Too many armchair educators here. I literally teach a lecture on this as part of a class on students with disabilities. Key things about DoE:
It’s 4% of the budget and 2/3 of that is to subsidize higher education for middle and lower income families. For K-12, it’s about 5% of the budget, as most funding is state (unfortunately usually by property tax, which generally fucks poor folk).
To get that 5%, you need to play by DoE rules. That includes no discrimination, school must be free and accessible, and you need to follow IDEA, the law that gives students with disability access to an education. Without federal DoE, there is no standard requirement to accommodate kids with Autism, learning disabilities, and more. (Technically section 504 can still apply, but it’s complicated. Private schools usually have that but not IDEA). Btw, about 100B + 20B for K-12 funds and disability, respectfully.
DoE funds and conducts a ton of research that improves pedagogy, not just the standard NCLB achievement tracking but things like the ELS database that is one of the few sets with data from 10th grade all the way to age 30, to directly analyze effects of high school programs on long term success. My dissertation used that, and yes, those folks are probably super-illegal fired, USAID style. If you’re wondering, it’s 800M in grants and research, which is chump change.
Understand, this is as idiotic as gutting the IRS. Economics have found that return on investment is tremendous (8x to 60x depending on who you ask) because you reduce crime and expensive prison costs. Simply preventing a murder saves millions of dollars, and education is shown to do this (including the very same ELS data I mentioned!)
There’s more that I can say, but if you have questions, I literally have a degree in education policy. Please ask!
Two useful things, but there’s no political incentive unfortunately. Education is usually the first thing to defund since you won’t deal with ramifications until long after your term ends. Only senetors and judicial last long enough and neither are responsible for budget… you just rarely get anyone trying.
States do even things out on their end, but same issue with terms. California for instance has a budget deficit and are cutting education budgets (albeit mostly with higher ed, iirc). That means more reliance on local funds, which ironically fuck rural voters most, aka Republican districts (funny enough, this distribution of funds to rural schools is a big reason DoE survived Reagan with GOP support).
Others already cut to the chase, but yeah. The long short of it is that’s just another move to siphon funds to the wealthy at the cost of the needy. I won’t say it could never work, but it would likely be less efficient if you managed the same coverage as public school.
You could draw analogies to healthcare. When healthcare is privatized, not only does everyone pay more, it also leaves a ton of people without coverage. Same for education, as every child has to be covered. The voucher system works similar to subsidized healthcare (e.g. Medicare) which kinda works but why convert a perfectly acceptable universal option with a more expensive, more complicated, and more unequal system? You just inflate costs and certain people make money while everyone else suffers… without even improving quality, no less.
That all said, I’m generally open minded. It’s frustrating knowing how much better private schools are vs public… when I attended UCLA, I was frequently surrounded by private school alumns because they had connections. They had counselors, AP courses, tutors, and here I was, a first generation who only got in because of community college. It’s very unfair as it is, and I fully understand the wishful thinking some (few) might have in a voucher system. But the research just isn’t behind it.
Yeah, I agree. Just trying to explore all viewpoints because I truly don’t get how people think defunding the DoE will fix things. The system has clear issues, but breaking it up and making it more expensive doesn’t seem like the answer either.
It’s probably mostly propaganda that gets most people, same with USAID. People have a poor grasp of what they do and higher ups know but they likely have an interest in it, like ties to the industry or are anti-science/pro-religion or simply hate a group they want to discriminate against. DoE protects and improves the social mobility of black and brown folk and that was good enough reason in the 80s for GOP to target it, after all.
You should be extra cautious around any suggestion of voucher programs. We’ve heard them proposed for schools and we’ve heard them proposed for healthcare expenses. One fundamental problem with vouchers is that they are set to a fixed amount of money, but what happens if quality service requires more than that? Well, people just don’t get quality service, right?.. And that’s the intentional gimmick. That’s the goal. In the past the government might provide a service using tax dollars, then it switches to vouchers, but then when the vouchers don’t provide enough cash now the service itself gets cut. And somehow it’s supposed to be inevitable.
I was reading a study about education reform over the last 20 years and essentially the push for rewarding teachers based on student performance and voucher systems and the idea to make schools compete highly against each other, that’s all totally failed to improve the quality of education in multiple countries. If you remember when Bush was pushing NCLB, one of the ideas was the notion that we should make teachers and schools compete just like businesses. But that actually doesn’t make sense on a national policy level intuitively, because you don’t want one school to be better than another, you want all schools to be better. (Or rather, I want all schools to be better, but some people have really f***** up values.) And then now there’s solid data from large international groups that show our intuitions were accurate.
NCLB at face value isn’t bad, and I wouldn’t characterize it as a competition, but it had a few fundamental flaws. The biggest was punishing underperforming schools, which is just… really stupid, like how exactly is that going to make the schools better? The second was teach to the test, since we quantified (poorly) what education is. That enforced rote memory over critical thinking and reasoning skills.
My more personal gripe is statistical, though. Using cutoff scores without actually accounting for covariates (like previous scores) has also gotta be the worst possible way to track success. If a student is reading at a 4th grade level while in 10th grade, a school is punished if they read at an 8th grade level in 11th grade (a four year improvement!). Like, Jesus Christ, I’m so glad Obama admin at least fixed most glaring problems in 2015, cause yikes.
School vouchers are actually terrible. They take funding from already struggling schools and give it to private institutions which already don’t have to follow many of the policies outlined above (they can discriminate in a lot of ways that public schools can’t). They also mostly end up being a subsidy for the wealthy.
Too many armchair educators here. I literally teach a lecture on this as part of a class on students with disabilities. Key things about DoE:
It’s 4% of the budget and 2/3 of that is to subsidize higher education for middle and lower income families. For K-12, it’s about 5% of the budget, as most funding is state (unfortunately usually by property tax, which generally fucks poor folk).
To get that 5%, you need to play by DoE rules. That includes no discrimination, school must be free and accessible, and you need to follow IDEA, the law that gives students with disability access to an education. Without federal DoE, there is no standard requirement to accommodate kids with Autism, learning disabilities, and more. (Technically section 504 can still apply, but it’s complicated. Private schools usually have that but not IDEA). Btw, about 100B + 20B for K-12 funds and disability, respectfully.
DoE funds and conducts a ton of research that improves pedagogy, not just the standard NCLB achievement tracking but things like the ELS database that is one of the few sets with data from 10th grade all the way to age 30, to directly analyze effects of high school programs on long term success. My dissertation used that, and yes, those folks are probably super-illegal fired, USAID style. If you’re wondering, it’s 800M in grants and research, which is chump change.
Understand, this is as idiotic as gutting the IRS. Economics have found that return on investment is tremendous (8x to 60x depending on who you ask) because you reduce crime and expensive prison costs. Simply preventing a murder saves millions of dollars, and education is shown to do this (including the very same ELS data I mentioned!)
There’s more that I can say, but if you have questions, I literally have a degree in education policy. Please ask!
The problem is that smart people don’t vote republican, and the republicans need more brown noses.
So increase DoE funding and decouple schools from property tax funding?
But then how would
indoctrinate the young and massively inflate their numbersdo very important charity of education?Wild times
Two useful things, but there’s no political incentive unfortunately. Education is usually the first thing to defund since you won’t deal with ramifications until long after your term ends. Only senetors and judicial last long enough and neither are responsible for budget… you just rarely get anyone trying.
States do even things out on their end, but same issue with terms. California for instance has a budget deficit and are cutting education budgets (albeit mostly with higher ed, iirc). That means more reliance on local funds, which ironically fuck rural voters most, aka Republican districts (funny enough, this distribution of funds to rural schools is a big reason DoE survived Reagan with GOP support).
Could school vouchers and tax credits work?
Others already cut to the chase, but yeah. The long short of it is that’s just another move to siphon funds to the wealthy at the cost of the needy. I won’t say it could never work, but it would likely be less efficient if you managed the same coverage as public school.
You could draw analogies to healthcare. When healthcare is privatized, not only does everyone pay more, it also leaves a ton of people without coverage. Same for education, as every child has to be covered. The voucher system works similar to subsidized healthcare (e.g. Medicare) which kinda works but why convert a perfectly acceptable universal option with a more expensive, more complicated, and more unequal system? You just inflate costs and certain people make money while everyone else suffers… without even improving quality, no less.
That all said, I’m generally open minded. It’s frustrating knowing how much better private schools are vs public… when I attended UCLA, I was frequently surrounded by private school alumns because they had connections. They had counselors, AP courses, tutors, and here I was, a first generation who only got in because of community college. It’s very unfair as it is, and I fully understand the wishful thinking some (few) might have in a voucher system. But the research just isn’t behind it.
Yeah, I agree. Just trying to explore all viewpoints because I truly don’t get how people think defunding the DoE will fix things. The system has clear issues, but breaking it up and making it more expensive doesn’t seem like the answer either.
It’s probably mostly propaganda that gets most people, same with USAID. People have a poor grasp of what they do and higher ups know but they likely have an interest in it, like ties to the industry or are anti-science/pro-religion or simply hate a group they want to discriminate against. DoE protects and improves the social mobility of black and brown folk and that was good enough reason in the 80s for GOP to target it, after all.
You should be extra cautious around any suggestion of voucher programs. We’ve heard them proposed for schools and we’ve heard them proposed for healthcare expenses. One fundamental problem with vouchers is that they are set to a fixed amount of money, but what happens if quality service requires more than that? Well, people just don’t get quality service, right?.. And that’s the intentional gimmick. That’s the goal. In the past the government might provide a service using tax dollars, then it switches to vouchers, but then when the vouchers don’t provide enough cash now the service itself gets cut. And somehow it’s supposed to be inevitable.
I was reading a study about education reform over the last 20 years and essentially the push for rewarding teachers based on student performance and voucher systems and the idea to make schools compete highly against each other, that’s all totally failed to improve the quality of education in multiple countries. If you remember when Bush was pushing NCLB, one of the ideas was the notion that we should make teachers and schools compete just like businesses. But that actually doesn’t make sense on a national policy level intuitively, because you don’t want one school to be better than another, you want all schools to be better. (Or rather, I want all schools to be better, but some people have really f***** up values.) And then now there’s solid data from large international groups that show our intuitions were accurate.
NCLB at face value isn’t bad, and I wouldn’t characterize it as a competition, but it had a few fundamental flaws. The biggest was punishing underperforming schools, which is just… really stupid, like how exactly is that going to make the schools better? The second was teach to the test, since we quantified (poorly) what education is. That enforced rote memory over critical thinking and reasoning skills.
My more personal gripe is statistical, though. Using cutoff scores without actually accounting for covariates (like previous scores) has also gotta be the worst possible way to track success. If a student is reading at a 4th grade level while in 10th grade, a school is punished if they read at an 8th grade level in 11th grade (a four year improvement!). Like, Jesus Christ, I’m so glad Obama admin at least fixed most glaring problems in 2015, cause yikes.
School vouchers are actually terrible. They take funding from already struggling schools and give it to private institutions which already don’t have to follow many of the policies outlined above (they can discriminate in a lot of ways that public schools can’t). They also mostly end up being a subsidy for the wealthy.
I assumed. That’s just the argument I always hear. If the IRS gets gutted it seems like the revenue wouldn’t be there to fund the anyway.