Adults count, too, and Rhode Island children will benefit when we approach government policy as adults.
I’ve got the “con” side of a Providence Journal commentary-page presentation of Democrat Governor Gina Raimondo’s college tuition proposal, today:
The typical transition of students to adulthood goes something like this: Children begin attending public school in kindergarten (or earlier) and graduate with diplomas at the end of the 12th grade. Depending on their interests, aptitude and resources, they will either begin working, pursue vocational training or enter college. These decisions are all highly personal and represent only the beginning of a long life in the productive labor force.
In general, where is Rhode Island going wrong for its young folks in this story?
Hint: It isn’t the lack of opportunities for insiders to buy votes or take more money from taxpayers.
On the “pro” side is Deval Patrick who (as one might expect of a politician) tries to take credit for his state’s long slog toward health, proclaiming that “in many ways, from the perspective of a shifting economy, Rhode Island today looks like Massachusetts did 10 years ago.” Umm. Massachusetts’s Prop 2 1/2 tax reform went into effect in the early ’80s. The Bay State’s education reforms were implemented in the early ’90s. On that count, as I’ve written before, Patrick’s capitulation to the teachers’ unions placed a political ceiling on Massachusetts’s progress, and its standardized scores haven’t improved.
Raimondo’s got the front-page plastered with her face under the headline, “The Raimondo Brand: Nation’s top Democrats tout R.I. governor as icon of party’s ideals.” If that’s true, the national party is gambling a great deal on the governor’s phony self promotion. I end my op-ed quoting from Crimetown and suggesting that “free tuition” both compromises its beneficiaries morally and makes us all suckers. One suspects a national audience won’t be as inclined to ignore the utter failures of Rhode Island government, nor be impressed with the numbers games of its “reforms,” nor desire to emulate the policies of a governor under whom employment growth has almost entirely stopped.
A Bloomberg article by Steve Matthews, printed in the Providence Journal, is worth a close read. It’s about the plight of young college graduates who wind up with jobs that didn’t actually require a degree:
About 44 percent of recent college grads were employed in jobs not requiring degrees in the final quarter of 2016, not far from the 2013 peak of 46 percent, and the share of that group in low-wage positions has held steady, data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York showed Wednesday.
That’s a sign that the nation’s labor market isn’t at full health, despite an unemployment rate forecast to remain at 4.7 percent in March, close to the lowest in almost a decade. In fact, the elevated level of college grads in non-college jobs could mean there’s still slack and that the Fed can go slow in raising interest rates, betting that more high-wage jobs will materialize. It could also mark a more permanent shift in employment that the Fed can’t fix and be a tough challenge for President Donald Trump and Congress.
As the formula goes with such articles, Matthews opens with an anecdote to humanize the story: a hotel desk worker with a degree in something related to forest resources. Perhaps, one might suspect, not all degrees are created equal when it comes to their job-finding capacity.
Even if we put aside entirely useless, luxury majors, our approach of broadly encouraging college degrees, period, could be predicted first to max out occupations with limited openings. Forestry may be a highly valuable, highly technical degree (I don’t know), but the relevant jobs may be limited.
Another point worth drawing from Matthews’s article is that degrees shouldn’t come first, as an economic development plan, but last. Filling an economy that has insufficient job opportunities with new graduates will not create new jobs. It will just mean that somebody, somewhere is paying for an underutilized education and that the young adult has wasted time only to be sent back to the entry level of the career ladder.
I talked about this in my Last Impressions podcast last week, but Megan McArdle’s article about Utah’s success with income equality and other social markers deserves additional attention. One thesis is Utah succeeds by mixing people of different socio-economic backgrounds:
Sims has looked at what happens to kids from schools in pairs of counties located along state borders, which provides something close to a natural experiment. Adjacent counties can be assumed to have broad overlap in the kind of people and businesses that locate there but will, because of their different state governments, have different levels of school funding and institutional practices. Sims found this made “almost no difference.”
So he asked, in his words, “What are schools doing?” Answer: exposing students to social networks that aren’t like theirs.
I’d suggest that McArdle pulls up short on this count, especially with regard to comparing Utah to other parts of the country. She segues into a discussion of racial homogeneity and the state’s racial past, but a different focus might be more relevant.
The prominent Mormonism in Utah introduces a strong influence to celebrate middle-class values. When schools and the broader society mix children of diverse backgrounds and encourage the disadvantaged ones to emulate those with stronger family backgrounds, that’s helpful. In more-socially-liberal areas, the mixing can go the other way if adversity or victimhood status bring the social value.
Over in Tiverton, the school department is considering campaigning for an alternate budget that would add to its structural surplus. I look at the history over on Tiverton Fact Check:
The prospect of that campaign reminds me of spring 2015. That year, a budget petition that I put forward reduced the school’s increase by about $126,000. (The school budget still went up more than that, but not with local taxes.) The school committee voted to cancel plans for all-day kindergarten.
Ultimately, they reversed that decision after weeks of advocacy on my part and that of affected parents. How much would you guess their budget came up short at the end of the year? It didn’t. In fact, the school department had $1,130,867 left over, a surplus, bringing its reserves to $3,454,163. If my budget petition had lost (or if all-day kindergarten had actually been cancelled), the surplus would have been around $1,257,208 for a total of about $3,580,504.
The most important phrase in Rhode Island public school budgeting is “maintenance of effort.”
Despite evidence of problems as a school committee exercises authority over the majority of a town’s resources, local activists target a budget board with very little actual authority. Why?
Crying out for mercy, Mormons helping Mormons, and a community of suckers
Open post for podcast.
Well, this is a curious finding, articulated by Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds on Instapundit: The takeaway here is that people who didn’t go to school at all did as well as or better than people who did. Considering the huge amounts of money, and other social resources, that we invest in K-12 education, that’s kind of […]
Missing the kiss (and the point), teacher union fantasy, charity for them, and stuff for you
Open post for podcast.
A lack of accountability in public education is creating systemic abuse of students and taxpayers and can only be ended with school choice.
Watching Rhode Island decision-leaders continue to make decisions based on a mix of selfish interest and ideological delusion is frustratingly like watching Idiocracy
As is typical, Kevin Williamson is worth reading on the practical economics of government policy:
We are a very, very rich country. We can afford all sorts of things: food for the hungry, health care for the indigent, education for children, and hearing aids for families that for whatever reason cannot manage to scrape together $1,000 a year to invest in the well-being of their own children. (Those $5,000 hearing aids last for about five years, meaning that their real cost over time is less than the $1,200 a year typical American family spends on cable television.) I myself am all for doing many of those things, though I do not think that government very often is the best instrument for getting them done. But if we are going to use government, then, by all means, let’s use government in the most honest, transparent, and straightforward way we can. Forget the insurance mandate and just write the check.
In that regard, Democrat Governor Gina Raimondo’s free tuition would be preferable to some other policy that tried to force somebody else to pay for it — homeowners insurance or something like that. Of course, other basic economic lessons come into play, which struck me when WPRI’s Dan McGowan tweeted:
“Affordability” is a measure of price against value. Following Williamson’s price estimate for hearing aids, in-state tuition at the Community College of Rhode Island (CCRI) is less than the average family cable bill. Rhode Island College (RIC) and the University of Rhode Island (URI) are substantially more, but both saving and borrowing spread out the payments.
Considering that the average monthly student loan payment for all years of all colleges is somewhere around $280, two years of in-state tuition in Rhode Island would be much less. That means young adults are valuing a large number of other things — cable, cell phones, video games, weekly dinners out, and so on — more than they’re valuing education.
Pushing the price down for them doesn’t make them value the education any more. What it will do, though, drive up tuition and hurt taxpayers.
Scared of the flakes, right to work, against smarts, and parenting through adventure
Open post for podcast.
A closing private school in Newport could teach a lesson on civic society and the role of government, if we let it.
The attack on Charles Murray was another step on a path that I was attacked for warning about years ago, and I fear things will get worse before there’s a correction.
Denisha Merriweather has a powerful school choice story, as told by Alexandra DeSantis on National Review Online. And it has made an advocate of her:
In her view, education policy ought to be a bipartisan issue, and she thinks the strength of the school-choice movement lies in its inclusive mindset. “I do feel like the public-school advocates or the teachers’ unions always want an ‘us or them’ mentality. In their minds, you can’t have both,” she explains.
“And we on the school-choice side are not saying that at all. We’re saying, ‘Let’s all be productive, and let’s all serve our children.’ That’s one thing that really sets us apart from those who are pushing for the public-school system,” Denisha continues. “Why can’t we have more choices, and all the choices? [The unions] can’t understand that we do want to keep the public schools. We just want all of these other choices, too.”
In some respects, she’s incorrect about that. The unions, and the rest of the education establishment, have a different vision of what government schools should be — namely, the monopolistic control of all education, with only the exceptions that the very wealthy can carve out with their own money. That’s what “both” means to them.
Where poor performance and high cost become so outrageous that a somnolent public begins to wake up to the problem, the establishment will concede very limited reforms, perhaps to the degree of setting up a private school system within government itself (that is, charter schools). To rephrase Merriweather, it’s not that the establishment doesn’t believe that we can have both a public school sector and a healthy private school sector; it’s that the establishment doesn’t want both to exist.
State Representative Brian Newberry (R, North Smithfield, Burrillville) has submitted legislation to require Rhode Island schools to teach students about the founding documents of the United States, and I’m not sure Providence Journal reporter Linda Borg quite understands the difference between that proposal and this:
Generation Citizen goes into the classroom and provides students with a hands-on civics project. Last semester, a group of Providence students studied community-police relations and lobbied for the community safety act, meeting with the City Council and others.
“Our young people don’t see politics and government as a path to real change,” [Generation Citizen Providence lead Tom] Kerr-Vanderslice said. “If we provide local, project-based civics education, they start to see politics as a pathway to making an impact.”
Newberry’s objective (I infer) is to educate students on the structure and boundaries of government. Understanding our founding documents is understanding the agreement we have made with each other about what we can and can’t use the force of government to do. Generation Citizen is teaching students how to be activists (generally left-wing activists, by the looks of it).
Those are very different lessons — in some ways opposing and in some ways complementary. Borg’s article, however, tells the reader almost nothing about Newberry’s perspective with his legislation. Rather, his bill is mainly a framework in which to present Kerr-Vanderslice’s perspective.
In that regard, the article presents an excellent illustration of the dangers of the progressive mentality. What is important, under its sway, is for people to learn how to leverage government (implicitly serving the interests of people who deify it), not for them to understand people’s right to live independently from government. The message being taught is: If you want something, go get government to force people to give it to you at the point of a gun.
As one constitutionally disposed (so to speak) to resist the temptations of Donald Trump, I have to say that it’s great to hear sentiments like this from the President of the United States:
President Donald Trump visited a Florida Catholic school on Friday, praising the Catholic education system and touting his support for school choice programs.
“You understand how much your students benefit from full education, one that enriches both the mind and the soul. That’s a good combination,” the president told Bishop John Noonan of Orlando at St. Andrew Catholic School March 3.
Among the most compelling testimonies for school choice that I heard in Rhode Island came from a native American woman who told legislators about rebounding from childhood of abuse and a young adulthood addicted on drugs. She emphasized that, although not Catholic herself, she valued the moral norms and religious foundation that her daughter’s Catholic school provided.
Looking at data, earlier, that suggests that public schools are keeping kids not only from dropping out, but also from transferring to schools outside of the state’s government system until senior year makes me wonder how many of those students needed what that woman thought her daughter needed. Whether the problem is (a) the local economy — affecting both parents’ ability to afford tuition and donors’ ability to finance the education of others’ children — or (b) the government’s move into the private school market with charter schools or (c) the expanding perks that taxpayers subsidize exclusively for government-school students, if children aren’t finding the schools that are right for them, then we’re all worse off for it.
The data for dropouts and graduation from Rhode Island public schools adds to the impression that government education is increasingly about keeping enrollment up as long as possible.
Whether or not graduation rates have improved, the ability to lower standards without being caught makes them of diminished utility.
Last week, Democrat Governor Gina Raimondo and Democrat Senate President Teresa Paiva Weed visited Rogers High School in Newport to promote the governor’s plan to buy votes by giving families taxpayer dollars for two years of public college:
“When I talk to people around the state like your parents, they tell me that they are kept up at night thinking about your future,” Governor Raimondo told the students. “I want you and Rhode Islanders like you to get the jobs companies are creating here. The number one barrier to a college degree is cost. Our Free College proposal is affordable and an investment we need to make in your future. I am so thankful for Senate President Paiva Weed’s leadership and partnership. Working with her, I’m confident that all of you will have a shot at a good job here in Rhode Island.”
The women didn’t mention that 96% of students at Rogers High School are not proficient in math, and only 21% are proficient in reading. A more honest message would be:
In cooperation with your teachers’ union, we have ensured that most of you are not receiving the education that you deserve. You’ll be excited to hear that rather than fix the problems that we’ve created for selfish reasons, we’re going to take tens of millions of dollars from your parents and neighbors and cut two to four years out of your adult life in order to try to get you to where you ought to be right now.
The reception that these politicians get when they abuse their power like this — using school time to campaign to children — ought to be more like a Tea Party town hall than a pep rally. It would seem that keeping students under-educated has its benefits.
The Trump administration’s change of course on the issue of transgender bathrooms (and similar facilities) — sending the question back to state governments — was excellent for illustrating the narrative-driven bias in the news. The best expression that I’ve seen came from the Newport Daily News, which ran a front-page headline last Thursday proclaiming that “Transgender students lose bathroom choice.”
The McClatchy news service article beneath the headline, however, immediately tells a different story:
The Trump administration Wednesday told public school districts across the nation that they no longer have to allow transgender students to use the bathroom that matches their gender identity.
In the progressive lexicon, when the federal government doesn’t force a position that progressives support, it is automatically forcing the opposite position. In the terms of the headline, transgender students didn’t lose anything by this decision; rather, states gained a choice.
And what happened? At least in Rhode Island (which should be the central concern of the Newport Daily News), Education Commissioner Ken Wagner immediately issued a statement to say:
The rescinding of this federal guidance does not change our policy – there is no room for discrimination in our schools, and we will continue to protect all students, including transgender and gender nonconforming students, from any type of bias.
Of course, what he says isn’t exactly true. Students who aren’t comfortable sharing bathrooms with those of a different sex are “all students,” but the system is explicitly biased against accommodating them. If they should be so bold as to express their discomfort, the state government suggests, “administrators and counseling staff” should get involved to change their beliefs.
Be that as it may, the fact remains that the state of Rhode Island is perfectly able to continue setting its policy, and several school districts have made a point of proclaiming their agreement.
For some, though, that’s never sufficient. They are incensed by the notion that people hundreds or thousands of miles away might be able to agree among themselves to disagree with the progressives of Rhode Island. Our freedom is only ever to agree with the Left.
I’ve attended events similar to this one, as described by Jackie Roman in the Valley Breeze:
Plans to give Smithfield’s education facilities, mainly the elementary schools, a facelift are coming to fruition. …
The event was attended by Smithfield administrators, teachers, government officials, parents, and even a few elementary school students.
“We are crafting ideas of what defines the future of teaching and learning,” [Frank Locker of Frank Locker Educational Planning] said.
That sounds good, and to some extent, of course, government schools must plan for the future. But the whole endeavor raises a basic question: What qualifies these people to “define the future of teaching and learning”?
A follow-on question is what stake, really, these people have in the outcome, such that they might pursue what works, rather than what feels good? That’s a problem endemic to all government activities.
It’s very easy, and disproportionately fulfilling, for people to sit around and imagine what a wonder the future could be. But unless families are empowered to reject those plans by sending their children elsewhere, the folks “crafting ideas of what defines the future of teaching and learning” are just playing with other people’s lives.
The odds are pretty obvious and challenging, if you think about it: Government at all levels employs millions of people; many of them have access to information the public does not; many of them make decisions that affect their own compensation and that of their peers; and (at least for now) their continued wealth and opportunity depends on getting people to allow government to take their money away.
Since the years of Obama stimulus spending — let’s say Rhode Island’s fiscal years 2009 through 2011 — I’ve been convinced that the administration’s goal was to ensure that government agencies were insulated from the recession. (Another goal was to launder money to left-wing activists, but that’s not my subject with this post.) As time moves along and data becomes more available, it’ll just take some work to trace the dollars.
But it is a lot of work. The general public, occupied during working hours in their own private-sector occupations, can’t hope to keep up. This fund blends into that fund from the other source through technical accounting categories, with repositories here and there that must remain shielded from public view for privacy or other reasons. The opportunity to mislead is structural.
In a small way, though, I think I’ve got a handle on how the Tiverton School Department transformed temporary stimulus money into a permanent increase in local funding and have written about it on Tiverton Fact Check:
In summary, when the state money shifted from regular aid to “restricted,” the school department built the excess into its budget. But when the funds shifted back, the increase was buried in this “restatement,” so local taxpayers would remain forever responsible for the supposedly temporary increase. As a matter of fact, the “restricted” aid didn’t actually decrease much; the accounts just changed.
Thus, the Tiverton schools maintained healthy budget growth even as the Great Recession wore on and housing values plummeted.
I’d be surprised if something similar wasn’t accomplished by school districts throughout Rhode Island and across the United States. Actual stimulus would have been a government reduction in taxes, but that wasn’t Obama’s goal.
Here’s an interesting study. It’s from GEMS Educational Solutions, and I found it via a positive mention in a Guardian article, so we’re probably not talking a right-wing group, here.
The study compares certain educational statistics across countries, and one of its principles is that “inefficiency can be a result of either underpaying or overpaying teachers.” By that measure, the United States would become more efficient (better managing results versus tax rates) by lowering salaries by five percent and increasing class sizes by 10%.
Rhode Island’s teacher salaries are top 10 for the country, so 5% would be too low for our state. Also, the 15.3 student:teacher ratio listed on GEMS’s application compares with a Rhode Island average of 8.
To be clear, these are back-of-the-envelope comparisons. A more-thorough review might require adjustments of the numbers (different years, different teacher roles included in the student ratios, etc.). I come across people, though, especially locally, who find inconceivable the idea that less spending on anything government does might be bad.
The evidence continues to appear that government schools are drifting from their educational mission and toward left-wing indoctrination.
“Racial equity” in school discipline statistics has been another disastrous policy emphasis serving the Left’s drive to break up families and siphon off their power.
American fascism, Moira Walsh’s evil men, and the governor’s bad arguments.
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I’ve got a post on Tiverton Fact Check pointing out the oddly divergent trends of school enrollment and budgets:
Think of it this way: When the PTOs send out notices that the Budget Committee will be considering the school budget, parents and teachers fill the town hall. How many of them show up at School Committee meetings when important curricular questions are on the table? How many parents step forward during contract-negotiations to express concern that large increases for employees could eat up funds for innovative technology or even for fixing roofs and HVAC systems?
The taxpayers of Tiverton should absolutely provide the resources necessary to ensure our children and our neighbors’ children have every opportunity to succeed. But acknowledging that principle still leaves us having to answer an important question: How much is really necessary?
The following chart shows the trends in student enrollment in Tiverton public schools and the school department’s budget since the 2001-2002 school year.
Check out this unsigned editorial in the Wall Street Journal about an amazing innovation in Wisconsin education: letting school districts pay teachers based on their value to the schools!
As Stanford University economic researcher Barbara Biasi explains in a new study (which is awaiting peer review), Act 10 created a marketplace for teachers in which public-school districts can compete for better employees. For instance, a district can pay more to recruit and retain “high-value added” teachers—that is, those who most improve student learning. Districts can also cap salaries of low-performing teachers, which might encourage them to quit or leave for other districts. …
She also found changes in salary structure. For instance, salaries in Green Bay increased about 13% for teachers with five to six years of experience but a mere 4% for those who had worked 29 or 30 years. Salaries among teachers with the same seniority also diverged more. In Racine the opposite occurred. Green Bay was able to pay better teachers more without regard to the lock-step pay scales traditionally dictated by unions.
Well, you don’t need a degree from Rhode Island College to reason out why this would be so: “better teachers gravitate to districts where they can negotiate their own pay while lousy teachers tend to migrate toward those where salary scales are regimented.”
I’d add that it’s not just teacher quality. Some teaching roles are easier than others, taking less learning and less work, depending on grade level or subject. Sometimes unique challenges will be entirely specific to a school.
Only a system run primarily for the benefit of labor unions would organize something as critical as educating children in such a ridiculous way.