Is New Jersey Really that Horrible? (school districts, salary, title)

[Ninjahedge]

Originally Posted by HeadedWest

That would be a good start. There is virtually zero correlation between the money spent on public schools and the results.

Start with the overhead (the superintendent's office is the best starting point).

Where did you get this from?

There is no direct correlation that can be seen immediately between school spending and its end result, but there IS a correlation!

You see how effective history is when the books kids use still ignore the whole black-rights era as if it did not happen. Or how effective science books from the 50's are (duct-taped spines only go so far you know!!!!).


Although I DO agree with cutting the $$$ to the Sup. The main problem with our school budget is that ALL expenses are under the same blanket.

And when your admin is as fat as ours is, you end up sleeping on the floor some nights.

[elflord1973]

Originally Posted by Ninjahedge

Because your post was not realistic.

Didn't stop you, did it

It basically said "cut everything and let God sort it out".

That's not true at all. I can cite and have cited clear principles regarding what does and doesn't call for government intervention.

You on the other hand, as far as I can tell, either want to socialize everything, or want to the government to socialize everything at its discretion (which ultimately amounts to much the same thing)

No rich neighborhoods using public schools? Have you been to Ridgewood?

I don't follow. I did not suggest that rich neighborhoods don't have public schools.

You gave an off-the-cuff answer with no real practical thought. If you want to be taken seriously in a discussion, you can't start by proposing your most outrageous and impractical suggestions first.

Cutting taxes to almost nothing requires cutting services in the same jurisdiction to almost nothing. This is impractical in some sense (most people aren't up for a radical restructuring of the multiple levels of government) but it is hardly "outrageous".

I did propose some specific plans, such as vouchers, that are quite practical, and based on sound economic principles.

That never works. The problem is, it takes a certain amount of cash to make schools work efficiently. The school itself mind you , not the administration.

You start offering things like vouchers, you are pretty much cutting the hamstrings of the public school system.

In fact the exact opposite is happening. A bloated public education system is crowding out private education, and suffocating catholic schools, because parents can't afford to pay tuition twice over.

Making schools work "efficiently" isn't a matter of more money (hint: what is the denominator in "efficiency" ?). Did you perhaps mean "effectively" ?

Either way, the public system is hopelessly inefficient (primarily due to lack of incentives)

Fixing it is not a matter of more money or less money, it is a matter of rethinking the incentives.

• At present, ill-behaved students can impose costs on others with impunity.
• Good teachers aren't rewarded.
• Bad teachers can't be dismissed if they have tenure.
• Schools have a captive market.

Everywhere, there is a lack of incentive to do well. You can take the worlds most brilliant, self motivated people and make them mediocre by getting the incentives wrong.

So it's not just about letting students move to private schools or preventing this crowding out effect, it's partly about letting schools remove students who are chronically disruptive, or teachers who are poor performers.

Schools do not work that way. You do not want to ship your kid to school 30 miles away. So the "dynamic" will stay local.

North NJ is quite dense, so there are many towns where several schools are nearby.

HA! OMG! Sorry JR, but you have to pay to get on that swingset??!?

Nice straw man. There are already examples of pay to use, for towns that have beaches, etc. I'm not saying that they all should be privatized (mostly those that can attract a good crowd from out of town are good candidates), but it is potentially a way to turn a liability into a money maker.

[HeadedWest]

Originally Posted by Ninjahedge

There is no direct correlation that can be seen immediately between school spending and its end result, but there IS a correlation!

Do you have any evidence for that assertion (in US public schools)?

[elflord1973]

Originally Posted by Ninjahedge

Although I DO agree with cutting the $$$ to the Sup. The main problem with our school budget is that ALL expenses are under the same blanket.

And when your admin is as fat as ours is, you end up sleeping on the floor some nights.

How do you address that inefficiency though ? It is the nature of government run services to be inefficient, especially in terms of the administrative bloat you cite. This is a double-whammy, because not only is the (administration) sector too large, they are often on defined benefit pension plans which are a fiscal time bomb.

No-one has any incentive to improve this. In the private sector (where they have incentives to provide services more efficiently), this wouldn't stand -- when they cut budgets, excess layers of management and bureaucracy are the first to go. It's possible to do this in the public sector, but it does require some thinking about the incentives that currently exist, and what they should be replaced with. The incentive structure in the current system can be summarized in two words: "moral hazard".

I've yet to see you provide an argument as to why schools should be run by the government in general (if schools should be goverment-run, then why not bakeries, shoe stores, book stores, etc ?)

[Ninjahedge]

Originally Posted by HeadedWest

Do you have any evidence for that assertion (in US public schools)?

Only 30+ years of experience in the districts my mother has taught in.

They are still in the top %% even though the money has been slowly drained from them over the same time period.




Tell me how you think you would see an instant change? You think teachers just migrate like waterfowl? That books spontaneously combust when they do not have enough funding?

Cuts are usually seen in the long run, and they are also balanced by the desire to learn. The fact that Hoboken has over $30K PER STUDENT in spending does not change the fact that most of its students do not give a poo and that the Admin there is all looking at 6-figure plus salaries.

Money does not directly relate. It applies to many parts of the system and its end result can be seen, but you do not cut funding one year and the kids instantly become dropouts. It makes it very hard to make nice neat statistical graphs and observations!

[Ninjahedge]

And Elf, the privatre sector is not the hail mary that will solve executive inefficiency.

Not without strict regulation.

Our own financial situation should be testament enough on that one. Sometimes it is not the manager that gets the best results that matters, but the one that can crush the competition.

Somehow I really do not see that fitting in the education sector.....

[elflord1973]

Originally Posted by Ninjahedge

And Elf, the privatre sector is not the hail mary that will solve executive inefficiency.

Not without strict regulation.

I don't see this so much as public vs private as much as having some incentives in place. This could be done within the framework of a public system (at least in theory it could) but this is a problem the private sector is much more effective at addressing.

You didn't answer my other question -- what principles determine whether an industry is a good candidate for government takeover ? If the schools, then why not the bakeries ?

Our own financial situation should be testament enough on that one.

The two are not comparable, not unless schools become public-traded limited liability corporations. I agree that this would be bad for schools (I think it's bad for investment banks too).

However, can you name a single country that has the government running the banking system, that has a stronger economy than the US ? For all complaints about the financial system, it is as good as any other despite its problems.

[Ninjahedge]

Should I count the debt that we paid off or not?

Also, there are countries that have lost less of their net worth through the banking collapse because of their own stricter regulation. Basically every "western" nation (including the ones ni the east! ) that followed our lead in deregulation has had major problems and many have resorted to government bailouts.

So doing a comparison along the lines you have drawn is not a fair comparison.

It is like pointing out the success of football players that used steroids and ignoring not only their near-term baldness, but their premature illnesses and death because of it.

Our financial intsitutions did indeed beat the pants off of the others in the world, but that is only because of the stuff they were injecting in their own butts when they were allowed.

[elflord1973]

Originally Posted by Ninjahedge

Should I count the debt that we paid off or not?

Also, there are countries that have lost less of their net worth through the banking collapse because of their own stricter regulation.

I'm not against regulation. One can make good arguments for regulation (you haven't done so, but others have)

But even a well regulated baking sector is not analogous to a government run education system.

If you're arguing that a heavily privatized education system would need substantial regulation, I wouldn't disagree with you (indeed, I'd be happy to outline specific reasons why regulation would be appropriate there, and why I think the same argument would not apply to a bakery or shoe store).

What I'm proposing is hardly radical, and contrary to what you may think, it's not a "left/right" issue. The US is unique in having essentially a feudal system based on a vicious, regressive "keep the bums out" mentality. The left buy into this because politicians buy out key players like government workers and teachers unions.

In social-democrat Australia (where I'm from), it is possible to go to a school in another district, you need to go through some bureaucratic dance but it's possible (because schools are largely state funded). And even "socialist" Sweden has a voucher system. You think of the idea of being able to choose which school you attend as some kind of extreme fringe right wing idea because you're focused on US policy debates, but in the overall scheme of things, the system in the US is a nasty hierarchical bureaucracy that is good for little other than maintaining the prevailing social order -- a peculiar mix between right wing and left wing authoritarianism. The irony is that there are countries generally considered a long way "left" of the US, who implement some of these ideas.

Our financial intsitutions did indeed beat the pants off of the others in the world, but that is only because of the stuff they were injecting in their own butts when they were allowed.

But it's not just our financial institutions. Centrally planned economies collapse under their own weight.

Economies that work well are based on a system of bilaterally informed, voluntary exchanges (that means, private industry). One can debate how much regulation or what type of regulation is appropriate, but the basic principal is universal among successful economies.

[Ninjahedge]

Actually, I was able to go to a different school district when I was in HS Elf.

I just had to pay. Advantage was that I paid less since my mother worked there.

But you can choose (sorry I cherry-picked that one).

Maybe what the system needs is to be branched off a bit from the executive level. We really need to study this and find a way to make the people who WANT to teach (a very unforgiving job) teach and be rewarded for it, but give them a bit of insulation from the politics of the private sector. Tenure may be a bit drastic, but some protection needs to be afforded to these people, especially in this litegeous and backstabbing world we have evolved into (even "friendly" districts/markets can really test your moral mettle.)

Anyway, a heavily regulated private sector, or a more compartmentalized public sector structure might be needed, but as we have seen with many things, sometimes even "help" programs are more constrictive than helpful (what was that school lunch program deal a few years back? They needed a certain amount of food, or milk, or something, and actually made it more expensive to get aid than to do without....)

School administration may need to go private sector, but teachers (good ones) are hard to come by and do not fit the private secor mode 100%. We really need to see what bait attracts them, and what fish-food keeps them from going belly-up.