You can't overleap that

Dr. Professor Neal Portenza performing his own autopsy, Melbourne, April 2014. Via Sydney Morning Herald.

Guess David Brooks ("Schools for Wisdom") got another one of those phone calls—

Friends of mine have been raving about the documentary “Most Likely to Succeed,” and it’s easy to see what the excitement is about. 

Your mission, should you accept it, is to make it sound exciting to watch a documentary about charter schools for the 21st century, when everybody that has a job at all will be changing jobs 25 times over the course of a working life and most people won't have jobs at all but just be Uber drivers, whether they're cooking burgers or writing code or singing opera or building roads, and there's no longer a need to know anything, since it's all Googlable, and newspaper stories and legal briefs are themselves written by computers, and our educational system designed in the Prussian empire in the 1870s isn't appropriate any more.

Actually tell me why we still have to have school at all:

Cheap shots and free associations

Poster by Mungo Thomson, 2004.

@matthewstoller @emptywheel @AlexanderAbdo @froomkin I know that, Matt- I've never, ever thought "reform" would come from USG - still don't.
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) November 18, 2014

No, of course, how could a branch of government institute reform in a government agency? Like, how would that even work? It makes no sense at all!

David Brooks goes to Newark

Really. He was seen. And on the basis of his experience, he's written a little campaign piece on behalf of Newark mayoral candidate Shavar Jeffries.

Jeffries, son of an absent father, his mother murdered by an abusive boyfriend when he was only ten years old, raised chiefly by his grandmother and a community of watchful cooperative neighbors in the city's South Ward, with a big assist from scholarships to Seton Hall [jump]

Mysteries of bloat

To explain to us all what's going on with the Chicago teacher strike, David Brooks has come up with a totally new basic economic theory!

In place of the conventional Samuelson model of consumption goods

	excludable	non-excludable
rivalrous	private goods (cars, shoes)	common goods (forests, fish)
non-rivalrous	club goods (movies, golf)	public goods (water, knowledge)

he has devised one that is an order of magnitude more efficient, that looks something like this:

Economy I	Economy II
tradable sector	bloatable sector

Whereas the conventional model looks at the world of goods from the demand side, the narrow and selfish standpoint of the consumer, the new model is from the supply side, that of producers, job creators, people who make a difference, so it's much more important and serious.

Economy I is the tradable sector. This includes companies that make goods like planes, steel and pharmaceuticals. These companies face intense global competition and are compelled to constantly innovate and streamline. They’ve spent the last few decades figuring out ways to make more products with fewer workers.

Economy II is made up of organizations that do not face such intense global competition. They often fall into government-dominated sectors like health care, education, prisons and homeland security. People in this economy believe in innovation, but they don’t have the sword of Damocles hanging over them so they don’t pursue unpleasant streamlining as rigorously. As a result, Economy II institutions tend to get bloated and inefficient as time goes by. 

Naturally getting things from Economy I is good for consumers, who benefit from that intense global competition when it lowers the prices you have to pay for stuff; you will have noticed how much cheaper airplanes and prescription drugs have become in recent years. Or maybe you haven't noticed, if your insurance plan pays for the meds, but it's probably true.

Pencil draw graph image by Anatoly Tiplyashin from Fotolia.com. The source, "How to make a Pareto graph", explains that "A Pareto chart is used to graphically illustrate a complex set of data. It is based on the Pareto Principle, which says that 80 percent of the effects come from 20 percent of the causes."

By the same token, when your Economy II stuff starts getting bloated, the best thing you can do is start getting it produced in a more Economy I kind of way. Prisons, for example, used to be ridiculously luxurious institutions, like cruise ships, with as much as a one-to-one ratio of staff to customers and who knows what kinds of on-board facilities: gyms, celebrity lectures, single rooms for those who don't care to socialize so much, etc.

This bloat has been remedied by the introduction of market forces in the form of privately run for-profit prisons; the competition inspires them to cut costs drastically, making every penitentiary a taut, profitable hell-hole. Of course your government won't see any of the resulting cash, but it'll be in the hands where it can do the most good, those of job creators.

The same kind of thing holds for public schools, as in Chicago, horrible places pullulating with children and overpaid teachers earning nearly as much as a  management consulting consultant for Accenture, whatever that is; compare that to the quiet, refined atmosphere of a typical private school, with its small classes and friendly non-union teachers. They'd better be, you say, at tuition fees of $40,000 a year, but that's not the point.

In traditional economics, it's hard to see how you could make a public school (public goods) more like a private school (club goods) without charging tuition. Brooksian economics explains it with the simple and elegant Sword of Damocles principle: keep your workers in a permanent state of fear. This is bound to make them as innovative as you could want.

Charter Schools under the Microscope. By Nathan Golub for IndyWeek.

Town and Brown

The New York Times has been commemorating the 58th anniversary (May 17) of Brown v. Board of Education with a series of articles dealing with the fact that American schools are still segregated by race (in a beautifully written thick-description feature by N.R. Kleinfield describing the consequences of segregation at a charter middle school in Flatbush, Brooklyn), the apparent fact that the authorities don't seem to see any reason for doing anything about it (David L. Kirk's op-ed asking why school reformers have abandoned desegregation as a way of narrowing the school achievement gaps between racial groupings), and the widespread belief that it really isn't a problem anyway (in an 8-way debate—"Jim Crow is dead, segregation lives on. Is it time to bring back busing? "—about what needs to be done).

Really! That is, some of the debaters thought desegregation was a pretty good thing and worth reviving, of course, but others seemed not to understand why it was even an issue; according to Lance Izumi of the Pacific Research Institute, for instance,

From Babble Voices.

Falling back to 1970s-style desegregation policies like busing ignores new schooling options that weren’t available decades ago and which offer better educational opportunities for minority students.

As if the original desegregation policies had merely been techniques for wringing inefficiencies out of the system. It's like arguing that there's no point in enforcing anti-slavery laws because there are better ways of maximizing profit for cotton cultivators. School segregation is illegal, according to the law of the land as established in Brown in 1954, and it is illegal because it is wrong—because it deprives people of certain rights guaranteed them in our constitution.

It was amazing to me to see in these essays, as also in the reader comments, how many apparently respectable people don't seem to know that Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) was decided wrongly; that separate can never be equal. Kirk's article makes it seem, in fact, as if the Supreme Court has effectively overruled Brown and restored Plessy to its original status, in the sense that it has been gradually disallowing all the means for desegregating. (Indeed, the reputedly evil Michelle Rhee was actually on the left side of this one, since she argues in the Times debate for "socioeconomic integration", i.e., for a method of achieving racial integration without mentioning race, which might make it acceptable to the Court and effective at the same time.)

In particular the proponents of various kinds of "school choice" and charter school approaches appear genuinely to believe that separate but equal institutions are possible. They emphasize the spiffiness and modernity of the charter school or Small School of Choice, its advanced electronic equipment, its youthful (underpaid) teachers. Izumi even cites a fraudulent "proof" of the high quality of the new schools in terms of what a spiffy study it was

The study used the most rigorous experimental design, randomized control trial...

(It may be a rigorous design,  but it's not very rigorously applied; in fact, an absolutely crappy study—I've discussed the work in question at some length here.)

But if you look at the typical features of these new schools—the high ratio of administrators to teaching staff, the focus on high-stakes test scores and test prep, the elaborate discipline and dress codes, the de-skilling of teachers who are often required to stick to a script—you can see that they are not at all equal to the kind of school you want for your own children, in spite of the bells and whistles. They're not meant to instill habits of critical thinking but of swift obedience. They're not meant for "our kids" but for "their kids". And Brown has not yet become irrelevant.

Finnish blackboard. From Dipity.

OK, but my teacher seems a little remote

 The Times report by Stephanie Saul on the cyber charter school movement yesterday morning has not roused a lot of online fury. I sure don't know why. Here is how it opens:

Nearly 60 percent of its students are behind grade level in math. Nearly 50 percent trail in reading. A third do not graduate on time. And hundreds of children, from kindergartners to seniors, withdraw within months after they enroll.

By Wall Street standards, though, Agora is a remarkable success that has helped enrich K12 Inc., the publicly traded company that manages the school. And the entire enterprise is paid for by taxpayers.

You should read the whole thing, especially if you believe the way to solve our education problems is by sprinkling a little market-fairy dust on them (no, it's really just a way for the rent seekers to expropriate more money from our children).  Then have a look at Jenny Anderson on Finland: