site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 7, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

9
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

This makes sense to me - it stands to reason if you spend basically the same on rich students and poor students the former will still do better based on all their other advantages.

I can’t imagine the spending disparity at which that wouldn’t be the case or the upper/middle classes ever allowing us to actually approach it. I maintain the state is an ersatz parent at best and that arguing over the exact allocation of property taxes is barking up the wrong tree.

I have no idea what if anything would actually make poor and rich students equal, but here at least they'ree suggesting a more modest metric of hitting "funding required for adequate test scores," as estimated by the the Department of Education's National Education Cost Model.

Medium- and high-poverty districts are spending, respectively, $700 and $3,078 per student less than what would be required. For the highest-poverty districts, that gap is $5,135, meaning districts there are spending about 30% less than what would be required to deliver an adequate level of education to their students. (Conversely, the two low-poverty quintiles are spending more than they need to reach that benchmark, another indication that funds are being poorly allocated.)

I don't understand the cost model well enough to know if it makes sense or not.

The "adequacy" metric -- the National Education Cost Model -- should be regarded as political and useless. It assumes it costs more to teach poor kids to the same level, so if you have two adjacent districts with the same per-pupil funding, one rich and one poor, the poor one might be regarded as having "inadequate" funding and the rich one as having more than "adequate" funding.

Why would be that be useless? That seems obviously true to me. Put a fast person and a slow person and the same starting line and you expect the fast person to always pull ahead. Per their calculations, it takes more funding to get a poor kid to baseline than a rich kid, which is what you'd expect.

Still, the EPI paper doesn't say the districts are funded the same but the poor districts lose out only on adequacy, they say poorer districts are lower funded in absolute terms as well.

Per their calculations, it takes more funding to get a poor kid to baseline than a rich kid, which is what you'd expect.

That's not a calculation, that's an assumption.

The core purpose of the NECM is to account for the fact, long established in the research literature, that the cost of providing a given level of education is not uniform across districts (Duncombe and Yinger 2007). Perhaps most importantly, districts that serve larger shares of high-need students (e.g., higher Census child poverty rates) will have higher costs. In addition, other factors, such as labor costs (e.g., districts in areas with higher costs of living will need to pay their employees more), size (economies of scale), and population density, all affect the “value of the education dollar.” The model, therefore, first estimates the relationships between district spending and these important factors, including testing outcomes. Importantly, the model accounts for the fact that school funding both affects and is affected by testing outcomes (For example, a district with higher test scores will tend to have higher property values than a district with lower scores. This high valuation allows the former district to collect more property tax revenues, which, in turn, boosts spending and positively affects testing outcomes. The NECM uses econometric methods to account for this endogeneity and tease out the causal relationship between spending and outcomes.)

This initial model yields a kind of “relationship inventory” of how each factor is related to spending. We then use the “inventory” to predict the cost (spending levels) of achieving a common outcome level (e.g., national average math and reading test scores) for each individual district, based on that district’s configuration of characteristics (in a sense, by comparing each district to other similar districts). These “required spending” estimates can then be compared with actual spending levels (total spending, direct to elementary and secondary education) in each district (this same basic process also yields our state-level estimates, which are aggregated district-level estimates). The difference between actual and required spending is a measure of adequacy relative to the common goal of national average scores.

The core purpose of the NECM is to account for the fact, long established in the research literature, that the cost of providing a given level of education is not uniform across districts (Duncombe and Yinger 2007).

Note that Duncombe and Yinger 2007 was about reducing costs through consolidation.

Perhaps most importantly, districts that serve larger shares of high-need students (e.g., higher Census child poverty rates) will have higher costs.

The buried assumption here is that putting more money into schools with larger shares of poor students will improve their education. But that's exactly what we were trying to determine! This is circular.

The buried assumption here is that putting more money into schools with larger shares of poor students will improve their education. But that's exactly what we were trying to determine! This is circular.

I think you're imagining researchers comparing a poor neighborhood to a rich neighborhood and assuming the difference in outcomes is down to funding. They're not, they're comparing poor neighborhoods and finding that the stand out difference between them (after controlling for income, cost of living, demographics, population density) is the better performing poor school has more funding per student. This is a reasonable conclusion. I'm sure there are counterarguments or complaints to be made about their data or something but no one here is providing them

They're not, they're comparing poor neighborhoods and finding that the stand out difference between them (after controlling for income, cost of living, demographics, population density) is the better performing poor school has more funding per student.

The methodology is here I don't think that's what they're doing. And the numbers they come out with are large enough that I don't think they could possibly be doing that, because no high-poverty district would be "adequately funded" by their measures. They determine that the cost difference between a 100% poverty district and a 0% poverty district is, in their preferred model, $41,000 per pupil.

More comments