Schooling the Public

New York Times. Column on education. A few of my thoughts:

Between 2004 and last year, scores for young minority students increased, but so did those of white students, leaving the achievement gap stubbornly wide (emphasis mine)

I'd like to see the 'but' changed to an 'and'. Is that not what we want as a society? Minorities scores increased? Great! White kids (majorities??) scores increased? Equally great. Why is it a bad thing that the white kids had improved scores as did the minority students? Had the minority students' scores improved and the white kids' scores worsened, would the NY Times be celebrating this fact? I find the connotations of this sentence troubling. I know the point of No Child Left Behind is to close the gap, but I don't think we want that gap to be closed at the expense of one group versus the other.

The results point to the long-term crisis in many of the nation’s high schools, and could lead to proposals for more federal attention to them in the rewrite of the No Child law

Let me get this straight. The results of a federal public schooling program have been lackluster and disappointing, so the answer is for proposals to do more? I personally would love to see more responsibility to be delegated to the states and cities. I'm also of the flavor that advocates giving vouchers to parents and letting them decide where to send their kids. I think this is the most disgusting position the Democrats maintain. If we were serious about helping improve the prospects of general elementary education, we be open to radical reformation of the system. Innovative, entrepreneurial and varied. Hopefully Obama is as brilliant of a politician as some claim him to be. I'm praying that he's keeping the Teachers Union on his side to get re-elected in '12, then saying 'Screw You and your monopolization of the system and abject failure under that monopoly; I'm going to truly help our school system by doing some crazy shit with Arne Duncan'.

I've rambled and gotten off topic. I'm done.

Let's learn from our mistakes and then repeat them anyways!

There were many causes of the current economic downturn, but one of the major causes was the fact that Fannie and Freddie (Frannie) grew from packaging traditional 20% down, 30 yr. mortgages to packaging more mortgages that were sub-prime and Alt-A. The government subsidies that Frannie received allowed them to become the biggest player in the mortgage backed security arena. I don't want to sound too naive, but government intervention into the mortgage business encouraged risking lending (to avoid 'red-lining') and led to a concentration of the mortgage market into two (unofficially) government backed companies.

So, a great lesson to learn from this is that by keeping rates artificially low ("below what the market will bear"), bubbles start to form. You've seen it with artificially low mortgage rates, artificially low Fed interest rates, artificially low rent prices (rent-control), and artificially low 'anything else'. Any manipulation in the market leads to some consequence down the road. Synergies cannot be created by an institution that does not face long-term incentives. The government does NOT face long-term incentives. They face elections, every 2/4/6 years. That is not sufficiently long-term. (Note: I am not advocating for longer terms!)

Not everybody agrees with me. Utopians, for example. Some people believe the government can fix the problems. Some people believe the government is one big synergistic entity. Despite what history has shown, Utopians hold out for this false sense of economies of scale. They say, "Let's give government more power, let's make government bigger; only then will government be able to see the whole picture and truly fix the problem." I present to you, the next step in the Utopian's journey: 

President Barack Obama is urging an end to government subsidies for student loan providers such as Sallie Mae and Citigroup Inc., with the government becoming the sole provider of federally backed college lending.

While at first I was hopeful to see the ending of government subsidies for student loans, I was heartbroken to see that power transfered to the Department of Education. I'm sure the people of the Department of Education are all well-meaning folk that want every American to have access to a college education, but sans competition to establish market rates for lending this is either a) a bubble in the making as credit is extended too cheaply to students; b) a burden on students who's rate's will be above a naturally established rate; or c) a giant transfer of wealth from the truly poor to the middle and upper-class. Remember, every inefficiently spent dollar towards promoting college education in one dollar taken from social programs that aid those in desperate poverty. But, then again, I guess the new Administration can just either go increase taxes (potentially, again) on the most efficient class or lower the threshold of the "classifiably rich" from $250,000 to (reportedly) $208,850 to an even lower (hypothetical) $175,000, to some amount that leads to socialism. (Note: I do not believe Obama is a socialist)

Then again, why exactly are we proposing that standard 4-year colleges and universities are the best path for every student. I don't expect it to happen anytime soon, but it has become one of those 'conventional wisdoms' that college is the best 'next-step' for every high schooler. If we really wanted to be innovative, let's look at trade schools, apprenticeships and other non-traditional forms of education. But that, my friends, in another talk for another day.