Jonah Goldberg's for it, Sara Mead's against it. I bet you can guess whose side I'm on. Sample: "Goldberg comes to this conclusion based on the Washington Post's recent series focusing on the horrible state of the District of Columbia Public Schools--which is sort of like concluding we should abolish the U.S. military because of the Abu Ghraib scandal." Indeed.
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Abolishing Public Schools
12 Jun 2007 05:11 pm
Comments (21)
Gals before pals, eh, MY?
It would be better to abolish private schools. The public schools would get a lot better.
The sad reality is that the majority of black and Hispanic kids are going to lag or fail academically whether we follow Goldberg's or your girlfriend's prescriptions. Instead of trying to boil the ocean, a smart policy would be to make programs with proven results like the KIPP schools available to, say, the top 10-20% of students in under-performing majority black and Hispanic public schools.
The public school teachers would get smaller class sizes with 10-20% of their students gone, and they wouldn't have to worry about an invidious comparisons between their schools and the charters because it would be understood that they got to keep the less-bright majority (along with the bad apples). They would also be performing a valuable service, keeping the bad apples out of the charter schools.
This wouldn't be a perfect solution, but why let the perfect be the enemy of the good? If we followed this talented tenth/fifth strategy, at least some D.C. public school students might get educated. Maybe one could even grow up to be an education blogger?
My child goes to a public school in the District of Columbia. It's a good school. Not that I'm breaking any new ground here, but Jonah Goldberg is a moron, and it regularly astonishes me that he's paid to string words and ideas together.
The sad reality is that the majority of black and Hispanic kids are going to lag or fail academically
Fred wins this thread's Sailer Award for overt racism . . .
I have one child that went public for 12 years and one private for 12 years. I am not sure it would have changed my approach to educating our two kids, but I think vouchers would have made public schools more responsive and improved quality.
A good thought experiment - if k-12 kids could vote, individually or through parents, would k-12 be supported by vouchers as an option? Probably, yes.
Instead of beating down Jonah G as the straw man, why not have some gumption and take on Milton Friedman's arguments?
I got hung up at the "government restaurant" part. Does the government really run 10% of the restaurants? I couldn't for the life of me ever remember visiting a government restaurant, but being a curious type who enjoys the consumption of a variety of nourishing and sometimes delicious food products, I'd like to visit one of these government restaurants.
which is sort of like concluding we should abolish the U.S. military because of the Abu Ghraib scandal.
A better analogy would be with local police departments, which, strangely, no one on the right recommends privatizing when there's an upward blip in the crime rate (nor decries the widespread unionization of police officers as a reason for the local persistence of crime, etc).
Matt: you're too intelligent not to see the obvious merit to Goldberg's argument. Government has every reason to fund students, but little or no reason to fund schools (not to mention operate and manage them).
The argument that's being sold short here is the one about abolishing the U.S. military. Abu Ghraib/Haditha/Iraq-in-general isn't enough? What do we need--My Lai, Dresden, Hiroshima--something really horrifying?
A DC-area consultant conducted a study just last year on the high school Class of 2006 that had attended NW DC public elementary schools. The question was whether the kids that transferred to private high schools (Sidwell, St. Albans, GDS) after attending public elementary (Lafayette, Murch) got into more elite colleges than the kids who went on to public high school (Wilson). The answer was that their performance was indistinguishable: the USNWR rankings of the colleges this subset of Wilson kids got into were exactly the same as the ones the Sidwell/St. A/GDS kids got into.
The DC area public school system does indeed prove something about the public/private schooling debate. It proves that in wealthy neighborhoods with populations that care about education, public schooling works great.
Of course most of these kids (particularly the ones that end up in the private schools) are ineducable (which makes them more educable than me but that isn't saying much). Look at the way they vote. You'd think that college educated people would demand that some third party type (who is bound to be a wacko but how can you be a decent person and not a wacko in America?) occupy the White House but - you know - slightly more than half of the people with BAs vote for not only one of the two major parties but literally some of the worst people in the country; they vote Republican. These schools probably should be turned into restaurants. Think of all the delicious food you could get for that money.
I've always had the impression that Goldberg was the sort of guy who felt that going to school was a major obstacle to the truly important things in life, namely drinking beer and watching cartoons on TV.
So I'm not really surprised that he advocates abolishing all schools...
I got hung up at the "government restaurant" part.
I get hung up on the "government running schools" part. I mean, sure, federal, state, and local governments all have input into how individual schools are run, but isn't most of the decision-making handled at a local level? That is, saying that "the government" shouldn't be involved with schools means convincing hundreds or thousands of school boards and local government organizations to close public schools in their neighborhoods. I think Goldberg types will have to be a lot more convincing than they've been in the past, to get something like this to happen. (I mean, why can't they just start with a single school district in some flyover state? I vaguely recall that this has happened, but not exactly on purpose.)
"A better analogy would be with local police departments, which, strangely, no one on the right recommends privatizing when there's an upward blip in the crime rate (nor decries the widespread unionization of police officers as a reason for the local persistence of crime, etc)."
This comment highlights why Sara's original analogy was clever, but weak. Even those way at the libertarian extreme acknowledge that there are certain functions required by a government, and that only a government can provide: national defense, policing, enforcing contracts, etc. Sara's quip about getting rid of the Army reminds me of Mario Cuomo's response to an interviewer who questioned Cuomo's expansive view of the role of government. Cuomo said something like, "Well, we can't all have our own armies, so there are some things we need government to do". True, but referring to a universally acknowledged core function of government to defend a non-core function (there are non-government schools, after all) is a little disingenuous.
With all due respect to Sara Mead, she avoided Goldberg's point completely. I mean, pointing out the existence of KIPP schools is hardly an answer to the question of why the government should be involved in schools at all.
The more general point is, how ought one determine which activities the government is going to run itself, which activities the government is going to subsidize private sector, and which activities the government is going to stay out of completely.
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Al, it would seem that Goldberg should have the Burkean burden of proof of why a system that has emerged from the mists of medieval parish schools is so profoundly and irreformably inefficient that it should be thrown on the scrap-heap and replaced by an invitation to commercialization (not that there's anything wrong with commericalization per se). It's true that Mead is unconcerned with the broad question about which activities are relevant for the government, but she is exerising her expertise as an ed blogger to show the good news about public schools.
i definitely see merit in the case for the public school system, but as a liberal who honestly cares about universal education it's disheartening that so many of my political peers dogmatically dismiss the objections. as progressives we should be advocating experiments to find out what actually works.
The objection to public schools is purely ideological and rests on the assumption that markets are best at everything. I disagree with this libertarian axiom root and branch.
Government schools are accountable to the people who fund them, and they are designed to provide universal education. Private schools have incentives not to educate everyone - some students are cheaper than others to educate, after all. They are not accountable (the majority are religious), and funneling public money to privateers opens up substantial room for corruption and graft.
I think we're seeing a wholesale reaction away from the market-as-god, as people are remembering why things like unions, child labor laws, and the like were invented - as reactions against the excesses of unregulated markets.
Marc, that's a straw man argument. No one argues that markets are best for everything. There are certain functions that only governments can provided, as I mentioned above -- policing, enforcing contracts, etc. Education clearly isn't something that only governments can provide, since there are non-government k-12 schools, including parochial and private schools.
Comments closed June 26, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
Shorter Goldberg--now that we'ved wrecked your public schools, you ought to abolish them . . .
Posted by rea | June 12, 2007 5:22 PM