Lie To Me

As a rule I enjoy Kevin Drum's blog at Mother Jones. But his occasional forays into education generally descend into naysaying and pessimism--Kevin's one all-purpose insight on the subject is that education policy is hard and as such not worth trying to solve. For example:

But to some extent education is a zero-sum game. If we invest more money in inner-city schools, it means less for the suburbs. If we try to attract the best teachers to urban schools, it means that suburbs get weaker teachers. If we do it anyway, suburban parents will start sending their kids to private schools. And the point at which public support for No Child Left Behind evaporates is the point at which suburban schools start "failing" in large numbers. That isn't something suburban parents will tolerate, and they'll simply vote out of office anyone who tries to make them.

First, 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. Moreover, there's a very consistent pattern in the research: whether you're looking at class size, teacher quality, or various other generally agreed-upon interventions, student sensitivity to education quality varies with educational need. If you're a well-off suburban student with two college-educated parents and an enriching home environment, class size doesn't matter that much. If you're a low-SES student with none of those advantages, class sizes matters a lot. This is common sense: the more the rest of your life deprives you of educational opportunities, the more what you get in school matters. A straight redistribution of resources from the current state of things (where wealthiest students get the most resources) to resource equity or even providing the neediest students with more would create a net increase in aggregate education outcomes.

Second, Kevin's sense of the essential selfishness of suburban parents (he says that "One of the great third rails of education policy debates is acknowledging the fact that suburban parents will flatly never go along with anything like [allowing children from poor districts to transfer into wealthier suburban districts]) is simplistic and overstated. 

Your typical suburban parent / voter has two competing impulses. On the one hand, most decent people recognize a general societal obligation to provide all students with a free public education. That's why every state constitution guarantees such services and nobody is in a hurry to repeal those provisions. On the other hand, when asked, parents will jealously guard the resources available to their own children.

So the key thing is to not ask.  For example, back when I worked on education funding in Indiana, we created a formula that allowed local school districts to keep all of the revenue they generated through property taxes, but then distributed state funds inversely to local property wealth, equalizing the overall funding level. The effect was to redistribute hundreds of millions of dollars of sales and income tax revenue from the wealthiest school districts to the poorest. But because that transfer occured in the context of an immensely complex formula understood by less than half a dozen people and negotiated in a back room long after the official hearings had finished and the press had gone home, nobody really got upset by it, because nobody knew exactly how much money they were losing, and we were in no hurry to tell them.  

The point being, sometimes too much information is detrimental to fair public policy. States that have tried to explicitly transfer local property wealth between districts have had a horrible time of it, because the extent of the redistribution was too obvious. Sometimes it's better to hide the true extent of people's contributions to the common good. Otherwise they'll start asking questions and from there it's a slippery slope all the way back to every family huddling alone in a cave and foraging for fruits and nuts.