A Letter To My Students

August 25, 2010 8:33 AM

A Letter To My Students A letter from Michael O'Hare, professor of Public Policy at UC Berkley to his students. He lets them know about how the world of his generation cheated them, both by their own and their choices in government leaders, who all fell along the wayside due to the swindle, and how they can pick themselves up by the bootstraps to right it.
posted by deezil (77 comments total)

Isn't this a bit presumptive in that not all of his students will share his world view or believe or even care that his generation 'cheated' them? Also, part of the reason your generation fucks things up so bad is this obsession that the world revolves around you. Hey guess what...maybe this generation will not be effected at all and things will be fine. Get over yourself.
posted by spicynuts at 8:41 AM on August 25, 2010 [4 favorites]

Can't we just all agree that everything is awful forever? The sooner we do this the sooner we get to the running around screaming future we're all secretly longing for.
posted by The Whelk at 8:43 AM on August 25, 2010 [5 favorites]

Yeah. THERE WAS NO GOLDEN AGE, MORONS!
posted by spicynuts at 8:47 AM on August 25, 2010

maybe this generation will not be effected

It's already happening!

Can't we just all agree that everything is awful forever?

You care to argue with his main point that California infrastructure and education is worse now than it was 40 years ago?
posted by mrgrimm at 8:49 AM on August 25, 2010 [15 favorites]

Isn't this a bit presumptive in that not all of his students will share his world view or believe or even care that his generation 'cheated' them

The point of his writing the letter is to engage them and perhaps inform or challenge their views. That is what education is about. And he IS right, the latest generation has been cheated. Large scale access to Universities in this country came after the war and was provided by the GI Bill of it's day.For baby-boomers it was still possible to put away earnings from summer work to oset most college costs. The last sixty years, however, has seen less and less support from government (mainly state) in paying for education and more and more of the costs pushed on the individual student. The generations who benefitted from government subsidized school, particularly higher education, have since decided that they don't want to pay for it for the next generation. It is plainly unfair, selfish, and damagingnto the future of the country.
posted by boubelium at 9:01 AM on August 25, 2010 [20 favorites]

Maybe there wasn't a golden age but the US in general and California specifically are in worse shape than they've been in my memory.
posted by octothorpe at 9:02 AM on August 25, 2010 [4 favorites]

Apologies for the typos, I am writing on one of those damned iPad screens.
posted by boubelium at 9:02 AM on August 25, 2010

Proposition 13 screwed that state up so much it may never recover.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 9:02 AM on August 25, 2010 [12 favorites]

A quarter of your classmates didn’t finish high school, discouraged and defeated; but they didn’t leave the planet, even if you don’t run into them in the gated community you will be tempted to hide out in. They have to eat just like you, and they aren’t equipped to do their share of the work, so you will have to support them.

So he's saying that I work harder than the cashier at Safeway who is on her feet all day and has to wait for the bus and live two hours away? Because I can honestly say I really don't, and I probably make three times more even though they could probably do my job. I'd say she does more than her fair share of the job. I also know plenty of people who do as much as I do all day and make a ton more.
posted by anniecat at 9:03 AM on August 25, 2010 [12 favorites]

Was going to snark, but after reading the article, both the Professor and mrgrimm are spot on.

There's a disturbing abandonment of the public sphere in this country, whether by the surge in home-schooling, the rise in privately owned new urbanism 'town centers' or the rotting of infrastructure described here, it seems like people are increasingly withdrawing to private enclaves to the detriment of the public. It's a bit concerning.
posted by leotrotsky at 9:03 AM on August 25, 2010 [7 favorites]

Maybe there wasn't a golden age but the US in general and California specifically are in worse shape than they've been in my memory.

I'm not going to get into this argument again because some people just want to believe the above sentiment, but I would ask, for my own edification....how long is your memory? Because I remember living in LA in 1992 and there was some serious teacher shit. That's the last I'll say here.
posted by spicynuts at 9:04 AM on August 25, 2010

This may be a bit UK-centric, but This is the age of war between the generations:

Why, for example, are governments everywhere running out of money, not just in Britain and Greece, but also in America, Germany, Japan and France? Why are taxes relentlessly rising in all advanced capitalist countries? And why is public spending being cut on schools, universities, science, defence, culture, environment and transport, while spending on health and pensions continues to rise?

... According to IMF calculations, the credit crunch, bank bailouts and recession only account for 14 per cent of the expected increase in Britain’s public debt burden. The remaining 86 per cent of the long-term fiscal pressure is caused by the growth of public spending on health, pensions and long-term care. The credit crunch and recession did not create the present pressures on public borrowing and spending. They merely brought forward an age-related fiscal crisis that would have become inevitable, as by 2020 the majority of the baby-boomers will be retired.

The rational solution to this fiscal crisis would be for governments to reduce their spending on pensions, health and longterm care. Yet these are precisely the “entitlements” protected and ring-fenced by politicians, not just in Britain but also in America and many European countries, even as other government programmes are ruthlessly cut.

The politics of the next decade will be dominated by a battle over public spending and taxes between the generations. Young people will realise that different categories of public spending are in direct conflict — if they want more spending on schools, universities and environmental improvements they must vote for cuts in health and pensions.

posted by TheophileEscargot at 9:07 AM on August 25, 2010 [4 favorites]

The last sixty years, however, has seen less and less support from government (mainly state) in paying for education and more and more of the costs pushed on the individual student.

Well, to be fair, some of that is due to services being pushed onto state and local budgets rather than being paid by the federal government. The cost of incarceration is local and state, for example, while the mandate for the War on Drugs is federally-driven.
posted by GenjiandProust at 9:08 AM on August 25, 2010 [3 favorites]

Because I remember living in LA in 1992 and there was some serious teacher shit. That's the last I'll say here.

“This deal held until about thirty years ago...”—from the article
posted by thsmchnekllsfascists at 9:10 AM on August 25, 2010 [3 favorites]

So he's saying that I work harder than the cashier at Safeway who is on her feet all day and has to wait for the bus and live two hours away?

I think he is saying that you get paid more, and therefore should shoulder more of the burden of rebuilding the infrastructure, since she can't (especially since it doesn't make sense to tax her down below the assistance rate). That was my interpretation.
posted by GenjiandProust at 9:10 AM on August 25, 2010 [2 favorites]

boubelium: " Large scale access to Universities in this country came after the war and was provided by the GI Bill of it's day"

For men, at least.
posted by l33tpolicywonk at 9:11 AM on August 25, 2010 [1 favorite]

Jon Stewart's 2004 commencement speech to William and Mary (his alma mater):

Lets talk about the real world for a moment. We had been discussing it earlier, and I…I wanted to bring this up to you earlier about the real world, and this is I guess as good a time as any. I don’t really know to put this, so I’ll be blunt. We broke it.

Please don’t be mad. I know we were supposed to bequeath to the next generation a world better than the one we were handed. So, sorry.

I reject the idea that what he's saying is subjective based on your world view or politics.

Today's graduates are inheriting immense deficits because previous generations were allowed to pay less (in taxes) than the cost of the services they demanded government provide, and will have poorer quality food, air, and water thanks to their parents' unwillingness to be responsible about their lifestyle choices. Whatever you think of the right approach to solve the problem, these realities cannot be rationally disputed. The difference is only in people who recognize these problems and seek solutions, and those who choose to ignore them because, well, it's easier to leave the hard choices until later/to others.
posted by dry white toast at 9:13 AM on August 25, 2010 [31 favorites]

For men, at least.

For white men, at least.
posted by MrMoonPie at 9:16 AM on August 25, 2010 [1 favorite]

In his first paragraph, he uses the word "best" three times, which is the root of the problem he then goes on to describe. The drive to be "best", as opposed to being "good" or "great", implies competition with others...bringing yourself up by knocking your competitors down. It means maximizing your individual present state or immediate future at the expense of long-term mutual benefits. It values competition over cooperation, greed over compassion. He obviously hasn't learned a thing.
posted by rocket88 at 9:19 AM on August 25, 2010

For me, it was worth reading it just for the phrase deadly helix of mediocrity.
posted by I EAT TAPAS at 9:20 AM on August 25, 2010 [4 favorites]

spicynuts, I graduated high school in southern CA in '92, and yeah, the process of falling apart was well under way even then. That "golden age" of California education, roads, whatever: that was in my (our?) parents' day. Both of my parents (and 2 of my grandparents!) grew up in the same area I did, and my mother went to public high school & college in the late 50s/early 60s.

Back then California's education system was quite honestly the envy of the world. I wish I could remember the name of the book that I (partially) read a couple of years ago, talking about how all that came to be. But everything was new and top quality. I don't know how old octothorpe is, but those times are certainly within the memory of people alive today.

Johnny Gunn nails it that Prop13 kicked off all of the abandonment and decay of the CA public infrastructure, and that was in 1978. So it took a generation for everything to fall apart, the same generation in which middle/lower-class wages stagnated, and inequality surged.
posted by epersonae at 9:21 AM on August 25, 2010 [7 favorites]

I'm a lot older than most of you here so perhaps my take on things is different but I can recall when most of the crumbling infrastructure California and other states are dealing with were being built. I can also recall when the slow decline began, when we stopped putting money into that infrastructure. Now our bridges are falling into rivers and our highways crumbling into rubble. Sure, there's stimulus money, but that's a short term fix. And it pisses me off because I have never voted for neglect or to deny services to anyone. I'm a parent, I have two children in college and despite their education they'll probably end up less well off than I am, stuck with paying for something my generation decided to ignore.
posted by tommasz at 9:25 AM on August 25, 2010 [10 favorites]

I think the situation has some nuances that he's glossing over, although I admit he seems to have the broad strokes about right.

What California voters demanded and got wasn't just "no taxes," because if that was the case the state would have failed a lot faster than it did. What actually happened was a shifting of tax revenues away from property tax and low and middle-income earners, to rely very heavily on a progressive income tax structure — the highest personal income tax bracket in CA is more than 10%, if you include the $1M+ mental-health tax.

The second-largest revenue source, at least back before the Crunch, was the sales and use tax. Third was the corporate tax.

While on its face this might not seem like a bad strategy, it shares some key problems with virtually all tax schemes that boil down to "soak the rich" by relying heavily on progressive income taxes: the biggest is that it's really volatile.

In good years, such a system can bring in huge amounts of revenue without being overly distortive, and California's did. But when you go through a bad bear market, the high-earning individuals paying the most tax tend to be disproportionately affected, at least in terms of their income. (If you have an even higher tax on capital gains and interest income than normal income, then this problem is exacerbated.) As people fall out of those high tax brackets, revenue can fall very quickly.

While in theory this could be planned around, in practice it doesn't seem as though most governments have the fiscal discipline necessary to maintain the huge reserves that would be needed to smooth out big market fluctuations, like we saw in 2008 onwards. I guess you could set up some sort of system that guaranteed revenue, and then split taxpayers into tranches by income percentile and set the rate appropriately — e.g., say that no matter what, the top 10% are going to pay 50% of the budget, the next 10% pay 20%, etc., and determine the rate once you have everyone's tax filings in and you know what the "top 10%" means in terms of income. But I doubt that would be acceptable to most voters; it has a sort of unpleasant lottery-like aspect to it, where someone would never really know what sort of tax rate they'd be looking at until the bill showed up. That sort of uncertainty would have costs just by itself.

Consumption and corporate taxes are volatile, too, although the consumption taxes are probably not quite as bad as a progressive income tax, since in most places it's flat. (Although if it exempts things like food or clothing, or concentrates on luxury goods, then it's going to have the same issues.)

I'm not sure what the lesson is, except that "I don't want to pay, make somebody else" eventually becomes just as unsustainable as "I don't want to pay." Switching to a tax system that relies more on real property taxes and less on income isn't a magic bullet, because we saw big declines in property values. The best solution is probably just having the state carry much larger cash reserves, and keeping spending at a lower level relative to revenue streams during the good years. But I am cynical about an elected government's ability to do that over the long haul, so I suspect this is an issue that we'll revisit time and time again in the future.
posted by Kadin2048 at 9:41 AM on August 25, 2010 [4 favorites]

The best solution is probably just having the state carry much larger cash reserves, and keeping spending at a lower level relative to revenue streams during the good years. But I am cynical about an elected government's ability to do that over the long haul, so I suspect this is an issue that we'll revisit time and time again in the future.

I'm cynical too, given the tax rebates that Jesse Ventura gave out when he was governor of Minnesota.
posted by ZeusHumms at 9:44 AM on August 25, 2010

I would like to see some stats to go with this...

State employees per capita over time

State pension liability over time

State worker productivity over time (eg. administrative productivity for a department, esp. before/after the introduction of information technology)
posted by ZenMasterThis at 9:48 AM on August 25, 2010 [1 favorite]

Also: State taxes per capita over time.
posted by ZenMasterThis at 9:49 AM on August 25, 2010 [1 favorite]

The percentages for grades on exams, papers, etc. in my courses always add up to 110% because that’s what I’ve learned to expect from you

Yes, our amp is better because it goes up to 11. What, just make it louder and leave the maximum output a 10? Then it wouldn't be the best amp ever!

Simplified history is simple. Infrastructure costs money, and it was easy before Prop 13 was passed and rolled back property taxes and capped growth for the future, before environmental regulations and health-focused building codes made construction of major projects a lot more expensive, and before California was as densely developed as it is now. Now each bond that is passed and new taxes that are tacked on here and there are trying to regain what was so quickly lost, but money doesn't go as far as it used to, especially with increased regulations and population. Mind you, I'm not saying Prop 13 was all bad, but it was a quick and significant change, one that didn't give any room for slow adjustments to find a new balance between taxes and services. (Also note: I don't have a complete understanding of California's financial history, just what I've gleaned from various courses and discussions - I was born a year after Prop 13 passed.)

But the good prof continues:

A quarter of your classmates didn’t finish high school, discouraged and defeated; but they didn’t leave the planet, even if you don’t run into them in the gated community you will be tempted to hide out in. They have to eat just like you, and they aren’t equipped to do their share of the work, so you will have to support them.

Yes, graduation rates in California are tragic, but that doesn't mean these kids are now a drag upon society, and a burden on Berkeley grads. According to the census, 9.6% of families in California fall below the poverty level, and 12.9% of individuals. And it's not only the Noble Berkeley Grads who will carry the state forward to a brighter future.
posted by filthy light thief at 9:54 AM on August 25, 2010

I can recall when most of the crumbling infrastructure California and other states are dealing with were being built.

The infrastructure that is now crumbling was built atop the non-existent infrastructure of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Mid-twentieth century America was a dingy place clapped out from the depression, where huge crappy cars full of people smoking cigarettes and not wearing seatbelts threw litter out the car windows rarely entered much less finished college, and just about every food, clothing, consumer, cultural and political product you could think of was approximately a thousand times worse than it is now. (You've seen the black and white pictures. It really was a comparatively black and white world.) Then everything changed. Over the last half century, there was an explosion of wonderfulness in all areas of American life, a supernova answered prayers, solved problems, and the fulfillment of dreams that had tantalized humanity from the beginning of time. The current generation entering the University of California has been born onto the top of this great tottering pile of happiness. This guy would have them believe that our current state of social felicity is the baseline for humanity, and that his students should resent any deviation from its ahistorical marvelousness. But really, something very special happened over the past 50 years, and it wasn't all about government spending. The causes were multifactoral. And if the big bang is slowing down, there are probably lots of reasons for it beyond Prop 13.
posted by Faze at 9:55 AM on August 25, 2010 [7 favorites]

Large scale access to Universities in this country came after the war and was provided by the GI Bill of it's day.

For men, at least.

For white men at least.

Was the GI Bill only for white people? I was not aware of this.
posted by incessant at 9:57 AM on August 25, 2010

In his first paragraph, he uses the word "best" three times, which is the root of the problem he then goes on to describe. The drive to be "best", as opposed to being "good" or "great", implies competition with others...bringing yourself up by knocking your competitors down.

I thought he was just stroking their egos, instead of the harsh "Welcome to college. Look to your left. Look to your right. Only one of you three will graduate, the rest will burn out like the worthless maggots you are." Scholastic excellence isn't a zero-sum game, though there is some back-stabbing and sabotage in the broader race to be #1.
posted by filthy light thief at 9:57 AM on August 25, 2010

.how long is your memory? Because I remember living in LA in 1992 and there was some serious teacher shit

Yeah, the really irritating thing is that people think this is new. "This generation's problems," I keep hearing over and over again like a broken record. It's not this generation. "This" generation's parents are not baby boomers. "This" generation's parents are the children of the baby boomers. Baby boomers are grandparents and great-grandparents. It's bullshit to suggest this is in any way, shape or form new. This has been going on since Reagan, and everybody either forgot or were never forced to learn about it. Remember Reagan? Former governor of…?
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 10:09 AM on August 25, 2010 [3 favorites]

deadly helix of mediocrity

The creamy center of every Dean and Hank Venture clone. The show shares this ethos of a present day that is a hollow self-centered echo of the golden era in the past.
posted by Babblesort at 10:16 AM on August 25, 2010 [2 favorites]

I don't want to think of myself as a boomer. I went to high school in the 70's and not the 60's, so it seems to me as I was always getting there just as the boomers finished screwing it up for the rest of us. But I'm close enough to share at least some of their outlook with them, and I object to this notion that every call for lowered spending / taxes is just selfishness.

I think there are a lot of people who'd be perfectly happy to pay for, say, the required electrical work in the school, but who think the money would more likely go to paying for the curriculum meetings and books required by a new and improved way to teach multiplication (which has changed so much since our grandparent's time!). There are people who would be OK with paying teachers, but figure the money would just go to administration.

I think there's a hope that if they're starved for money, they'll cut back to the essentials, but it's a rare school that will drop costly administrative requirements to pay for the plumbing. Not to pick on schools. Police and public works are the same way.

And as our society gets seeming more and more bitterly partisan, any sensible middle gets cut out. Locally, for example, I'd have been happy to pay for having the four-lane road resurfaced, but I was less thrilled about paying for it to be narrowed to two lanes, and roundabouts installed at the intersections. Does that make me selfish? I can choose between voting for the people who won't replace the heater in the senior center, or for the people who want to rent an all-new facility at a cost of millions.

I'd like to be a responsible citizen, and pay for a civil society. So, how do I get the leaky roof fixed on the library when the Republicans want it to fall apart and the Democrats want a new building and outside media consultants, and both want to play only to their base?
posted by tyllwin at 10:20 AM on August 25, 2010 [2 favorites]

I attended California public schools from kindergarten through 3rd Grade, in 1970. I remember how enriched we were. My elementary school was in a brand new building, with wonderful facilities. Art, music, physical education, laboratories, everything was stocked up and we learned and learned and learned. We moved to Arizona and I was so far ahead of the other kids that I was skipped up into the next grade.

All public schools have declined in the intervening years, but California's had a height to tumble from.

I was in the Loma Prieta earthquake. My freeway fell down. The Nimitz was slated for retro-fit, but there was never enough money.

Yes, it was Proposition 13 specifically that caused the damage. But in the greater scheme of things, it's the whole, "I got mine, you figure out how to get yours" attitude that makes people view taxation as a punishment, rather than as a necessary contribution to socieity.
posted by Ruthless Bunny at 10:21 AM on August 25, 2010 [5 favorites]

Large scale access to Universities in this country came after the war and was provided by the GI Bill of it's day.

For men, at least.

For white men at least.

Easy to snark, but the GI Bill included women veterans and setup no barriers based on race. Now, the fact that the majority of aid recipients were white men has much more to do with post-war society and its hangups on race/gender. Don't assume that just because something is old it is sexist or racist.
posted by boubelium at 10:29 AM on August 25, 2010 [3 favorites]

Was the GI Bill only for white people?

No, but most colleges were at the time.
posted by MrMoonPie at 10:36 AM on August 25, 2010 [2 favorites]

Is it safe to assume most people commenting here don't live in or haven't lived in California? This isn't just rhetoric to us -- this is a noticeable decline in services and society. And although we could fix the budget problems by raising taxes (the $500 figure is most common, but I've seen $650 and $400 as well), we're mostly faced with attitudes like Tyllwin's: just be more efficient, guys! They've been saying that for 30 years. Efficiencies don't fix roads. Efficiencies don't hire teachers. Efficiencies don't buy books. You know what efficiencies get you? Less, fewer, worse. Starve the beast? It's working.

Yes, C_D, Reagan presided over the beginning of this debacle in California, though you know what he did when he first came to office? Raised taxes to balance the budget. Of course, he subsequently closed mental hospitals, cut funding to the UC system, and then gave back billions to people in tax rebates, and he was a major force behind Prop 13 in 1978. You're right, C_D -- this decline isn't new. This decline has been going on since the 80's. Does that make it less of a problem?

The oldest baby boomers were born in 1946. The youngest were born in 1964. Tyllwin, you just might be a boomer. I'd say a significant percentage of the incoming freshmen, born in 1992, when the boomers were between 28 and 46, probably have parents who were in their 20's and 30's at their birth. If their parents weren't boomers, they were darn close. I don't know many 64 year-olds who're great-grandparents, do you, C_D?
posted by incessant at 10:57 AM on August 25, 2010 [1 favorite]

So he's saying that I work harder than the cashier at Safeway who is on her feet all day and has to wait for the bus and live two hours away? Because I can honestly say I really don't, and I probably make three times more even though they could probably do my job. I'd say she does more than her fair share of the job. I also know plenty of people who do as much as I do all day and make a ton more.

The difficulty (unpleasantness?) of labor and it's value to others aren't necessarily related, obviously. Even Marx had the "socially nessicary" caveat in his labor theory of value. The value of her work as a cashier is being diminished by the abundance of people "willing" to do it and automation (soon we'll only need a few people to oversee a long row of self-checkout systems).

We need to give everyone a chance to learn to do the work machines can't, for their good and our own, and that bar is constantly being raised.

Even with vastly improved education system some growing portion population won't be able to provide for their fellow citizens anything those citizens would be willing to exchange even the bare necessities of life for, because we can get it from machines (see: The Rust Belt). What then?
posted by phrontist at 11:07 AM on August 25, 2010 [2 favorites]

Oh, feel free to call me a boomer if you like. I just personally feel that if you get much past a 10-15 year span the people involved have less and less commonality. I'm not sure we gain a lot of understanding by grouping me with people who were working when I started kindergarten, and I'd probably draw a line after the point when people stopped having to worry about being drafted. But your mileage may vary.

I surely don't claim that efficiency would fix everything. It isn't a popular position but I don't think our taxes are too high, and I live in NY. All I'm saying is that it isn't pure selfishness to get angry about paying when you think the money is going down a rathole.
posted by tyllwin at 11:18 AM on August 25, 2010

All I'm saying is that it isn't pure selfishness to get angry about paying when you think the money is going down a rathole.

On the other hand, anger at what you think is your money "going down a rathole" is, often enough, fueled by selfishness. Or so it seems from the conversations I've had with people about taxes.
posted by GenjiandProust at 11:34 AM on August 25, 2010 [1 favorite]

Glad to see this letter's getting wider distribution, but it's not like he's the first person to say any of this. He was also hands down my least favorite professor in grad school, though, so I may be a bit biased.
posted by gingerbeer at 11:47 AM on August 25, 2010 [1 favorite]

There's a disturbing abandonment of the public sphere in this country

This. Notwithstanding all the show-me-the-stats and twas-ever-thus handwaving here in the thread, this is true by almost any objective measure (voter turnout, volunteering, socializing with neighbours, leisure time spent somewhere other than an enclosed private space) not just for California or the US but almost all of the industrialized world.

For a more nuanced take on it, try Tony Judt's "The Disintegration of the Public Sphere." The short version:

If we don’t respect public goods; if we permit or encourage the privatization of public space, resources and services; if we enthusiastically support the propensity of a younger generation to look exclusively to their own needs: then we should not be surprised to find a steady falling-away from civic engagement in public decision-making. In recent years there has been much discussion of the so-called ‘democratic deficit’. The steadily declining turnout at local and national elections, the cynical distaste for politicians and political institutions consistently register in public opinion polls—most markedly among the young. There is a widespread sense that since ‘they’ will do what they want in any case—while feathering their own nests—why should ‘we’ waste time trying to influence the outcome of their actions.

In the short-run, democracies can survive the indifference of their citizens. Indeed, it used to be thought an indication of impending trouble in a well-ordered republic when electors were too much aroused. The business of government, it was widely supposed, should be left to those elected for the purpose. But the pendulum has swung far in the opposite direction.

I try not to engage in boomer bashing too much, but the simple fact is that no generation of human beings in the history of the planet has ever consumed resources so voraciously, and it's a physical certainty that no generation ever will again. And none in living memory has left such a brokedown wreck of a civil society and industrial economy to its descendants.

I think these consequences were mostly unintended, and I believe the 45-65-year-old demographic contains as many wonderful, kind, generous, brilliant people as any other. But the externalized costs of your unprecedented prosperity are coming due. And you owe it to your grandchildren to spend the time you have left rebuilding and reinvesting. Alas, if the boomers with capital to spare that I know personally are any indication, you've already blown much of the wad on a second home, a third car and six weeks in the Virgin Islands.
posted by gompa at 11:49 AM on August 25, 2010 [15 favorites]

On the other hand, anger at what you think is your money "going down a rathole" is, often enough, fueled by selfishness

Oh, very true. I know people who think "feeding hungry people" is money down a rathole. But it's not fair to tar all opposition to high taxes with that brush.
posted by tyllwin at 12:06 PM on August 25, 2010

I think there are a lot of people who'd be perfectly happy to pay for, say, the required electrical work in the school, but who think the money would more likely go to paying for the curriculum meetings and books required by a new and improved way to teach multiplication (which has changed so much since our grandparent's time!). There are people who would be OK with paying teachers, but figure the money would just go to administration.

This rubs me seriously wrong, as I sit and watch the University of California implode.

Point A: You don't tell a surgeon which knives they should be using, so what business have you got telling teachers how to teach? And with so blunt an object as funding levels, no less? The things you mentioned - curriculum meetings and books - are actually important. There is,, believe it or not, quite a bit more to mathematics than simple multiplication, and figuring out what parts are most important to teach in the face of a massively shifting technology base and No Child Left Behind bullshit is a huge problem. As for books, if you cant see past your own bullshit on this one, I feel sorry for you.

Point B: Funding levels as a means of regulation are not the way to go. Funding decisions are made by administrators, who, overwhelmingly, look out for themselves first, and people like themselves second. The University of California has seen a proliferation of administrative types even as courses and entire programs are being cut. These administrators are paid more and more on average, apparently because it's such hard work fucking people over, and will happily slit every productive throat in the system before they get around to slitting their own.

The UC system really is the cornerstone of what this article is talking about. The deal was that University education in California was to be TUITION FREE for those who showed merit enough to get into the schools in the first place. One more time, Tuition Free! This was in the California Master Plan for Education, and is still true in the stupidest possible way. For as funding was cut (and the administrative class grew), student fees were instituted. Last year they increased the student fees by about 33%, to over $10k per year.

The tuition-free, merit-based model created the greatest university system on the planet, in part by utilizing brains that simply wouldn't have a chance in other parts of the US. The location of silicon valley is not an accident: Berkeley grads went out and directly drove the massive technological shift that Faze points to as the ahistorical moment in this story.

As the system becomes less accessible to lower income students and the promise of the Master Plan is rescinded, the quality of our students diminishes, along with quality of life and the probability of being the center of another ahistorical moment. The decline of the UC system is tragic, in the Shakespearian sense.
posted by kaibutsu at 12:10 PM on August 25, 2010 [11 favorites]

the reason i am way smarter and richer than most people is because, early on, i accepted the ongoing reponsibility to educate myself.
posted by kitchenrat at 12:18 PM on August 25, 2010

The deal was that University education in California was to be TUITION FREE for those who showed merit enough to get into the schools in the first place.

An excellent idea if you actually have "merit" mean something, but the minute you start telling every child in a state with over 6 million students that they must* go to college, it rapidly becomes unsustainable.

*Not can, must.
posted by madajb at 12:29 PM on August 25, 2010

The UK also had a golden age of extremely low university fees in the 1960s and 70s -- just long enough for today's politicians to get a cheap education, before jacking up the fees on their own children.
posted by jb at 12:33 PM on August 25, 2010 [3 favorites]

The elephant in this room is military spending: 60% of the federal budget. The vast majority of that budget is spent on private contractors. It is the single largest wealth transfer from the public sector to the private sector in our budget. Literally a direct check cut to a select few individuals. In terms of government spending, military spending results in the smallest multiplier in terms of GDP growth, compared to almost all other government spending. You wonder why the United States is falling behind economically and socially? It's because our military spending is equal to the combined spending of the rest of the world. They put their taxes to use, you know, doing things that produce healthy, educated, functional societies.

I personally blame the baby boomer generation: Turn on, Tune in, Drop Out, and then give the keys to the castle to the exact same assholes who got you into Vietnam. Excellent plan.

You want to lower taxes and reduce government handouts to individuals? Cut Military Spending! It's the largest slice of the pie that does the absolute least for you.
posted by Freen at 12:35 PM on August 25, 2010 [15 favorites]

If i could choose between the current disaster of a K-12 system and the system of 20 years ago, even at a higher cost, I would surely choose the one from 20 years ago, But I can't.

Point A: You don't tell a surgeon which knives they should be using, so what business have you got telling teachers how to teach?

No, I wouldn't tell a surgeon what knives to use. But if I had a surgeon with the success rate of America's schools today, I would choose some other surgeon. Since that's not so much an option in the sphere of public schools, there must be other means used. What I share with the anti-tax crowd is a mistrust that the experts have gotten us to where we are today, and a perception that schools produced better results when those experts were less in control.

It matters also that the average person would have a zero success rate in surgery. But the average person thinks, rightly or wrongly, that they could teach a child to read if they had to. So, even without malice they'll feel more qualified to meddle.

The things you mentioned - curriculum meetings and books - are actually important. There is,, believe it or not, quite a bit more to mathematics than simple multiplication, and figuring out what parts are most important to teach in the face of a massively shifting technology base...

Then why do the math classes of today (and I'm only talking about simple math, arithmetic to algebra) and the language classes of today produce students with less grasp of the simple mechanics? What benefit have those dollars brought us? The people who took math 30 years ago had a higher skill level, so perhaps it would have done no harm to leave the curriculum alone. Massively shifting tech seems like a red herring to me -- we don't have kids who can't use a computer. We have kids who can get online just fine, and they learn that all on their own, but can't write or multiply.

No Child Left Behind bullshit is a huge problem.

I agree here. It's a misguided attempt to force schools to concentrate on basics, which ends up forcing them merely to focus counterproductively on a measurement.

As for books, if you cant see past your own bullshit on this one, I feel sorry for you.

Then, please, take pity on me, and explain to me like I was child why an "Introduction to Algebra" book from 2010 is all that much better than one from 1960? We've spent lots of money over the intervening 40 years. What did we get for it, and was it a good value?

Point B: Funding levels as a means of regulation are not the way to go.

I don't like it either. But if the costs are ever increasing, while the results are going down, what do you expect people to do, except use the only tools available to them? Cutting off the oxygen is one of the few tools available to them. Look, I don't say that it's the correct strategy, just that it's nothing like an attitude 'I got no kids, so why should I care." Likewise, if one thinks "I'd pay for and engineering professor, but if I fund UC, what I'll get is a professor of liberal basket-weaving," you can deplore that attitude, but it isn't, basically a purely selfish one. You can't get that part of the electorate on your side by lecturing them about selfishness.

Funding decisions are made by administrators, who, overwhelmingly, look out for themselves first, and people like themselves second. The University of California has seen a proliferation of administrative types even as courses and entire programs are being cut. These administrators are paid more and more on average, apparently because it's such hard work fucking people over, and will happily slit every productive throat in the system before they get around to slitting their own.

This. I couldn't agree more.
posted by tyllwin at 12:53 PM on August 25, 2010 [3 favorites]

I would like to see some stats to go with this...

Sorry, no funds for research.
posted by mrgrimm at 12:53 PM on August 25, 2010 [3 favorites]

boubelium: " Don't assume that just because something is old it is sexist or racist."

There were also several provisions of the bill that discriminated against women, specifically the portions that dealt with the reception of benefits by widowers. While WACs, SPARs, Women Marines, and WAVES were included from the beginning in the G.I. Bill, it was not until the end of the 1970’s and the beginning of the 1980’s that WAACs and WASPs were awarded benefits, most of which had expired. The discrimination against male dependents and survivors of female veterans lasted until 1972.
posted by l33tpolicywonk at 12:57 PM on August 25, 2010 [3 favorites]

I had been to grad school at berkeley but still there are those at Univ of Virginia who would claim that the niv of Virginia is the top public college or university in the nation.
posted by Postroad at 1:12 PM on August 25, 2010

You want to lower taxes and reduce government handouts to individuals? Cut Military Spending! It's the largest slice of the pie that does the absolute least for you.

Military spending isn't just a payoff to well-connected individuals - a good portion of that money also goes to keeping engineers and other educated folks employed. As the "free trade" ideology spread, it seemed that suddenly the implicit protectionism of needing a security clearance for certain contracts became a reason to spend more on the military - to "keep jobs here". It's deliciously insane.

I graduated with a degree in CS in 2004, and most of my friends were either CS or EE types. I'd say roughly half ended up either directly employed by the government or working for a defense contractor.

The defense budget strikes me as some nightmarish, goatee-wearing mirror universe version of the WPA - it only employs people wealthy enough or able to take on enough debt to get an engineering degree and doesn't produce any infrastructure, or really anything of value. Just a massive make-work program to hide the extent of the economic damage we've done to ourselves.
posted by heathkit at 1:36 PM on August 25, 2010 [5 favorites]

The discrimination against male dependents and survivors of female veterans lasted until 1972.

So your complaint about how the post-WWII GI Bill only helped men has to do with the fact that male dependents were discriminated against? All in all, the male dependents who got hosed probably outnumber the WASPs and WAACs who got hosed, so it's a wash as far as "for men, at least."

Look, you thought it was more fucked up than it was. Just take the hit and move on.
posted by Etrigan at 1:46 PM on August 25, 2010 [1 favorite]

Heathkit: yes, you are correct, military spending also provides jobs, but when you look how much a b2 bomber adds to the general productivity of the country as a whole vs. other traditional government spending on education, infrastructure, etc. After the B2 bomber is built or the cruise missile is made, doesn't help anyone get to work, it doesn't facilitate more commerce the way that a thousand educated people might or a high speed commuter rail.

All government spending results in a multiplier effect on GDP, and thus on the economic wellbeing of the whole country. Some spending is significantly more effective than others at increasing the GDP, while all government spending necessarily adds to GDP.

A classic example of this, is when you speak with people about the New Deal, the great depression and WWII. The classic counter argument to theory that the New Deal ended the Great Depressions was that it was in fact WWII that ended the Great Depression. It's interesting because it's essentially the same argument: Military Keynsianism. Massive government spending ended the Great Depression. Some of it resulted in the infrastructure we use to this day, and some of it exploded in east germany. (tangent: during WWII the highest tax bracket was almost 94%. Real Patriots put their money where their mouth is.)

We as a society have to choose: do we want to spend in ways that provide ongoing societal benefits or ways that provide short term benefits to the few. This article, essentially argues the same thing: The Baby Boomers (read tea party) decided dollars in their pocket is more valuable than a functional society, and so here we are.
posted by Freen at 2:32 PM on August 25, 2010 [2 favorites]

Crucial additional argument against military expenditures: Opportunity costs.

From Wikipedia: Military Keynesianism
Military Keynesianism fails to take into account opportunity cost - i.e. what those soldiers would have been doing instead of being soldiers, and also what arms companies could have been making instead of war material.

additionally:

Another economic critique of military Keynesianism is based on a rather obvious observation - military spending comes from general taxation. It requires high levels of taxation to fund military spending, and that taxation must come from the productive sectors in the economy, thus being a long term drag on economic growth.

Essentially, Heathkit, your friends could be doing other, more productive things, and companies that add to the general well being and productivity of our society suffer in order to provide explosive material for the military.
posted by Freen at 2:40 PM on August 25, 2010 [2 favorites]

Heathkit: yes, you are correct, military spending also provides jobs, but when you look how much a b2 bomber adds to the general productivity of the country as a whole vs. other traditional government spending on education, infrastructure, etc.

I guess I didn't make it clear, but that's what I meant by "mirror-universe WPA" - the government spends a bunch of money to keep people employed, but without getting any kind of return on investment in the form of infrastructure.

The problem is, even if there's not a good multiplier effect, it's still keeping people employed, which creates tremendous political pressure against cutting defense funding. It makes me think of the tragedy of the commons - every congressperson has an incentive to bring defense dollars to their district to keep constituents employed, and you can argue that individually they're actually doing a good job for the people they represent by doing so, even if the collective result of this is bad for the country as a whole. I don't think it'll ever be politically possible to reduce defense spending until we fix the employment problem, but hopefully I'm wrong.

I've actually seen people argue vehemently against Keynesianism, yet insist that all defense spending is "good for the economy" and thus affordable. It's really frustrating - thanks for the Military Keynesianism link, I hadn't heard that term before.

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed." -- Dwight Eisenhower

posted by heathkit at 3:08 PM on August 25, 2010 [4 favorites]

Then, please, take pity on me, and explain to me like I was child why an "Introduction to Algebra" book from 2010 is all that much better than one from 1960? We've spent lots of money over the intervening 40 years. What did we get for it, and was it a good value?

I think you've chosen as an example the only subject that can work in your favour--math is a relatively static subject when it comes to what is taught in schools, though that too has changed over time. But, if nothing else, the authors of math books in 1960 didn't assume students had access to calculators or computers, which can be useful tools for teaching mathematics. Of course, I've had multiple graduate math courses where we used the same book the professor had taken the course from.

Latin seems like another subject that would not have changed a whole lot over time. In fact, my junior year of high school, I used the same edition of the Aeneid as my dad had. But I started Latin in the sixth grade. I'm pretty sure there simply weren't any sixth grade Latin textbooks when my dad was in school. I thought Ecce Romani was dumb, but I'm pretty sure sixth-grade-me would take it over Caesar's Gallic Wars.

There's not necessarily anything wrong with using the old book, if it's a viable option (or possibly the best one available). But that 40 year old science textbook might not be the best choice.
posted by hoyland at 3:43 PM on August 25, 2010

But, but - military spending gave us the internet!
posted by IndigoJones at 3:44 PM on August 25, 2010

hoyland: "I think you've chosen as an example the only subject that can work in your favour-"

Oh, I can think of one other subject...
posted by pwnguin at 4:21 PM on August 25, 2010 [1 favorite]

This decline has been going on since the 80's. Does that make it less of a problem?

No, it sucks more, actually. Because CA has had two decades of prosperity and the best, last, greatest boom times (probably) that this country will ever see again (at least as we know it). And CA is even more fucked now than it was under Reagan after all that. Disheartening doesn't begin to describe it.

The oldest baby boomers were born in 1946. The youngest were born in 1964. Tyllwin, you just might be a boomer. I'd say a significant percentage of the incoming freshmen, born in 1992, when the boomers were between 28 and 46, probably have parents who were in their 20's and 30's at their birth. If their parents weren't boomers, they were darn close. I don't know many 64 year-olds who're great-grandparents, do you, C_D?

Baby boomers beget Gen-X'ers beget current 18 y.o's. I consider this to be the age of Gen-X's kids, at least culturally. And if movie history serves, the early 90s also sucked. The tech boom saved us from ourselves—we basically bought ourselves another couple of decades if we'd spent it wisely. But then Bush came along.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 4:29 PM on August 25, 2010

Actually, math is a great grounds for the debate.

'Modern' low-level curriculae were designed to produce people who could drill through piles of problems without the help of computers. The emphasis was on creating number-crunchers and/or engineers to keep the military-industrial machine running full force. The book from forty years ago is great if you're trying to create first-class slide-rulers, and No Child Left Behind is absolutely an extension of that program. Students are encouraged by the structure of the curriculum to remember a repetitive process for exactly as long as it takes to pass a test. Then, when they reach the workforce, they're well practised to perform a repetitive process for exactly as long as it takes to earn a pay-check.

Curriculum is chosen with an end product in mind, and should absolutely be considered. One of the points of no child left behind is to remove any such consideration from the hands of the teachers; the goal becomes students who can fill in the right bubbles on a federally designed scan-tron. Remove discussion of curriculum and you remove all intention from the teaching process. Also: The Romans used Roman numerals, so why aren't we?

(I personally think we need more emphasis on algorithms and problem solving. Drills, in this day and age, are mainly useful to the extent that they teach you to work through something thoroughly. But that's just my two cents.)

Then why do the math classes of today (and I'm only talking about simple math, arithmetic to algebra) and the language classes of today produce students with less grasp of the simple mechanics?

The creation of higher barriers to teach paired with lower salaries for teachers have combined to keep good heads out of public schools. There is also an ingrained hatred of mathematics in American culture, if you haven't noticed, leading to an even more pronounced lack of qualified teachers. Anyone qualified to teach has better job options available. As a result, the math-for-math-educators classes at the Universities I've been at have featured students who often hate mathematics and are incompetent to boot. These people go on to generate the next generation of students who can't multiply.

Teacher salary is a part of the problem, but an even bigger part is the degradations built into the public teaching system. I want to go out and help kids, but going into today's schools I would almost certainly not be allowed to teach what I think should be taught in the way that I'm best at teaching it. My talents would be wasted. I've been working with extracurricular programs, but these mainly end up helping kids who have figured out that math is a good thing to know. You do what you can.

So part of the problem is reduction of funding, and the other part is politicians and voters who think they have a better idea of how to teach math than people who love the subject and dedicate their lives to it.
posted by kaibutsu at 5:05 PM on August 25, 2010 [3 favorites]

Then why do the math classes of today (and I'm only talking about simple math, arithmetic to algebra) and the language classes of today produce students with less grasp of the simple mechanics?

It's not just the hatred of math and poor teachers, that's been around for decades. My short answer is that we have now some truly amazingly staggeringly bad math curricula. Ed majors who need to justify their existence and so create new age type math books. Lots of four color glossy pictures and cultural meaning of the zero. Not so much of the drill stuff. Kids find that boring and hard. Let's make it relevant and touchy feely. I have seen, I swear by all that is holy, an assignment asking children to identify their "favorite" number and share with us why. It's a recipe for disaster, and it is what is forcing responsible parents to give up and enroll their kids in Kumon.

Sorry, end of rant. School begins in another two weeks and the child Jones is heading into fifth grade.

Carry on.
posted by IndigoJones at 5:18 PM on August 25, 2010 [1 favorite]

Well, of course he's cranky. You would be, too, if some guys from Mensa kept accusing you of being the Zodiac killer.
posted by Scram at 5:28 PM on August 25, 2010 [1 favorite]

I'm just glad to see that something (which was dashed off and he had no idea it would go as viral as it did) that looks at inequality and at our need to give back has gotten attention. This gives me hope that, even if he didn't word everything perfectly, these ideas are relevant and resonant and we may have more than a glacier's chance in hell of not destroying ourselves.
posted by Maias at 7:10 PM on August 25, 2010

P.S. The song expresses the sentiment even better!
posted by Maias at 7:15 PM on August 25, 2010

Baby boomers beget Gen-X'ers beget current 18 y.o's. I consider this to be the age of Gen-X's kids, at least culturally.

Well, maybe kindasorta. But keep in mind that a good number of the 'Y-ers', or 'Millenials', or whatever we prefer to call the current younger generation, were actually the kids the Boomers had in their 40's.

I, for instance, am a right-smack-in-the-middle X-er, born in 1972. But my youngest brother, who turned 18 this year, is a smack-in-the-middle Y-er, born to the same Boomer parents(1948 and 1950 respectively) as I was.
posted by spirit72 at 7:46 PM on August 25, 2010

I think you've chosen as an example the only subject that can work in your favour--


Sure, I cherry-picked the best example. But English Grammar, Introductory French/Spanish, or Ancient History could have worked. Even in science, our problem is not that we have college instructors exclaiming "ZOMG! These people believe in Bohr atoms, and can only do Newtonian physics!" It's that we have people in this country who don't know if the Earth revolves around the Sun, or vice versa.

But I'm not seriously arguing that we ought to be using books from 50 years ago, even if they haven't fallen apart. I was just being GRAR-y, I guess.

I'm arguing more broadly that the unwillingness to fund education is due as much to dissatisfaction with the system as to hatred of taxes, and was just using the churn in textbooks and curricula as an example of a place where many feel our system has lost its way.

I'd happily trade the skills of those first class slide rulers with those of today's graduates. Someone who can solve a physics problem with a slide rule can learn to use a calculator in an afternoon. But I'm not trying to create first class slide rulers. While I do think that we'd be better off with people who could solve engineering problems with a slide rule than with people who can't do it even with a computer, I'm not complaining about a sacrifice of drill in favor of algorithmic skill. I'm complaining that we produce graduates who have neither skill, when at least once we could produce the slide rulers. Now we get people who have trouble counting back change.

No Child Left Behind was a terrible mistake. It's made matters far worse. But it was a reaction to a situation where the standards had already deteriorated. No Child Left Behind got dragged in long after we'd left to the experts for 20 years and the experts didn't deliver. Medical experts, and computer experts, for example, delivered ever-increasing standards. Did the education experts?

The public, by and large, doesn't even really agree with the goals of the experts. I don't think John Q Taxpayer wants to pay for "we want to teach the children how to learn," or "how to problem solve" to give them "perspective," or "empower" them. The taxpayers, or at least enough of them to throw a huge wrench into the works in the form of "No Child Left Behind" wanted schools to teach a specific group of skills and facts; and then trust that they would figure out how to learn and problem solve on their own. "No Child Left Behind" is the direct result of the education establishment being unable or unwilling to do that.

And where this all leads us is to people feeling like this:

It's not just the hatred of math and poor teachers, that's been around for decades. My short answer is that we have now some truly amazingly staggeringly bad math curricula. Ed majors who need to justify their existence and so create new age type math books. Lots of four color glossy pictures and cultural meaning of the zero. Not so much of the drill stuff. Kids find that boring and hard. Let's make it relevant and touchy feely


Now, I'll not endorse nor deny that description. But plenty of people feel that way. Those people aren't going to feel good about funding more of it. If we want schools properly funded that impression has to be addressed. The people providing the funding need to be convinced that this is not where their cash is going. Someone who feels that way can't just be dismissed as "swindling our youth." They want better schools, in fact,

Even the tea party devils I feel like I'm channeling today don't want lousy schools. The people who have undermined California's tax base don't. Very few people want to destroy our schools just because they're greedy cheapskates. They simply resent being told "give us the money and let us make the decisions." If we want better schools we have to build some sort of consensus on what we want them to do and how.
posted by tyllwin at 7:58 PM on August 25, 2010 [1 favorite]

Right fucking on.

I don't believe in golden ages either, but there's a huge generation of baby boomers who benefited massively from living in California at the right time. Booming economy, sky rocketing property values, the best public infrastructure the world has ever known, and they walked away from it all so they could buy vacation homes and hummers, screaming about oppressive inefficient government the entire time.

I'm glad I don't live in California anymore, not that this isn't where the rest of the country is headed. It's too sad to see the state falling apart like this, and 51% of the electorate voting for it to fall apart faster.
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 8:48 PM on August 25, 2010 [2 favorites]

They simply resent being told "give us the money and let us make the decisions." If we want better schools we have to build some sort of consensus on what we want them to do and how.

I guess this is the sentiment of the anti-government voter that I find so grating. (I'm not directing this at you tyllwin, and I didn't take this to be your personal opinion, maybe I'm wrong). We'd all be a lot better off if we let experts make decisions about things like education, public transportation, food safety, seismic engineering, etc. Who the fuck am I to decide how to spend billions on textbooks? It's not the government fat-cats that gave us No Child Left Behind, it's the Joe the Plumbers.
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 8:57 PM on August 25, 2010 [2 favorites]

Ok, correct me if I am wrong, but isn't it the school boards who determine things like which textbook or curricula to use? And the school boards are filled with "everyday people" who got elected to that postition, correct? Why? Why do we run schools this way when we don't run anything else this way?

I worked for an expert in the field of early childhood education. I was involved in data collection for a study of different pre-K curriculum in order to judge their specific effectiveness. That study was state funded. (Actually it was under George W. Bush's reign as Governor of Texas and my boss worked pretty closely with Laura and was invited to the White House Christmas Party and such.) But anyway, I get the idea from my experiences on the academic side of education research that the serious researchers with the credentials in child development, psychology, and learning aren't the same people who are generally allowed to make decisions about curriculum. The actual people involved at the school and administration level may have graduated with an education degree, which in many cases is a totally inadequate course of study.

So when people talk about "experts" I think we may be talking past each other. There certainly are people who are experts in how children learn and what they need to be taught and the best ways to teach them. And then there are the people who make the decisions about what happens in schools. The fact that these are usually completely isolated groups is, I suspect, the root of much of our education problems.
posted by threeturtles at 10:30 PM on August 25, 2010

We'd all be a lot better off if we let experts make decisions about things like education, public transportation, food safety, seismic engineering, etc.

The public is, in general, quite willing to do that — quite possibly to a fault. But the public's trust, once broken, takes generations to recover.

You don't see the electorate second-guessing civil engineers very much, because by and large the public's perception is that civil engineers know what the hell they're doing. Nuclear engineers? The public seems more than happy to interfere, with blunt instruments like funding if necessary, in nuke-power projects: there's a widespread perception that the 'experts' sold us a bill of goods once, and won't get that sort of carte blanche again. (Whether that's really justified is a separate issue, but it's clear the perception is there.)

Educators, very broadly, have gotten themselves into a situation that's not dissimilar to the nuclear engineers'. There is a widespread perception that the public let the "experts" run things, particularly in the 60s and 70s, and got New Math and a bunch of other abortive experiments as a result. In fact, I think you could say that New Math is the educators' Chernobyl: everyone in the field may understand why it failed and it would never be allowed to happen again, something not even worth discussing seriously anymore, but the public doesn't see it that way.

There's a deeper problem at work, too, and it's where the engineering analogy breaks down. The public trusts civil engineers because their successes are obvious: bridge stays up, good; bridge falls down, bad. Nuclear engineers will someday earn the trust of the public in a similar fashion, mainly by delivering on their promises incrementally while not blowing smoking radioactive holes in the Earth. But I don't think we have even come close to agreeing on a good metric for measuring the success of educational strategies.

And so, without any warm-and-fuzzies towards education as an academic field and the apparent lack of acceptable ways to measure performance, the public has pulled in the reigns significantly. The insistence on "back to basics" and then standardized testing, culminating in NCLB, sprang directly from a general distrust of professional educators, not a hatred of schools or of education in the abstract.* It's just that the public started to perceive that they could do the job better than the professionals, and decided to give it a whirl.

Given that it's ultimately the electorate who has the power, it's up to professionals to fix the perception issue and earn back the public trust.

* Prop 13, though, that I think you could argue represented some ugliness, insofar as it was a response to Serrano v. Priest. However, I think Prop 13 and standardized testing mandates, and even NCLB, come from a fundamentally different place.
posted by Kadin2048 at 10:37 PM on August 25, 2010 [1 favorite]

Scram: "Well, of course he's cranky. You would be, too, if some guys from Mensa kept accusing you of being the Zodiac killer."

Heh. I wasn't going to mention that part.
posted by gingerbeer at 10:41 AM on August 26, 2010

Oh, yeah!
posted by MrMoonPie at 11:51 AM on August 26, 2010

It's not the government fat-cats that gave us No Child Left Behind, it's the Joe the Plumbers.

Joe the Plumber doesn't have that much power and from what I can see generally wants school decisions to be strictly local. NCLB is a federal level boondoggle birthed by strange bedfellows George Bush and Edward Kennedy.

One scholar (UCDavis trained, coincidentally) fingers the National Business Roundtable. If that's too tin foil hat for you, there are other works to read.

It's just that the public started to perceive that they could do the job better than the professionals, and decided to give it a whirl.

Alternatively, the public felt it couldn't do a worse job. As I said above, there's a reason why there's a thriving market for tutors and Kumon and such in ambitious zip-codes. To say nothing of home schooling in perhaps less obviously ambitious zip-codes.* Parents at least aren't down on signing the checks, they're down on the results, which for too many are less than what they experienced, or too far estranged for what they experienced.

Which is really going to be the bottom line metric for determining the efficacy of a given school. If it isn't as just as good or clearly a whole lot better than what the parent remembers, it ain't worth spit.



*(The facile can dismiss these folk as a buncha creationists and gay haters, but there are plenty of secular home schoolers out there.)
posted by IndigoJones at 5:02 PM on August 26, 2010

Someone who can solve a physics problem with a slide rule can learn to use a calculator in an afternoon.

Going to have to digress a bit here, as I take umbrage at this particular example. Physics is a terrible subject for people who have learned only by rote; they can't do actual physics worth a damn. They can plug numbers into an equation, sure, but they have a whole lot of trouble figuring out what is actually going on, what all those equations and arithmetic mean. If you change the problem a little bit from what they've seen before, it's quite clear that a number of people who are good with arithmetic just have no clue what's actually going on.

As far as math education goes you need to be able to be comfortable with doing arithmetic by rote, but the conceptual part--why you're doing it and what it means--is also important for math to be very useful. The problem is schools only seem to have the time and expertise to try to teach one or the other.
posted by Zalzidrax at 11:23 PM on August 26, 2010

Likewise in math. If you can grasp the conceptuals, then getting the rote down is a matter of doing the rote work on a daily basis, which likely doesn't happen unless there's a damn good reason for it. This is why people suck at arithmetic: the modern environment has removed the daily pressure for people to actually count change. This doesn't mean that they don't understand numbers, though, or that they couldn't get good at arithmetic if there were a need for it. As such, the main reason to train kids to get really good at arithmetic is to get them into the habit of getting really good at rote tasks. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, just something that needs to be recognised. Speed arithmetic has no inherent value, any more than a good knowledge of Roman numerals. It's a tool: it's value is what we use it for.

This is why educators (like myself) are interested in teaching problem solving. To be a good problem solver, you have to have the conceptuals down, and be flexible enough to apply them to new situations. You look across a tomato field and say, 'How can I apply calculus to this?'

What follows is a really long example, illustrating a more extreme case of the arithmetic problem:

The most important branch of mathematics is linear algebra, and that is because we understand linear algebra really, really well. Our understanding of the world largely comes down to our ability to translate complicated problems into linear algebra. This is what calculus, differential equations, optimization, quantum physics, computer graphics, and a pile of other disciplines do.

The concepts in linear algebra are multitudinous and genuinely hard, but pretty easy to apply once you understand them. There's also a bunch of rote stuff involving matrix multiplication, which is somewhat helpful in learning the conceptuals and very important for fast computations. (These are the things that everyone needs to learn but that no-one should ever have to grade.) And then, once you have the conceptuals down, you should delegate all the matrix multiplication to a computer as quickly as possible, because - as important as matrix multiplication is - there is absolutely no reason for humans to be doing it. Even the algorithms humans are best at aren't very good for computers: if you want to program a computer to multiply quickly, you need to learn new algorithms that aren't taught in basic linear algebra classes.

So what should we teach? If engineering firms were saying 'these graduates can't even multiply matrices!' they would be a) right, and b) fucking insane to suggest that anyone should need to remember the mechanics off the top of their heads.
posted by kaibutsu at 2:41 PM on August 27, 2010 [1 favorite]