Re:Unions
by jerf on Monday November 29, 2010 @08:57PM
(#1952725)
Allowing school choice is the single largest thing we could do to address the culture problem. That's my point. You're just handwaving on the culture problem, I'm giving you a step you can actually take to get there.
Second-order effects, second-order effects, second-order effects. When schools actually respond to more effort and it has some sort of visible effect on a child's education, more people will care. Incentives matter. The current system absorbs all of a parent's care and hammers it flat into the same basic mediocre product, suppressing it instead of amplifying it. A caring parent may do better than an uncaring one, but nowhere near enough better. Unfortunately, not investing a lot into the system at that point is perfectly locally rational.
How do you propose to fix the culture problem? The same-old, same-old first order solution where you appropriate some money and run some ads exhorting people to care more about schooling? New programs with the sweet, sweet intentions and nobody even examining the question of whether do anything because everybody's too busy feeling good about themselves? Paying people to care more, perhaps by incentivizing good grades? We've tried all those and more. It's not like "it's a culture problem" is exactly a new idea, and it's an easy one for "the system" to deal with because it does involve just what I said (money and government programs, for better and for worse not hard to push through), a solution very easy for the system to deploy. It won't work until schools actually magnify efforts instead of squashing them, and no amount of central mandating is going to get us there.
Cultural issues like schools aren't houses. That's first-order thinking. They're life forms, second order and so on. They react to your decisions, they do not passively consume them. With those sorts of systems it's actually quite common for the straightest path from here to there to be anything but simply striking out in what is most obviously the direction of the goal and pushing as hard as you can. If it were that easy, we wouldn't have a problem in the first place!
Second-order effects, second-order effects, second-order effects. When schools actually respond to more effort and it has some sort of visible effect on a child's education, more people will care. Incentives matter. The current system absorbs all of a parent's care and hammers it flat into the same basic mediocre product, suppressing it instead of amplifying it. A caring parent may do better than an uncaring one, but nowhere near enough better. Unfortunately, not investing a lot into the system at that point is perfectly locally rational.
How do you propose to fix the culture problem? The same-old, same-old first order solution where you appropriate some money and run some ads exhorting people to care more about schooling? New programs with the sweet, sweet intentions and nobody even examining the question of whether do anything because everybody's too busy feeling good about themselves? Paying people to care more, perhaps by incentivizing good grades? We've tried all those and more. It's not like "it's a culture problem" is exactly a new idea, and it's an easy one for "the system" to deal with because it does involve just what I said (money and government programs, for better and for worse not hard to push through), a solution very easy for the system to deploy. It won't work until schools actually magnify efforts instead of squashing them, and no amount of central mandating is going to get us there.
Cultural issues like schools aren't houses. That's first-order thinking. They're life forms, second order and so on. They react to your decisions, they do not passively consume them. With those sorts of systems it's actually quite common for the straightest path from here to there to be anything but simply striking out in what is most obviously the direction of the goal and pushing as hard as you can. If it were that easy, we wouldn't have a problem in the first place!