Mitt Romney's education proposal sounds nice. It is called A Chance for Every Child, [Chance Report] and it is 35 pages long [full text: Mitt Romney, A Chance for Every Child]. It might be just campaign propaganda, like Barack Obama's 2008 promises of hope and world peace, but then again it might become public policy. You should probably read it, but how would you get anything done if you tried to judge political candidates by actually reading 35-page memos or 1600 page bills they have voted for or against?
I read it. I also know about the privatization (really Christianization) efforts already enacted at the state level. I also served on a public school board for a K-12 district for 8 years. Allow me to walk you through the essential points.
Romney characterizes American schools as failures, except private schools. In Jeb Bush's Foreword we are told that the U.S. spends "more on public education than virtually every other nation" which is so close to being a lie we might as well call it that. But he is correct in saying that American children lag behind their global peers, particularly in mathematics and science. Bush attacks Obama's education leadership, even though Obama has mostly just continued the education policies of Jeb's brother, former President George W. Bush.
The key initiative in the Romney education package is providing alternatives for "students trapped in bad schools." "Parents must receive clear information about the performance of their current school," so that they can know if their kid's school is bad. Yep, parents need federal help to know that. Without the guiding hand of the Feds, parents and professional educators are lost in the desert of education, following some half-mad Moses about, waiting for the day they can massacre the Palestinians and enroll the kids in good schools.
Federal funding goes with the child. If the parents take the child out of the public school and into a private school, the new school gets the funds.
Effectively Romney believes education will improve by defunding public schools, putting in their place private schools taught by non-union, untrained, uncredentialed, but cheap teachers. Really, Romney is specific about this: "Eliminate unnecessary certification requirements ... [which] reinforce hurdles that prevent talented individuals from entering the teaching profession." Talented individuals like science teachers who use Genesis as a text book. Or history teachers who say the Holocaust never happened.
This is called "building on the success of charter schools." Even though test results have shown charter schools, while varying greatly in quality, as a whole have done worse at educating children.
Profits for education corporations are also part of the plan: "welcome private sector participation in providing information, financing and education itself." That is, to the extent capitalists like Romney have not moved the formerly American private sector to China. Or maybe he means Chinese state-owned industries could take over teaching civics classes.
This seems to be at odds with another part of the plan: "Repeal confusing and unnecessary regulations." Many of the current batch of regulations were put in place by lobbyists for private industry. Guess which regulations will be repealed? Not the ones that need to be.
Many aspects of the plan, and its underlying analysis, can't even pass the smell test. We are told too many high school graduates who enroll in college require remediation. But because wealthier parents tend to use private schools and have their children attend college in disproportionate numbers, we know that this has to be a failure of the private school system.
The Chance Report laments the poor average outcomes for non-white children. It says that this is because the schools who serve these children are of poor quality. But privatizing ghetto schools is likely to make the situation worse, not better. Given equal pay, the better private school teachers will seek positions in the less difficult middle to upper class private schools, just as they seek the easier jobs within the public school system. The parents of a ghetto private school will still lack friends in high places, the money to create an educationally stimulating home environment, and the high-level education and business skills that the more successful children are exposed to by their privileged parents. If ghetto children infiltrate a "good" private school, middle class parents will flee, taking their children's federal dollars with them.
The real problem is economic and ethnic segregation, and the only real solution is one that directly integrates people from differing income levels and ethnic identities.
Yes, the report directly attacks the right of teachers to be represented by unions. Having been on a school board, I am not overly fond of teachers unions. But I will say the union's occasional abuses of power are nothing in comparison to the abuses of power by private corporations, school administrators, and politicians. Romney hates unions because he hates all workers. He smiles at them because as a politician he needs their votes. As a capitalist he needs their cooperation; he certainly is not going to do any actual, direct contact with clients or products, work himself.
Romney's Chance Report laments the high cost of college and rising burden of student debt. He claims, perhaps correctly, that the recent increases in federal funding (loans, tax deductions and grants) for college have only enabled colleges to raise fees. Yet Romney fails to offer a solution! In 35 pages all he can say is that students should get private loans, not government ones. Perhaps they can put their tuition and expenses on credit cards at 20% interest and spend an entire lifetime in debt to Romney's capitalist cronies.
All this plan really amounts to is a bid to fund religious education. Capitalists like their workers ignorant, and that is the main value of private schools with religious affiliation. Teaching religious ideas requires forcing children to rely on authority, not on their innate ability to think for themselves. Religious private schools are a horror where fiction is taught as fact.
The only horror that could possibly overmatch religious schooling is a for-profit school system. Children pushed by federal dollars and clever marketing would become profit centers. Children would be branded with corporate logos instead of Jesus, Moses, Mohammed or Buddha. They would continue to emerge from schools dazed and confused, not ready to excel in this modern world of evolutionary biology, quantum-physics based electronics, and knowledge-based creativity.
Religious schools teach hate (sorry, no exceptions, just shades of gray). The only reason to force a particular cult view upon a child is to differentiate them from the other cults and from modern, non-religious persons. Telling children what is right about their creed always involves knocking other creeds, and usually verbal and even physical abuse for even bringing up ideas that challenge or differ with those being promulgated by uncredentialed, faith-inspired teachers. We have seen how the capitalist elite has used religious hate over the American centuries to motivate mobs to attack any social or political deviation from the capitalist agenda. That is what Romney and his Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant capitalist cronies are about with their privatization plan: creating the next generation of their army of heavily-indoctrinated, emotionally bent, hateful Tea Party types.
The only realistic path forward in a democracy is to create the best public schools we can. We can't expect schools to truly equalize opportunities between children of working class or impoverished parents (increasingly, the same thing) and middle class or upper class students.
Public schools were invented in the United States. Many of them are actually quite good, regularly turning out better-qualified graduates than most private and religious schools. Those that are not good are sometimes suffering from unmotivated teachers, but in my experience the real problem is usually lack of parental support for the teachers, not the other way around.
The only thing I agree with in the Republican position is that bad teachers should be fired. The teachers unions could do a lot to restore public confidence in teaching if they would police their own members, rather than always working on the assumption that every teacher is a great teacher who needs to be defended by the union lawyers.
Ultimately Romney's Chance Report is just a political ploy, buying religious sectarian votes with public funds.
Disclaimer: I attended Roman Catholic schools K-8, then a private high school and private college.
See also: Romney Calls Education Civil Rights Issue, New York Times, May 23, 2012
Showing posts with label private schools. Show all posts
Showing posts with label private schools. Show all posts
Thursday, May 24, 2012
Saturday, May 19, 2012
A graduation present: forgiving student loans
Are we in a student loan crisis? What should be done about it?
The overall consensus is that on the whole education in these United States is no longer globally competitive. That implies our society should be spending more on education, including college education. But should that be in the present form of privately made loans backed by federal government guarantees?
The Long Recession has meant that students graduating starting in 2008 and apparently continuing through at least this summer of 2012 have mostly not been able to get jobs of any kind, much less the higher-paying jobs that normally come with a college degree. Hence many regret about having taken out loans, and some have called for all student loans to be forgiven.
The American system of financing education is itself complex. There is a public sector that is typically fully taxpayer subsidized through high school. At the college level, how much taxpayer subsidy there is in public universities varies not just state by state, but in tiers depending on college (or junior college) attended. Private education exists to give children and families a competitive advantage over the uneducated and publicly educated. Despite that, it too receives public subsidies, though they tend to be tax breaks rather than direct subsidies. Student loans are a major source of income for private colleges, but are generally not available for private K-12 education.
All colleges, public and private, are supposed to offer a competitive advantage to their graduates. Most people do not have 4-year college degrees. In effect taxpayer money that goes to higher education helps the richest one-third or so of the population, which largely corresponds to adult citizens with college degrees.
Aside from, but not unaffected by student loan programs, we have the escalating cost of college educations. If college educations benefit society, and not just the money-seekers who buy those educations, then this can be a problem in itself. Within the sector janitors, professors and administrators may argue how to cut up the pie, but arguably the pie is expensive out of proportion to the benefits it provides society. It has been argued that when more loans and grants are made available by the government, the result is simply higher tuition charges, leaving us on a treadmill.
It should also be noted that degrees are also part of an important anti-competitive part of our national economy. Degrees are often a prerequisite to professional licensing. Thus those with certain types of degrees are able to, with their fellow professionals, engage in monopoly price-setting for their services. These segment monopolies, most notably in the health field, also drive costs to society in a way that is unbalanced and arguably unethical.
Thus talking about student loans, we should see that not everything should be lumped together. A $50,000 in loans to a Film Studies major does not have the same economic effect as $50,000 in loans to a medical student or to an accounting student. A loan to a student at a private college may just enable the cost of education to rise. A loan to a student at a public university may only shift the economic burden from taxpayers to the student, even if it does not cause the university to inflate its tuition and fees. A government-backed loan raises somewhat different public policy questions than purely private loans would.
We should probably look at the various state college systems for some insights into what works (defined as getting a good education to cost ratio). In general neither the state systems nor the private colleges have been immune to cost inflation. In the state systems wage inflation seems to be driven by unions, but caps on taxpayer support limit overall costs. In the non-system of private colleges costs seem to be driven by administrators and increased demand for student luxury. In both cases we have exceptions: private universities that keep their costs reasonable and pass that on in reasonable tuition, and public state systems where the public (taxpayers) and students get a better return for their money than in the average state. We should look at those exemplary colleges and use them as models. [I hear professors and administrators screaming: but that would mean a pay cut for me! And yes, that is what I am advocating: a life devoted to scholarship and teaching, an exemplary low-environmental impact, low luxury, no-frills occupation. Or at least in that direction, from where we are now.]
My back-of-the-envelope impression is that there are relatively few particular families who benefit from wealth transfers through taxation and the distribution of public education (including tax breaks & other subsidies of private institutions). If a student's parents can afford for the student to go to college, with or without loans, they probably pay substantial taxes. The middle and upper classes of the U.S. currently pay very little in taxes that subsidizes the children of the lower classes at the college level. If anything, those who do not attend college pay taxes that subsidize those who do.
Fixing the current system is different from designing a blueprint from scratch. The current system works for the powerful. The most powerful can send their children through college (and usually graduate school) without loans. These children start work where anyone else might aspire to finish life: debt free, with high-salary jobs and a "it's not what you know its who you know" safety net. But those who go through college on loans have little room to complain, given that, if they are not at the very top of the system, they at least have an opportunity to exploit the lower classes with their degree. They just have to work harder at it.
Banks may be essentially predatory, but I don't see why they should forgive student loans when the point of the loans was to try to get a leg up the economic ladder. There is even less ethical reason for the government, which is really the taxpayers, to rescue banks and debtors alike.
Stop government guarantees for student loans and the short-term economics side of the problem will resolve itself in a few short years. Banks will stop making the loans. Some parents will pitch in more, but many students will drop out. Colleges will face budget contraction. They will deal with it in different ways, some keeping tuition high, but many will choose to lower tuition. That, in turn, will make college more accessible, at least for the middle class. Degrees, being rarer, will become more valuable.
High tuition, with or without student loans, cuts off class mobility and causes talent to be misallocated. But lower tuition just changes the situation a shade of gray. There is no particular correlation between talent at birth and parental economic or academic status. Nurturing the academic and intellectual talents of children is good, but it is a limited good, grabbed by the same people who grab most goods in America, the entrenched elite of professionals and capitalists, large and small.
It follows that even if the states provided free college educations for those who qualify, many slots would end up occupied by "legacy" students, who only make it because of major parental support during their pre-college years. Private colleges like Stanford would continue to turn out new generations of predators that specialize in eating other kid's lunches.
Reforms should be supported. Tax the rich and use some of the taxes to make college free for those who qualify. Recognize that private colleges are businesses and should be taxed; discouraged, not encouraged.
The real goal should be a society in which the environment is respected, and all people are respected too, regardless of who their parents are, or what occupation they end up in. The only way we are going to realize that is "nationalization." In this case, however, it is the states that should take over the private colleges, enabled by national legislation.
Probably the single biggest educational mistake in American history was made in 1819 by the Supreme Court in Dartmouth College v. Woodward. The state of New Hampshire tried to turn Dartmouth from a private corporation into a state-run college. The Supreme Court said No. Thus we became a nation with two tiers of college, a private tier for the slave owners, professionals, landlords and (later) the industrial capitalists, and a public tier for the rest of us.
Making that change, short of armed insurrection, would be difficult. The current Supreme Court would have to be replaced in its entirety by some President representing a different set of values than those held by the Democratic and Republican parties.
The only viable long-term solution is to nationalize the nation itself. Think about that, graduates, especially those of you opting not to go to college.
The overall consensus is that on the whole education in these United States is no longer globally competitive. That implies our society should be spending more on education, including college education. But should that be in the present form of privately made loans backed by federal government guarantees?
The Long Recession has meant that students graduating starting in 2008 and apparently continuing through at least this summer of 2012 have mostly not been able to get jobs of any kind, much less the higher-paying jobs that normally come with a college degree. Hence many regret about having taken out loans, and some have called for all student loans to be forgiven.
The American system of financing education is itself complex. There is a public sector that is typically fully taxpayer subsidized through high school. At the college level, how much taxpayer subsidy there is in public universities varies not just state by state, but in tiers depending on college (or junior college) attended. Private education exists to give children and families a competitive advantage over the uneducated and publicly educated. Despite that, it too receives public subsidies, though they tend to be tax breaks rather than direct subsidies. Student loans are a major source of income for private colleges, but are generally not available for private K-12 education.
All colleges, public and private, are supposed to offer a competitive advantage to their graduates. Most people do not have 4-year college degrees. In effect taxpayer money that goes to higher education helps the richest one-third or so of the population, which largely corresponds to adult citizens with college degrees.
Aside from, but not unaffected by student loan programs, we have the escalating cost of college educations. If college educations benefit society, and not just the money-seekers who buy those educations, then this can be a problem in itself. Within the sector janitors, professors and administrators may argue how to cut up the pie, but arguably the pie is expensive out of proportion to the benefits it provides society. It has been argued that when more loans and grants are made available by the government, the result is simply higher tuition charges, leaving us on a treadmill.
It should also be noted that degrees are also part of an important anti-competitive part of our national economy. Degrees are often a prerequisite to professional licensing. Thus those with certain types of degrees are able to, with their fellow professionals, engage in monopoly price-setting for their services. These segment monopolies, most notably in the health field, also drive costs to society in a way that is unbalanced and arguably unethical.
Thus talking about student loans, we should see that not everything should be lumped together. A $50,000 in loans to a Film Studies major does not have the same economic effect as $50,000 in loans to a medical student or to an accounting student. A loan to a student at a private college may just enable the cost of education to rise. A loan to a student at a public university may only shift the economic burden from taxpayers to the student, even if it does not cause the university to inflate its tuition and fees. A government-backed loan raises somewhat different public policy questions than purely private loans would.
We should probably look at the various state college systems for some insights into what works (defined as getting a good education to cost ratio). In general neither the state systems nor the private colleges have been immune to cost inflation. In the state systems wage inflation seems to be driven by unions, but caps on taxpayer support limit overall costs. In the non-system of private colleges costs seem to be driven by administrators and increased demand for student luxury. In both cases we have exceptions: private universities that keep their costs reasonable and pass that on in reasonable tuition, and public state systems where the public (taxpayers) and students get a better return for their money than in the average state. We should look at those exemplary colleges and use them as models. [I hear professors and administrators screaming: but that would mean a pay cut for me! And yes, that is what I am advocating: a life devoted to scholarship and teaching, an exemplary low-environmental impact, low luxury, no-frills occupation. Or at least in that direction, from where we are now.]
My back-of-the-envelope impression is that there are relatively few particular families who benefit from wealth transfers through taxation and the distribution of public education (including tax breaks & other subsidies of private institutions). If a student's parents can afford for the student to go to college, with or without loans, they probably pay substantial taxes. The middle and upper classes of the U.S. currently pay very little in taxes that subsidizes the children of the lower classes at the college level. If anything, those who do not attend college pay taxes that subsidize those who do.
Fixing the current system is different from designing a blueprint from scratch. The current system works for the powerful. The most powerful can send their children through college (and usually graduate school) without loans. These children start work where anyone else might aspire to finish life: debt free, with high-salary jobs and a "it's not what you know its who you know" safety net. But those who go through college on loans have little room to complain, given that, if they are not at the very top of the system, they at least have an opportunity to exploit the lower classes with their degree. They just have to work harder at it.
Banks may be essentially predatory, but I don't see why they should forgive student loans when the point of the loans was to try to get a leg up the economic ladder. There is even less ethical reason for the government, which is really the taxpayers, to rescue banks and debtors alike.
Stop government guarantees for student loans and the short-term economics side of the problem will resolve itself in a few short years. Banks will stop making the loans. Some parents will pitch in more, but many students will drop out. Colleges will face budget contraction. They will deal with it in different ways, some keeping tuition high, but many will choose to lower tuition. That, in turn, will make college more accessible, at least for the middle class. Degrees, being rarer, will become more valuable.
High tuition, with or without student loans, cuts off class mobility and causes talent to be misallocated. But lower tuition just changes the situation a shade of gray. There is no particular correlation between talent at birth and parental economic or academic status. Nurturing the academic and intellectual talents of children is good, but it is a limited good, grabbed by the same people who grab most goods in America, the entrenched elite of professionals and capitalists, large and small.
It follows that even if the states provided free college educations for those who qualify, many slots would end up occupied by "legacy" students, who only make it because of major parental support during their pre-college years. Private colleges like Stanford would continue to turn out new generations of predators that specialize in eating other kid's lunches.
Reforms should be supported. Tax the rich and use some of the taxes to make college free for those who qualify. Recognize that private colleges are businesses and should be taxed; discouraged, not encouraged.
The real goal should be a society in which the environment is respected, and all people are respected too, regardless of who their parents are, or what occupation they end up in. The only way we are going to realize that is "nationalization." In this case, however, it is the states that should take over the private colleges, enabled by national legislation.
Probably the single biggest educational mistake in American history was made in 1819 by the Supreme Court in Dartmouth College v. Woodward. The state of New Hampshire tried to turn Dartmouth from a private corporation into a state-run college. The Supreme Court said No. Thus we became a nation with two tiers of college, a private tier for the slave owners, professionals, landlords and (later) the industrial capitalists, and a public tier for the rest of us.
Making that change, short of armed insurrection, would be difficult. The current Supreme Court would have to be replaced in its entirety by some President representing a different set of values than those held by the Democratic and Republican parties.
The only viable long-term solution is to nationalize the nation itself. Think about that, graduates, especially those of you opting not to go to college.
Thursday, September 6, 2007
Charities of the Rich, and a Suggestion
My parents sent me to Catholic schools in Jacksonville, Florida, but I was spared the torture of Bishop Kenny High School when I won a scholarship to The Bolles School. My dad had a military pension plus his pay as a school teacher; he could afford Catholic school, but the private Bolles School would have been beyond his means without the scholarship.
Last week I received a postcard from the Bolles alumni office that reminded me of a scam of major proportions that is seldom talked about (because it is not in the interest of the rich to talk about it). This is the income tax deduction for charitable donations, which are often not really charity at all.
The postcard notified me that two different people gave $1 million donations to Bolles. For a new boat house. Seems the crew (rowing) facilities are inadequate at Bolles. The tennis courts are okay, the swimming pool is state-of the art, the parking lot for the rich kids SUVs is adequate. But the old dock on the St. Johns River is a disgrace.
Me, my mother went to school bare foot and Bolles was where I started learning about the winsome ways of the ruling class. I learned my clothing being clean and within the guidelines was not adequate. One particularly class-insensitive twit (son of a powerful man who would later sit on the Federal Reserve Board) told me a thousand dollar stereo (back then that was half a year's work at minimum wage) was an absolute necessity. I listened to music on a $7 AM radio. But hey, that was all okay, mostly people were very nice to me and I was there to learn. I learned English (funny, I thought I knew it before I arrived there), French, math, and a fair degree of science. Definitely worth the occasional insensitive ridicule.
But what I want to ask you hear is this: what really is a charitable donation? What should be considered a self-serving donation? And as public policy, what should be tax deductible?
I would submit that giving rich kids a boat house is no more charity than giving them allowances for cocaine, although it might be a better use of the money.
In fact, when it comes to private schools, getting a tax deduction means you are taking money away that could potentially be used for public schools. I ccould go along with a tax deduction for money that goes into a scholarship fund, maybe even a library if it were also open to the public.
I've heard this problem riddles the upper classes. Many prefer to give donations to private hospitals that serve the rich, while ignoring the hospitals that serve the poor. Should that rate a tax deduction?
I also have a problem with so-called educational tax deductions, right and left and middle-of the road, for groups that are really political. I'll go into that in more detail in a later blog.
I don't think that a donation to a religious group is, in itself, charitable. If you are donating to build a church, and you are going to attend the church, I don't see how that is different than building yourself a private home. To get a charitable deduction I would require that the end serve the poor: feeding, housing, healing, clothing, teaching them job skills, or otherwise helping them.
The charitable tax deduction, for the most part, is a scam, and it is a scam that the rich benefit the most from.
People should give to charity because it is the right thing to do, not to get praise and a tax deduction.
My favorite charity? Doctors Without Borders.
Like my analysis? Find more at www.iiipublishing.com.
Last week I received a postcard from the Bolles alumni office that reminded me of a scam of major proportions that is seldom talked about (because it is not in the interest of the rich to talk about it). This is the income tax deduction for charitable donations, which are often not really charity at all.
The postcard notified me that two different people gave $1 million donations to Bolles. For a new boat house. Seems the crew (rowing) facilities are inadequate at Bolles. The tennis courts are okay, the swimming pool is state-of the art, the parking lot for the rich kids SUVs is adequate. But the old dock on the St. Johns River is a disgrace.
Me, my mother went to school bare foot and Bolles was where I started learning about the winsome ways of the ruling class. I learned my clothing being clean and within the guidelines was not adequate. One particularly class-insensitive twit (son of a powerful man who would later sit on the Federal Reserve Board) told me a thousand dollar stereo (back then that was half a year's work at minimum wage) was an absolute necessity. I listened to music on a $7 AM radio. But hey, that was all okay, mostly people were very nice to me and I was there to learn. I learned English (funny, I thought I knew it before I arrived there), French, math, and a fair degree of science. Definitely worth the occasional insensitive ridicule.
But what I want to ask you hear is this: what really is a charitable donation? What should be considered a self-serving donation? And as public policy, what should be tax deductible?
I would submit that giving rich kids a boat house is no more charity than giving them allowances for cocaine, although it might be a better use of the money.
In fact, when it comes to private schools, getting a tax deduction means you are taking money away that could potentially be used for public schools. I ccould go along with a tax deduction for money that goes into a scholarship fund, maybe even a library if it were also open to the public.
I've heard this problem riddles the upper classes. Many prefer to give donations to private hospitals that serve the rich, while ignoring the hospitals that serve the poor. Should that rate a tax deduction?
I also have a problem with so-called educational tax deductions, right and left and middle-of the road, for groups that are really political. I'll go into that in more detail in a later blog.
I don't think that a donation to a religious group is, in itself, charitable. If you are donating to build a church, and you are going to attend the church, I don't see how that is different than building yourself a private home. To get a charitable deduction I would require that the end serve the poor: feeding, housing, healing, clothing, teaching them job skills, or otherwise helping them.
The charitable tax deduction, for the most part, is a scam, and it is a scam that the rich benefit the most from.
People should give to charity because it is the right thing to do, not to get praise and a tax deduction.
My favorite charity? Doctors Without Borders.
Like my analysis? Find more at www.iiipublishing.com.
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