Education - Public vs PrivateFollow

Every child should know of Vermin Supreme.

Ah yes. Let's just throw money at the problem and it'll go away. Any reason to assume that'll work? Do you suggest this because you think that education in the US is underfunded, or because you think that the military is overfunded?

I'm leaning towards the latter. But if we really want to go after overfunding, why don't we take half the money spent on health care and spend it on education instead? Wouldn't that get us even more money? Or perhaps we should focus on the actual issue of education instead of using it as an excuse to go after something else.

It's not that it has "no bearing" on outcome, but that at a certain point, the value of spending more money is outweighed by other factors. There's a whole body of studies looking at this and the conclusion is pretty clear. In school districts already doing well, spending more money improved test results and rankings. In school districts doing poorly, spending more money didn't have much effect at all. The causes of poor schools is more than just lack of funding and can't be fixed by just spending more money.



That's not clear cut at all. So if schools spend $500 on each chair instead of $50, the students will do ten times as well? That makes no sense. Just spending more money doesn't make the education better. Yes. I used a contrived example, but the point is to make it clear that you can't assume that more spending equals better education. There's lots of ways you could spend more money and not have an impact on the education outcome at all.



Even if we could assume that the movie of the week plot where all it takes is a good teacher to show up and magically the trouble making students will want to learn and turn into great citizens by the end of the semester actually happened more often than lighting hitting those students instead, it still wouldn't work. Unless you find some way to force those teachers to not choose to teach elsewhere more money isn't going to work. Everything else being equal, most teachers will choose to teach in a good quality school with good students who want to learn. The pay differential would have to be dramatic to make that change.



Yes. Most education funding comes from the local city, and most of their revenue comes from property taxes. But it's not like we can force cities to not do this. What you're proposing isn't just to increase funding for schools in poor areas, but you'd have to find a way to prevent higher rent areas from spending more on their schools. You'd need some pretty draconian measures to accomplish this and there's still no reason to assume that it would achieve what you hope for.




Ah... The red/green game in effect. Your mother wanted others to pay when it benefited her, but didn't want to pay herself when it didn't. Interesting.

Let me give a counter anecdote, which somewhat counters the idea of funding. Where I live, there are several individual towns, and everything else is considered part of the "City of San Diego". This means that there are a number of very wealthy communities which fall inside the City and not in their own separate town. This means that they pay higher property taxes, but the results are shared between their schools and the schools in the lower income parts of the city.

Want to compare the difference between a school in Carmel Valley (where I live, but part of the City of San Diego), and say Logan Heights (also a part of the City). Want to guess which schools get a larger per-student portion of the city funding? Everyone loves to focus on the independent towns (like Del Mar, or Solana Beach) which collect significantly greater property taxes for education than other areas, but they fail to look at the areas where rich neighborhoods and poor are lumped into the same pool.

But it's that latter case that allows us to examine whether more spending helps a poorly performing school. And the answer, pretty resoundingly, is no.



It wont help. It wont help even if you distribute the money unequally and spend twice as much on schools in poorer areas.

Um... And it would be illegal to do anyway. Those cities collect property taxes, not the state. The state collects additional taxes which it uses for education programs as well.




I think people often misuse the term "fair". There's nothing more fair about this. An equal outcome is not necessarily a fair one.

Um... But semantics aside, it still wouldn't work. Assuming that the objective isn't just to ensure equitable funding, but rather to achieve the ends of improving education outcomes in currently under performing schools, then we should look at that outcome instead of just assuming that an equitable distribution of funding will automatically fix the problem. It wont.



Yup. You're always going to have people who will take advantage of the system. But this is why a voucher system (or something similar) which puts the education choice (and the education dollar choice) in the hands of parents would at least help a bit. If a school (or district of schools) has to compete for their dollars, then they'll be more likely to do things with that money designed to make the parents more likely to spend their dollars on that school/district. Education outcome becomes the presumed measurement. And we're talking about outcome from the parents perspective, not what some pencil-pushers think will achieve results based on the current pet-theory of the moment.


It's not a perfect alternative. Nothing is. And it's not going to magically turn around poorly performing schools either. But as I've stated several times in this thread so far, the question is whether we should be focusing on trying to fix broken schools, or give students an opportunity to get away from them. And while it sounds wonderful to talk about fixing the school, if that process requires denying students the opportunity to find something better and it's been going on pretty much unfixed for decades now, aren't we doing more harm than good? What comfort is it to the student who had to suffer through trying to obtain a good education from a terrible school that you were spending money to make the school better instead of giving him/her a way out?


Not much comfort at all.

Make a suggestion, then.


Privatising all education is a stupid suggestion. Before you make it.


Also, are you really suggesting that healthcare in the US is over funded? More over funded than the military?

Called it!

Education is necessary for society to function. It's like roads. Unless you'd like to return to feudalism?


Cite for the expenditure?

No, your healthcare system is abysmal. You have some nice research facilities, though. R&D doesn't really count as "spending on healthcare", though, by the way.

Where we're going ... we don't need roads.

Third one was Wild West. It had my favorite line, "That'll shoot the fleas off a dog's back at five hundred yards, Tannen! And it's pointed straight at your head!"

Don't break your arm patting yourself on the back.



That doesn't address why you think that funding public schools instead of giving people vouchers which they could use to buy education from private schools is better. I agree that education is necessary for society to function. I disagree on the best way to provide that education.

I'm not even arguing for eliminating public funding for education (which should be apparent when I speak about vouchers). I'm talking about how we spend those dollars. I believe that the current method is incredibly ineffective, constrictive to those being educated, and does a relatively poor job of actually educating people.



Huh? Do I actually need to do this? CBO budget figures for 2010:

Spending on Defense: $689.1 Billion

Spending on Medicare: 520.4 Billion
Spending on Medcaid: 272.8 Billion

So just at the federal level, where all our military spending exists, and just counting public spending, health care spending is about 15% greater.

We add in state spending on health care, and then private spending on health care, and the total in 201 was around $2.6 Trillion dollars (there are a zillion sources out there repeating this number). Now, you may argue that that's unfair because we don't spend private money on the military, but we *do* spend private money on education. If we're to ask how much we as a society pay for each of those things in total, I think it's fair to examine that total cost.



And yet, it's used regularly and repeatedly when calculating health costs per capita and comparing that to other countries.

Honestly, that's neither here nor there. We spend less money on our military, yet our military works quite well. So perhaps the problem isn't with the amount we spend, but how we spend it? I'm not claiming there is no waste in our military spending, but at least it accomplishes the objectives our military spending exists for in the first place. The same cannot be said of our school system.

Yaay, you win a cookie.


Any way, I'm not entirely sure how gbaji managed to make this about healthcare.


You still spend too much on your military. You could spend half as much and still spend more than most other countries around the world.


Now, about education being sorely under funded.

Edited, Feb 13th 2012 7:46pm by Nilatai

Because you attempted to compare spending on education with spending on the military. I simply pointed out that if we're looking for a bigger pool of money, with lots of waste and questionable value for the money spent, we should look at health care spending instead. Isn't that a fair response?



Do we? Why not say we spend too much on health care or education then? Your assertion really isn't about how much is spent, but a personal dislike for what it's spent on. That's nice and all, but then why not just say that you don't like the military and think we should have less of it?

You know. Be honest about what your position is?



And? At a time when the most common argument about whether the US should get involved in various problems (like say Syria) revolve around whether we have the military resources to get involved, shouldn't one conclude that our military isn't big enough? I mean, the anti-war left has been using the (similarly dishonest) argument that we should get out of Iraq and/or Afghanistan based on the fact that by involving ourselves in those wars, we limit out ability to respond to other conflicts and problems for a decade now. Shouldn't the response to them be "Ok. So let's build a bigger military"?

Like I said, it's a dishonest argument. Just like yours is. If you don't like the military, and don't like the use of it, then say so. Don't hide behind arguments about costs and whatnot.




Is it? What's strange is that you seem to want to address funding for the US military based on what it does (or what it needs to do), but refuse to do the same for the US education system. We spend much more per-capita on education but don't have anywhere close to the best education outcome.


I think you've missed the point that my argument isn't about whether we're over or under funding anything. My point is that we're funding incorrectly. Spending more money, when we're doing it in an inefficient manner, wont accomplish anything. My argument is to change the way we turn dollars into education. You're the one trying to spin it off into a competition between different types of programs.

Edited, Feb 13th 2012 6:08pm by gbaji

Actually, I accidentally linked the federal numbers for all of them. So no. Either way, I'm not comfortable using the other numbers, because those are estimates, not actual sourced data. Was really just glancing at the source, since it was only being provided to prove a point to you--if we ask you for a cite, you are expected to CITE. It isn't our job to do yours for you.

And veterans benefits absolutely factor into defense spending. They are specifically part of the system we use to support those in the defense program, to repair the damage done to them through it, and to attract people to the program in the first place.

It's the exact same reason why the wage for, and benefits of, teachers are included in the education cost. Funny how you didn't claim we should invalidate those.

[EDIT]

Nilatai wrote:



LOL

So spending 600 Billion on the military, to protect American lives, is worth it. But spending the same amount on health care, to protect American lives, isn't?

I can't even remotely imagine that the money spent on the military has saved more lives than health care has, dollar for dollar. Up to a certain point, sure--having an operating military is important. The problem is that adding funds to medical services will always result in saved lives overall. Adding funds to the military above what we need is only going to add unnecessary bloat.

Our current military expenditures are based on a Cold War scenario that is two decades past. It's time to appropriately reduce it.

Edited, Feb 13th 2012 9:45pm by idiggory

Its the back nine we've had considerable problems with for the past sixty odd years.

Smaller military = less veteran benefit obligations. No one is saying "Let's dump all our tanks into the ocean but keep paying the tank drivers".