Eberstadt and Van Ness on the non-working population; Liddell on clumsy Presidential transitions; Good and Wallich on bad President/citizen relationship; Pondiscio on conservatives and school teachers
> Instead, conservatives ought to work with teachers to boot the bureaucrats out of the classroom. We should be opposed to “accountability
And indeed that's what conservatives have been doing in supporting vouchers and charter schools. And "accountability" is exactly the rhetorical tactic the left uses to try to knobble it.
As far as I can tell, conservatives are slowly winning that war.
The only way out on education is choice. The only real accountability is losing funding when nobody wants your service, like a regular business.
But that's the rub. Public school teachers know that any reduction in funding from vouchers threatens their salary, benefits, even jobs. While in theory they could get new jobs teaching at private schools, that's an unnecessary risk from their perspective and there is no way to know if it will turn out as good. For those with lots of seniority it will almost certainly not turn out as good.
The teachers unions ask very little of the teachers, which is smart. Shutting down the schools may have been terrible for the children, but it meant getting paid to phone it in for the teachers. Masks were an annoyance for many teachers I know, but the left leaning teachers probably thought they were a good thing.
I remember in 7th grade having a teachers called Mr. Tilli. Mr. Tilli was a fat dude that would come into class with a box of dunking donuts every day. He would start the class with about five minutes of some vague explanation of what we should do for the rest of the period and then he would just sit there eating the donuts and lounging about. I played paper football with the kid next to me for the entire period. Of course that dude hates vouchers, he could never get a job at a private school.
Teachers usually hate when the administrators ask them to do stuff, but they take it as the cost of doing business. The business is a sweet job with great benefits that asks very little of them. Some teachers give more then they have to, but its not a requirement.
If kids go to private schools then you have fewer kids to teach. That means expenses go down. Since vouchers are usually less than per pupil spending, that means there is more money available per pupil for those that remain.
You might need to cut expenses (lay off teachers) if you have less kids to teach, but those same teachers would then be in demand to work at private schools.
It's true that money could leave the system if people already sending their kids to private school got money they didn't have before. However,
1) Only about 9% of kids go to private school today, most to fairly low tuition k-8 affairs like the one we send out daughter to. If they receive half the funding a public school kid gets then at most we are talking about 5% of the budget.
2) People sending their kids to private school pay taxes too (probably more on average than those in public school). They deserve to get some of their tax dollars back for their kids education.
It is the fault of the public school system for being so atrocious that people don't want to send their kids there even though it's free. Our private school spends about 60% per pupil as our local school district and we still consider it a superior education.
Public school funding is per student in attendance per day. That is one reason schools make such a big deal about unexcused absences. They lose funding.
Sorry, Arnold, Pondiscio starts with a faulty poll question that leads him immediately astray. My experience over time demonstrates that progressives usually don't describe themselves as "very liberal" or "liberal"- they usually go for "independent" or "moderate". On the other hand, conservatives are more willingy to describe their political philosophies accurately.
I see this all the time when the Left describes the media organizations, and the media's own descriptions of political movements. We are told the NYTimes, CNN, and WaPo are centrist news organizations, FoxNews is far right conservative, and the media tell us every conservative organization is "far right wing", and there are no "far left-wing" and almost no "left wing" organizations of any kind.
I never found anything said about white privilege compelling until I read a book from Johns Hopkins press titled The Long Shadow. And I don't even think the book ever uses that term. After reading it I still don't think most other things labeled white privilege are as said but this book describes situations I can see as that. While it doesn't mean your concerns about LFRP and location are for certain wrong, I think it strengthens the argument for the importance of location.
A COO might be an improvement but not much as long as cabinet departments are headed by appointees, including assistant and under secretaries.
Better that money for schools not go through the federal government to start with.
'For the bottom fifth of America's localities, the average overall LFPR [labor force participation rate for people of working age] in 2019 was lower than the national level for men and women with just a high-school education'
This is simply selection bias, when you live in a marginal economic area you either get work in that area, move somewhere else for work, or give up and stop trying. Lower LFPR is a fact of what typically is out migration which shifts the ratio but not the actual outcomes. Much like the GINI coefficient which counts Hatians making $30,000 in the US as increasing inequality but Hatians making $300 in Haiti not being unequal.
Look at the top 5% in LFPR map- there is a large cluster just to the West of Washington DC, covering all the suburbs where all the people employed by the Federal Government live.
I have a hard time taking their correlation between LFPR and employment seriously (oh a 0.98 correlation? your measuring the same thing twice, that doesn't give you new information). Employment drives LFPR- as LFPR is DEFINED as someone who thinks they can get a job by looking. Someone who 'wants' a job but doesn't look because they don't think there are jobs (or think they aren't hirable) is defined as someone out of the labor force. So LFPR follows employment (or people are stupid or hiring is random).
A large part of the problem may be related to the diminished importance of state governments and the unimportance of the electoral college. It's often been lamented that, compared to Hamilton's designs in the federalist papers, the electoral college has never actually been a significant body, because it was captured by the party organizations almost immediately. I'm not sure that could be fixed, but the presidential primary system is relatively straightforward to have a go at reforming. There are no real rules to the primary system, and it's not even necessarily illegal under election law to rig the votes (because the process is not regulated or defined by election law but rather by internal party customs). Since the primary system is basically fake and customary anyway, you can do whatever public opinion and awareness allows you to do with it, although some states have some sparse laws concerning it.
Another issue that many "strong president" advocates have is that they often ignore the implications of the Youngstown Steel case, which stymied Truman during the Korean War. They hope to invoke "Defense Production Act" like a Harry Potter spell that gives them control over the government without considering things like Youngstown. Truman was forbidden from taking control of the steel industry despite urgent wartime exigencies. The typical political advocate looks to the Great Depression and World War II without considering that the courts and the system coordinated to prevent that from happening again. Even considering Covid, neither president was all that capable of doing all that much without the eager cooperation of the states.
Advocates hope to be able to appoint a civil dictator in the office of the presidency, and are then perennially disappointed. The roots of the dictator term derive from the Roman republic, which had dictators... only for the military; the equivalent office of Eisenhower as "Supreme Allied Commander" during WWII. They look to Lincoln as an example without considering the unique circumstances of Lincoln or the many years that Lincoln was stymied by subordinates and by the states.
As to the office of the presidency- the executive branch is basically full of Democrats in most, if not all, of the departments that are not the Department of Defense. This shows, in my opinion, in what a Republican President is capable of doing once getting into office- starting idiotic wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. When a Democrat is President, he is capable of moving the executive branch to do things, most of which are idiotic, too, but with far greater scope.
The President is pretty much an appointee-in-chief. To be effective, a President has to do three things well: (a) set strategic, big-picture themes, (b) pick people who are highly capable in translating the big picture into middle sized pictures and likewise good at picking their underlings, and (c) perform enough oversight to assure that the appointees stay aligned to the big picture.
The POTUS will always be a beauty contest where the most charismatic personality wins. The government so so much bigger than the chief executive officer (he/she) is the PR front person. Where the emphasis should be placed IMHO is not on the chief executive but where the rubber hits the road: Top managers of the many many branches of governing should be held by COO pedigree types well educated in the depth they run. What's Mayor Pete doing running the Dept of transportation is just one example. The vetting of top managers should not be determined by who you know but by many years of experience in the department he/she/they run.
> Instead, conservatives ought to work with teachers to boot the bureaucrats out of the classroom. We should be opposed to “accountability
And indeed that's what conservatives have been doing in supporting vouchers and charter schools. And "accountability" is exactly the rhetorical tactic the left uses to try to knobble it.
As far as I can tell, conservatives are slowly winning that war.
The only way out on education is choice. The only real accountability is losing funding when nobody wants your service, like a regular business.
But that's the rub. Public school teachers know that any reduction in funding from vouchers threatens their salary, benefits, even jobs. While in theory they could get new jobs teaching at private schools, that's an unnecessary risk from their perspective and there is no way to know if it will turn out as good. For those with lots of seniority it will almost certainly not turn out as good.
The teachers unions ask very little of the teachers, which is smart. Shutting down the schools may have been terrible for the children, but it meant getting paid to phone it in for the teachers. Masks were an annoyance for many teachers I know, but the left leaning teachers probably thought they were a good thing.
I remember in 7th grade having a teachers called Mr. Tilli. Mr. Tilli was a fat dude that would come into class with a box of dunking donuts every day. He would start the class with about five minutes of some vague explanation of what we should do for the rest of the period and then he would just sit there eating the donuts and lounging about. I played paper football with the kid next to me for the entire period. Of course that dude hates vouchers, he could never get a job at a private school.
Teachers usually hate when the administrators ask them to do stuff, but they take it as the cost of doing business. The business is a sweet job with great benefits that asks very little of them. Some teachers give more then they have to, but its not a requirement.
If kids go to private schools then you have fewer kids to teach. That means expenses go down. Since vouchers are usually less than per pupil spending, that means there is more money available per pupil for those that remain.
You might need to cut expenses (lay off teachers) if you have less kids to teach, but those same teachers would then be in demand to work at private schools.
It's true that money could leave the system if people already sending their kids to private school got money they didn't have before. However,
1) Only about 9% of kids go to private school today, most to fairly low tuition k-8 affairs like the one we send out daughter to. If they receive half the funding a public school kid gets then at most we are talking about 5% of the budget.
2) People sending their kids to private school pay taxes too (probably more on average than those in public school). They deserve to get some of their tax dollars back for their kids education.
It is the fault of the public school system for being so atrocious that people don't want to send their kids there even though it's free. Our private school spends about 60% per pupil as our local school district and we still consider it a superior education.
Public school funding is per student in attendance per day. That is one reason schools make such a big deal about unexcused absences. They lose funding.
Sorry, Arnold, Pondiscio starts with a faulty poll question that leads him immediately astray. My experience over time demonstrates that progressives usually don't describe themselves as "very liberal" or "liberal"- they usually go for "independent" or "moderate". On the other hand, conservatives are more willingy to describe their political philosophies accurately.
I see this all the time when the Left describes the media organizations, and the media's own descriptions of political movements. We are told the NYTimes, CNN, and WaPo are centrist news organizations, FoxNews is far right conservative, and the media tell us every conservative organization is "far right wing", and there are no "far left-wing" and almost no "left wing" organizations of any kind.
Second. And Professor Kling may not have caught that those statistics are from 2017. A lot has changed in seven years.
I never found anything said about white privilege compelling until I read a book from Johns Hopkins press titled The Long Shadow. And I don't even think the book ever uses that term. After reading it I still don't think most other things labeled white privilege are as said but this book describes situations I can see as that. While it doesn't mean your concerns about LFRP and location are for certain wrong, I think it strengthens the argument for the importance of location.
A COO might be an improvement but not much as long as cabinet departments are headed by appointees, including assistant and under secretaries.
Better that money for schools not go through the federal government to start with.
'For the bottom fifth of America's localities, the average overall LFPR [labor force participation rate for people of working age] in 2019 was lower than the national level for men and women with just a high-school education'
This is simply selection bias, when you live in a marginal economic area you either get work in that area, move somewhere else for work, or give up and stop trying. Lower LFPR is a fact of what typically is out migration which shifts the ratio but not the actual outcomes. Much like the GINI coefficient which counts Hatians making $30,000 in the US as increasing inequality but Hatians making $300 in Haiti not being unequal.
Look at the top 5% in LFPR map- there is a large cluster just to the West of Washington DC, covering all the suburbs where all the people employed by the Federal Government live.
I have a hard time taking their correlation between LFPR and employment seriously (oh a 0.98 correlation? your measuring the same thing twice, that doesn't give you new information). Employment drives LFPR- as LFPR is DEFINED as someone who thinks they can get a job by looking. Someone who 'wants' a job but doesn't look because they don't think there are jobs (or think they aren't hirable) is defined as someone out of the labor force. So LFPR follows employment (or people are stupid or hiring is random).
Thanks for putting into better words the objection I was going to make to the linked analysis.
Yes, yes, yes with respect to all these points on the presidency. Your link to the "Emotive Presidency" goes to the wrong article. This is the link: https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-emotive-presidency
A large part of the problem may be related to the diminished importance of state governments and the unimportance of the electoral college. It's often been lamented that, compared to Hamilton's designs in the federalist papers, the electoral college has never actually been a significant body, because it was captured by the party organizations almost immediately. I'm not sure that could be fixed, but the presidential primary system is relatively straightforward to have a go at reforming. There are no real rules to the primary system, and it's not even necessarily illegal under election law to rig the votes (because the process is not regulated or defined by election law but rather by internal party customs). Since the primary system is basically fake and customary anyway, you can do whatever public opinion and awareness allows you to do with it, although some states have some sparse laws concerning it.
Another issue that many "strong president" advocates have is that they often ignore the implications of the Youngstown Steel case, which stymied Truman during the Korean War. They hope to invoke "Defense Production Act" like a Harry Potter spell that gives them control over the government without considering things like Youngstown. Truman was forbidden from taking control of the steel industry despite urgent wartime exigencies. The typical political advocate looks to the Great Depression and World War II without considering that the courts and the system coordinated to prevent that from happening again. Even considering Covid, neither president was all that capable of doing all that much without the eager cooperation of the states.
Advocates hope to be able to appoint a civil dictator in the office of the presidency, and are then perennially disappointed. The roots of the dictator term derive from the Roman republic, which had dictators... only for the military; the equivalent office of Eisenhower as "Supreme Allied Commander" during WWII. They look to Lincoln as an example without considering the unique circumstances of Lincoln or the many years that Lincoln was stymied by subordinates and by the states.
As to the office of the presidency- the executive branch is basically full of Democrats in most, if not all, of the departments that are not the Department of Defense. This shows, in my opinion, in what a Republican President is capable of doing once getting into office- starting idiotic wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. When a Democrat is President, he is capable of moving the executive branch to do things, most of which are idiotic, too, but with far greater scope.
The President is pretty much an appointee-in-chief. To be effective, a President has to do three things well: (a) set strategic, big-picture themes, (b) pick people who are highly capable in translating the big picture into middle sized pictures and likewise good at picking their underlings, and (c) perform enough oversight to assure that the appointees stay aligned to the big picture.
The POTUS will always be a beauty contest where the most charismatic personality wins. The government so so much bigger than the chief executive officer (he/she) is the PR front person. Where the emphasis should be placed IMHO is not on the chief executive but where the rubber hits the road: Top managers of the many many branches of governing should be held by COO pedigree types well educated in the depth they run. What's Mayor Pete doing running the Dept of transportation is just one example. The vetting of top managers should not be determined by who you know but by many years of experience in the department he/she/they run.