U.S. education under attack?

[ThinkerX]

At the strictly local level, education is one of the 'big three' (along with roads and emergency services).  Politicians who fail to cough up the cash for the big three get crucified in the elections.  At least, that's the case around here, and my area is heavily conservative with abundant homeschooling.   

[Altherion]

2 hours ago, Rippounet said:

Fair enough, but that's focusing on academia. What about other teachers?

That I know, but what unions do doesn't necessarily reflect everyone's ideas.

In the most recent election, somewhere between two thirds and four fifths of teachers in unions voted Democrat and, as the article points out, the union leaders were surprised these numbers were so low.

2 hours ago, Rippounet said:

And again, that's focusing on higher education. When I said I could find sources showing the opposite, I was thinking about primary or secondary education.

It's difficult to disentangle the funding for primary and secondary education. Most of it comes from local taxes and the federal and state governments have no power over it (i.e. this is not what the original post is discussing). As far as I can tell, the federal funding is mostly for food and for tax exemptions. The food goes to the very poor who are more likely to be Democrats. The tax stuff is a mixed bag as some of it can go to people who don't even pay taxes (so again, the very poor), but some requires an income. I think the majority of people who benefit from federal programs are Democrats, but it is difficult to be sure.

[Seli]

9 hours ago, DunderMifflin said:

Does government funding always translate into superior education? Is there a provable formula where the more tax dollars thrown in the name of education will always be followed by better educated students?

Government funding leads to fairer education, is my guesstimate. And that is worth a lot.

[Paladin of Ice]

I just posted this in US Politics, but it looks like it belongs here too.

In one move the Trump administration is looking to screw students, create a new too big to fail financial institution, and aggravate a bubble with the potential to sink the US economy. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2017/05/22/trump-grant-student-loan-servicing-work-just-one-company/102004374/

Quote

The Department of Education said it will hand over the work of servicing federal student loans to one company — from the current roster of nine — in what it says is a money-saving move, triggering concern and criticism from student loan advocates who fear customer service would get worse.

The department estimates the move will save about $130 million in the next five years. "Savings are expected to increase significantly over the life of the contract,” Secretary of Education Betsy De Vos said in a statement. “Borrowers can expect to see a more user-friendly loan servicing interface, shorter email and call response times and an improved payment application method.”

Of about $1.4 trillion of student debt now owed by 44 million Americans, a vast majority of the total — more than $1 trillion — is issued by the Education Department. The government currently outsources the work of handling payment, collection, payment deferment and general customer service to nine private companies.

By granting the business to one company, the government will create "a trillion dollar bank," said Natalia Abrams, executive director of Student Debt Crisis, an advocacy group. "The too-big-to-fail is what we saw with the banks in 2008," she said. "I see this already as an industry out of control, with high profit. And in creating one company...there would be no competition."

...

The government has experience dealing with an exclusive private-sector partner in student loan servicing. From 2003 to 2013, ACS Education Services handled servicing of direct student loans under a Department of Education Contract worth an estimated $2 billion. Acquired by Xerox in 2010, it's now known as Xerox Education Services.

During ACS’ tenure, many borrowers complained that they were overcharged, or faced difficulties getting into income-driven repayment plans that would lower their monthly payments. In Nov. 2016, ACS agreed to a $2.4 million settlement with the Massachusetts Attorney General’s office over allegations of those problems and others.

ACS cooperated with the investigation and agreed to make improvements to its student loan servicing practices, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey said in an announcement of the settlement.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and two state attorneys general sued Navient in January. The lawsuits alleged that the Delaware-based company, the nation’s largest student loan servicer, processed borrowers’ payments incorrectly, provided inaccurate payment information and failed to act when borrows complained. Additionally, the company allegedly provided incentives to employees who recommended that struggling borrowers postpone payments under an option in which interest continues to pile up, instead of switching to an income-driven payment plan that avoids extra fees.

 

[Centrist Simon Steele]

3 hours ago, Paladin of Ice said:

I just posted this in US Politics, but it looks like it belongs here too.

In one move the Trump administration is looking to screw students, create a new too big to fail financial institution, and aggravate a bubble with the potential to sink the US economy. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2017/05/22/trump-grant-student-loan-servicing-work-just-one-company/102004374/

 

It's almost unbelievable how corrupt and short sighted this is.

[Toth]

Since there seem to be still doubters that defunding schools is something bad (which baffles my mind, actually), let me paint you a picture on how defunding schools have affected the German school system over the past decades. I don't think that the situation is comparable in all departments, especially since those federal cuts seem to get rid of patches that try to soften up the US system's integral deficies, but the idea should be generally the same.

Well... the idea in Germany is that you throw young people out into the job market as soon as possible, which is the reason why High School education was shortened from 7 to 6 years, but the curriculum contains the same amount of stuff that needs to be pressed into longer school days. Meanwhile budget cuts affect mostly the employment of teachers. With fewer teachers, whenever someone gets ill or gives birth, there is no one there to replace him/her, which means cancellation of valuable lessons, trouble to make up for the missed lessons and therefore worse marks for those who needed them. With less teachers and packed schools because no new ones are being built the class size rises, which mean less opportunities for the teaches to give individual help to those who are drowned out by the masses. Throw in a few troublemakers, foreign pupils with special needs in regards to learning the language,as well as mentally ill pupils because special schools were closed down under the pretense of 'inclusion', but barely any support or extra training offored to regular teachers to handle them. Under these conditions, you throw entire classes under the bus. The most comitted teachers then flee to the schools in the most elite surroundings, abandoning 'problem schools' which need them the most, simply because the conditions there become intolerable and when comitted people hit a wall, they tend to break (burnout statistics make that clear as a day). In fact, more and more teachers don't have an educational training at all, because they employ more and more 'Quereinsteiger', which means, people with a business background thrown into a haphazard express training who can be thrown into any subject that needs to be tought without the need of an education in it. They work for lower wages and are supposed to fill in for multiple specialized teachers, only the pupils suffer in many cases because it takes time until they themselves learn what they are supposed to teach, if they do at all.

An interesting side effect is that Germany has developed a whole fucking industry of private tutoring to allow those whose parents have the money to pay for it, to make up the lost lessons through the failing school system. This is utterly ridiculous and of course enforces the gap between the wealthy and poor, the government programs to pay those extra lessons for few of the really poor does little to patch it.

More money would solve all of these problems at the core and you don't need to have a crystal ball to see where you have to invest it: More teachers and smaller classes, especially in those schools in low income problem areas. These schools are in fact the most important. If we want to have any chances in the market of the future, we need to raise social mobility and not shut it down. And education is the key to it!

[Alarich II]

48 minutes ago, Toth said:

Well... the idea in Germany is that you throw young people out into the job market as soon as possible, which is the reason why High School education was shortened from 7 to 6 years

Education in Germany is not a federal affair, it is strictly "Länder"-only via the constitution. So let's be clear: in Saxony for example, G8 has been the norm since 1949. Bavaria tried it, fucked up, and returned to G9. NRW simply fucked up.

But moving away from German issues...

While cutting back on education is almost always a bad idea unless you can very clearly identify the areas where money is wasted, education does not improve by just throwing money at it either. Some time ago I read a study that showed that smaller classes tend to be better for students but only to a certain number of students. From there on the main benefit of further reduction of class size was that it reduces teachers stress levels. Now we can perhaps agree that stress-free employment for teachers is desirable, but IMO probably not the first priority for an education system.

Within the education there are also misallocations - schools that already suffer from short funds get less, others are already packed with priviledged students and get massive funds on top. Or take the national debate over tuition fees in Germany. Oh, the outrage that students have to pay 1.000 EUR per Semester. But noone calls for massive protest, that in some citites full-time day-care costs well over 200 EUR per month, not including the shitty food you have to pay for as well. Despite all evidence that every Euro spent in day-care and primary school infrastructure, does more to reduce social inequality and improve future education than at the high school or university level, where social stratification and selection has already heavily skewed the balances for those who come from priviledged backgrounds. But school kids don't protest and don't vote and students do, so the money goes there.

The problem with education is that there is no clear vonsensus what should actually be the goal of our education system. So the money goes in there and without clear objectives, there's no accountability. So we know that education is important, and probably expensive too, but do we get the best deal? Probably not.

[Toth]

1 hour ago, Alarich II said:

Education in Germany is not a federal affair, it is strictly "Länder"-only via the constitution. So let's be clear: in Saxony for example, G8 has been the norm since 1949. Bavaria tried it, fucked up, and returned to G9. NRW simply fucked up.

I know. I guess I should have stated that this is the situation I'm seeing in Berlin/Brandenburg right now. Though since from what I know US education is a states issue as well, I still thought the situation is comparable. And my main point was how much the effects of negligent funding affect the teachers through increasingly excessive demands and them being overworked and disillusioned negatively affects the quality of the education. Federal subsidies to make the job more attractive/release pressure from them should really do wonders in this regard.

[DunderMifflin]

On a global scale it would seem the countries that spend the most on education reach a top group of first world countries that are considered the best educated, but within that top group there isnt anything indicated that if you spend THE most money that it will result in THE best educated students.

And that's not even speaking of how "educated" the product is, meaning how well the education results in career performance and ability to perform jobs rather than just temporarily memorizing facts to pass tests.

[the Greenleif Stark]

Throwing more money into public education does not translate to better education.  See (my state)New Jersey as an example.  Outrageous property taxes, roughly 70% of your property taxes funding education, something like 30 districts (out of 600ish) receiving over 50% of the funding, 3500$ per pupil in non-abbott districts vs 16500$ per pupil in abbott districts.  Something needs to be done, unfortunately, here in NJ, nothing but more spending will be happening when Phil Murphy wins, he's bought and paid for by the teachers' union. 

[Week]

The thread is about cuts to education. Nobody is arguing that there is no diminishing value to throwing more money into any program.

[DunderMifflin]

As far as I can tell the cuts are all for unspecified after school and summer programs. Idk what effect that has on the teachers and students involved in those programs without any sort of data provided.

I'm not a fan of the push to keep children in school as much as possible. Eliminating summer vacation and keeping kids in school hours and hours after 3pm. It seems to just render school into a babysitter. Also, if you have flawed education I don't see how adding more hours of the flawed method is supposed to translate to sucess.

[Iskaral Pust]

I hate the thought of any attempt to undermine public education.  OTOH, public education in the US has become such a political football that I don't see how it can hope to escape partisan interference.  Higher education has become a captive market without price controls and is feeding a huge debt bubble that will drag on generations y/z/alpha for decades.  K-12 education is being made responsible for addressing inequality in life outcomes when the vast majority of the inequality stems from the parents' socio-economic situation and cannot be effectively redressed by schools.  The political wish for equality among students -- equality in outcome rather than opportunity -- means tracking by ability remains verboten in public schools, so parents of relatively gifted or just ambitious students feel compelled to game the system through private/charter/magnet schools to escape the left half of the bell curve.  Teachers are a significant political lobby, heavily partisan, and preferred above students in the bureaucracy.  And, most fundamentally of all, K-12 education is captive to the wider self-segregation within our society that reinforces local micro-cultures; it's not just AP classes vs. gang affiliations, it's also creationism vs. secularism, etc -- even if local* property taxes were not used for education, wealthy & educated parents would still cluster together and confer huge advantage on their children just by being wealthy and educated. 

So education policy has been used as a channel for competing political dogma, and has lately been stuck in the liberal trap that we can fix all of society's problems through "better" schools, which is then exploited by insiders, whether the teacher's union, administrators, for-profit owners, student debt providers, etc.  Once you've become one of the biggest political footballs in the country, you have to expect that you'll be kicked back and forth as the political balance shifts.

 

*FWIW, the exorbitant property taxes and state income tax paid by me and all of my neighbors are used to fund schools throughout Chicago, which is effectively a transfer to the poorer part of the city who pays very little in any kind of tax.  So even though we don't have localized school funding, unlike the suburbs, the public schools in the wealthy neighborhoods are still vastly better than in the poor neighborhoods.  It's the quality of the student and their preparation by parents that matters most, not the funding to the schools.

[Centrist Simon Steele]

3 hours ago, Week said:

The thread is about cuts to education. Nobody is arguing that there is no diminishing value to throwing more money into any program.

Thank you--a dismantling of public education, and specifically--that dismantling seems to be geared at low income students and teachers who funded their educations through loans.

 

After school programs are provided for families low income families who want to make sure their kids have a safe place to be, have food, can finish homework and learn good habits--instead of being unsupervised in dangerous areas. They are a wonderful idea and could be improved on certainly, but you don't improve on them by gutting them and telling people "now we have choice!"

Also, as a teacher, I can speak a bit to the personal side to the union. Joining a union, for a lot of teachers, isn't about promoting political agendas--but protection while working in a vulnerable space. I paid union dues because I wanted to do the best job I could and knowing I had some protection in a vulnerable job. Most kids are wonderful, but one kid could say: that teacher said something inappropriate to me. Then what? Unions provide legal representation. I ran into an issue where I didn't know, apparently, you're supposed to give good grades to school board members' kids. And I gave the kid the damned grade he deserved because he refused to work. The school board member and my principal, I found out through student gossip!, were going to fire me. Of course, they may have done it, but the union protection stepped in and pointed out: this teacher has an exemplary record, never been disciplined, etc. Took a lot of pressure from me. Whether I was dem. or rep. that kind of support is necessary.

[Altherion]

On 5/23/2017 at 11:14 AM, Week said:

The thread is about cuts to education. Nobody is arguing that there is no diminishing value to throwing more money into any program.

The rationale for cuts and for not throwing more money at the issue is exactly the same. The only reason to favor the latter and not the former is if you believe that we're currently sitting at precisely the optimal point.

On 5/23/2017 at 2:12 PM, Simon Steele said:

After school programs are provided for families low income families who want to make sure their kids have a safe place to be, have food, can finish homework and learn good habits--instead of being unsupervised in dangerous areas. They are a wonderful idea and could be improved on certainly, but you don't improve on them by gutting them and telling people "now we have choice!"

Like many things that money can be spent on, this sounds nice... but why should the federal government pay for it?

 

[Seli]

53 minutes ago, Altherion said:

Like many things that money can be spent on, this sounds nice... but why should the federal government pay for it?

 

Because the money spent is protecting a proportion of its population that lacks certain freedoms against circumstances outside their control. Children don't influence where their parents (can afford to) live, children can't vote out local government that ignores them, children don't make the curriculum, children don't decide what is available for them in libraries.

[DunderMifflin]

If that's the case I don't think it should be lumped in with education. That's some sort of different social service. Babysitting is not education. 

The first thing on the chopping block is the 21st Century Learning Center. this is another failure, or if can't accept that word just call them successes that are directly traced to the "No child left behind" policy where instead of these centers being for the entire community, only those deemed low income enough are eligible. The one by my old city was a gang hangout, also a place where these low income kids would pretty much blow off any lessons and go play basketball with regular members of the community who may or may not be involved in gangs.

[zelticgar]

  Someone up thread mentioned this earlier but funding for education is overwhelming based on state taxes, not federal. Sure there are some important programs that the Feds fund and no one wants to see draconian cuts but the overall percentage of federal funds that go to schools is less than 10% based on a quick google search.

Two big issues I see - State education mandates and funding calculations at the state level that are not fair.

State mandates handcuff local schools. It results in teaching to the lowest common denominator instead of being able to fully teach all students based on their capabilities.  I pulled my oldest out of public schools because they don't offer any honors or advanced classes. She was mixed in with students that had behavioral and emotional issues who would disrupt classes  and teachers would have no power to address it because they were restricted by IEP's and a myriad number of rules and regulations. The school felt it was okay to maintain no separation based on capabilities so we pulled her out and sent her to private school.

To add to this the funding calculations the state uses favor the poorest and the richest communities. My town was one of 6 schools in the state that received less State funding from 2005 to 2015. Yes, we received less state funds in 2015 for education than we did in 2005. One of only 6 towns in the state. The poor towns got money because they rightly needed it, the rich towns got money because they can work the system and have political influence. The middle income towns were left to increase property taxes to fund schools therefore making the property values go down due to higher taxes. It hit really hard in the housing bubble but now we are starting to come back. Unfortunately there has been no change at the middle school level around programs to support higher achieving kids. 

[Week]

8 hours ago, Triskan said:

This post seems a bit draconian to me.  Also, I think that the argument that there's no diminishing value to throwing more money into any program is an almost undeniable element in any discussion of education funding.  And to cap it off, there are people arguing stuff about values, diminishing and otherwise; the people fighting about education funding and policy.

It was more of a general response to DM chasing their own tail. There is interesting discussion to be had - that was not it. The original poster specifically was talking about cuts and these cuts -- any argument on the flawed basis of "throwing more money into an already flawed program" is coming in with bias that cannot be addressed seriously.

[Centrist Simon Steele]

8 hours ago, Seli said:

Because the money spent is protecting a proportion of its population that lacks certain freedoms against circumstances outside their control. Children don't influence where their parents (can afford to) live, children can't vote out local government that ignores them, children don't make the curriculum, children don't decide what is available for them in libraries.

Altherion, this is how I would have answered. And to add: our country should take of its poor. I want to believe we live in a country where we keep our kids healthy, educated, and productive no matter the financial means of the family.