy, released a paper that showed, among other things, that, on average, high-spending Wisconsin districts perform the same or worse on state-mandated exams and the ACT relative to low-spending districts.
And just last month, Michael J. Petrilli, the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, pointed out in a column that Florida made significant academic gains over the past several years while spending per pupil remained “flat as a pancake.”
In an interview, Petrilli said it’ll be incumbent on researchers and policymakers to dig into district spending habits to see where money is affecting student outcomes. “It’s certainly something that we don’t fully understand,” he said.
john hare
Jul 29 2020 at 4:26am
One of the quotes in the middle of your comment suggests that the $13,000.00 per year per student should be $20,000.00 per year per student caught my attention. It seems to be blindingly obvious that there is a disconnect between price and product here. The vast majority of school funding is clearly not making it to the sharp end.
In an idealized situation, a teacher with 10 students would have a six figure budget with these numbers. Average class size is larger, and teacher pay is much lower. And that is before considering the poor results.
Mark Z
Jul 29 2020 at 6:41am
On 1, sure, the chart of interest is on page 2: https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa746.pdf
2) My point was precisely that property taxes aren’t the sole source of funding, and that funding from other sources like state and federal governments more than equalize funding with respect to poor vs. rich areas.
There have also been notable cases where public school funding has been cut where – contrary to fears raised at the time – precipitated increases in outcome. I’ll dig up where I read about such cases a few years ago, I believe Philadelphia underwent significant cuts during the few years after the great recession. This WaPo piece discusses a study done there: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2013/11/20/surprising-new-research-on-school-funding/. Virginia also cut education spending several years ago and yet test scores continued to go up faster than the national average (this is discussed here, https://reason.com/2015/02/23/more-money-does-not-equal-better-public/). I don’t doubt there are districts where increasing funding would increase performance, but I don’t think such districts are readily identifiable. I also don’t think showing that increasing funding can improve outcome is the same as showing that it generally will increase outcome. School districts are demonstrably capable of finding ways to spend exorbitant amounts of money without affecting outcome, and often school districts short on resources are actually quite well-funded, but the funds are poorly managed, where funding ends up going to unnecessary administrative staff or extremely generous pensions. In short, I think school districts should prioritize restructuring their finances and spending their funds more efficiently rather than trying to get more. (there are a couple charts on page 1 here showing that growth in administrative staff has dwarfed education staff during the last few decades over which spending has also increased: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED543118.pdf)
Idriss Z
Aug 1 2020 at 4:40pm
Mark, four normative axioms I want to make clear I am operating on before we get to deep into the metrics, because:
1- “efficiency” when discussing children and their education is far more nebulous than other ideas of “efficiency.” Instead of looking at test scores and grades which are only a means to an end, it is important to put far more emphasis on longitudinal metrics such as social mobility, health outcomes, diversity, equality of education, and institutional. The reason we need to look at these metrics more deeply is…
2- Schools provide more than just education, and they are largely community dependent: they provide meals, childcare, after school activities, socialization skills, financial independence skills, sex education, pharmapsychological input! career training, networking etc… This clearly makes the analysis much more more complex, it is nonetheless needed as…
3- Oversimplification of the analysis misses the opportunity for fine-tuning and experimentation. We, as a society have not gotten education down to a science, an over reliance on efficiency being attainable compounds this weakness of ours in a crippling manner. The more we hamstring our education budgets the more the disparities in success between us and other nations widens. Often on this site the idea that market and price experimentation will improve the quality of education is championed. The basis of this is exactly why we need increased public funding, it allows us leeway to figure out what works for each community…
4- This is exactly the same approach taken by businesses! Tesla doesn’t post a profit, but it has been afforded a large amount of capital to find ways to create great things without any promises for return on investment on an industry of critical importance. We should treat schools similarly because they are vastly more important. To John’s point (If I I don’t think anyone should be too concerned with economic maximization for our (the adult) generation. We bore the fruits of our parents more generous investments, we should be more magnanimous with investment in the next’s education, efficiency be darned! We have a larger population, have you not accepted that diminishing marginal returns is just a thing. Also, John, children are no longer a product (read US Const. Amends. 13-15).
With that being said, I really appreciate your replies and have some hopefully helpful comments that broaden your perspective on the importance of education:
1- That SAT is not a suitable metric for this analysis. See normative point 1 above. Sir Ken Robinson has excellent points on this as they take a more comparative international approach.
2- I agree with several of your criticisms, but I’d urge you to not miss the forest for the trees. The fastest developing economies all have heavily invested in education, it’s not that there is a guarantee each outcome will be better, the bet is the more you invest, the more you will get out. And then we remember diminishing marginal returns to which the response is, education’s return on investment is heavily loaded on the long-term. If you understand how important an educated population is for our future prosperity and success then I believe you’d agree it’s worth far more than the paper it is funded by. For the points I disagree:
A- Your WaPo authors’ conclusions agreed with my normative point 2, “Of course, the fact remains that neither the SDP nor its nearest counterparts are even close to adequate levels of achievement, with all of them hovering, on average, near the 50 percent mark for both math and reading proficiency. So our findings should in no way be interpreted as a call to slash funding for any of these districts. If anything, we see this as evidence in favor of reinstating a statewide fair funding formula, which takes into consideration differences across districts in the characteristics of the students served – such as poverty, English language learners, and special education – as well as characteristics of the district itself, such as local labor market conditions and cost of living, among other student and district factors.”
B- The Reason article is exactly the kind of oversimplification to just math and reading literacy (and ignore everything else) that normative point 3 warns against. For example, NJ kids have been far more likely to understand Black Lives Matter than Utah eighth grades, a type of human literacy far more important for living in a civil society than math or English comprehension. Far too often Reason is limited to just 1 or 2 Reasons and lose sight of all other very good Reasons to do something. Also, they blame government involvement in our education and health systems when we are consistently falling behind peers with far more government involvement in education and health…
3- “In short, I think school districts should prioritize restructuring their finances and spending their funds more efficiently rather than trying to get more.” I am really confused by this… our discussion is whether we (the taxed population/ people on whose behalf the representative gov’ts policy and budget allocation ought be based) give more funding to school districts. Maybe if we give them the funds they say they need then they’ll be able to do it more efficiently. I for one am for a robust, albeit inefficient, educational system as opposed to. Educational outcomes are more important than the paper that they are produced by, no matter how inefficiently, Moreover, as with normative point 4 above, there is no way to be more efficient without experimentation and there is no way to experiment without more funds, and there is no way to have more funds unless there is more efficiency. This is a formal Catch-22, the solution is logically more funding unless you can show me another way to break it.
I want to thank you for taking the time out to respond and link your evidence, I enjoyed the reads. I do, however, really implore you to rethink your opinions (whatever they may be) on what educational policy should accomplish and how we measure those accomplishments. I think you’d be surprised to understand why people care so much about this.
Steve
Jul 27 2020 at 6:12pm
This is clearly driven by fear that once the funds are allowed to be kept by taxpayers, it will be much, much harder to claw it back via further tax increases. This isn’t limited to public insititutions, a lot of companies reduce budgets for the following year if all the money isn’t spent. You can bet there’s a lot of unnecessary purchases to make sure the budget is completely used up.
Phil H
Aug 8 2020 at 3:19am
I’m somewhat sympathetic to BC’s views on education (while still sending my kids to school, conflictedly). But this struck me and made me laugh:
“Suppose I prove your toenail fungus cream doesn’t work. I counsel, “Stop wasting money on that worthless cream.” Would you demur, “Not until we find a toenail fungus remedy that works”? No way.”
Actually, that’s exactly what people say. Particularly here in China, where traditional Chinese medicine, despite being bonkers rubbish, still commands an unbelieveable degree of dogmatic adherence.
Or think of religion. Do sacrifices to the gods work? Demonstrably not. Yet they were and are remarkably popular for thousands and thousands of years. BC’s right that this is illogical. But it’s definitely human in some sense.
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