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I woke up to Trump pulling a plug on the Department of Education. There's the usual freakout because this makes great headlines, there's the usual handwaving from the WH about how the programs people actually care about will get renamed and shoveled somewhere else, and Trump's enemies become further entrenched.
In principle this is similar to a lot of his other actions: it's motivated by the belief that Americans are getting a raw deal (they are), that they are paying too much and spending the money ineffectively (the money is not resulting in better educational achievement), and the looming giant specter that the government is heavily debt laden and going to go broke if you are not a subscriber to some wonkery like MMT. Trump is using the full power of the executive to chainsaw away the federal bloat and return power and responsibility back to the states.
What Trump likely hasn't foreseen is the likely response to this. I consider the Incentive Problem at the Heart of the American Justice System one of the most important articles written about America in the last decade. It's worth reading in its entirety; but the tldr is something like this: the tension between spending their own money and other people's money has created the disaster that is modern American policing, sentencing, judging and confinement. States don't want to pay for the operation of their own prisons at the same time they want to spend less on policing, so they'd rather give it up to for-profit prisons or shove it off to federal responsibility while enacting a weird kind of anarcho-tyranny.
This attitude is not exclusive to America. Brexit is probably a more notorious example: poor Britons who voted Leave correctly identified that their government considered their job not governance but selling them decisions made in Brussels. In their ignorance and naivete, they expected their own government to pick up the slack after leaving and believed they could do a better job of it by themselves. The reality is this: a government used to outsourcing their decision making process and shirking responsibility cannot be expected to suddenly pick up that responsibility when it is placed upon their shoulders. They will make a complete hash of it: "Brexit means Brexit" - never in a million years did the people expect that this would fail to move the needle on any of the reasons they voted for it (immigration, economics) or the complete lack of a plan for delivering it, as if the organs of government were rebelling against being told to perform their jobs for the first time in years and immediately set about trying to sabotage the mandated accomplishment with malicious compliance (you voted for Brexit because you hate immigrants, let's get even more of them in the country).
I believed, and still do, think Trump is a better president for America than Harris and many of these changes he's trying to push through have been a long time coming. Better yet, the loony side of Team Blue decisively lost in politics, and "demographics are destiny" has been proven false again. Maybe there's a chance they'll learn something before the pendulum swings back again.
However, there stands a very real chance of complete disaster across America as people who have never had to make a real decision in their lives find themselves suddenly having to as the Fed washes its hands and trims budgets. Not to mention the state employees who suddenly have to find room in the budget for all the things the federal government previously took care of. State governments are as subject to the same socialization of losses and the privatization of profits as the Fed is, and just as vulnerable to grifters, lawyers, and all manner of incompetent bureaucrats.
Before team red stans /ourguy/ some more, I would urge you to reconsider - do you have a good opinion of the people working in your state's government, and do you think the people running your state are up to the task of taking on the responsibilities that the Fed is dumping on them?
In the field of grade school literacy, Mississippi jumped from the very bottom to top 10 over the last 10 years, entirely due to their state government taking the responsibility of educating their children into their own hands. I'd be very interested to hear the arguments from people insistent their state can't be expected to educate their children as well as Mississippi does.
A big part of the Mississippi jump in scores was mandating (in 2013) that students in third grade repeat the year if they are not reading and mathing at grade level. The federal assessment tests are in fourth grade, so fourth grade reading and math scores go up 11~12% when illiterate third-graders are held back. The scores for the federal assessment test in eighth grade are only up 3% or so.
I think it's much better to hold back kids who can't read instead of passing them (like in DC, where students who miss the majority of classes get through high school), but you can't congratulate them when they put their thumb on the scale this heavily.
You think this is too heavy a thumb on the scale? I disagree. Perhaps the timing does optimize for Federal money, but that doesn't mean it doesn't also provide the benefits it seems to. I agree with you that holding a child back is much better; I think 3rd grade seems like as good a first benchmark as any. I could be convinced earlier would be better but not much later.
I'm no expert, but it's an astonishing thing to accomplish in 12 years. If they can game the metrics this badly and not improve education outcomes, the metrics were useless anyway.
Well if they're holding back kids frequently you gain a second variable that the metric is measuring: age. Are you really testing the reading capability of fourth graders if they are the age of fifth graders due to being held back? That doesn't seem particularly fair as a measure of the quality of education between schools that do and do not hold kids back.
I think grade level should be a measure of academic ability rather than age. Obviously, there will be some correlation between age and academic ability due to brain development; also obviously, some kids will develop slower than their peers. If other states are just passing those kids along because they think grade level should measure time served rather than academic achievement, yes that will obviously harm them in comparison to states that don't do that. But mostly because they are pretending they've educated these kids to grade level when they haven't. If Mississippi 10 years from now has measurably better educational outcomes for their high school graduates than they did 10 years ago, who cares if some of the graduates are 19 rather 18? Gaining an actual high school education by 19 (or 20) seems vastly preferable to being cut loose at 18 and functionally illiterate.
Mississippi's success implementing the obvious strategy of making students repeat material they haven't sufficiently mastered strikes me as evidence other states are doing it wrong. Maybe some of that effect is illusion based on gaming the metrics we use to measure success. But it's such an obvious strategy that has resulted in such success that I strongly doubt there is truly no meat on those bones.
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