It sounds to me like Kevin C. is agreeing that suburban parents will protect their schools like crazed weasels, and the only way to overcome this is to lie to them early and often. And he thinks I'm the pessimistic one?
In retrospect, titling that post "Lie To Me" and talking about hiding information from parents was a bad idea--as is blogging at 4 AM after a night on the town. So let me take another shot. The point I was trying to make wasn't so much about dishonesty as framing and communication.
If parents and taxpayers were purely rational people, then only two things would really matter when it comes to public finance: the total amount of money they pay in taxes and the way the government chooses to spend that money on services. The basis of taxation and the means by which tax dollars are collected and distributed should matter much less, if at all. (Assuming certain underlying conditions like democratic governance and lack of corruption, of course, i.e. not living in DC.)
So let's say your household makes $100,000 a year, of which you pay $30,000 in taxes. Of that, $20,000 goes to Uncle Sam via federal income and payroll taxes, $6,000 goes to the state via income and sales taxes, and $4,000 goes to a number of local governments, including your school district, based on property taxes. (You're also paying some corporate, excise, and other taxes but to keep this simple we'll stick with the big ones). You have one child, for whom your school receives $10,000 per year, in total, from local, state, and federal sources.
If your elected officials came along and said "Hey, were going to revamp the tax code and the school funding formula, so some of your taxes will go up and others down and the money will flow in very different ways, but in the end you still owe $30,000 in taxes and your kid's school still gets $10,000," then you shouldn't really care. A dollar's a dollar and they're all green.
But in fact people don't think this way. They tend to be much more proprietary about local taxes and proportionately much less interested in taxes paid to and spent by governments that are far way--even though the latter collect most of the taxes. Local finance is much more tangible. Automatic payroll deduction is regular and abstract; the money disappears in small chunks before you ever see it. Ditto with sales taxes--a little nick, one transaction at a time. Property taxes, by contrast are based on a physical thing, and even if they go into escrow every month with your mortgage payment, you still get a large annual bill from the local government that spells out the total. Similarly, a lot of federal money is spent on things that happen in other places to other people. Federal spending is also complicated and thus opaque. Local spending is immediate, straightforward, and easy to identify--fire protection, police, sanitation, and most of all schools.
So when you tell people that you're going to take a chunk of their child's locally-generated, locally-spent property tax revenue and give it to other people's children in other school districts, they get angry. That's why so-called "Robin Hood" school funding programs have been unpopular. When their kid is involved, everyone turns into Prince John.
Yet when the state implements a school funding formula with precisely the same effect in terms of total tax burden and total school spending, but does so using sales and income taxes distributed via formula, people get much less angry. Indeed, they're generally supportive. As I should have made clearer in the original post, there's nothing revolutionary about the Indiana formula--all states do this to some degree (although Indiana more than most.)
All ethical people recognize a general obligation to the well-being and education of all children. At the same time, parents are intensely protective of their own children's well-being. If you ask them to choose between their kid and someone else's, they'll choose theirs. That doesn't make them weasels--just humans. But that also means that when a certain class of parents wields more political power than others, there's a high likelihood of injustice.
To guard against that, we have to be smart about how issues are framed. We need to understand the foibles of human cognition and act accordingly. If property taxes are irrationally hard to redistribute, than redistribute something else. Appeal to larger ideals of child welfare and the economic benefits of universal education. This works--most states have adopted policies that level out local wealth-based spending differences, and the trend has improved over time. We shouldn't lie to parents. But there are better and worse ways to tell them the truth.
4 comments:
Kevin,
Thank you for writing,
"we have to be smart about how issues are framed. We need to understand the foibles of human cognition and act accordingly"
I think that's the biggest bone of contention between traditional educational reformers and "reformers" from the 90s who brought a rational, data-drven approach where knowledge and social systems are supposed to be chopped up into discrete units.
Those of us who have real world experience in flesh and blood educational systems have never quite understood your model of human cognition. It flies in the face of science since Descartes and our professional experience.
Now, we have a president who understands and who has appointed a lot of advisors from behavioral economics.
I still have a complaint regarding your previous statement,
"education isn't a zero-sum game. It's not like there's an immutable fixed quantity of teachers out there--we can improve training and recruitment, among many things ..."
In the long run, of course you're right. But in the short run - say the seven year life of NCLB - education remains basically zero sum. Some "reformers" and "charters" and schools showcased for extra resources can increase student performance in the short run, but its mostly by "creaming." It is mostly from siphoning of from the most motivated parents and best teachers. Real reform requires an increase in the pie for all. In the long run we can get it done. But only if we have realistic and respectful acknowledgment of the human dynamics.
As an avid reader of both Kevin Drum and The Quick and the Ed, I have been following this debate since the beginning, but I can't help but wonder if you have gotten off track from Kevin Drum's original point... suburban parents are selfish, and would never agree to any mass integration efforts between urban and suburban school districts.
While, evening out school funding using non-direct sources of income might be possible with creative communication, that is a far cry from getting suburban parents to agree to mass integration of urban and suburban students, even though magnet programs.
I am skeptical to whether the integration efforts are effective (as I understand it, the sweet spot is around 30% minority - 70% majority). Demographically, I just don't think there are that many population centers that could achieve that ratio (or something effectively similar).
Like Kevin, I am also skeptical to as whether any suburban parents would agree to the program even if it was possible.
Arne Duncan, who theoretically must be aware of all the stats and facts still decided to move to a suburban neighborhood far away from the city schools... he didn't even consider the charter or magnet schools.
Ironically, as far as I can tell by reviewing VA's school data, Arlington actually does below average (compared with the rest of the state) at educating all student groups except for whites. I seriously doubt they are even better at educating whites, as much as they are luckily enough to have a huge number of upper middle class whites compared to the rest of the state.
Why is everyone willing to side step the proper function of the family in matters of education? In all other realms of social justice that involve redistrubition, it seems like parents have more authority in regards to how public funds benefit their family. For instance, with policies like food stamps and medicaid, families still play at least some degree of a "cosumer" role. If parental freedom doesn't matter, why don't we just take all kids from their homes at an early age and put them into integrated boarding schools where they can go to school 10 hours a day for 6 days a week. I am sure that would raise their achievement. But would that be fair? I guess that would depend on your ideology.
I don't feel most suburban parents are racist and/or classist but rather concerned about their children's safety. I grew up in the Boston area, where there has been a long-established integration program called METCO. It has been my experience that METCO is typically viewed in a positive way in the participating suburbs. The parents in general welcome the diversity that the city kids bring to the suburban schools.
This is in contrast to where I live now in the S.F. Bay Area where there is large scale busing of students from poorer neighborhoods into schools in wealthier ones. There has been a lot of problems with gang violence and a flight to private schools by families who can afford the tuition.
The difference IMHO is that families have to apply to the METCO program. So the students participating in the program are less likely to have a dysfunctional homelife than the average city kid. It's the same "creaming" issue as charter schools like KIPP or MATCH.
Bringing in poor minority kids is not what's problematic; it's bringing in the ones from dysfunctional families who often wind up causing issues with gang violence.
Post a Comment