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If the Economy Were a School District...

Malerin

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It would have been taken over by the government by now. The economy's "benchmarks" over the last ten years have been terrible:
- Negative job growth for the entire decade
- Negative stock market (DJIA) growth for the decade.
- Negative income growth for the decade


In education, we're told competition (ala the free market) will help rescue failing schools. It doesn't seem to have worked too well for the...um...free market itself.

Mr. Duncan, can we get a "charter" economy to compete with this economy?
 
What would Secretary Duncan know about the actual day-to-day job of teaching? He never taught a day in his life. To him children are widgets on an assembly line of free enterprise. Just another product.
 
Malerin said:
In education, we're told competition (ala the free market) will help rescue failing schools. It doesn't seem to have worked too well for the...um...free market itself.
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What on earth gave you the idea that competition is supposed to rescue failing schools? Of course it won't, that's not the point. The point of competition is to let students abandon failing schools and find schools that are not failing. Imagine if Lehman Brothers' customers were not allowed to take their money elsewhere...
 
Malerin said:
It would have been taken over by the government by now. The economy's "benchmarks" over the last ten years have been terrible:
- Negative job growth for the entire decade
- Negative stock market (DJIA) growth for the decade.
- Negative income growth for the decade


In education, we're told competition (ala the free market) will help rescue failing schools. It doesn't seem to have worked too well for the...um...free market itself.

Mr. Duncan, can we get a "charter" economy to compete with this economy?
Click to expand...
Argument by analogy, is it?

Given that education and commerce are two different things, with two totally different goals and two totally different mechanisms for achieving those goals, it sure seems like you're analogizing apples to bicycles.

What analogous aspects of education and commerce do you wish us to consider as being suitably comparable in your argument?
 
Malerin said:
In education, we're told competition (ala the free market) will help rescue failing schools. It doesn't seem to have worked too well for the...um...free market itself.

Mr. Duncan, can we get a "charter" economy to compete with this economy?
Click to expand...

I really don't think you want to get into finger-pointing at failed governments -- and failed because of democracy and bread and circuses. State of California, Detroit, New Jersey, et al.

The only difference is democracy doesn't give you a choice in the matter.
 
By the way, I submit a school district with the stats of the "bad economy" would be considered a spectacular school district. Compare to something like Detroit's, which has been taken over by the state, with something like 25-50% graduation rate, depending on how it's calculated.


In any case, governments that have "taken over" their economies...don't do too well historically.
 
Ziggurat said:
The point of competition is to let students abandon failing schools and find schools that are not failing.
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Yes, that is the point, however it doesn't happen that much. Under No Child Left Behind children have the right to leave failing schools. Very few do. The reasons are multiple: parental apathy, travel issues, not enough seats in other schools. Even researching which schools are better can be confusing. In NYC schools are assigned simple designations: A, B, C, & D. Parents still send their kids to D schools.
 
Beerina said:
Compare to something like Detroit's, which has been taken over by the state, with something like 25-50% graduation rate, depending on how it's calculated.
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It is indeed very tricky how it is calculated. Let's assume that a high school admits 500 students to it's 9th grade class. The school is rated based on how many of those 500 graduate after four years. Students who dropped out, transferred to other schools, moved away or died are still counted as part of the original 500.

Special education and limited English learners who might need more than four years to graduate are also included in the original number.
 
theprestige said:
Given that education and commerce are two different things, with two totally different goals and two totally different mechanisms for achieving those goals, it sure seems like you're analogizing apples to bicycles.
Click to expand...

Good point. In commerce your boss can give you a shovel and a pile of dirt and your task is to dig a hole. Either you can do it or you can't. In education you're asked to complete a task without either the shovel or the dirt. Absenteeism is one of the biggest reasons for student failure. A person could be the greatest teacher since Socrates but if the kids aren't there to teach why should the teacher be held responsible for their failure?
 
Ziggurat said:
What on earth gave you the idea that competition is supposed to rescue failing schools? Of course it won't, that's not the point. The point of competition is to let students abandon failing schools and find schools that are not failing. Imagine if Lehman Brothers' customers were not allowed to take their money elsewhere...
Click to expand...

As ALT pointed out, school choice already is in place. As ALT further pointed out, many parents don't take advantage of this. Your analogy misses the mark. It should read:

"Imagine if Lehman Brothers' customers could take their money elsewhere...but chose not to do so."

That would say a lot about those customers, wouldn't it?

Edit: This thread properly belongs in education. My point is that competion-based solutions like RTT are band-aids at best. The real problem is community involvement, student/parent apathy, discipline and low attendance.
 
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Alt+F4 said:
Good point. In commerce your boss can give you a shovel and a pile of dirt and your task is to dig a hole. Either you can do it or you can't. In education you're asked to complete a task without either the shovel or the dirt. Absenteeism is one of the biggest reasons for student failure. A person could be the greatest teacher since Socrates but if the kids aren't there to teach why should the teacher be held responsible for their failure?
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Isn't this a little like the complaints about counter-terrorist security measures? People complain that the proposed security measures aren't worth much, since they can't stop super-ninja sleeper cells ... And then we find that time and time again, it's not the ninjas that are launching terrorist attacks, it's marginally-clever chumps who would have easily been stopped by even the most basic security measures, if we'd ever bothered to take counter-terrorist security seriously.

I suspect something similar is going on in the realm of public education... If it were only the absentee students that fared poorly, we probably wouldn't have much reason to complain about our teachers (instead, we'd be deputizing more truant officers).

ETA: Also, in commerce, it's assumed that the task you've been given is profitable in some way. By the time you're done with the shovel and the dirt, you, your boss, and his customer expect that things will be so improved that all three of you will be richer than you were before you began the task. But is it appropriate to impose the cold, hard logic and ruthless demands of the marketplace on education?
 
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But is it appropriate to impose the cold, hard logic and ruthless demands of the marketplace on education?
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Well, it's been pointed out "society" would get magnitudes more bang for the buck devoting resources to help the gifted than making sure every last loser can make simple change. "Oh what a horrible attitude!" :mad:

But true nonetheless. Much like devoting the trillion dollars for the war on terror into heart disease, cancer, and so on, would save one hell of a lot more lives. Probably even accounting for the occasional city nuke.


And finally, given how efficient and effective the government is, some have pointed out how unethical it is to have government teaching children. While you can argue that for some, it's "that or nothing", that doesn't mean that "that" is necessarily a good job.

Competition seems to work for producing faster computers, so why not for producing better students?
 
Beerina said:
Competition seems to work for producing faster computers, so why not for producing better students?
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Because people aren't integrated circuits, or even remotely analogous to integrated circuits.

Besides, that's my question. Instead of just repeating it, could somebody try to actually answer it?
 
Beerina said:
Probably even accounting for the occasional city nuke.
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What does this mean?

And finally, given how efficient and effective the government is, some have pointed out how unethical it is to have government teaching children.
Click to expand...

The government doesn't teach children. Human beings do.

Competition seems to work for producing faster computers, so why not for producing better students?
Click to expand...

Children are not computers or anything that can be produced on an assembly line.
 
Ziggurat said:
Children aren't produced on an assembly line, but I'm not sure about the whole can't be thing.
:duck:
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Yes, you are right, I meant to say that K-12 education can't be produced on an assembly line. Unlike widgets, every child is different.
 
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