A lot of times we hear “equity”, “achievement gap” and similar. The recommended response is usually more money. But why? When is that an appropriate policy action? The following commentary is intended to straighten out thinking about this situation.
First we need to recall the two major purposes that justify the coercion of taxation for education:
- To ensure that the citizens who will eventually be voters, are actually informed enough that they constructively can contribute
- For fundamentally economic purposes
“Civilizing” or making sure children become well-behaved when they are adults also could be listed as a purpose; however, due to near-universal education, as well as the obvious failures of such in urban school districts in this area, it’s not at all clear that there actually is a difference to be had by formal schooling vs. the school of hard knocks.
With regards to the point about early childhood education, increased exposure to spoken language, etc. mitigating or eliminating disabilities such as dyslexia that effectively limit future freedom of action: this is valid, but in order efficiently to carry out the economic purposes of education, you will end up requiring early childhood education, etc. in support of that objective. It’s that these points are a subset of the overall economic argument.
Voting competency is a worthwhile goal, but the effectiveness of formal schooling in achieving it is low. Moreover, the current average achievement level of students in American K-12 schools is not high enough that we would consider there to be a large distinction between developing skills and knowledge for voting, vs. economic considerations generally. The major deviation lies in the study of history and civics, but you have to know enough about how your government works to run your businesses. On average, you’re talking about less than 20% of rigorous education that primarily benefits voting competency.
Economic purposes are not particularly constrained, but the most economic benefit also is obtained by getting the education done as early as possible. However, very young children are not going to be able to sit still for long periods without emotionally damaging restraint, all children are not going to be able to stare at screens and books for long periods of time without eye damage, and adults have work and family responsibilities that limit their free time. Consequently, we have to allocate class time to reading, writing, and arithmetic, and try to teach life skills, science, social studies, etc. via audiobooks, outdoor activity, etc.
To simplify the following discussion, let us first consider that only public schooling is available:
Only to provide economic competency, there is no need to provide advanced education; when the students reach that limit, they are done with their compulsory education, and you have them make their first choices about vocational vs. college tracks. Hence when you allocate funds, one approach would be to spend money on children, progressively increasing resources up until you are individually tutoring, until each child passes. The result of this will be that some children are very cheap to educate, and some very expensive. (The only obvious benefit at this point in the development of information-era economies, is getting college STEM majors out the other end, and no one else really matters in formal education except for trade schools and certain occupationals, both of which can be done via apprenticeships. )
Because the very expensive students are a small percentage of the overall population, you immediately enter into consideration of the tradeoff of letting the intensive IEPs and poor kids not attain economic and/or voting competency. In the case of the mentally disabled, they may never be able to obtain competency, so education beyond basic personal restraint may be essentially wasted. In the case of children whom we consider fundamentally incapable of classroom discipline, the similar consideration applies. It would be ideal if all citizens could vote to reject Hitler, but if you know you are not helping yourself with these groups, you cut them loose.
The similar consideration applies as you work your way up the schooling ladder, but in a society without environmental lead and with half-capable parents, you don’t have that many people to cut. Hence the problem, deficiency, or deviation from plan with a public school begins when significant numbers of presumably mentally fit children cannot obtain economic competency, to the point that jobs can’t be filled. That doesn’t mean that they are good at algebra – it means that everyone can get a job with the skills they were able to attain for whatever educational achievements they managed to work towards, that is valuable enough to feed themselves, earn old age pension, etc.
Here we begin the discussion of the fact that such a situation can be fixed, and that there are constructive examples of this. The Success Academy of New York provides a clear demonstration that when parental involvement in their children’s education is combined with a high-discipline, high-standards environment, at least half of the poor and socially marginalized children will achieve obvious voting competency. Hence we only can consider that half of the lowest tier of society, at most, could possibly be incapable of economic competency: but that is not likely, due to the parent selection process weeding out the ones who merely are too busy, or not sufficiently interested in doing educational work at home. Moreover, since much of the labor force remains essentially manual, lower-skilled, or vocational/job-specific training, the fact that you might only be able to get half the population to college readiness, doesn’t mean that the other half is unemployable. We recognize that worldwide, manual labor is essentially marginal, but we still can employ everyone in a westernized country with reasonable birth rates, and have many worthwhile things left over.
Hence when we talk about the theoretical upper limit, regardless of cost, we really mean to say we are half-adopting or even snatching children away from their original parents and giving them to paid parents who do what Success Academy says, and raise the children completely and properly (e.g. vs. the parents who may try but just don’t have the time because they are too busy working). The cost for this varies, but you talk about boarding school, the cost of having multiple kids and making a middle class income to raise them, as anchor points. In concrete terms, that means you pay a couple $50K a year for one of them to be a full-time teacher and keep the kids in house, or possibly something like $25K to be the educational parent and advisor.
There are some less drastic, but also less effective, steps. One is to just have the high-standards no-excuses school, which does marginally improve results (maybe 10% additional voting competency), but that is nowhere near what you could get with a Success Academy approach. Since you have to pay for the inferior school anyway ($10->$16K typically), the additional Success Academy cost for the vastly improved results is clearly a good value play; you only do the alternatives if you don’t have the money.
There are some other approaches to the problem, like marginally increasing teacher pay, and dedicating additional resources/tutors/special classes to kids who are falling behind. These won’t get you much global benefits that show up in a significantly sized student population, but can help for kids that otherwise would be motivated to learn, just struggling. The issue with measuring the benefit of these approaches is that you won’t see results for some time unless you have a really good standardized test ladder, and because these kids got behind, unless you can catch them up nearly all the way, they probably will fail the voting competency test, and so it seems that you had no practical effect even though your intermediate MOE of years of learning gained was clearly positive.
Hence you have a range of options in a normal public school setting: one end of that range is a basic level that accords to laissez-faire, and the other end is a full potential achievement, with different optimal spending strategies and required funding levels.
One approach you could take to this is to have a public funding increment that pays for education up to the voting competency, and then an additional increment that pays for economic benefit. The difficulty is that because of differences in student achievement, which in turn are linked to resources (public school and parental) put into the child, you don’t have uniform voting competency growth; and even if you do, you still would want to accelerate the learning of the smart children to put them on the path to becoming medical doctors, PhD experimenters, etc. That is, you could have all children on track to being voting competent at majority (18 years of age), but with acceleration, you could get some of those kids additional college competencies in at the same age, that would have sizable economic benefits.
Of course each parent of the different groups has a different view of the allocation of limited funds: the parents of the struggling students want voting competency, the parents of high potential/currently high-achieving students want their economic boost. This is where the issue of per-student allocation across the entire district (or multi-district region), vs. the allocation of funds to individual students, comes into play. It’s also where the issue of high standards ultimately comes in, in the later stages of education (it always is correct at the beginning). If the government pays an equal amount to each child, that will not produce the same results for every child, hence an achievement gap, that practically speaking reflects the socioeconomic status, and maybe e.g. the race, of the parents. If the government pays up to a cap to get voting competency, hence once a child gets there/is on track no more funds are allocated, or the bare minimums, then the effect of the system is to pay the stupid/poor kids more, and in the process waste the smarter/richer kids’ time if that system is not fully accelerated up until a successful voting competency test. If the government pays to full potential (plus the voting competency), then on top of being hugely expensive, there may be more spending for the smarter/richer kids than for the stupid/poor kids.
Now to relieve some of the initial assumptions about public school being the only option. First, we need to talk about the relative costs.
There is an effective economic cap for the cost of per-pupil education at ~$30K, that being the cost of a full-time tutor at lower grades in a relatively low cost of living area (because the full-time tutor can rotate between two or three kids in independent work). Obviously if you have 3 kids, and the state cost is at $10K/child, you have the option of home schooling as well, which isn’t far down in terms of academic performance, especially at higher grades where more student input and initiative is needed vs. teaching – and the online education in the 2020s is excellent, better than a significant number of human educators. Many school districts are well into the $10s of K per pupil, and hence already the issue of the public schooling (or even private schooling) becoming wasteful, is pressing. You cannot rationally add funds in those school districts; it would be better to have many (not all, some are professionals) of the mothers teach the kids on vouchers, and then there still would be some schools for the others to which vouchers could be applied.
We also need to consider the relative differences in students and parents, educators, etc. This has always been an issue for certain special education students, where specialized instruction is essentially separating out certain students. However, it’s also an issue when you consider that some students do better in remote learning than in-person, or with large-group classes vs. home schooling. If you are trying to optimize the individual student’s performance, you have to make that decision in light of their quarterly assessments vs. benchmarks, institutional vs. small group performance, most effective styles of teaching and class organization for that student, etc. This will force you into tracking, different school environments, etc. based on the amount of funding you can provide.
Moreover, we must recall that the academic trajectory of young children is far less predictable before roughly the third grade, and a lot of the predictive power beyond that, is due merely to falling behind in e.g. reading ability, for which there is strong evidence that interventions and active parental involvement can resolve issues. So you are not in a position in the elementary education, really to restrain spending below the notional $10K/child, because you don’t have a good predictor of where you would really save money, vs. incorrectly de-tracking a child.
Hence, whether you talk about cost-unrestricted educational achievement, or cost-bound spending, you’re usually still dealing with the outcome of multiple educational settings. The only situation where that somewhat isn’t the case, is when you have a restrictive cap on school spending (e.g. $3K per student), and so you are packing the classroom full of kids taught on a script. But that still doesn’t optimize cost for all students – it optimizes only for those students whose personal inclinations and/or parental support, do not lead them to follow the classroom script. That is to say – the ones who are not driven to be successful in relatively independent home schooling, which in all instances is the cheapest method.
So the provisions of educational expenditure at the basic/low-cost level are:
- Requiring parents to meet the standards e.g. of universal pre-K – middle income people won’t need it, poor people will have to work to get it
- In the formal education phase/kindergartenish, intensive spending up to the spending cap all the way through elementary and likely middle school
- De-tracking students in high school
- Home schooling as much as possible
- Requirement for at least scripted instruction in poorly-performing public schools (that is, free instruction without scripts is not an option for low achieving students in schools that are lagging)
and the major differences in a higher resource level are:
- Subsidized pre-K type activities
- Lower class sizes in public schools
- Additional application of instruction for lower-performing students in high school, allowing them to continue towards the college track