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Can you imagine a US Constitutional amendment that, if proposed, would actually get passed these days?
The relevant part of the US Constitution is:
So, either 2/3 of both the House and the Senate, or 2/3 of the states must propose it, and then 3/4 of the state legislatures or conventions in those states must support it, for it to become part of the Constitution... as I understand it at least.
What sort of possible amendments could you imagine would actually pass and become part of the US Constitution in today's political climate, if they were proposed?
I find this to be an interesting question because it is a barometer of what the various factions of US politics actually agree on, despite their various differences, and also a barometer of how much polarization there is in today's US political situation.
Line item veto.
It was briefly introduced in the 90s, but ultimately declared unconstitutional. It would be a method of breaking the "giant omnibus bill" system of government, by allowing the president to remove pork-belly spending at will. ((One proposal I've seen would restrict the veto to bills passed by a simple majority, bills passed by a two-thirds majority that would allow congress to overturn a veto would be immune from a line item veto, so if we really put together a compromise bill that has near unanimous congressional support it would be immune))
Then you get stuff like this where the executive completely reverses the meaning of the legislation.
Education is like a religion for Democrats sometimes. Even though almost everyone in the West now has a machine capable of streaming much of the world's knowledge to them in an instant, they act as if it is the 19th century and public schooling is necessary to save masses of illiterate farm kids who live tens of miles away from the nearest library from ignorance.
Probably the biggest actual effect that public education has on society these days is not that it educates. It is that it emancipates the work force from child raising, keeps kids off the street when they are at a rambunctious age, and teaches kids how to sit still and take orders from boring authority figures. It also occasionally helps some kids to escape abusive relatives. Public education also helps Democrats because it gives them a way to funnel kids through a system where they have disproportionate influence.
However, I think that for the most part Democrats' attitude to education does not primarily have to do with any of these factors. They seem to, for the most part, actually believe in the rosy views of public education and its didactic benefits that they espouse.
Robin Hanson on healthcare:
Education is the same way. The more human time and attention is dedicated to education (i.e. how much it costs), the more you signal that you care about educating children. The thing has been replaced by the symbolic representation of the thing. We would be in much less of a student debt crisis if middle-class women didn't have to get (subsidized) 4-year degrees in order to get childcare jobs at the government-run daycare.
First off, I am in no way arguing that being a kindergarten teacher requires a masters degree. I can think of a half dozen 16 year olds off the top of my head who could shadow an elementary school teacher for a week and do fine taking over.
But expanding that system to the general population would be a disaster because of lots of reasons(mostly that there is no bureaucracy-legible way to find those people), and I somehow doubt women who want to become teachers would stop going to college to save money if that was an option.
In the first place, teachers are mostly teachers- or should I say they become teachers- because they believe in the education system and the benefits of formal education. But furthermore, the option to get a four year teaching degree for significantly cheaper than a traditional four year degree already exists. Everyone who wants to can go to community college and save like $20k a year for at least two years; in my state it’s three years in practice because community college credits universally transfer to state schools. Actually, speaking of Texas, there’s a program to do remote learning from a low-performing state school while enrolled in community college and get your teaching certificate entirely through community college for much cheaper. You know who uses it? Women that want to be housewives but need to kill time until their boyfriends get more established. Career teachers choose to go straight to university in the presence of cheaper alternatives that don’t hurt your career because government hiring isn’t allowed to care about the institution granting a diploma.
And realistically, what’s the alternative to a degree requirement for teachers specifically? It’s a good proxy for ‘values education enough to plausibly care about the job’ ‘smart and functional enough to do the job’ and ‘cooperative with the giant all-consuming bureaucracy that governs every aspect of the job’. No other proxy seems legible enough to the bureaucracies that run the public school system.
What if they did an apprenticeship, like a blacksmith in the old days? Watch a good teacher teaching, talk with them about how they do things (maybe do this with a few people to even things out), hands on learning, then be supervised for teaching easy classes, then go and teach with supervision... then you're a teacher! Add some basic maths, logic, English and science tests to make sure they're not stupid and you're good to go.
I say this because education degrees don't necessarily teach people how to teach. In Australia education degrees often get below-average students and they don't teach classroom management as opposed to progressive ideology.
The bureaucracies aren't doing a good job, they're part of the problem. All this useless admin that eats up time and money. It's a problem in healthcare and a problem in education, spending and admin multiplies while results are stagnant. Privatize, charterize, get rid of the bureaucracy.
See figure 3 and figure 4: https://www.cato.org/publications/k-12-education
They do this, it's called student teaching.
Some states do let people start teaching before earning their degree, and some do allow the degree to be from a much cheaper community college. My daughter's pre-K teacher just sent a letter home about this, asking to include activities with the kids in her (regional college) coursework. I am unworried, it is pre-K, I can teach her to read and count myself if it comes to that.
Anyway, it's true, but not any more true than for at least half of jobs currently requiring a college degree. An admin assistant doesn't really need to study... whatever it is that the median low level administrator studied in college, yet here we are.
yeschad.png A system of apprenticeships is a great way to cut down on degree inflation and to ensure that the skills people learn are actually applicable.
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