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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   35328 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 26, 2022

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Over the summer, Arizona lawmakers passed a universal educational voucher program, to my understanding the first in the nation. It attaches state education dollars to students rather than to specific schools, allowing parents to choose where to send the money the state spends on educating their children.

This was immediately challenged by, well, the whole education establishment. Kathy Hoffman, Arizona's State Superintendent of Public Instruction, was officially tasked with overseeing the program; instead, she doxxed parents who signed up for it. Arizona's teacher's union was immediately mobilized to work with the far-left non-profit "Save Our Schools" organization, which sought to gather signatures to put a repeal of the scholarship law on the next election ballot.

Arizona's Secretary of State excitedly tweeted her receipt of the supposedly over 140,000 signatures (almost 120,000 were required). Her statement that

Filing petitions today means the applicable portion of law will not be implemented tomorrow on the General Effective date🛑As long as the petitions continue to meet the min sigs through all the processing, that portion of the law stays on hold.

is a bit confusing to me, I don't know how Arizona referendum law works but the idea that a petition to add an issue to the ballot could function to suspend the operation of a signed law raises several questions in my mind. However, as the Secretary of State maybe this was her call to make? Anyway she was too glib by half. The libertarianish Goldwater Institute, which had posted watchdogs on the filing process, immediately noted that fewer than 90,000 signatures had actually been filed. "Save Our Schools" Facebook page calls this "questionable" and notes that only the Secretary of State can make the final determination, but apparently the Secretary of State's office only received 8,175 petition sheets with a maximum of 15 signatures per sheet. Off their Facebook page, SOS concedes that they have likely fallen short. Their explanation of the miscount? "Well we were just estimating." Apparently Arizona's schoolteachers aren't so great with math!

SOS receives preferred treatment in the news reporting, but poking around some parent sites it looks like they have been predictably underhanded pretty much the whole way. Despite the support of both the Secretary of State and the Superintendent of Schools, both of whose offices are supposed to be effecting the law rather than repealing it, the voucher program is likely to proceed (which may only attract even more anti-choice money to the state's lobbies, I guess). With almost 11,000 applicants pending, it's likely to generate some very happy parents--along with at least some frustrated ones. I doubt we've heard the end of this.

But the victory here may encourage other states to follow suit. I feel like this is one more symptom of the present educational paradigm unraveling. COVID showed parents both how much, and how little, public schools do for them, personally. I know many parents who were relieved to send their children back to school. But I know many others who have simply decided to not. It's a bit of a homeschooling renaissance, it seems, and now in Arizona there are public education dollars attached to that. A family with three children could get something like $21,000 per year to help educate them.

The substance of the opposition is that this deprives neighborhood schools of much-needed funding, "skims the cream," hasn't got enough oversight, and empowers uncredentialed teachers to teach. These are basically all the same criticisms teacher's unions offer against charter schools, which are booming business in Arizona--Arizona's BASIS charter schools are regularly ranked among the best in the country (I count four of their Arizona campuses in the US News top 30). Basically, it looks like public education simply can't compete, and is desperately scrambling to protect its monopoly and union largess.

Parents, apparently, are not buying these arguments, at least in Arizona. And indeed I have never seen any evidence that these arguments have any merit; to the contrary, I am persuaded by The Case Against Education that our existing K-12 system cannot be upended fast enough. So I have been, and will be, watching Arizona's voucher experiment with great interest!

But in case I have not sounded appropriately unhinged thus far--I do have to ask. What would have been the outcome, if the Goldwater Institute had not posted watchdogs on the counting process? The Arizona news media seems to want to cast SOS as the watchdogs, here, but SOS appeared to be quite happy to smear their numbers in their own favor, and they have at least two powerful allies within the government who swallowed their claims whole, declaring the law "on hold" even when the math obviously didn't add up. This kind of narrative-crafting is really disturbing to me, and the fact that the Secretary of State seemed happy to take SOS at their word, to the point of tweeting about it, even as the Goldwater Institute knew instantly from the math that this wasn't going to fly... well, the whole thing seems awfully shady.

(This is where I deleted a paragraph borrowing a jack about "finding" a thousand more pages in a box somewhere...)

As I understand it, one of the biggest cost drains to public education is providing for mentally and physically disabled children. They're just vastly more expensive to teach than normal kids. And on top of that, if there's a slip in providing them good education, they're potentially able to sue, so even more costs have to be added to ensure that all education meets the legal requirements. If parents of normal children are effectively no longer subsidizing disabled children, educating disabled children will be very difficult.

"Don't destroy the price signal in order to transfer incomes."

It's vastly more beneficial to simply directly subsidize the education of mentally and physically disabled children while letting choice make things better for everyone else than to hobble the system for everyone.

Seriously. There is no good external reason to hide the ball that these students cost X dollars each to educate, whilst THOSE students cost 3X dollars.

If we agree it is important to educate the latter group, then assign 3X dollars for each of those students. Make it an open fact.

Some anecdata:

As someone from Arizona whose mother took them out of the public system and put them into a charter school, I suppose the public system was indeed a poor fit for me (and probably other kids like me), though I still kinda struggled grade-wise until I magically cleaned up in 12th grade.

I have a friend who works as a teacher, who is LGBT and very likely votes Democrat, and listening to him venting, it seems that his biggest complaint about his work environment isn't the kids (he loves them) or their parents, but the administration/bureaucracy/faculty/fellow teachers.

Good teachers have valid complaints aimed in many directions, though teachers in general make a bunch of crazy claims as well.

I have a friend (also a Democrat) who used to work in a large urban school district, but quit teaching because she was tired of taking time off to heal from injuries caused by her students, and the administration was thoroughly incompetent at addressing teacher safety. She wasn't even teaching special ed.

It seems like /r/teachers complains… well mostly about republicans existing, but when it takes a break from being a mainstream sun and focuses on being a sun for teachers, it complains about admin slightly more than parents or kids(but less than the two combined).

SoS claimed there was 10,200 petition sheets. i'm sure after they have finished properly reviewing all the signatures they will find the missing ones that weren't part of the initial count.

Arizona's BASIS charter schools are regularly ranked among the best in the country (I count four of their Arizona campuses in the US News top 30). Basically, it looks like public education simply can't compete, and is desperately scrambling to protect its monopoly and union largess.

I am extremely unconvinced by this logic. Those rankings mostly reflect the pre-existing traits of the students and their families. No one has provided any evidence that these rankings reflect anything causal and, to the degree they do, that these causal effects aren't purely zero-sum peer-effects. There is some evidence that specific inputs to rankings like this (e.g. class size) might have causal effects, but even there, the evidence is typically quite mixed.

To be quite honest, I would expect that the smart kids from stable two parent homes are doing a lot better in classes full of other smart kids from stable two parent homes than sharing classes with the local crack dealer’s bastards, and that you’re not going to help the latter anyways.

Those are the "zero-sum peer-effects" I reference.

The literature is mixed on whether they exist. For evidence contrary to your intuition, see https://doi.org/10.1086/666653

Even if they do exist, they're not a good reason to support non-public schools from a policy perspective, because peer effects are zero-sum. They're merely a reason to support private schools if you're rich/white/etc.

If peer effects are zero-sum, they are neither a reason to support, nor to oppose, non-public schools, right? Because it means that who your peers are has ~no effect on performance once you control for "pre-existing traits of the students and their families."

Yes, exactly.

This isn't true. Zero-sum means the overall effect of the peers is zero-sum - we have a number of children, and some offer bonuses and others maluses to the performance of their peers. This is the traditional argument for removing ability-streamed classes, incidentally, that we need to put the smarter kids in with the dumber ones in order to ensure that everyone gets a chance to get the adjacency bonus from the smart kids.

I'm not sure things function that way in reality - it runs up against obvious limitations like 'putting a mentally disabled kid in the accelerated class is going to badly screw someone over, or possibly everyone involved depending on how you run things' but the peer effects being zero-sum means your peers do have an effect on performance, but the positive externalities are strongly connected to better students who in turn yield said positive externalities themselves.

What if putting smart kids together benefits smart kids to a greater degree than putting smart kids with dumb kids benefits the dumb kids?

What if the smart kid bonus only applies to other conscientious smart kids and the dumb scumbags don't really gain from sharing a learning environment with the smart kids, they just hold the smart kids back?

I agree and think that's true - I was accelerated in high school, but then the program got shut down and I got put with the speds for a few months (on the basis that the special education teacher was trained in gifted education) until they decided to put me back into regular classes. Spending time with a guy who couldn't read did nothing for me, nor did it help him. I viewed him with contempt because I hated being sat with him, and he was barely aware of anyone's existence at all.

I'm just outlining the logic of 'something can be net zero-sum yet be bad for some and good for others'.

Careful now, you're not supposed to be muddying the rigorous analysis of experts with silly things like logic and heuristics.

Please speak plainly. What point are you making here?

I keep wanting to write something about this kind of blatant procedural outcome manipulation (but I'd be better off searching for someone who already has).

Utopians constantly say things like "we shall have a System to ensure X and prevent Y", and then spend zero time designing a system that isn't trivially exploitable by baseline sociopaths who, shockingly, are agents with goals that don't necessarily align with The System. See the current "communism with magic robots has never been tried" thread for a typical example.

Is there any way to get this across to people who don't want to understand it? In my experience the same people who were just complaining about the nomenklatura betraying the last revolution will stubbornly refuse to entertain the idea that the same thing could happen to their revolution.

Anyway, I'm willing to bet this particular event will get officially recorded on wikipedia as "extremist MAGA election fraud conspiracy theory derails effort to save Queer and Brown school children." Because a coalition of Facebook boomers just found out that the secretary of state lied about ballot counting on a massive scale, and the media has spent two years enforcing the consensus that this can't happen:

A shortfall of that size, about 37% less than the number of signatures supporters said they gathered, is not a "rounding error," said Christine Sawhill Accurso. She organized school-choice proponents to monitor petition signing stations — sometimes pushing back against the petition drive — and report their findings. Either Save Our Schools lied about its support, or was negligent in checking the petitions as they came in, Accurso said.

I think the most predictable outcome here is a huge effort to make this kind of organization impossible in future; bank accounts shut down mysteriously, all online accounts banned, and the phones of every participant added to spam blocking lists. The censorship framework is already there and rapidly growing more sophisticated, but some groups can still slip through the gaps for now.

nomenklatura

Can someone explain why I have seen this word maybe 10 times in the past week but never before in my life? Did some prominent person or blogger use it recently?

It's been extremely common in political speak since the Cold War.

You might have drifted into a new circle? It and the New Class concept have been popular in the dissident right for a long time (was it Sam Francis who introduced it from the New Left clique?)

I've been totally offline for a few weeks now, so it's probably not a current trend.

These days many people use it as a synonym for PMC, sadly.

Just Bader Meinhoff.

I keep conflating "Baader-Meinhoff" with "Dunning-Kruger." I suppose the composite that results is "you think this is just the frequency illusion, but you're mistaken."

Yeah, or maybe synchronicity in the Jungian "meaningful coincidence of two or more events where something other than the probability of chance is involved", with the 'something other' being memetic. People who are all thinking about the same topic are likely to be in a similar headspace. You want to decry nepotism, and you think some recent instance feels particularly soviet, and what was that cool word they had for them? Nomenklatura.

This is how memes are started though, and nomenklatura definitely fits the bill, so it is possible everyone saying it picked it up from the same source. They don't even have to do it consciously - if it fits well your brain might do it anyway.

Utopians constantly say things like "we shall have a System to ensure X and prevent Y", and then spend zero time designing a system that isn't trivially exploitable by baseline sociopaths who, shockingly, are agents with goals that don't necessarily align with The System. See the current "communism with magic robots has never been tried" thread for a typical example.

I feel like this is a fundamental difference between Communists and Capitalists.

Communists seem to think the vast majority of human beings are intrinsically good and only do evil when forced to by circumstance. By fixing the circumstance, you can remove the evil, hence prescribing increased bennies as a panacea to crime. In a utopia, nobody would do wrong because nobody would have a reason to. Everyone wants to hit co-operate and is only forced to hit defect by circumstance. Communism is supposedly about providing for everyone so nobody ever needs to defect against society. It is about diminishing the difference in rewards for co-operation vs defection to almost nothing and trusting in people's better nature to want to be good.

Capitalists recognise that the vast majority of people have at least the capability for evil, if not the constant inclination. People will commit crimes of opportunity and exploit systems and other people when they think they can get away with it. Most people will defect when they're reasonably sure they'll both profit and come out on top. Capitalism is supposed to channel people's greed and other evil instincts into a constructive direction by incentivising pro-social things with monetary rewards. It's putting a thumb on the scale of co-operate by increasing the rewards for co-operating. In theory.

To be clear, this is the platonic ideals of these ideologies and I think that almost nobody who supports them actually supports them in these forms or for these reasons. Most real life "communists" just want to upend society for a quick route to the top via new ruling party loyalty and are perfectly okay with guillotining criminals (and most of them think some people are inherently evil, mainly whites). Most real life "capitalists" don't care for much of capitalism at all honestly, they just don't want those aforementioned communists to win power, because they stand to lose personally, in terms of money, status or their life itself, and probably all three.

This, and the continuing efforts to get a Texas independence referendum, are two key efforts to watch for ascertaining the effectiveness of said censorship.

I think the most predictable outcome here is a huge effort to make this kind of organization impossible in future; bank accounts shut down mysteriously, all online accounts banned, and the phones of every participant added to spam blocking lists.

I'd take that bet, I don't think these people are going to face any consequences. School choice is well within the Overton window.

There are lots of bogus or even downright fraudulent signatures on any signature-gathering mission. People will put bogus information on your petition to deliberately fuck with you and you cannot stop them.

See also: Verizon vs. Net Neutrality

Well yeah, but in this case nobody had to do any of that for the official overseeing the process to celebrate tens of thousands of nonexistent sigs.

If they had written down "Mickey Mouse" an extra 50000 times, the process was for the SoS to verify the sigs to her satisfaction, then send a "randomly selected" 5% sample back to individual counties to do their own verification. Lots of opportunities to sneak things through there, kinda surprised it didn't happen; the last big one only failed after it went to the courts for review for fraudulent sigs the SoS "missed" (iou a source that isn't Salon)

That's the sort of thing I was talking about with people designing a System that on the surface looks secure, but in practice totally depends on one person playing by the rules.

I hope republicans haven't squandered the moment, instead of passing laws that try to dictate curriculum that teaching will find ways to get around in about 5 seconds they should have used the momentum to pass universal vouchers in every strong red state. Even then, I doubt republicans will have the fortitude to crack the public school system. When schools want more money they'll just stop the busses.

Couple of scattered thoughts on this:

  1. I have no opposition to public schools in principle, graduated from one myself without too much apparent damage. What I do have strong opposition to is this notion that an educator understands what a kid needs better than that kid's own parents and that we should just surrender the education of our children to the state without question or opposition. There are shitty parents to be sure but there are also shitty teachers in probably about the same proportion.

  2. When topline education funding takes a hit, I predict there will be no firing of excessive administrative personnel like diversity experts or secretaries or superfluous academic committees. The budge hits will be directly to education funding proper, textbooks and materials and the like, so the entrenched education interests can point to a shortage of textbooks and say "See what your ESA is doing to our precious children!?"

When topline education funding takes a hit, I predict there will be no firing of excessive administrative personnel like diversity experts or secretaries or superfluous academic committees. The budge hits will be directly to education funding proper, textbooks and materials and the like, so the entrenched education interests can point to a shortage of textbooks and say "See what your ESA is doing to our precious children!?"

This reminds me of the other thing I saw about Arizona education over the summer. I guess a couple years ago there was a bunch of organized protesting demanding a raise in teacher salaries, and the governor and legislature allocated money to give teachers a 20% raise over the next few years. But the public school districts did not pass that money on to teachers as promised, leading to another round of demands for increases in "teacher pay":

The Arizona Auditor General released a report earlier this year showing the average teacher salary increased by 16.5% or around $8,000, less than the promise of 20% by 2020. That report shows that while most districts increased pay, only 43% of districts statewide actually met the 20% goal since there was no requirement that districts spend the money on teacher salaries.

(I do wonder how widespread salary increases of 10%+ contributed to Arizona's inflation...) Meanwhile, Arizona district superintendents are pulling down $200,000 annual salaries, plus stuff like this:

She was joined by dozens of other educators who had gathered before heading into the first Buckeye Elementary School District meeting since the Arizona auditor general’s finding that the district paid its superintendent $1.7 million in retirement credits and unused leave and then failed to note it in public employment records.

The amount of money being poured into "public education" systems in the United States is absolutely gob-smacking. I don't know who first said that "think of the children" is the root password to all government systems, but it certainly seems to be true. It will be interesting to see how things change as more parent groups catch wise to the scam. Something else I saw on social media somewhere, was that the biggest mistake Democrats made during COVID was turning "parents of school-aged children" into a special interest voting bloc opposed to Democrat policies.

Meanwhile, Arizona district superintendents are pulling down $200,000 annual salaries

Hm, I think Superintendent Chalmers could afford much more than a 1979 Honda Accord these days.

But why would he ever want to?

This strategy of cutting the most visible and useful parts of the budget first to argue the whole is necessary, is called the Mount Rushmore Syndrome.

The most successful counterstrategy I know is to signal boost (and even fabricate) cases of largesse that is not being cut:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loony_left

This was sufficiently successful that, when the generally nonpartisan Yes, Minister TV series had an episode with Thames Marsh local council, who had cut all civil defence but kept open the "gay bereavement centre" (and a small bunker for the council leader) this was something that the audience could recognise and accept easily. It also meant that, even as the UK Labour party moved somewhat to the right between the 1983 and 1987 elections, they were still associated with radical socialism and social progressivism, due to their association with "loony left" local councils.

That article is fascinating. The "Baa Baa White Sheep" section is a several pages long explanation of how the whole thing was fabricated, with quotes and citations, how it was some private initiative, and how the council said that they support it but actually they said that it's none of their business, and how actually some reporter couldn't find any worker that confirmed the ban, and so on and so forth.

And then it ends with a single sentence: "In 2000, the BBC reported the withdrawal of guidance to nursery schools by Birmingham City Council that "Baa, Baa, Black Sheep" should not be taught."

The way Wikipedia manages to lie its head off while still sticking to reputable sources is fascinating.

Yes, it's a good example of misleading by selective elaboration.

A contemporaneous American documentary on the loony left:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=COt65HZCJaA

The "Why is this English school only serving English food?" part is particularly amusing. And I also feel sympathetic: I would feel bad if my child was only eating English food, but for the psychological welfare of the child, not for reasons of objecting to an English school serving only it in England.

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