CURMUDGUCATION: Cheap or Excellent??

CURMUDGUCATION: Cheap or Excellent??:

Cheap or Excellent??

So I'm on twitter, "discussing" this piece by Eric Hanushek. (I air-quote "discussion" not because of any qualities of the people involved, but because nobody can wax eloquent with depth and nuance at 140 characters a shot).

The piece belongs to the genre I think of as Befuddled Mysteries of Failure, in which reformsters scratch their heads at how reformy ideas have not worked. Hanushek's meditation on the intractability of the "achievement gap" (I air-quote "achievement gap" because it's a euphemism for "standardized test score gap") ends in typical bemusement.

Vastly more jarring is that the central goal of the report—the development of an education system that provides equal educational opportunity for all groups, and especially for racial minorities—has not been attained. Achievement gaps remain nearly as large as they were when Coleman and his team put pen to paper, even when better research has suggested ways to close them and even when policies have been promulgated that supposedly are explicitly designed to eliminate them.

"When Coleman and his team put pen to paper" is fifty years ago. But I tweeted that the mystery of why we hadn't yet closed the gap -- well, here, read for yourself the exchange that followed

And a whole bunch of people just loved that response. Liked it, retweeted it. And I realized, watching the retweets pile up, how tired I am of this particular argument.

Because it always starts with talking about the achievement gap and the non-wealthy, non-white students who are being denied as good an education as the burbians get, but then it ends up with insistence that we fix this problem on the cheap.

How could it possibly be cheap? Seriously-- we're talking, particularly if we go back to pre-Civil Rights segregated Jim Crow America, about a system that has systematically and deliberately provided low socio-economic students with underfunded, understaffed, under-resourced schools. How could it possibly NOT involve lots of money to fix that?? I don't honestly know if the 4X figure is correct or not, but if it is, there's another explanation for why we've failed to close any gaps-- because 4X 1954 education spending strikes me as not nearly enough of an increase.

You have two children sitting at a table. Pat is regularly eating full healthful meals packed with nutrients and all the food groups. Chris is eating bread and water and an occasional cup of cereal. Somebody comes in and says, "Well, this is clearly wrong. Chris is starving, while Pat is doing well. Chris should get to eat just as well as Pat does."

The dining room chief comes in and says, "Yes, you're right. But we should only spend as much to CURMUDGUCATION: Cheap or Excellent??: