School performance is heavily politicized so many people have an incentive, sometimes financial, to say public schools are failing but what actually happens is what close to a century of research has shown: student performance tracks their household socioeconomic status, but we tend to approach the problem backwards for ideological reasons and see it as “improve school performance to fight poverty” when every bit of data says it should be “deal with poverty to improve school performance”.
Is it the case that the amount of money spent on infrastructure is increasing unnecessarily or because previous generations voted against maintenance until things failed completely?
Is spending going up due to teacher salaries or because the solution to perceived problems is adding more layers of much higher-compensated management who will reliably divert staff time away from education?
Again, I’m not saying that everything is perfect with no room for improvement but rather that there’s both deliberate misrepresentation (e.g. the charter school industry literally banks on this belief) and significant confusion caused by trying to find a cheap fix for complex social problems.
That doesn't work in business. You fail, you go out of business. Nobody cares why you fail, nobody listens to excuses.
I can't imagine many teachers feeling this way, seriously. Not everything requires life-or-death financial pressure to encourage excellence.
Even the most well-intentioned teachers behave according to their incentives.
> Not everything requires life-or-death financial pressure to encourage excellence.
I didn't say everything. After all, I work on D for free. But you simply cannot run an organization with tens of thousands of people in it and expect excellence when there is zero incentive for excellence. It just ain't gonna happen.
Teacher pay is 100% based on length of service and which college degree. Nothing else. Nothing. It matters naught whether a good job is done or not. Even if one wins "Teacher of the Year", it is worth exactly $0.
Yet they drive the entire economy. They work better than anything else. Other systems have been tried repeatedly that rely on:
1. the lash
2. altruism and ideology
3. threats of going to hell
are pretty lousy motivators.
Giving people autonomy, mastery, and purpose can help, but that simply does not scale.
She's a headmistress in the UK that specifically tailors her school's offerings to lower-socio kids who don't have educated/literate parents at home, and her GCSE results beat out the majority of middle-class schools.
There are some similar examples in Australia too. I know the previous principal of Frankston Primary School managed to get above average AIMS results from a cohort consisting of basically pure white trash.
I guess the point is that, even though this may be true overall, there are clearly examples where excellent schools have thrived in spite of poverty/illiteracy, and tailoring schools to the demographics of the local area could help millions of disadvantaged kids.
The most famous case is that of Jaime Escalante:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaime_Escalante
The school system worked hard to undermine and destroy his work.
In my country they are experimenting with giving them a bonus but it just isn't worth it.
Anyway, this is an example of libertarian first principles thinking. The problem with first principles thinking is that in the real world it's literally always wrong (because there are always factors you forgot about), but that this doesn't convince people to stop doing it, because they know it must be true despite it never in practice being true.
Large companies are like mini-governments with their own kind of politics. We tolerate them because despite all the useless make-work that happens in a large company, we usually find that it's still far more efficient than a bunch of smaller companies would be.
And when a publicly-traded company gets too large for its own good, corporate raiders can step in, acquire it on the cheap and spin off its parts into leaner and meaner firms. The whole process is driven by the expectation of efficiency.
You mean companies never fail and go out of business? It happens all the time.
> Does the profit motive actually stop Google or Uber from constantly doing useless makework projects and releasing unprofitable products?
Did you read in the news recently that Amazon axed Alexa? Because it was losing $billions?
Besides, it's rarely possible to tell in advance whether a new product line will be successful or not. The thing to do is try it and see. If it fails, you axe it. If it succeeds, you put more investment into it.
It's like a TV series. "Yellowstone" was wildly successful, and Paramount is pouring money into prequels and sequels. "The Time Traveler's Wife" didn't do well, so no second season.
Exactly as free market principles predict.
It's true that "if you can't make payroll, the company goes out of business" but anything less unoptimal than that also happens all the time. Individual executives who cause the failures get promoted, bad products with price-insensitive customers/investors live on, unprofitable business lines in otherwise surviving companies can live forever, managers grow their teams for non-economic reasons, customer brands of failed companies get bought and relaunched by anonymous Chinese companies instead of disappearing.
(Wrt this website, capitalism has given former YC president Sam Altman multiple McLarens and a New Zealand apocalypse bunker despite his never having a known productive job in his life.)
> Did you read in the news recently that Amazon axed Alexa? Because it was losing $billions?
That wasn't a rational decision. Amazon started Alexa on a whim, didn't monetize it on a whim, and canceled it on a whim. In a large company, the R&D people who develop products are often walled off from knowing about finances because the execs don't want corporate finances to be widespread knowledge, and so their yearly performance reviews are based on inventing cool stuff rather than if they were profitable or not. So the execs just didn't decide to tell them to do profitable stuff, then got bored and cancelled it instead of doing that. Too bad for anyone who got laid off, but it wasn't their fault.
(It's strange for them to claim it was losing billions though. It sure seemed like they were selling a lot of licenses, and Amazon is usually known for good cost control. Where was it all going?)
> It's like a TV series. "Yellowstone" was wildly successful, and Paramount is pouring money into prequels and sequels. "The Time Traveler's Wife" didn't do well, so no second season.
The TV industry has lots of cost-insensitive customers because most people don't cancel their cable/streaming accounts every month even if they don't use it. So they don't have perfect signals here either.
Netflix in particular is famous recently for constantly cancelling series even if they're doing well. And when something underperforms just a little they also cancel it, when they probably could've invested a bit more to improve it instead. This is actually hurting them because it reduces customer trust, which suggests they really just like cancelling things - or at best, they're irrationally sensitive to the possibility actors might ask for a raise next season.
That's why there's always opportunity for a competitor to step in, do better, and take their lunch. Happens all the time.
> Amazon started Alexa on a whim, didn't monetize it on a whim, and canceled it on a whim
How do you know this?
Besides, I can see from your post that you know how to run businesses better. Maybe you do. I recommend you start one - you'll get rich!
That's not a cite. Please cite your evidence.
1. fail to get kids to meet grade academic standards => teachers get a raise and more budget
2. gifted programs succeed => gifted programs get canceled