Shitposter while I tend to two babies. Maybe when I have my life back, I’ll help us get a few more niche communities back?

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • 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.


  • 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.


  • 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).


  • 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:

    1. 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).

    2. 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.

    3. 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!