- The socioeconomic evolution of the United States in the twenty-first century will be heavily determined by the power of two local institutions: the zoning board and the school board. This prediction is not nearly as bold as it might seem; the two boards have heavily determined our evolution for the past forty years, and no one is about to challenge them.
These choads. Said the guy who has never tried to site a business. Zoning codes are followed with missionary zeal. The fact that 40% of New York couldn't be built anymore reflects the fact that zoning has changed to reflect reality, not history. The population of New York was substantially less 40 years ago and as such, you don't get to build like that anymore. Hey, could you say something else really, really stupid? Let's demonstrate our incontrovertable proof by throwing the most controversial sociologist we can find at it. Look. Elizabeth Warren wrote an entire goddamn book about this in 2003. Her argument was that property taxes shouldn't fund education because it led to rich-ass neighborhoods with appalling inequality. She listed as an example a neighborhood in Baltimore, I think, that was rumored to be getting a charter school which immediately increased property values by 120% before the school was even sited. A liberal looks at the problem and says "we need to figure out a way to separate schools from wealth." A conservative looks at the problem and says "we need to figure out a way to let entrepreneurs build skyscrapers in neighborhoods."Crucially, zoning codes are not typically followed.
The case that education is massively important in American life hardly needs to be made. Charles Murray shows that educational attainment is a powerful predictor of divorce, disability status, marital childbearing, and other social indicators.
I cringed a bit when Murray was named. There have to be reams of other sociologists who provide similar evidence. But is poorly managing the optics of one's evidence enough to torpedo the article? I took the article as an exposition of how zoning boards and school boards--ostensibly local organizations--have had enormous national implications. I couldn't agree more that we need to decouple educational funding from local property values, maybe through something like federal funding. But I recall you yourself said this is too sweeping, smells too much like socialism, probably ain't ever gonna happen.Let's demonstrate our incontrovertable proof by throwing the most controversial sociologist we can find at it.
A liberal looks at the problem and says "we need to figure out a way to separate schools from wealth." A conservative looks at the problem and says "we need to figure out a way to let entrepreneurs build skyscrapers in neighborhoods."
The article is an argument as to why zoning boards shouldn't be allowed to stop property developers from fucking up neighborhoods. They aren't trying for better educational outcomes at all - they're trying for better performance from their REIT ETF. That's why they quote Charles Murray. Because it's dog-whistle language for "we hate black people just like you do." The issue isn't local organizations and national implications. The issue is that when there's no national the local takes care of itself. Up until the end of the Vietnam war, school nutrition belonged to the Department of Defense - but we privatized that and wasn't that wonderful. The argument you linked is three years old. We hadn't had a socialist nearly win the Democratic nomination for president. We didn't have nazis carrying torches marching in Charlottesville. I've moderated my opinion somewhat; No Child Left Behind was about test standards and the data on charter schools is controversial but the data on investing in children is anything but. I think a funding strategy change is no longer out of the question. And shit. I discovered last night that I can get 20 credit-hours worth of CNC training from a local community college for $247. That's because of a phat job-training grant from the Department of Ed. If we can spend money on job training we can maybe spend money on kids. After all, both political parties profess to like them.
Admittedly, most everything I know about charter schools is anecdotal. When I've tried to figure out how well they work out in aggregate I see many conflicting narratives and evidence. It seems like they deliver an education as good as or a little worse than public schools on average. I've been looking at the charter schools in my area of town since my kid started having problems in school. Trillium Charter School roils in turmoil. I never considered Trillium, I knew someone who taught there, I've known parents with children there, it's a fucking shit show. Trillium has a solid C grade on some school rating sites. It needs to be closed to protect kids. The other charter school in our area has a solid B rating on one of the school rating sites. It's a Waldorf school and sounded like it might hold some promise. My mom, a former school teacher did some digging. it's run poorly. Unscheduled days off have been announced the week before they happen, and things like that. It's constantly in money trouble. If you look at their test scores are almost the same as the scores at the elementary school five blocks from my house. The charter a little better in reading than the local, but my kids is reading the first Harry Potter book to herself at age six. I don't need a school to teach her to read, she'll learn by doing on her own. If we stay at the local elementary she will go to class with the kids that live around her, many of whom she'll continue to go to school with for a dozen years. She will be part of a neighborhood community, she won't need a ride to her friends house across town to socialize. As far as giving control to the federal government goes I can only pray it never happens. Imagine our current education secretary guiding what goes in the syllabus. Worse yet watch the schools get privatized and handed off to the lowest bidder. The current system is choice if you have the means between good schools or less good schools, the alternative is probably no choice and worse schools.
What, exactly, would you call No Child Left Behind? The system we have right now is the worst of both worlds - federally mandated performance, local funding. About ten percent of school money comes from the feds. Looking at that solid lump at the bottom you'd think things were proportional. They aren't. At the same time, It's clearly not just about money. When you've got a mishmash of federal, state and local sources (of which federal is the smallest) you get a bunch of differing priorities. You "teach the controversy." You blow $1.3b on iPads.As far as giving control to the federal government goes I can only pray it never happens.
Full federal control would be the Feds deciding what text book is used, letting them decide what and how to teach hot button topics. Letting the feds decide what is taught in sex ed, what is said about evolution, about religion about government. As it stands localities have a great deal of control over what gets covered and how. I've never read anything that suggest federal involvement in well funded districts has any net benefit. The less involved the feds are in schools in our community the better in my book.
Full federal control would prevent the Texas School Board from buying 5 million textbooks that teach creationism. That would give every other school board the option to buy books that don't teach creationism. I don't want your book. I want a book that is at least approved by a chain of command I can vote against. There's nothing I can do about Texas books or Oregon books but publishers aren't going to come out with a special edition for New Mexico. I grew up with Texan biology books. They're bullshit. And they're why museums of creationism exist.As a market, the state was so big and influential that national publishers tended to gear their books toward whatever it wanted. Back in 1994, the board requested four hundred revisions in five health textbooks it was considering. The publisher Holt, Rinehart and Winston was the target for the most changes, including the deletion of toll-free numbers for gay and lesbian groups and teenage suicide prevention groups. Holt announced that it would pull its book out of the Texas market rather than comply. (A decade later Holt was back with a new book that eliminated the gay people.)
Or a full federally controlled school system would mandate that you had to have text books that taught creationism. Despite the Texas lock in I never had a biology text book that mentioned creationism. The local school board or state school board decided that you would use those text books because they were the cheapest. We elect our school board here, I don't know how it worked where you were. The more control localities have in the educational system the more likely, not less, that the values of the community will be represented in the classroom. I'm fine with people in Alabama learning creationism as long as it means people in Oregon will never have to.
"My state works, fuck everyone else." Trump won Alabama by 28%. The community will is definitely being represented in the classroom. That's probably why it hasn't really changed since George Wallace was governor - when a pedophile can only lose by 20,000 votes there's some issues with the community. No matter how bad you think it is, most of the country leans towards the middle. It's the fringe you need to worry about. Making the fringe subject to the majority is rarely a bad thing.