See Freddie deBoer's Substack piece today on exactly this point. Be prepared for some serious reading should you venture into Freddie's many linked studies and previous pieces on the topic.
If you believe Education Realist, or Arnold Kling for that matter, there really isn't anything that would improve educational results. American schools are doing about as well as they can, given the students, and what they're supposed to learn. Lots of students just aren't smart enough to become proficient, and most aren't especially interested in the subjects. A deadly combination that probably won't be changed
I consider it a “crime” of the worst order that you lumped AK in with the progressive, teacher’s union and establishment apologist “Education Realist”.
AK’s views and ER’s views could scarcely be more different.
Even if they might agree on the narrow statement “we shouldn’t work to try to reform public schools to get better results out of them”, their reasoning comes from *totally* opposite points of view!
AR seems to generally believe that the current education system is largely unreformable. ER believes In Panglossian fashion that there is simply no need to reform it at all, that it is doing as well as it possibly can.
And IIRC, AK’s comments along the lines of “Lots of students just aren't smart enough to become proficient” are much more to do with too many young people attending college. I don’t recall him making statements like “students aren’t smart enough” about K-12 education.
I think I have read every one of Education Realist's blogspot posts (aside from a few that were just about math lesson plans) and I don't think he is a "progressive, teacher’s union and establishment apologist". He does indeed say that schools are doing about as well as they can under present circumstances, but it's not a "schools are wonderful" thing; it's a "we have ridiculously high ideas of what schools can do."
Arnold Kling's Null Hypothesis says that when it comes to K-12, there has been no attempt at improvement in the last half century or so that is 1) noticeable, 2) scalable (e.g., there is only one Jaime Escalante; there was only one Perry Preschool) and 3) lasting (kids who had academic pre-K do better in first grade than similar students who didn't, but by third grade they are no better). It certainly suggests that K-12 students aren't sufficiently smart or motivated enough to do as well as most people think they should. That's because we have ridiculously high ideas of what schools can do.
In politics and policy advocacy, it is assumed that American schools are terrible failures and there is so much room for improvement. In fact, there are a lot of people who are progressives, or teachers union people, or members of the educational establishment (or all three!) who believe that. Why, with enough money and new pedagogy, we could eliminate the gap between blacks and whites, skyrocketing black achievement! Both Ed and Arnold do not believe this is true. If conventional wisdom is that schools could be at 100 and are actually at 50, neither of them is optimistic about even getting to 60.
I will partly defer to you re: AK’s opinion, and partly simply choose not to engage on it further, as I don’t have high certainty in my claims there.
Re: Education Realist, we will have to agree to *profoundly* disagree. I stand fully behind my claim of teacher’s union apologist, morally certain that private schools could not possibly get any better results than our public school system does. I will retract the Pangloss reference as not completely accurate.
And I stand by my “even if they *might* share a couple conclusions, they get there from VERY different places” assertion.
Or to put it another way, the progressive myth is that, "Public educational results would improve if only we spent more money on education." But this is only one subset of the more encompassing myth, "there is something we can do which will significantly improve educational results."
My claim is that indeed some percentage of students would achieve better results by getting out of execrable inner city public schools and into private schools.
No it would not meaningfully improve educations results and life outcomes for most, let alone all. Yes, OBVIOUSLY it would improve outcomes for some, and the relevant question public policy question and dispute here is for how many.
I hope you see the ridiculousness of citing ER who claims that it is “fact” that *nothing whatsoever* can be done to improve outcomes for *any* 🙄🙄🙄. In fact the conversation here shows him (her?) to be even more dogmatic a zealot for his (her) position - a position that in fact DOES align with that of the teachers unions, and defends their efforts to trap poor kids in terrible public schools by claiming it is impossible to do better with private competition - than even I recalled.
I agree that Education Realist thinks "that private schools could not possibly get any better results than our public school system does." But that is not because he has a love of "public" or a hatred of "private" and "markets". It's because he doesn't think they can do anything different which will result in greater student achievement (pretty much, he believes in the Null Hypothesis). They can "skim the cream", either in terms of student intelligence and motivation or in terms of parental pushing (indeed, the latter is pretty much Robert Pondiscio's reason for the success of Success Academy schools, and he's a fan of Success Academy!).
In America today, to say that education can't be improved much is to make yourself a pariah. It's also political suicide. So people on the right, who know that lots more money hasn't made students learn more, delude themselves into believing that some sort of "school choice" will. See, we have the answer when those lefties so obviously don't. But nobody does. That's an incredibly hard truth to accept.
You and I may or may not be largely in agreement on this topic, have moderate differences, or large ones; idk. I include the above short conversation from ChatGPT to help you understand that ER’s claims are ridiculous zealotry and so only subtract from credible argument, not add to it.
I am not "morally certain" that private schools couldn't get better results. I am factually certain, because research shows this to be the case.
I'm definitely not a union apologist. I don't agree with union positions, for the most part. Nor do most teachers, for the most part. But what I do dispute is that teachers unions make any difference to educational outcomes. And again, you have no research proving otherwise.
Your “‘factually’ certain” claim shows you lack ALL epistemic humility, and shows definitively you are nothing like AK.
Do you not acknowledge that your “certain” views align entirely with the public teachers unions, and sheds them in the best possible light? Am I correct in guessing that you are in fact either a current or former public school teacher?
Re: “proof”, of course no definitive proof is possible (nor would it get through the skull of any fanatic so “certain” even if it did exist). But the results of vouchers in Milwaukee provide solid *evidence* that private schools do better than the execrable MPS. And you can certainly not prove that the improved results are entirely because of ”cream-skimming”, which no doubt plays some role in observed differences.
And surely you are aware that the biggest reason we do not have more evidence is that the teachers unions fight tooth and nail to prevent school choice anywhere and everywhere it can. Obama famously disgustingly shut down the school choice program in DC, to cite merely the most high profile example.
"The African American students who make up roughly two-thirds of Milwaukee’s student body are the main recipients of vouchers. Their academic performance is thus important in assessing the overall impact of choice in the district. Figures A and B compare the National Assessment of Educational Process (NAEP) scores of black students in eighth-grade math and reading in 13 urban U.S. school districts. Black students in Milwaukee have lower eighth-grade math scores than students in every city but Detroit—notably, another urban district with a high level of school choice. In reading, Milwaukee’s black eighth-graders do even more poorly. They score lower than black eighth-graders in all other 12 city school districts. Although not represented in a figure, fourth-grade NAEP scores for the 13 cities show the same pattern."
“Affiliated with the labor movement, the EPI is usually described as presenting a left-leaning and pro-union viewpoint on public policy issues. Since 2021, EPI has been led by economist Heidi Shierholz, the former chief economist of the Department of Labor.”
Way to prove that you are not on the side of the teachers union, citing a biased paper spouting spin after spin put out by an organization affiliated with the labor movement.
(Or perhaps now you will tell me that Wikipedia is right-wing biased and you disagree with the claim that EPI is leftist and pro-union? 😂😂😂)
I read the study, and the dishonest spin/framing appears in almost every paragraph.
You utterly fail to comprehend that even if the link you cited was 100% honest and accurate (and to be clear, IT. IS. NOT) all it says is that there is not proof that vouchers DO deliver better results. It decidedly does NOT provide “proof” that vouchers do not deliver better results.
Given that your lack of answer “proves” that you are a teacher or ex-teacher (that was sarcasm; its a more than 0% possibility that you are not), you either were not a science teacher, or even a social science teacher, else you are decidedly a terrible one for failing to understand the most basic point that you have made unfalsifiable statements that are unrelated to science with your claims of “fact” and citing your pile of studies showing no benefit as “proof” that there is no benefit. Actual science does not work the way you suggest that it does.
Look. I voted for Trump 6 times, primary and general both. Whatever I am, it ain't progressive. I'm an immigration restrictionist, anti-CRT/woke/DEI, anti-affirmative action realist.
I agree I'm not to be lumped in with Arnold Kling, but Roger didn't lump us together. He observed the one belief we share, which is that educational results can't be much improved.
"I don’t recall him making statements like “students aren’t smart enough” about K-12 education."
He has.
"AR seems to generally believe that the current education system is largely unreformable. ER believes In Panglossian fashion thatthere is simply no need to reform it at all, that it is doing as well as it possibly can."
Arnold has utterly ludicrous ideas for reforming college, while I have excellent ones. I am not against reform of k-12 in the slightest. I just don't think the changes that reformers want will make a damn bit of difference.
Perhaps the only place we are mostly in agreement is that most “reforms” of public schools will likely make little to no difference. And for inner city public schools I’d probably agree that no “reform” to them will make any meaningful difference.
Vouchers and the competition that private schools will provide are the only thing that might eventually make a meaningful difference in public schools.
But I care not one whit about the public schools, but rather about the kids, especially the poor ones in inner city schools, some fraction of whom (10%? 40%? Neither of us know, but I believe it very likely to be in that range) would get a meaningfully better education and better chance at adult success if they could get out from the trap of their awful inner city public schools.
Yes, that means that I agree with you that for many kids in public schools, nothing will make a difference. Likely even for the median kid, since I acknowledge it’s likely less than 50% for whom we could get material better results.
But just because more than half would not be better off does NOT. AT. ALL mean that none would be better off, nor that it’s not worth doing.
I’m willing to take back my use of the word “progressive” to describe you, based on your words above. My apologies. But I definitively do not take back the “union apologist” descriptor because that is exactly what you are with your claims here.
"Neither of us know, but I believe it very likely to be in that range) would get a meaningfully better education and better chance at adult success if they could get out from the trap of their awful inner city public schools."
There's no evidence suggesting this is true, and lots of evidence proving it isn't.
"Vouchers and the competition that private schools will provide are the only thing that might eventually make a meaningful difference in public schools."
Nope.
And I'm not a union apologist. Once again, pay attention: I don't agree with unions. They don't do much right. But they have nothing to do with student outcomes.
That you don’t understand that it is literally impossible to *prove* such a negative - even if you had overwhelming evidence lending credence to your side of the argument - shows that it is pointless to argue with you.
I made a Pangloss reference earlier. The optimist portion of that reference was of course incorrect, but the zealous certitude was even more spot on than I had realized.
I don’t think that this is a progressive myth. If a myth (which I take that there is a good chance that this could be), it would be way larger believed than people of the progressive bent.
I don't think this could be called a progressive myth, if only because progressives believe that nothing can really improve educational results because of systemic inequities.
On the other hand, education reformers have their own myths, such as: educational outcomes would improve if......
Because nothing that completes that sentence will do a damn thing.
I look forward to the day when teachers' unions finally admit that increasing educational spending has, at best, only a very small effect on improving educational outcomes.
If you eyeball Ezra's chart, it looks like about 40% of US healthcare spending is public, in line with the approximately 40% of the US population that's covered by public programs.
I just don't think "Medicare for all" is a magic wand that will fix US healthcare.
The idea that there is a correlation between spending more on health insurance and having a healthier population could only have taken hold in a USA context. In most of the developed world it’s not even a myth - it’s an American shibboleth, reinforced at the folk level by weird rankings against ‘socialism.’
My comment about socialism was not aimed at you of course. It was just an outsider’s observation of the strange discourse around health in the USA. I agree with all your points and was just making an observation that in most of the world ‘spend more on insurance to get better public health’ wouldn’t even reach the level of a myth that needed debunking.
Race is a social construct. This is clearly true as apart from ethnicity no? The categories are often large umbrellas of geographic and ethnic commonality. Black, White, Latino, etc. How and when the groups expand, shrink, or consume one another is certainly historically and socially constructed. Asian as a category to include Indian or not, White to include Italians or Persians, or a whole host of ethnic Eurasian people, etc, etc.
I agree. If Bryan's point is that skin color and other phenotypic traits have a genetic origin, that is obviously true. But the use of the word "race" has been co-opted to mean any manner of thing including skin color, religion, culture or whatever is convenient for the authoritative class. A historical look at the way the word is used reveals IMO.
I think talk of race as a social construct is distracting. Often, when people deny that race is a social construct, they're really saying that race is tracking something real and non-socially constructed, such as genetic differences between groups. However, this kind of a strange way of putting the point. A group can be socially constructed and it can also track real genetic differences at the same time. For example, the group "alumni of Ivy League universities" is a social construction, but this group differs genetically from the rest of the population.
That there is "no evidence" for genetic differences among races in mental traits (e.g. IQ), such that this is something only an ignorant racist could believe.
Here are a few candidate myths. Not sure if these are specifically "progressive" or just widely held.
The U.S. doesn't spend very much on education.
High performing suburban school districts spend much more per student than low-performing urban school districts.
Humans are destroying the environment at an ever increasing rate.
The earth is overpopulated. [This one might be a bit subjective. But I do think most people overestimate how crowded the earth is because most people live in cities.]
“Men and women are the same (aside from (maybe) their reproductive equipment).”
Many people believe that the average man and the average woman are equally well qualified to be soldiers or firefighters, and only sexism holds women back.
6 thousand years ago and earlier in the middle climate zone, women live separately from men in their villages and at a much higher cultural and material level.
I used to point out to my students that no matter how much 'labor' they put into making an apple pie "from scratch" it would never have as much value as one my grandmother made in haste.
The myth that if the racial composition of a company's workforce differs from the racial composition of the population in the region where the company operates, the hiring process is racist.
The myth that all racial disparities in life outcomes must be the result of systemic racism (whether past, present, or both).
The related myth that in a perfectly equal and meritocratic society there’d be no racial disparities in accomplishments, life outcomes, pay, etc.
The myth that if the results of an exam favor certain groups, the exam must be inherently discriminatory.
The myth that the government doesn't impose racial quotas (it does, by penalizing companies whose employees' racial composition doesn't match the population from which they hire).
The exam point reminds me of a previous version of the debate around sats. One point of outrage involved the word regatta, which was obviously included for racist purposes because white people would be more likely to get it right.
The bizarre assumption being that to know what a regatta is you first have to be in one.
Even worse, the implication that changing the word into, what, ghetto or ganster, would be… anti racist towards blacks. Hell lets use words like empathy, neuroticism, and homemaking to stop sexism towards women. For us gay men, how about debauchery, lascivious, and androgyny while at it. Stop me before i get to Jews.
On meritocracy it seems to me the pretense has fallen altogether in favor of the notion that opportunities are by definition unequal because of systemic ubiquitous bigotry. A bit closer to the truth in analysis, but a fertile ground for illiberal policies (which the Americans will inevitably and with a straight face call liberalism…).
Please buy this book, read it, and write about it.
"Society cannot be reliably improved through lies, exaggerations, and misleading stories; it requires knowledge of the real, factual situation we face, in whatever area we seek to improve matters." Michael Huemer
They practice, but only one move ahead, and on what promises immediate benefits. 99% of humanity is not able to rationally calculate the benefits for EVERYONE, all their rationalism begins and ends with the dear and beloved STOMACH!
The fact that particular social categories like race align in certain ways with genetic markers (although not perfectly by any means) doesn't challenge the idea that those categories are social constructs. There are plenty of social categories that relate in some way to genetics - for example, "French" is obviously a social category, but people in that social category will very often have similar genetic patterns because they all live in the same general region. The claim that race is a social construct isn't a claim that it has "nothing to do" with genetics, or that genetics don't play a role. Everyone recognizes that racial categories relate to physical characteristics, which must necessarily have genetic bases. The claim, rather, is that these categories are not neutral biological ones, but rather social groupings that develop in response to social factors. I mean, you can also give a DNA test to most people on the Indian subcontinent and determine their caste membership, but no one thinks that means caste is biological system, right? It's obviously a sociopolitical system that makes references to physical characteristics but is not neutrally defined by them. The same is true of our racial categories.
"Modern science and modern epistemology are colonial; there are many more progressive scientific methods and woken epistemologies in the world (especially in the Third World)."
Public educational results would improve if only we spent more money on education.
See Freddie deBoer's Substack piece today on exactly this point. Be prepared for some serious reading should you venture into Freddie's many linked studies and previous pieces on the topic.
If you believe Education Realist, or Arnold Kling for that matter, there really isn't anything that would improve educational results. American schools are doing about as well as they can, given the students, and what they're supposed to learn. Lots of students just aren't smart enough to become proficient, and most aren't especially interested in the subjects. A deadly combination that probably won't be changed
I consider it a “crime” of the worst order that you lumped AK in with the progressive, teacher’s union and establishment apologist “Education Realist”.
AK’s views and ER’s views could scarcely be more different.
Even if they might agree on the narrow statement “we shouldn’t work to try to reform public schools to get better results out of them”, their reasoning comes from *totally* opposite points of view!
AR seems to generally believe that the current education system is largely unreformable. ER believes In Panglossian fashion that there is simply no need to reform it at all, that it is doing as well as it possibly can.
And IIRC, AK’s comments along the lines of “Lots of students just aren't smart enough to become proficient” are much more to do with too many young people attending college. I don’t recall him making statements like “students aren’t smart enough” about K-12 education.
I think I have read every one of Education Realist's blogspot posts (aside from a few that were just about math lesson plans) and I don't think he is a "progressive, teacher’s union and establishment apologist". He does indeed say that schools are doing about as well as they can under present circumstances, but it's not a "schools are wonderful" thing; it's a "we have ridiculously high ideas of what schools can do."
Arnold Kling's Null Hypothesis says that when it comes to K-12, there has been no attempt at improvement in the last half century or so that is 1) noticeable, 2) scalable (e.g., there is only one Jaime Escalante; there was only one Perry Preschool) and 3) lasting (kids who had academic pre-K do better in first grade than similar students who didn't, but by third grade they are no better). It certainly suggests that K-12 students aren't sufficiently smart or motivated enough to do as well as most people think they should. That's because we have ridiculously high ideas of what schools can do.
https://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/clarification-the-null-hypothesis/
In politics and policy advocacy, it is assumed that American schools are terrible failures and there is so much room for improvement. In fact, there are a lot of people who are progressives, or teachers union people, or members of the educational establishment (or all three!) who believe that. Why, with enough money and new pedagogy, we could eliminate the gap between blacks and whites, skyrocketing black achievement! Both Ed and Arnold do not believe this is true. If conventional wisdom is that schools could be at 100 and are actually at 50, neither of them is optimistic about even getting to 60.
I will partly defer to you re: AK’s opinion, and partly simply choose not to engage on it further, as I don’t have high certainty in my claims there.
Re: Education Realist, we will have to agree to *profoundly* disagree. I stand fully behind my claim of teacher’s union apologist, morally certain that private schools could not possibly get any better results than our public school system does. I will retract the Pangloss reference as not completely accurate.
And I stand by my “even if they *might* share a couple conclusions, they get there from VERY different places” assertion.
Or to put it another way, the progressive myth is that, "Public educational results would improve if only we spent more money on education." But this is only one subset of the more encompassing myth, "there is something we can do which will significantly improve educational results."
You cite whatever narrative “myths” you like.
My claim is that indeed some percentage of students would achieve better results by getting out of execrable inner city public schools and into private schools.
No it would not meaningfully improve educations results and life outcomes for most, let alone all. Yes, OBVIOUSLY it would improve outcomes for some, and the relevant question public policy question and dispute here is for how many.
I hope you see the ridiculousness of citing ER who claims that it is “fact” that *nothing whatsoever* can be done to improve outcomes for *any* 🙄🙄🙄. In fact the conversation here shows him (her?) to be even more dogmatic a zealot for his (her) position - a position that in fact DOES align with that of the teachers unions, and defends their efforts to trap poor kids in terrible public schools by claiming it is impossible to do better with private competition - than even I recalled.
I agree that Education Realist thinks "that private schools could not possibly get any better results than our public school system does." But that is not because he has a love of "public" or a hatred of "private" and "markets". It's because he doesn't think they can do anything different which will result in greater student achievement (pretty much, he believes in the Null Hypothesis). They can "skim the cream", either in terms of student intelligence and motivation or in terms of parental pushing (indeed, the latter is pretty much Robert Pondiscio's reason for the success of Success Academy schools, and he's a fan of Success Academy!).
In America today, to say that education can't be improved much is to make yourself a pariah. It's also political suicide. So people on the right, who know that lots more money hasn't made students learn more, delude themselves into believing that some sort of "school choice" will. See, we have the answer when those lefties so obviously don't. But nobody does. That's an incredibly hard truth to accept.
https://chatgpt.com/share/6757ee1f-2850-8005-9721-706103620ad9
You and I may or may not be largely in agreement on this topic, have moderate differences, or large ones; idk. I include the above short conversation from ChatGPT to help you understand that ER’s claims are ridiculous zealotry and so only subtract from credible argument, not add to it.
Roger is accurately describing my views.
I am not "morally certain" that private schools couldn't get better results. I am factually certain, because research shows this to be the case.
I'm definitely not a union apologist. I don't agree with union positions, for the most part. Nor do most teachers, for the most part. But what I do dispute is that teachers unions make any difference to educational outcomes. And again, you have no research proving otherwise.
We are all 3 in agreement on what your views are.
Your “‘factually’ certain” claim shows you lack ALL epistemic humility, and shows definitively you are nothing like AK.
Do you not acknowledge that your “certain” views align entirely with the public teachers unions, and sheds them in the best possible light? Am I correct in guessing that you are in fact either a current or former public school teacher?
Re: “proof”, of course no definitive proof is possible (nor would it get through the skull of any fanatic so “certain” even if it did exist). But the results of vouchers in Milwaukee provide solid *evidence* that private schools do better than the execrable MPS. And you can certainly not prove that the improved results are entirely because of ”cream-skimming”, which no doubt plays some role in observed differences.
And surely you are aware that the biggest reason we do not have more evidence is that the teachers unions fight tooth and nail to prevent school choice anywhere and everywhere it can. Obama famously disgustingly shut down the school choice program in DC, to cite merely the most high profile example.
See, Andy, here's what is actually called a cite. Not a chatgpt conversation.
https://www.epi.org/publication/school-vouchers-are-not-a-proven-strategy-for-improving-student-achievement/
"The African American students who make up roughly two-thirds of Milwaukee’s student body are the main recipients of vouchers. Their academic performance is thus important in assessing the overall impact of choice in the district. Figures A and B compare the National Assessment of Educational Process (NAEP) scores of black students in eighth-grade math and reading in 13 urban U.S. school districts. Black students in Milwaukee have lower eighth-grade math scores than students in every city but Detroit—notably, another urban district with a high level of school choice. In reading, Milwaukee’s black eighth-graders do even more poorly. They score lower than black eighth-graders in all other 12 city school districts. Although not represented in a figure, fourth-grade NAEP scores for the 13 cities show the same pattern."
“Affiliated with the labor movement, the EPI is usually described as presenting a left-leaning and pro-union viewpoint on public policy issues. Since 2021, EPI has been led by economist Heidi Shierholz, the former chief economist of the Department of Labor.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_Policy_Institute#:~:text=Affiliated%20with%20the%20labor%20movement,of%20the%20Department%20of%20Labor.
Way to prove that you are not on the side of the teachers union, citing a biased paper spouting spin after spin put out by an organization affiliated with the labor movement.
(Or perhaps now you will tell me that Wikipedia is right-wing biased and you disagree with the claim that EPI is leftist and pro-union? 😂😂😂)
I read the study, and the dishonest spin/framing appears in almost every paragraph.
You utterly fail to comprehend that even if the link you cited was 100% honest and accurate (and to be clear, IT. IS. NOT) all it says is that there is not proof that vouchers DO deliver better results. It decidedly does NOT provide “proof” that vouchers do not deliver better results.
Given that your lack of answer “proves” that you are a teacher or ex-teacher (that was sarcasm; its a more than 0% possibility that you are not), you either were not a science teacher, or even a social science teacher, else you are decidedly a terrible one for failing to understand the most basic point that you have made unfalsifiable statements that are unrelated to science with your claims of “fact” and citing your pile of studies showing no benefit as “proof” that there is no benefit. Actual science does not work the way you suggest that it does.
hahaha.
Look. I voted for Trump 6 times, primary and general both. Whatever I am, it ain't progressive. I'm an immigration restrictionist, anti-CRT/woke/DEI, anti-affirmative action realist.
I agree I'm not to be lumped in with Arnold Kling, but Roger didn't lump us together. He observed the one belief we share, which is that educational results can't be much improved.
"I don’t recall him making statements like “students aren’t smart enough” about K-12 education."
He has.
"AR seems to generally believe that the current education system is largely unreformable. ER believes In Panglossian fashion thatthere is simply no need to reform it at all, that it is doing as well as it possibly can."
Arnold has utterly ludicrous ideas for reforming college, while I have excellent ones. I am not against reform of k-12 in the slightest. I just don't think the changes that reformers want will make a damn bit of difference.
Perhaps the only place we are mostly in agreement is that most “reforms” of public schools will likely make little to no difference. And for inner city public schools I’d probably agree that no “reform” to them will make any meaningful difference.
Vouchers and the competition that private schools will provide are the only thing that might eventually make a meaningful difference in public schools.
But I care not one whit about the public schools, but rather about the kids, especially the poor ones in inner city schools, some fraction of whom (10%? 40%? Neither of us know, but I believe it very likely to be in that range) would get a meaningfully better education and better chance at adult success if they could get out from the trap of their awful inner city public schools.
Yes, that means that I agree with you that for many kids in public schools, nothing will make a difference. Likely even for the median kid, since I acknowledge it’s likely less than 50% for whom we could get material better results.
But just because more than half would not be better off does NOT. AT. ALL mean that none would be better off, nor that it’s not worth doing.
I’m willing to take back my use of the word “progressive” to describe you, based on your words above. My apologies. But I definitively do not take back the “union apologist” descriptor because that is exactly what you are with your claims here.
"Neither of us know, but I believe it very likely to be in that range) would get a meaningfully better education and better chance at adult success if they could get out from the trap of their awful inner city public schools."
There's no evidence suggesting this is true, and lots of evidence proving it isn't.
"Vouchers and the competition that private schools will provide are the only thing that might eventually make a meaningful difference in public schools."
Nope.
And I'm not a union apologist. Once again, pay attention: I don't agree with unions. They don't do much right. But they have nothing to do with student outcomes.
“…lots of evidence proving it isn't”
That you don’t understand that it is literally impossible to *prove* such a negative - even if you had overwhelming evidence lending credence to your side of the argument - shows that it is pointless to argue with you.
I made a Pangloss reference earlier. The optimist portion of that reference was of course incorrect, but the zealous certitude was even more spot on than I had realized.
I don’t think that this is a progressive myth. If a myth (which I take that there is a good chance that this could be), it would be way larger believed than people of the progressive bent.
I don't think this could be called a progressive myth, if only because progressives believe that nothing can really improve educational results because of systemic inequities.
On the other hand, education reformers have their own myths, such as: educational outcomes would improve if......
Because nothing that completes that sentence will do a damn thing.
I look forward to the day when teachers' unions finally admit that increasing educational spending has, at best, only a very small effect on improving educational outcomes.
Ref. 'The Economist', 10 Dec, 2016; https://archive.is/qXuig
I look forward to the day when people who long for teachers unions to do something will realize how irrelevant teachers unions are to the outcomes.
Something about this doomed Age of Austerity and Neoliberalism. Maybe: “America has been steadily gutting funding for social services since the 80s.”
This guy has a great podcast you all should check out. It’s called “Ideas Having Sex.”
Thank you sir!
How about “increased health insurance leads to significantly better health outcomes.”?
Or “ increased government spending on health care leads to significantly better health outcomes.”
From a fiscal point of view, this dwarfs all this other myths in their impact.
I get annoyed when people argue that a switch to public healthcare would be an easy fix for US healthcare problems.
You can see in this video that Ezra Klein argues that US public care is cheaper than private:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNla9nyRMmQ
I suspect that is a myth. According to "highlights" on page 8 of this PDF, only about 40% of Americans are covered by Medicare/Medicaid/etc.:
https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2023/demo/p60-281.pdf
If you eyeball Ezra's chart, it looks like about 40% of US healthcare spending is public, in line with the approximately 40% of the US population that's covered by public programs.
I just don't think "Medicare for all" is a magic wand that will fix US healthcare.
The idea that there is a correlation between spending more on health insurance and having a healthier population could only have taken hold in a USA context. In most of the developed world it’s not even a myth - it’s an American shibboleth, reinforced at the folk level by weird rankings against ‘socialism.’
Repeating the myth does not make it less of a myth, and I never mentioned socialism.
The fact is that the connection between spending and health is very tenuous.
Far more important than are:
1) Genetics
2) Lifestyle choices on exercise, diet and substance abuse
3) Basic public health, like vaccines and sanitation, which have already been achieved in developed nations.
4) (lowest) Actual medical interventions, which are only tenuously linked to health insurance.
Having health insurance is at best 5th on the list of cost-effective means to increase health.
My comment about socialism was not aimed at you of course. It was just an outsider’s observation of the strange discourse around health in the USA. I agree with all your points and was just making an observation that in most of the world ‘spend more on insurance to get better public health’ wouldn’t even reach the level of a myth that needed debunking.
Race is a social construct. This is clearly true as apart from ethnicity no? The categories are often large umbrellas of geographic and ethnic commonality. Black, White, Latino, etc. How and when the groups expand, shrink, or consume one another is certainly historically and socially constructed. Asian as a category to include Indian or not, White to include Italians or Persians, or a whole host of ethnic Eurasian people, etc, etc.
I agree. If Bryan's point is that skin color and other phenotypic traits have a genetic origin, that is obviously true. But the use of the word "race" has been co-opted to mean any manner of thing including skin color, religion, culture or whatever is convenient for the authoritative class. A historical look at the way the word is used reveals IMO.
I think talk of race as a social construct is distracting. Often, when people deny that race is a social construct, they're really saying that race is tracking something real and non-socially constructed, such as genetic differences between groups. However, this kind of a strange way of putting the point. A group can be socially constructed and it can also track real genetic differences at the same time. For example, the group "alumni of Ivy League universities" is a social construction, but this group differs genetically from the rest of the population.
That there is "no evidence" for genetic differences among races in mental traits (e.g. IQ), such that this is something only an ignorant racist could believe.
Here are a few candidate myths. Not sure if these are specifically "progressive" or just widely held.
The U.S. doesn't spend very much on education.
High performing suburban school districts spend much more per student than low-performing urban school districts.
Humans are destroying the environment at an ever increasing rate.
The earth is overpopulated. [This one might be a bit subjective. But I do think most people overestimate how crowded the earth is because most people live in cities.]
On that last topic there have been a great series of posts at https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/100-billion-humans
“Men and women are the same (aside from (maybe) their reproductive equipment).”
Many people believe that the average man and the average woman are equally well qualified to be soldiers or firefighters, and only sexism holds women back.
6 thousand years ago and earlier in the middle climate zone, women live separately from men in their villages and at a much higher cultural and material level.
Gun violence and gun rights. Most commentators emphasize gun violence without talking about defensive gun use.
Economic myths: 1) Rent control, 2) Minimum wage
I’d add the labor theory of value. Seems to underpin a lot of leftist thought
I used to point out to my students that no matter how much 'labor' they put into making an apple pie "from scratch" it would never have as much value as one my grandmother made in haste.
The myth that if the racial composition of a company's workforce differs from the racial composition of the population in the region where the company operates, the hiring process is racist.
The myth that all racial disparities in life outcomes must be the result of systemic racism (whether past, present, or both).
The related myth that in a perfectly equal and meritocratic society there’d be no racial disparities in accomplishments, life outcomes, pay, etc.
The myth that if the results of an exam favor certain groups, the exam must be inherently discriminatory.
The myth that the government doesn't impose racial quotas (it does, by penalizing companies whose employees' racial composition doesn't match the population from which they hire).
The exam point reminds me of a previous version of the debate around sats. One point of outrage involved the word regatta, which was obviously included for racist purposes because white people would be more likely to get it right.
The bizarre assumption being that to know what a regatta is you first have to be in one.
Even worse, the implication that changing the word into, what, ghetto or ganster, would be… anti racist towards blacks. Hell lets use words like empathy, neuroticism, and homemaking to stop sexism towards women. For us gay men, how about debauchery, lascivious, and androgyny while at it. Stop me before i get to Jews.
On meritocracy it seems to me the pretense has fallen altogether in favor of the notion that opportunities are by definition unequal because of systemic ubiquitous bigotry. A bit closer to the truth in analysis, but a fertile ground for illiberal policies (which the Americans will inevitably and with a straight face call liberalism…).
Since you lasted posted on Huemer's book, I've developed an affinity for it.
See here: "George Floyd's Cause of Death" https://substack.com/@scottgibb/p-152318083
And here: "Where Does Woke Ideology Come From?" https://substack.com/@scottgibb/p-152078638
Please buy this book, read it, and write about it.
"Society cannot be reliably improved through lies, exaggerations, and misleading stories; it requires knowledge of the real, factual situation we face, in whatever area we seek to improve matters." Michael Huemer
Thank you Prof. Huemer.
It's good to hear that, brother.
The myth (or the exaggeration) that people do not engage in economically rational behavior
They practice, but only one move ahead, and on what promises immediate benefits. 99% of humanity is not able to rationally calculate the benefits for EVERYONE, all their rationalism begins and ends with the dear and beloved STOMACH!
Here are a few historical myths:
1. The Native Americans were peaceful and living in harmony with nature.
2. The Bolsheviks were good at first until
Stalin took over.
3. Che Guevara was primarily interested in helping poor people around the world.
4. Cuba was helped by its revolution.
5. Ancient matriarchal societies existed.
The fact that particular social categories like race align in certain ways with genetic markers (although not perfectly by any means) doesn't challenge the idea that those categories are social constructs. There are plenty of social categories that relate in some way to genetics - for example, "French" is obviously a social category, but people in that social category will very often have similar genetic patterns because they all live in the same general region. The claim that race is a social construct isn't a claim that it has "nothing to do" with genetics, or that genetics don't play a role. Everyone recognizes that racial categories relate to physical characteristics, which must necessarily have genetic bases. The claim, rather, is that these categories are not neutral biological ones, but rather social groupings that develop in response to social factors. I mean, you can also give a DNA test to most people on the Indian subcontinent and determine their caste membership, but no one thinks that means caste is biological system, right? It's obviously a sociopolitical system that makes references to physical characteristics but is not neutrally defined by them. The same is true of our racial categories.
"Modern science and modern epistemology are colonial; there are many more progressive scientific methods and woken epistemologies in the world (especially in the Third World)."
Why stick to progressive myths? You've yet to discuss myths about Israel not to mention the myth of patriotism means supporting our foreign policy without question,. See Atrocity, Inc. via Grayzone or even better this article from Antiwar.com: https://news.antiwar.com/2024/12/02/us-zionist-group-targets-pro-palestine-protesters-with-facial-recognition-in-hopes-trump-will-deport-them/