What can we DU now to help TTW and Yoshi ?

[sketchy]

389. More thoughts on "throwing money at the problem"

from this blog post:
Education Funding Equity: A Technocratic Justification vs. Jonathan Kozol’s Rationale

Posted on January 27, 2015 by janresseger
Link:
https://janresseger.wordpress.com/2015/01/27/education-funding-equity-a-technocratic-justification-vs-jonathan-kozols-rationale/

from the post:

"In a memorable keynote address fifteen years ago I heard Jonathan Kozol declare, 'People say that spending money on education is just throwing money at the problem. We ought to try that. It might work.'"

Certainly investing in public school equity and improvement has not been the trend in recent years. About ten years ago, New York set up a new school funding formula to send more money to poorer school districts to remedy the lawsuit in Campaign for Fiscal Equity v. New York, but when the Great Recession hit, New York’s general assembly stopped funding the plan it had created. At about the same time the legislature of Pennsylvania created a formula for the purpose of equalizing school funding, but in came Governor Tom Corbett who cut a billion dollars out of the state’s education budget, and the new formula died. Kansas has radically cut taxes and slashed education funding accordingly; it is mired in a lawsuit to try to force the state to fund education. And last Friday the state supreme court in Texas agreed to hear an appeal of what the Associated Press calls “the gargantuan school finance ruling” that found “the way the state pays for public schools is unconstitutional, saying funding levels are inadequate and are unfairly distributed around the state.”
http://www.star-telegram.com/news/politics-government/state-politics/article8052639.html

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more:

As for spending priorities for education, “Unfortunately, a number of states provide less funding for high-poverty schools than for low-poverty schools, while some others provide about the same funding to high-and low-poverty districts. As of 2011, only 14 states provided at least 5 percent more funding per student for high-poverty districts than low-poverty districts. Further, many states provide inadequate funding for schools overall… None of the states with the ten highest incarceration rates ranked in the top half of states for school funding per student in 2011.”

Surely it would seem that in a compassionate and just society—a society whose citizens believe in equality, fairness, and the American Dream—these numbers would be an adequate motivator for reform. But in case a commitment to the common good isn’t enough to motivate us these days, there is a new opinion piece by Noah Smith for Bloomberg View—a sort of plutocrats’ justification for public school spending, Throw More Money at Education. http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-01-23/spending-more-on-public-schools-boosts-u-s-economy

Smith references a longitudinal economic paper, just published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, that justifies school funding by demonstrating a correlation with children’s future earnings. The paper comes from economists C. Kirabo Jackson, Ricker Johnson and Claudia Persico. http://www.nber.org/papers/w20847 “The economists find that spending works. Specifically, they find that a 10 percent increase in spending, on average, leads children to complete 0.27 more years of school, to make wages that are 7.25 percent higher, and to have a substantially reduced chance of falling into poverty. These are long-term, durable results. Conclusion: throwing money at the problem works. Here’s the hitch: The authors find that the benefits of increased spending are much stronger for poor kids than for wealthier ones. So if you, like me, are in the upper portion of the U.S. income distribution, you may be reading this and thinking: ‘Why should I be paying more for some poor kid to be educated?’ After all, why should one person pay the cost while another reaps the benefits?”

To convince such a skeptic, Smith counts the ways increasing spending might be worth the investment: “When poor Americans become better workers, it doesn’t just boost their wages. It also boosts the profitability of the companies where they work.” “The more industries can use U.S. workers instead of Chinese workers, the more industries will base their production in the U.S.” “If you own a business, you might need to hire some low-income people.”

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At least with regard to education, "throwing money at the problem" seems to work.