The Addiction by Ferrara, 1995

“Look at me and tell me to go away. Don’t ask. Tell me.”

“What’s your major?”
“Anthropology.”
“You like it?”
“What else is there? Man is the measure of all things.”
“Protagoras, right?”
“What are you studying?”
“Adversity’s sweet milk, philosophy.”
…
“How can you act so glibly. Look what you’ve done to me. How could you do this? Doesn’t this affect you at all?”
“No. It was your decision. Your friend Feuerbach wrote that all men counting stars are equivalent in every way to god. My indifference is not the concern here. It’s your astonishment that needs study.”

“You’re halfway through your dissertation, you don’t go to class, you don’t study, you don’t conference. I don’t know what the hell you’re doing.”
“Every philosopher had a predecessor without whom his system of philosophy could never have developed. The same could be said for all of us but you see it’s all frail, because our predecessor doesn’t have a name…”
“Predecessor to what? I don’t know what you’re talking about… I don’t even know who I’m talking to. Kathy you gotta get some help.”
“You know, this obtuseness is disheartening, especially in a doctoral candidate. You ought to know better.”

“Your breath smells like shit, you know that? …They fall like flies before the hunger, don’t they? You can never get enough, can you? But you learn to control it, you learn like the Tibetans to survive on a little… The entire world’s a graveyard and we — the birds of prey picking at the bones. That’s all we are, we’re the ones who let the dying know the hour has come. You think Nietzsche understood something? Mankind has striven to exist beyond good and evil from the beginning. You know what they found? Me. You want tea?”
“No.”
“Maybe later.”
“How can you drink it?”
“A lot of people drink tea.”
“I mean people like us.”
“I’m not like you. You’re nothing. That’s something you ought not to forget. You’re not a person, you’re nothing. Have you read Naked Lunch?”

The Redness of Strawberries

[I started writing this post a few weeks ago. In part it was an attempt to outline some aspects of the philosophical realism debates to my wife Anne, who studied the psychology of visual perception in grad school. There was probably more I intended to write, but I don’t recall what it was any more.]

The strawberry looks red to me; it looks red to you. Does it look red to our cat? Presumably not: in empirical findings, cats don’t spontaneously distinguish red from other colors. So what is it about the strawberry that makes it look red to me? What is it about human vision that makes strawberries look red to us? In what ways does human vision differ from feline vision, such that members of these two species perceive the same strawberry differently? These are questions dealing with both visual perception and the properties of light, questions addressed by empirical science.

Is it an intrinsic quality of human vision that we have the potential to see as red any object reflecting light within a certain range of  wavelengths? Is it an intrinsic property of light falling within a particular range of wavelengths that it has the potential to be seen by any human as red? Did the light possess this intrinsic potential for being seen as red by humans even before there were any humans on earth? Does the strawberry possess the intrinsic potential for being perceived in all manner of ways by an infinite number of potential species that haven’t yet evolved and that may never actually evolve anywhere in the universe?

Alternatively, is there something about the human visual sensory-perception system that makes us see light within certain wavelengths as red or, even more strongly, that makes the light red for us? Is there something about the light that causes it to be seen by humans as red, that makes humans see its redness? What is the relation between a thing’s passive receptivity on the one hand, and its active agency on the other?

Maybe the red that I see when looking at the strawberry is a property not of my vision nor of the strawberry, but of the vision-strawberry-light interaction. Maybe it isn’t reducible to intrinsic properties of my vision or the strawberry or the reflected light; rather, it is a hybrid object that emerges from the vision-strawberry-light interaction. Does this imply that the red strawberry which I see comes into being as I look at the strawberry? Is this emergent hybrid red-strawberry-seen object a different thing from the nonred-strawberry-seen object that emerges when the cat looks at the strawberry? Does the hybrid red-strawberry-seen object cease to exist when I stop looking at it? When I look again, is it the same hybrid object as I saw before, or is it a new one?

Can any of these philosophical distinctions be addressed through empirical scientific investigation? Or are they just interesting ideas to speculate about?

In a World…

Lately I’ve been looking at some entertaining film trailers made by high school students, trailers for movies that don’t exist. Watching these pseudo-trailers it’s clear that a certain Hollywood style has become the gold standard. And in a world of Hollywood movie trailers, one Voice demanded to be heard: Don LaFontaine. LaFontaine died two years ago, but his legacy endures. Here’s a brief sample of his work:

So I was taking a walk this morning, thinking about some of the philosophical ideas I’ve been exposed to over the past year and a half, when suddenly I could almost hear Don LaFontaine’s voice-over:

In a world of real objects that never interact, objects wrapped within objects within objects that never touch each other, objects whose own pieces are not even parts of the objects, there is a Plasm where the objects’ sensual doppelgängers go to spawn hideous and unspeakable hybrids. In a society without people, a society that communicates only with itself, a society surrounded by individuals who cannot communicate with one another, two Men demand to be heard…

Bright Ideas

Here’s an odd little study, conducted by Tufts U. psychologist Michael Slepian. Apparently light bulbs really can stimulate bright ideas.

Slepian and his colleagues gave college students spatial, math and verbal problems to solve and had either a bare light bulb or an overhead fluorescent light turned on in the room partway into the problem. The volunteers either solved the problems faster or more often with the light bulb than with the fluorescent light.

It turned out that the bright-idea effect didn’t occur if the light bulb was shaded.

“Our findings are not a result of the level or type of lighting, but are a function of exposure to the symbol of insight, the light bulb,” Slepian explained.

Read the rest here.

Common Interests, Common Needs

From this AP story:

Israel’s deadly raid on a Gaza-bound aid ship has ignited unprecedented anger in Turkey and driven the Jewish state’s relations with its most important Muslim ally to their lowest point in six decades. There are signs, however, that the countries’ long-term strategic alliance and military ties will endure…

Turkey’s eight-year-old Islamic-rooted government has publicly and frequently expressed outrage over Israel’s 2008-2009 war in Gaza and continuing blockade of the strip. But Turkey’s deeply secular military remains heavily dependent on high-tech Israeli arms in its battle against Kurdish separatist guerrillas based along Turkey’s mountainous southeastern border with Iraq. Israel’s right-leaning government said that the countries’ defense ministers had agreed hours after the raid that the incident wouldn’t affect Israeli weapons sales to Turkey.

The massive Heron drones to be delivered this summer can fly at least 20 hours nonstop and first saw action against Hamas militants in the Gaza war. Turkey hopes they can gather crucial intelligence on Kurdish rebels and allow pinpoint strikes at a time of escalating insurgent attacks. Israel also recently completed a more than $1 billion upgrade of Turkey’s aging tank fleet and U.S.-made F-4 warplanes. Turkey has opened its airspace to Israeli pilots for training purposes.

“There are still common interests, common needs,” said Ofra Bengio, a professor of Middle Eastern history at Tel Aviv University’s Dayan Center.

First, I’m aware of the pot calling the kettle black: both governments are allied in their efforts to suppress large indigenous ethnic populations with military force. Second, I become aware of someone pointing out to me the blackness of the pot, so that the kettle doesn’t look quite so bad in comparison. Third, on some level it doesn’t matter as long as the blockade gets lifted.

Greedy Physician Bastards

In pushing toward what passed as healthcare reform legislation, supporters from both parties promoted a core commitment: we want doctors to make treatment decisions, not government bureaucrats or greedy insurance companies. As this news story reminds us, doctors also contribute to the healthcare greed factor.

Medicare, the federally-run health plan for retirees, accounts for about 20% of all healthcare expenditures in the US. In effect Medicare functions as a government-run insurance company, negotiating contracts with doctors, hospitals, pharmas, etc. and reimbursing them for services they deliver to covered health plan members. By most accounts Medicare runs a pretty tight ship, incurring lower overhead costs than private insurers while delivering equal or better health outcomes. Medicare also costs less than private insurance. That’s largely because Medicare negotiates tough contracts, reimbursing the various provider sectors at lower rates than do private insurers.

The federal reform bill, in order to cover some of the costs of increased access to care, imposed fees on private health insurers, pharmas, and medical device manufacturers. The legislation also included some cuts in Medicare, specifically to privately-administered Medicare plans, home care, and selected hospital expenses.

Now comes the time for Congress to decide about Medicare reimbursement rates for physicians. A 21% cut had previously been agreed upon, but the effective date for implementing the cut has repeatedly been delayed. The doctors of course would like to see the effective date pushed back indefinitely or, better yet, eliminated altogether. Democratic Party leadership, including Obama and Pelosi, have assured the AMA that they will stop the pay cut. But the doctors and their lobbyists aren’t satisfied with that: they want other Medicare cuts mandated in the reform bill to be spent on an increase in Medicare physician reimbursement rates.

Just listen to this sob story cited in the linked article:

“In the past two years, (lawmakers) keep coming up to the deadline — or a little past it — and waiving the cuts for shorter and shorter periods of time, which makes us uneasy,” said Dr. Susan Crittenden, a primary care physician practicing near Raleigh, N.C. “The current uncertainty about what the fee schedule will be, and whether at some point there will be a 20 percent cut, makes it harder to accept new Medicare patients,” Crittenden said. Although government surveys indicate that Medicare beneficiaries’ access compares favorably to that of privately insured patients, doctors and patients say that’s not always the case. Crittenden’s practice takes very few new Medicare patients, since the program pays her medical group well below private insurers’ rates. “I like to take care of older adults, but I have rent to pay, and a staff to pay,” she explained.

Of course this sort of alarmist rhetoric is aimed at retirees and their lobbyists: get us more money or we’ll quit taking care of you. It’s a thinly-veiled extortion threat. In this human-interest vignette the Feds come off as the villains, while the private insurers are implicitly portrayed as the good guys. Because private insurers pay them a living wage the doctors are less anxious, able to pay the rent and the staff, able to satisfy their longing to take care of old people. Hey, whatever it takes.

I noticed that Dr. Crittenden makes no mention of her thwarted desire to treat poor people, whose Medicaid reimbursement rates are indexed at a discount even below the Medicare rates. Like many other doctors, she probably already stopped accepting Medicaid patients some time ago. Besides, there’s no political leverage to be gained by calling attention to poor people’s lack of access to care. Most voters believe that they’ll never become chronically unemployed, but they do look forward to a comfortable retirement in which their healthcare needs are taken care of.

Physician fees account for less than one-fourth of all US healthcare costs. However, doctors also control access to all the other expensive healthcare goods and services: they prescribe drugs and lab tests and medical devices, they admit patients to hospitals and long-term care facilities, and so on. Consequently, all these other industry lobbyists support the doctor-centered model of care, which of course means embracing the proposed increases in physician reimbursement.

According to this governmental report, primary care physicians in the US earn about $186,000 per year on average; for specialists it’s $340,000. Not surprisingly there’s a shortage of primary care docs nationwide, while the vast majority of med school students plan to train as specialists. Physicians in the US are paid more than 5 times the average wage; French physicians, in contrast, make a bit more than twice the national average. Is American doctoring worth it? According to most empirical studies with which I’m familiar, health outcomes and adherence to evidence-based practices are no better in America than in France. And, as has been widely observed, population health is worse in the US than in France.

Most physicians in the US work for themselves, either as individuals or as members of physician-owned group practices. They make money by working, and there are no outside investors who skim a share of doctors’ revenues as profit. In a sense doctors are the champions of an anarcho-syndicalist economy in which workers own the means and the output of production. Somehow I’m not sure I want a healthcare system controlled by these particular working-class heroes, any more than I want it controlled by the for-profit insurance companies or by the corporate employers who hire insurers to manage their employees’ health benefit plans.

More Kenzie Art

In honor of our daughter Kenzie completing her third year of high school, here are three more of her paintings.

“Medusa” (acrylic) This piece won the “People’s Choice Award” at the Jared Polis Congressional Art Show earlier this month. Jared Polis is the U.S. Representative from our district. He made his fortune by launching an online greeting card company, so he’s probably always been into art. Polis actually attended the Show and handed out the awards, so Kenzie had a chance to chat with him a bit. He seems like a nice guy.

“Noche de los Muertos” (acrylic)

“The Bauble” (watercolor)

Bachelor’s Degree Equivalency

On a prior thread here, as well as in recent discussions at Perverse Egalitarianism and Hyper Tiling, it’s been observed that higher education is too often regarded as a consumer good, bought by students and sold by colleges and universities. For undergrads the most valuable educational commodity is the bachelor’s degree, required as an eligibility requirement by many employers and by graduate schools. The degree is bought in installments as it were: once you accumulate the required number of credit hours you get the sheepskin. Colleges charge a lot of money per credit hour, and the bill has to be paid by somebody — the government, the student, rich patrons of private colleges — if those credit hours are going to be credited to the student’s account. Even if a student takes on the formidable task of self-study, amassing as much knowledge as does a traditional college degree recipient, there is no badge of achievement to be bestowed on the autodidact. Only formally-accredited colleges and universities can award the bachelor’s degree, and they award degrees only to students who enroll in and pass the required number of courses.

But why couldn’t there be an equivalent to the bachelor’s degree?

There’s an equivalent to the high school diploma, at least in the US and Canada. Students who pass the standardized GED tests receive a high school equivalency certificate, accepted by most employers and by 95% of US colleges. That’s fairly remarkable, since the GED certificate-holder tends to carry a public stigma: it’s widely assumed that the GED betokens academic failure in high school, behavior problems that got the kid expelled, perhaps teen motherhood for girls. I’ve not looked into research about how well the GED kids perform at the next level; I do know that my cousin, who dropped out of high school and who eventually got her GED, later earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees.

On the other side of the spectrum, bright and industrious students can earn college credits while still in high school. High scores on standardized Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate exams and essays can be worth up to two years of college credit hours. The student pays a fee for AP and IB evaluations, but the price is minuscule compared to college tuition. Of course these courses aren’t free: they’re taught by high school teachers as part of their salaried job. But that’s interesting in its own right: these are successful teachers of college-level courses who typically have at most a bachelor’s degree in the subjects they’re teaching.

It’s even possible to earn an associate degree — the terminal degree awarded by community colleges — simultaneously with a high school diploma. Unlike IB and AP courses, these dual-enrollment programs don’t target the highest-aptitude students; rather, they’re intended for kids who, often for financial reasons, don’t expect to continue their educations after high school. Apparently the added challenge and incentive of the dual-enrollment option also tends to keep more kids in high school who otherwise would be at high risk of dropping out.

It’s not like a bachelor’s degree is some sort of standardized product. Requirements differ quite widely by school and by majors. Even within a particular school, two profs might teach the same course very differently, using widely disparate teaching materials, imposing very different expectations on their students. The high school AP and IB courses present far more uniformity than do the “real” college courses for which they serve as equivalents. “Real” college professors might deem this level of standardization a bad development, turning education into a production line that minimizes the importance of individuality among professors and students alike. Maybe so, but isn’t there always the danger of mystification and fetishization in claiming that the essence of one’s product cannot be reduced to formulaic specification and quantification, even when the very high price charged for that product is very precisely specified and quantified indeed?  Still, standardization can be done, and it is being done successfully in the case of AP and IB.

Why not take educational standardization even farther: not just two years’ of college credit, but four; not just an associate degree, but a bachelor’s degree? Let some panel of professors agree upon what should constitute adequate preparation generally and in specific subject areas to qualify for the undergraduate degree. Broadly specify the course curriculum and readings; organize discussion sessions either in person or on line; conduct standardized exams; have the experts evaluate the exams, essays, and theses. Students who qualify could earn a bachelor’s degree without ever setting foot in a traditional college lecture hall or, more importantly, without paying the exorbitant and always-increasing tuition expense. I’m sure the brick-and-mortar universities will want protect their product. Fine: call it a B.A. or B.S. equivalent then. If it’s done right, I think the word would eventually spread among employers and grad schools that the equivalent really is equivalent.

Still Not Persuaded

When I woke up way too early this morning I was thinking, based on yesterday’s discussion of my last post, that I’m still not persuaded about the value of perpetuating the present post-secondary educational system. To dismantle all collective learning, relying entirely on individual self-study via books and websites: I agree, that’s not a very good alternative. But surely some some sort of mutual learning-teaching circuitry could be strung together.

Carl says that college students need motivation to learn and encouragement to keep trying, and I don’t doubt it. Everybody needs at least an occasional outside boost to their own inner motivation; everyone needs someone to help them believe in their own ability to do something hard if they keep at it. But couldn’t students motivate and encourage each other, without paying somebody else to do it?

As things currently stand, students surely do motivate each other to an extent in the classroom. But given the way the goals of the process are set up, education tends to devolve into a solo game. Each high schooler is trying to squeeze a few more points onto the GPA and SAT so he or she can compete for the highest-prestige colleges. And how do the students identify those desirable colleges? Mostly it’s by the cumulative GPAs and SATs of the students currently enrolled there. At least implicitly the aspiring collegians are expecting to join a cohort of their intellectual peers in a mutual learning environment. But then they get to college and it’s still mostly about squeezing a few more points onto the GPA in order to compete for jobs and grad school at the next level.

Schools and teachers have historically established communal enclaves that honor and embody the higher standards of truth, knowledge, thought, imagination. Students strive toward achieving those higher standards of learning; teachers demonstrate, encourage, and lead the way toward mastering the standards and pushing their boundaries even farther. All that is good. I’d just like to see the collective power of students to motivate and encourage one another be more effectively brought into play.

If investor-dominated capitalism perpetuates itself in the daily practices of everyone who participates in it, then the current structure and practice of higher education seems too willingly complicit in that perpetuation. If we want to move toward something closer to anarcho-syndicalism, it’s almost surely not going to kick in once the students leave school and take paying jobs. The workplace already presents a pretty compelling collective motivation: maximize corporate profits. From inside the corporate world it’s hard to resist, either individually or collectively, the persistent motivation and encouragement, not to mention the demand, to contribute to the bottom line. Something has to give, and usually it’s the workers’ shared commitment to standards of excellence. Clearly the marketplace dominance of money over excellence is a prime reason why so many of the brightest college students say that they’d rather not, striving mightily to stay as long as they can in the relatively idealized university environment. But the ivy-covered walls are being breached: funding gets squeezed, professorial jobs get scarcer, the universities seem more and more like industrial training facilities.

I suspect I’m being a bit post-apocalyptic in my imaginary overhaul of higher education, anticipating how the traditions and standards could be perpetuated if the money for higher education suddenly dried up. Would kids all go straight from high school into paying jobs, learning only what their employers require of them in order to contribute to the bottom line? Or would the higher learning standards still issue a call that at least some could hear and heed? Even if no money changed hands, could learners voluntarily band together to honor the higher standards, to strive together toward them, to push their boundaries? In short, could learning take place entirely divorced from the capitalistic flows of money and power, flows that are fueled by individuals competing with each other to further the interests of the investor class?

For an increasing number of prospective college students the apocalypse is already here, with the ever-higher price tag of a university education being out of reach. The economy has already collapsed through aggressive lending and excessive borrowing; even so, prospective college students are encouraged to take on massive student loans with the expectation that the investment will pay off later in the form of higher-paying career opportunities. In order to pay off those loans, the graduate is immediately locked into an economic climate in which earning the greatest amount of money takes first priority. And what if those jobs aren’t there in four years? Defaults, personal bankruptcies, the public footing the bill on piles of toxic federal loans. And if the jobs dry up, where do the higher tax revenues come from to cover those bad student loans? Borrowing, again.

Maybe in fantasizing a tuition-free, cooperative model of college education I’m being a kind of accelerationist, pushing toward the apocalypse. But I’m thinking, why wait for disaster to strike? Maybe an imagined post-apocalyptic scheme could be better than the one we’re trying to preserve. Talk is cheap; so are books: you could rig up a pretty powerful system with just those two components.

Of course nobody is going to hire me to redesign higher education, or any other industry for that matter, along the lines of an anarcho-syndicalist model. And God knows I’m no inspirational leader. I’m told that impractical ideologically-motivated schemes sap energy from making incremental improvements in what already exists. I have a hard enough time distinguishing between fiction and reality, between what could easily be and what couldn’t possibly be. But as I’ve said often enough before: hey, it’s just a blog post. I’d originally written this rant as a comment on yesterday’s thread, but it got too long. Now it’s a new post. I’ve already got yet another education-related post queued up, but I’ll stick this editorial commentary in here first.

Stop Paying Professors to Teach

Two people graduate from high school. Both are deemed adults by their society: they can drive, vote, rent an apartment, join the military, go to jail, get married. (Paradoxically in the US, they can’t drink alcohol legally.) They can reproduce. One of these two people goes to college; the other takes a job. The one who goes to college pays; the one who takes a job gets paid. They’re both learning something new, by means of written learning materials, guidance from masters in the field, discussion, self-study, and practice. After a year the college student has 3 more years to go until graduation; the one who took a job can do work at a professional level of competence.

Two people graduate from college. One goes to graduate school; the other takes a job. The grad student neither pays nor is paid; the one who took the job gets paid. They’re both learning something new, by means of written learning materials, guidance from masters in the field, discussion, self-study, and practice. After a year both the grad student and the one who took a job can do work at a professional level of competence.

Adults are capable of learning on their own, without having to pay professionals to teach them. They can read, think, discuss, ask questions of those who know more than they do. Teachers can be beneficial to adult learning, having greater expertise than the students. Teachers can also infantilize their adult students by perpetuating dependency relationships firmly established in childhood. Quantitatively or qualitatively, it’s not clear whether adult students learn better among themselves or under the supervision and tutelage of an expert.

Adult students can be useful to experts. Beginning by performing menial tasks, students can rapidly acquire the skills and knowledge required to attain some core competencies in their professors’ areas of expertise, even becoming active contributors to the professors’ research. It would seem a fair trade for the professors to guide the students’ learning in exchange for the students’ labor as research assistants. What about students who want only an overview of several academic disciplines, without gaining competence as a practitioner in those disciplines? Give them a set of standard reading materials and a forum for discussion and let them have at it. Or an advanced student who is attaining competence in that field can teach — just as grad students often do now.

I don’t see why college shouldn’t be organized like graduate school. No money changes hands. Students learn, gradually attaining competence in doing work in the fields they study. Professors do research, benefiting in their labs from the work their students gradually learn to perform. It’s still not quite as good a deal for the students as taking a paying job, but it’s better than having to pay their own money — or their parents’ money or the taxpayers’ money — to do something they could do on their own or in a cooperative exchange with professors that’s mutually beneficial.

Why isn’t college organized this way? In part it’s because a college degree is widely regarded as an entry requirement for higher-status, more enjoyable, better-paying jobs, and so spending the time as full-time learners eventually pays off financially. Also, there’s the intrinsic value of learning for its own sake, a value for which there is no financial reward. But why should students have to pay for these opportunities to learn and to advance their career prospects, rather than just putting in the time and effort? In no small part it’s because college professors don’t get paid enough to do the work in the fields of research in which they’ve attained expertise. They have to support themselves financially, in full or in part, by teaching. The government, which at one time covered the teaching expenses for college students just as they still do for primary and secondary school, no longer pays the full cost. That could have meant fewer professors handling larger class sizes in order to keep education free for the students. Instead it means that the students have to pay more and more out of their own pockets to cover their professors’ salaries.

In order to preserve this source of income, the professors and their administrators sell the value not just of advanced education but of the college degree. Adults can learn on their own, individually or collectively, but they cannot bestow a degree on themselves or on one another. Only universities are authorized to dispense this particular credential. If you want it, you’re going to have to pay for it.

Increasingly, areas of work expertise are transformed into areas of teaching specialization, while universities are transformed from research centers into adult education schools. In American liberal arts colleges and community colleges, the professors might not even be expected to do research: they’re paid to teach and only to teach. Maybe it’s always been this way. But does it have to stay this way? Let the taxpaying public finance the research that gets done in the universities (and recoup the return on investment, if there is any, rather than handing it over to industrial investors). Let the learning take care of itself.

Put Teachers In Charge

I’ve been posting quite a bit about teaching lately, much of it critical. It’s not that I dislike teachers (though I do, kind of, but let’s not get into that). Rather, I’ve been trying to decide whether I really believe that teachers rather than the government should make the decisions about educational policy and implementation. Facing tighter budgets, school administrators are making at-times draconian cuts to teacher salaries and staffing. Teachers and professors believe that they aren’t being adequately represented in the decision-making process, that the MBA types who run the show are more concerned about the bottom line and pleasing big-business constituents than about excellence in education. I’m inclined to side with the teachers. On the other hand, managers and pedagogical specialists and evaluators are workers too. Just because they don’t provide their services directly to the students doesn’t mean they’re the teachers’ enemies or that their expertise is useless to the educational mission. The point is to use the taxpayers’ money to educate students as effectively as possible. All the educational workers are competing for fewer resources these days; it’s not their fault that property values have sunk and unemployment has skyrocketed, cutting the two primary sources of school funding.

A brief organizational recap: In the US, primary and high school teachers typically work for the local School District, which is a form of local government. There are over 13 thousand independent school districts in America. The local School District finances education via tax revenues, typically a combination of local property tax and state income tax. Each school district is administered by a Board of Education, elected by the citizenry served by the district. The Board sets the overall educational policy and budget for the district, usually in collaboration with the state government’s Department of Education. The School Board hires a Superintendent to function as chief executive for the School District. The Superintendent need not be an educator; many are a professional administrators hired from the private sector. Typically the School Board defers to the Superintendent on overall District management, pedagogy, finances, hiring/firing, etc. In most School Districts the teachers are unionized, though union membership is not mandatory in all Districts and unionization may be banned by charter in selected publicly-financed schools.

Let’s say the economy sputters and the tax revenues decline at both the state and local levels. The School Board, representing the community at large, looks to the Superintendent to cut expenses. The Superintendent, typically a non-educator MBA type officed in a separate admin building, gathers pertinent info from admin staff and school prinicipals, then makes a decision. The teachers, two or three degrees of separation from the Superintendent, feel disenfranchised and out of the loop. They see teaching budgets being slashed while administrative overhead seems to have survived relatively unscathed. The Teachers’ Union makes an appeal directly to the School Board, but the Board defers to the Superintendent whom they hired for making just these sorts of decisions. Resentment and alienation builds among the teachers.

My inclination is to support a reorg of the educational system in which School Districts are run directly by the teachers as independent non-profit organizations rather than by the governmental School Boards. That way the teachers themselves can decide how to make the best use of the tax revenues allocated for education, rather than having government bureaucrats imposing these decisions on them. Let the teachers hire their administrators rather than vice versa; let them decide what sorts of evaluators and experts they need. The teachers can still make public pleas for more funding, but at least in hard times they’re collectively making their own decisions about salary cuts and which employees to let go.

My main concern about teacher-run school districts is that the teachers would be more concerned with preserving their profession and their own jobs than with doing the best, most cost-effective job of educating the students.

I’m not a teacher, so I’m not directly affected by the current turmoil in the schools. I do have a kid who attends the local public high school, though. From my kid’s perspective, I say the more teachers the better — whatever helps my Special Snowflake maximize her potential. But I’m also a local resident and so a contributor of tax revenues to the local School District. US public primary and secondary schools spend an average of over $10,000 per student. That seems like a lot to me, especially given the paucity of evidence linking money spent to educational effectiveness.

Teachers tend to resist systematic teacher evaluations, usually on the grounds that none of the evaluation tools adequately assesses the value of what teachers really do. But there are empirically validated, if admittedly imperfect, methods of evaluating teacher effectiveness, based both on student learning results and on observation of teaching process. Teachers’ unions protect existing jobs, even if it means keeping crappy teachers at the high end of the pay range just because they have seniority. But new laws in many states are mandating teacher evaluations, with financial penalties imposed on school districts that fail to act on the findings, which may require dismissing underperforming teachers. And that means union-busting.

I read about online schooling ideas and I think that maybe they’re a good way to reduce costs per student without adversely affecting learning. Local teachers typically resist online schooling, which creates an opportunity for investors to set up for-profit companies. These companies meet students’ and parents’ demand for low-cost online courses, charging prices equal to or higher than traditional brick-and-mortar schools, while paying their teachers less (non-union, on contract rather than salaried, fewer benefits). Then these schools collect their pro-rata share of tax revenues to pay for their services, with investors reaping profits at the taxpayers’ and public schools’ expense.

It seems that there ought to be a way for public schools to get lighter on their feet, more open to pedagogical innovation, more willing to change practices in light of research findings, with less antagonism between administrators and teachers, and with more support from the local citizenry. It would involve some sort of cooperative model built on a shared commitment among teachers, students, parents, and taxpayers to achieving the best and most efficient education for the most kids. And if the teachers’ unions want to protect less-effective teachers’ jobs, then the schools and the teachers will collectively have to figure out how best to compensate for these teachers’ failings so that the students don’t have to pay the price.

Despite the teachers’ resistance to change, I’d still prefer that they run the School District rather than political appointees. It’s the teachers who can make the best use of pedagogical innovations generated by researchers and by other schools around the country. The money to pay for the schools still comes from the taxpayers, and so the State Department of Education and the local School Board will still function as the citizens’ advocates, deciding how much money is available to the schools and evaluating how wisely that money is being spent in educating the community’s kids. That should include conducting meaningful evaluations of teaching practices and student outcomes. But the citizens and the governments would have to be willing to let the teachers figure out how best to make use of the evaluation data in order to do a better job.

SAT Prep Courses Not Worth It (gasp!)

Results on the standardized Scholastic Aptitude Test are required of students applying for admission at most American colleges and universities. SAT prep courses are a big business aimed at college-bound kids and especially at their parents. Fierce competition for getting into the best universities, aggravated by persistent fears of personal inadequacy, create the perfect market conditions for these courses. The Princeton Review (classy name) is probably the biggest vendor of SAT prep courses. In their material they claim dramatic improvements in SAT scores for kids who go through their program. Now, based on empirical evaluation, it turns out that — surprise — the purported effectiveness of the Princeton Review course is grossly exaggerated!

“Scott Kirkpatrick, president of the test-preparation services division of The Princeton Review, said that the company had been planning to shift away from an emphasis on score improvement independently of the Better Business Bureaus case, and that it is changing its focus to offer a more personalized approach to helping students improve in all areas. ‘Score improvement is not our core mission,” he said. “I don’t want us to be a test-prep company. We need to be an education company.'”

What a happy coincidence then that the empirical debunking coincides so closely to Scott and his buddies’ decision to rescind their public claims of enormous score improvements.

Practical implications of the evaluation: don’t waste your money on the prep course, make educated guesses on SAT questions you’re not sure of, take the test twice but not three times, and accept your strengths/limitations with whatever equanimity you can muster. If you do really poorly on the college entrance exams but you really want to go to college, apply to schools that don’t require the test.

In interpreting the results of the evaluation, do we infer that:

(a)  the test prep teachers and curriculum aren’t very good?

(b)  the test prep students are slackers who fail to take full advantage of the the course?

(c)  the SAT reliably measures something that resists teaching/studying to the test?

(d)  the $1200 prep course isn’t intensive enough — we need a more personalized $6000 prep course?

French Farm Aid

Interesting economic news from France:

“Supermarkets have agreed to cut their profit margins on fruit and veg to help producers make ends meet… Supermarkets that do not follow the new rules will be sanctioned with a higher tax rate on the land they own.”

See the rest of the story here. In contrast to the dominance of corporate farming in the US, the traditional small family farm still predominates in France.