Notebook per
Contra Robinson On Schooling
Citation (APA): Alexander, S. (2016). Contra Robinson On Schooling [Kindle Android version]. Retrieved from Amazon.com
Parte introduttiva
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 2
Contra Robinson On Schooling By Scott Alexander
Evidenzia (giallo) - Posizione 5
Robinson argues against school vouchers:
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this is the first time you’ve read a logical argument, written in good faith and intended to convince someone,
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STRANO TROVARE PEZZI ARGOMENTATI VS I VOUCHER
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Introducing profit into the school system is very dangerous,
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...
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it creates a terrible set of incentives.
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strong incentive for the school to give as little in return as possible.
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L ACCUSA
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maximize value to shareholders
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IL VERO OBBOETTIVO
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schools should try to spend as little money educating students
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If you don’t have to spring for new lab equipment or new textbooks, you have no incentive to do so
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corporations have an incentive to maximize shareholder value. But they can’t do that without satisfying their customers.
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CONTROARGOMENTO CHE NN CONVINCE
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alignment
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parents can simply go elsewhere.
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choice creates competition, which creates quality.
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In reality, parents will not have many options
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CONTRO CONTROARG
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(there are only so many schools within a feasible distance
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In a public school system, all money is spent on the schools.
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In a for-profit school system, at least some portion of that money is directed instead toward the pockets of shareholders
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point, made somewhat weaker by failure to consider why it doesn’t apply to everything else.
Nota - Posizione 35
CONTRO CONTRO CONTROARGOMENTO
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compares school vouchers to foodstamps,
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I know the quality of service these poor people get for their money. And it is really good.
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There’s a story about Boris Yeltsin coming to America for the first time, walking into a random grocery store, seeing that random middle-class Americans had a better selection of goods than the highest-status Soviet officials, and freaking out that this was some kind of weird Potemkin economy that the Americans had set up to demoralize him.
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x ELTSIN
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fifty different kinds of cereal
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hundred different kinds of soda,
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also really cheap.
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So why don’t grocery store shareholders leech off so much money that everything is overpriced and has terrible service? Why aren’t stores dingy and full of rats?
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DOMANDA
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Something like 48% of Americans are satisfied with the education system in the US. My guess is 100% of Americans are satisfied with the grocery
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SODDISFAZIONE
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My guess: the loss from profits matters less than the gain in efficiency.
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X TESI
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Profit margins are a specific number.
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Usually they’re not very big.
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An example: Health care in this country is overpriced
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ESEMPIO
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Some people think this is because greedy insurance
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But health insurance companies have a profit margin of about 3%
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not a big deal if you’re wondering how much they affect health care costs.
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If you’re paying $ 5,000 a year for health insurance, then take away all profit motive from the insurance companies and you would pay $ 4850 a year for health insurance.
Nota - Posizione 56
x PROFITTO DELL ASSIC
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Insurance companies aren’t callously throwing sick people out on the street for profitability reasons, they’re callously throwing sick people out on the street because they can only pay as much money as their customers give them and that isn’t enough to fund as much health care as people need.
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x CRUDELTÀ DELL ASS
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3% are for profit and the other 97% are of necessity.
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payday lenders.
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ALTRO ESEMPIO ( CHI PRESTA AI OOVERI)
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In a profitability analysis by Fordham Journal of Corporate & Financial Law, it was determined that the average profit margin from seven publicly traded payday lending companies (including pawn shops) in the U.S. was 7.63%, and for pure payday lenders it was 3.57%. These averages are less than those of other traditional lending institutions such as credit unions and banks. Comparatively the profit margin of Starbucks for the measured time period was just over 9%, and comparison lenders had an average profit margin of 13.04%. These comparison lenders were mainstream companies: Capital One, GE Capital, HSBC, Money Tree, and American Express Credit.
Nota - Posizione 66
x USURAI
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Payday lenders aren’t charging outrageous interest rates so they can get fat off the profits. They’re charging outrageous interest rates because loaning money to poor people who often fail to pay back
Nota - Posizione 68
x REALI MOTIVAZIONI
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I propose that about 11% of their funding would go to profit, the same as current private schools.
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IPOTESI DI PROFITTO
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If private schools cost the same amount of money as public schools, but 11% of that went to shareholder profits, wouldn’t our children receive an 11% worse education?
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x IL RAGIONAMENTO DELL OPPOSITORE
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There’s the dangers of profit and the promises of better efficiency.
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TRADEOFF
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Here is a graph by the Cato Institute
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In case you don’t trust them, here’s Politifact rating a similar claim
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It’s not that teachers are getting paid any more– their salaries have remained stagnant
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It’s not that school buildings cost more
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how is an activity which basically involves getting a bunch of kids into a building and throwing a teacher at them rising so dramatically in the absence of changes in building or teacher prices?
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X DOMANDA CRUCIALE
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three theories:
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Simpson’s Paradox.
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PRIMA TEORIA
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higher percent of students are in low-performing racial groups
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race-specific scores are also stagnant
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OBIEZIONE
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extra money has been used to help previously underserved special needs kids.
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SECONDA TEORIA
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these kids apparently cost about twice
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Up to 13% of students are special needs,
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then providing extra services to special needs kids can explain a rise of 13% in education costs, but not the 150%
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OBIEZIONE
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“The bureaucracy is expanding
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TERZA TEORIA
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One argument in favor: the same thing that’s happening to primary education is happening to college education.
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X CONTROPROVA
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other people say it’s not exactly administration but it’s something else.
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But it doesn’t seem to be Simpson’s Paradox or special needs kids.
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The point is, private schools lose 11% of their funding to shareholder profit, and public schools apparently lose 75% of their funding
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X CONCLUSIONE
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Do private schools also lose 75% of their funding to nobody-knows, since I don’t see many of them around as cheap as schools were in 1980? I’m not sure.
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X NUOVA DOMANDA
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I know many people who are involved in education, and they are all very good people who are very passionate and definitely would never skim 75% off the top and use it to buy gold-plated yachts for themselves.
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x ESPERIENZA XSONALE
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In my home state of California, there was a big funding shortfall ten years ago, and schools tried to cut everything they could, but finally they said there was nothing left to cut and they had no more ideas, and I believe that they tried as hard as they could.
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X TAGLIARE LA SPESA
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If bureaucracy is inflating the price of schooling, it’s not doing so in an obvious way
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it might be a general ethos of inefficiency
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look what happens with food stamps: the moment you start handing out a “voucher,” conservatives start seeing it as some kind of unearned “handout.”
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LA PAURA DI ROBINSON
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Pressure then develops to cut the handout.
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they erode the idea of education as a fundamental right,
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making it seem like a privilege
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education’s popularity relative to food stamps.
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Imagine a world where food stamps are replaced by the Federal Food Agency.
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Every week, a truck comes to poor people’s houses and gives them
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Do you think conservatives would be any happier with this than they are with food stamps?
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Medicare remains popular even though it’s essentially a voucher.
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RISPOSTA
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there are some things that worry me about school vouchers.
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Although for-profit hospitals aren’t noticeably worse than not-for-profit, they’re also not noticeably better.
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existence of for-profit hospitals hasn’t started some kind of virtuous cycle
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Having a field be open to competition isn’t necessarily incompatible with it being overpriced and inefficient.
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existing private schools are not generally 75% cheaper than public
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CI SI ADEGUA
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cost-cutting is harder than I might think.
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Privatization schemes are also heavily dependent on the existence of highly astute parents, who have the time and inclination to carefully study schools.
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ROBINSON PREOCCUPATO DEL RUOLO DEI GENITORI
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most vulnerable children are unlikely to have such parents.
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his point that many parents are ignorant or malicious is well-taken.
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Catholic school is already sort of like this and they don’t seem to be some weird foreign cancer on the body politic, so maybe it’s not such a big deal?
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X INDOTTRINAMENTO SMENTITO DA SCUOLE CATT
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Fourth, vouchers could worsen class segregation.
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everyone already goes to public schools in their own class-segregated neighborhood anyway.
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at least there’s a little socioeconomic diversity
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“privilege” of going to a school without poor students.
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people will pay extra for a house in a gated community
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I wonder if it would be possible to have a system where you’re not allowed to combine the voucher with your own money.
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we would have to add one very big upside
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it destroys the incentive to overspend on/ segregate housing in order to get into a “good school district”.
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x UPSIDE
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Elizabeth Warren has argued this is primarily behind the secular rise in real estate
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This factor could easily be more important than everything else combined and might make school vouchers a plus even if they seriously worsened the quality of education.
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let’s experiment.
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and don’t have too much risk,
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As we start to understand things better, extend the window
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lack of good competition
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PREOCCUPAZIONE
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Let’s let random people open tiny schools.
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TINY SCHOOL
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like 3% of parents home-school their children.
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All the research shows that home-schooled students do much better than traditionally schooled students on standardized tests, college admission exams, college GPAs, and general life satisfaction as adults.
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X QUALITÀ
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thoughtful conscientious parents
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SELF SELECTION
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a big genetic advantage.
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A woman has a kid and decides she doesn’t want to go back to work and leave the kid in daycare for eighteen years. She takes some test, clears some regulatory hurdle, promises that she’ll clear a certain bar on her kids’ standardized test scores, and registers as an approved school. Then she gets a couple of friends and neighbors who trust her to send their kids to her too. Maybe her husband works outside the home, so she doesn’t even need five. She’s happy with two or three (I think it would be important that you can’t make any money by educating your own kid; otherwise the incentive is to keep them out of school and pretend to be educating them yourself). Then she tutors them in a class a fifth the size of comparable public school classes.
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x ESEMPIO
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If you’re an actual, qualified teacher, maybe you can get ten or twenty
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That’s $ 100,000 to $ 200,000, minus your overhead,
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for the majority of American history, kids were taught by a member of the community in a one room schoolhouse,
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the system that produced Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, et cetera.
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remember that all the research shows that formal teacher training and level of teacher credentialing has zero effect
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x TITOLI DI INSEGNAMENTO
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This would provide provide a means of self-directed, boss-free income for millions of people,
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Probably there’s some sort of horrible flaw that I’m missing.
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moral of the story is to experiment more.
