Friday, October 02, 2020


Forgiving Federal Student Loans Is a Horrible Idea

This is not the first time, nor probably the last, that I have given my views about forgiving federal student loans. It was a horrible idea when first proposed, and remains so today—perhaps more so than ever.

Before, discussing loan forgiveness, I repeat my longstanding opposition to the entire federal student loan program. It has dramatically raised the cost of college. My educated guess is that without that program for the last 50 years or so, tuition fees today would be about one-half of what they actually are. Federal student loans have contributed to the underemployment of college graduates accompanying the over-investment by the federal government in higher education programs. It has led to lower academic standards as manifested in grade inflation and other things reducing academic effort. It has enhanced the highly undesirable over-centralization of higher education decision-making in Washington, D.C. It has substantially funded a massive collegiate administrative bureaucracy that is anti-intellectual, anti-innovative, but profoundly rent-seeking and power and wealth maximizing.

But let’s turn to student loan forgiveness. Petitions are circulating with many signatures arguing that student loan forgiveness is great way to stimulate an economy suffering the ravages of Covid-19. Some $1.6 trillion in private household wealth will be created overnight, stimulating consumer spending, leading to lower unemployment. Politically, it is the kind of stimulus that might gain bipartisan support in an era of acute political paralysis characterized by a Congress that most Americans hold in contempt.

Why, then, do I object? First of all, forgiveness is simultaneously hideously unfair and promotes highly unproductive economic behavior. It is unfair to millions of law-abiding Americans who take their contractual obligations seriously, and who have paid back their student loans. They sacrificed to meet their legal obligations, while, with loan forgiveness, many others will be free of those obligations, some of whom were individuals living good lives and spending a lot rather than being frugal in order to meet their legal financial responsibilities.

In effect, loan forgiveness undermines the rule of law and core principles of free market capitalism. It says “contractual arrangements may be abrogated by the government.” It introduces uncertainty into governmental dealings with private individuals—will the government change the rules of the game? If so, when, how much, and to whose advantage?

Moreover, America has gone on an unprecedented debt binge, with the net national debt expected to pass 100% of annual output very shortly. Three major nations—Japan, Italy, and Greece—all have national debt to GDP ratios above 100 %, and all have undergone severe economic stagnation. Debt forgiveness reduces payments to the Treasury, increasing future budget deficits. The nation needs to go on a fiscal diet, not a binge.

Moreover, forgiveness would probably effectively emasculate future federal college lending. Who would ever repay a loan if the prospects are high for loan forgiveness? The notion of “free college” is madness, encouraging the greater use of resources for an inefficient area, higher education, where college graduates already are underemployed and where incremental students entering college would typically have poor prospects for success, unless we reduce already low standards of expected academic achievement still further.

Short of eliminating it, are there potential reforms that could improve the lending program? Sure. A case can be made to allow student loans to be dischargeable in bankruptcy. There should be a crackdown on persons who are serial loan borrowers for multiple graduate degrees, with an absolute maximum limit on total borrowing. Better yet: cut off student loans for students doing poorly academically—that is what universities themselves do with students on scholarships. Why not encourage private lending instead of government lending? Why not offer alternative ways of financing schooling, such as Income Share Agreements? Why not promote cheaper non-degree learning programs, perhaps offering financial assistance for them?

I must say I am not sanguine about the future. The Washingtonian perspective is “throw more money at the problem,” in this case by loan forgiveness or tuition subsidies that reward and promote inefficiency. The Democrats, if they take control, feel they owe favors to their allies in higher education, while the Republicans have lost much of their traditional concern about financial soundness and promotion of fiscal conservatism.

SOURCE

To Go to School in L.A.

“We don’t realistically anticipate that we would be moving to either tier 2 or to reopening K-12 schools at least until after the election, in early November. When we just look at the timing of everything, it seems to us a more realistic approach to this would be to think that we’re going to be where we are now until we are done with the election.”

That was Los Angeles County Health Director Barbara Ferrer, in a recent conference call to educators and school nurses. Director Ferrer did not outline the science behind keeping schools closed before November 3 and opening them after November 3. Parents and students might note that the key date is a political event, a national election, and has nothing to do with science. Unlike her predecessor, Dr. Jonathan Fielding, Barbara Ferrer is not a medical doctor. Even so, the non-doctor might have cited the experience of Sweden, which did not shut down schools for students under the age of 16.

As Dave Lawler notes at Axios, Sweden’s school policy was based on the belief that “students faced little risk from coronavirus and far more from missing months of school,” and the risk to teachers was also “lower than many feared.” Scandinavian neighbors Norway and Demark shunned Sweden’s no-lockdown approach, but “health officials in Denmark and Norway came around to Sweden’s stance on schools.” The decision had nothing to do with any election or other political considerations, which seem to take priority in the United States.

In July, for example, Washington, DC, mayor Muriel Bowser proclaimed that schools would be closed until at least November 6, three days after the presidential election. The American Academy of Pediatrics, the CDC and Dr. Anthony Fauci all warned of dire secondhand consequences if children are not brought back to school. Teacher unions, on the other hand, have threatened to strike if schools reopen, and that was a factor in Bowser’s decision. In the style of Barbara Ferrer, the mayor cited no scientific data that might justify the action.

As this confirms, politicians and health officials alike are playing politics with the pandemic, and it goes far beyond the schools.

SOURCE

Teachers Find Options in Pods

Krissy Rand has more than a decade of experience teaching special education to elementary school students, most recently in the Salem, Mass., public school district. She was disheartened to learn about her school’s Covid-19 fall guidelines. With no library or gym time, “you’re basically a prisoner in your classroom,” she says.

The 39-year-old Ms. Rand put out her résumé. Eight groups of families contacted her within three days. She now makes more money teaching six first-graders from six families in Wellesley, Mass. They are following their public school’s curriculum, and she’s added cooking, yoga and earth sciences, with lots of hands-on experiments. She loves that there is no administrative red tape, and no sitting through long meetings.

“It’s a teacher’s dream,” she says. “The day flies by.”

Long underpaid and underappreciated, teachers are finding more career options as demand for instructors for micro-schools, “parent-organized discovery sites” (pods) and charter schools continues to grow.

Companies that help teachers find unconventional jobs are springing up across the country, while those already in the business are seeing explosive growth. The families making these hires often keep their children in school, but use the teachers to supplement remote learning.

“The idea is that the teacher is at the center of the education,” says Joseph Connor, co-founder of SchoolHouse, which has seen teacher clients increase to over 300 around the country from about 20 since it started forming micro-schools in New York City in January.

The salaries can be higher: Depending on qualifications and experience, pod size and region, teachers can earn hourly rates starting at $40 in learning pods, ranging from a few hours a day to a full-time, five-day a week position, says Waine Tam, CEO of Selected, which has placed teachers in pods in 42 states.

The national average public school teacher salary for 2018-19 was $62,304, according to the National Education Association.

Pods are a divisive trend. NEA president Becky Pringle agrees that these new arrangements help teachers earn money. But she worries pods will damage a public-education system already reeling from budget cuts and struggling to fund Covid-19 safety measures. This could open the door for more inequity, segregation and unsafe workplaces, since pods are expensive and unregulated, she says.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, says while learning pods highlight the need for more smallgroup teaching in schools, they’re a “pandemic Band-Aid” instead of a long-term, viable career option.

What pods do offer is an option for teachers who are looking for a way out now, says Colin Sharkey, executive director of the Association of American Educators. His organization has had four times as many inquiries since Covid-19 from member teachers who want to resign or retire, mainly due to safety concerns and understaffing. He thinks these numbers will worsen as budget cuts steepen, experienced colleagues leave and more schools start requiring a return to in-person classes.

This all comes as many families have struggled to find satisfying educational alternatives. According to a national survey in July of 500 people by Echelon Insights, an Alexandria, Va., based research firm, 21% of parents said they planned to send their child to a different school or home-school this coming year and 19% were undecided.

Mick Miller, 25, has also gone in a new direction as a teacher since the pandemic. He was working as an outdoor educator in Portland, Ore. But he worried about the safety of leading large groups. Then one of his former colleagues, a former private-school teacher and outdoor-school director named Lesley Marshall, contacted him about an organization she started called PDX Education Collab, which has paired teachers with eight learning pods since the pandemic.

Mr. Miller now supervises remote learning for four third-graders in Portland and has created extra curricula in archaeology and history, his major in college.

“I’ve always wanted to do this sort of teaching,” he says. He’s assigned them projects like navigating imaginary worlds with a compass.

“I think this experience will make me a better teacher,” says Izzy Boone, 22, who couldn’t find a job teaching after she graduated from college last spring and is now working for a pod, crafting curricula for four different grades-pre-K, kindergarten, second and third-for eight students for $1,000 a week in Geneva, N.Y. It’s a lot of work, but she says she feels like she is making a difference. “I love seeing how eager they are to learn,” she says.

Newly certified in social studies, Becca Levy was in the final round of interviews for her dream job teaching high-needs students at a public school last March, when the New York City Department of Education instituted a hiring freeze.

Ms. Levy waited until late August, but with the freeze still in place, she submitted her résumé to Selected. Almost immediately, a family contacted her about supervising a learning pod. She now teaches six students, in grades 3, 4 and 7, core classes along with extras like Latin and sculpture, in one of the parents’ offices in Greenwich Village.

“I’m just really happy I have a job,” says Ms. Levy, 22, who is making about the same as she would have with a starting salary at a public school. Still, next year she hopes to get that dream job teaching high-needs students because it’s important to her to play a role in addressing inequities in education. “My goal is to get back there as soon as possible,” she says.

SOURCE

A Book with a Kernel of Truth—and a Grain Silo of Nonsense

Every so often, a leftist thinker breaks free from the orthodoxy to point out that policies favored by “progressives” can have adverse consequences. When that happens, it’s worth paying attention.

We have such an instance with the publication of The Cult of Smart by Fredrik deBoer, a writer and one-time academic whose work has appeared in leftist publications such as The New Republic and Jacobin.

He proudly proclaims his Marxism, saying that what all good Marxists want is a better, more equitable world. While he sees a lot to complain about—America still allows capitalism, after all—his particular target in the book is the way our education system overemphasizes academic credentials. We excessively reward those who are good at getting them at the expense of people who lack academic ability.

DeBoer calls his book “a prayer for the untalented” and it strikes a sympathetic chord as he discusses his efforts at teaching students who just aren’t smart. It isn’t their fault that they aren’t academically inclined, the author argues. Some kids are blessed with smartness and some aren’t. Moreover, it is folly to pretend that the answer for those who aren’t is to find better schooling that will turn them into smarties. That is a break with most of deBoer’s fellow leftists who have boundless faith in our education system to solve any problem, provided that we give it enough money.

We push students who are lacking in academic ability to stay in school, taking classes that make them miserable, and then we tell them that they need to go to college unless they want to be regarded as failures. But the process of getting into and then through college is also a hardship for those students.

America has developed “the cult of smart” and for kids who aren’t smart, “It is pernicious, it is cruel, and it must change,” deBoer writes.

It doesn’t matter to him that his fellow progressives are the architects of our education system and often its greatest beneficiaries. In fact, he has harsh words for the well-heeled leftists who play the smartness game for their own children, such as those who were caught cheating and bribing in the Varsity Blues scandal. Nor does it matter to deBoer that it was President Obama who declared that the United States must set a goal of leading the world in the percentage of people we put through college.

Let’s give deBoer credit for his willingness to dissent from the leftist party line on the imperative of maximizing “educational attainment.” He even seems to at least dimly grasp a point that Thomas Sowell has been making for many years, namely that our education system is not designed for the benefit of the students, but rather for the benefit of the teachers and administrators who get paid whether their students succeed or not.

I agree wholeheartedly that we should stop forcing young people to stay in school when they hate being there. DeBoer suggests that we should consider allowing them to leave formal schooling at age 12 and that’s a good idea, since the “unsmart” might very well learn things they find interesting and useful outside of classrooms. (Thomas Edison, after all, was a terrible student and left school after only a few months.) We should also do all we can to stop the college degree mania that compels so many young Americans to spend huge amounts of time and money in pursuit of credentials that they don’t really want and which often do no more than open the doors for work they could have done while still in high school.

Another weakness in the book is that deBoer greatly overstates his case that America is inhospitable toward the “unsmart.”
Had deBoer bothered to look at writings by people he regards as his philosophical opponents, such as Thomas Sowell, Charles Murray, Richard Vedder, and other conservative/libertarian education critics, he’d have discovered that his case against our wasteful and unfair education system has already been made. His book would have been stronger if he had melded his own insights with the criticism of those writers.

Unfortunately, he cites none of them and offers only vague, impressionistic statements about what he thinks people on the right believe about our schools. That’s why it is hard to take The Cult of Smart seriously as a work on education policy.

Another weakness in the book is that deBoer greatly overstates his case that America is inhospitable toward the “unsmart.”

In fact, there are many possibilities for them to lead successful lives even though we put them through a lot of needless schooling. You don’t have to be smart to make it big in sports or entertainment. You don’t have to be smart to make a comfortable living in many trades where educational credentials aren’t (yet) essential. DeBoer writes as if those who are not “smart” are consigned to miserable, Hobbesian lives, but if he talked with some carpenters, tile layers, or auto mechanics, he’d find that they live quite happily, even though bragging about their education isn’t in the mix.

At the same time, deBoer acknowledges that plenty of smart people struggle. That is especially true of the many Americans who get advanced degrees but can’t find anything better to do than low-paying adjunct professorships. Being smart is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for success.

All in all, deBoer’s case against “the cult of smartness” is not very convincing. It’s not much ado about nothing, but much ado about a small problem.

In our markets for talent, people who aren’t smart can do well, but we should stop putting obstacles in their way. We should change our education system so that young people aren’t pushed onto paths that are bad for them. We should also open up more avenues for success by eliminating governmental policies that often get in their way, particularly minimum wage laws and occupational licensure regulations.

But deBoer is not interested in such tinkering.

His solution to the “cult of smart” is to adopt communism. You read that right. Our author is a dedicated lifelong Marxist who wants an America (and world) where markets are gone—educational markets, labor markets, housing markets, and so on. He advocates universal basic income so everyone can live with dignity, universal government-supplied health care, guaranteed government jobs for those who want them, good housing for all, and the rest of the full socialist agenda. All of that would be paid for with high taxes on the rich and by printing money, which advocates of “Modern Monetary Theory” claim is nothing to worry about.

And there’s the real reason for deBoer’s book. Like so many “progressives,” every real or imagined problem with our society becomes an excuse for expanding the scope and power of the government. He wants to fasten us into the yoke of Marxism—from each according to his ability, to each according to his need—because our governmental education system is flawed.

Part of deBoer’s “solution” to that flaw is to adopt “free college” as favored by Bernie Sanders. Evidently, he doesn’t see that one reason why the unsmart have such trouble is that credential inflation blocks them off from many good job prospects. If we make college “free,” credential inflation will just ratchet up more and make their lives harder still. Scholars on the right and the left have been arguing since the 1970s that subsidizing college has that bad side effect. Too bad that ratcheting down government interference holds no interest for our author.

It also seems not to occur to deBoer that our “cult of smartness” produces a great deal of value for everyone, including the unsmart. Take away the incentives and efficiency of capitalism and we will have fewer job opportunities and less innovation. Almost everyone would find that a very high price to pay so that a Marxist intellectual can indulge his fantasies.

Fredrik deBoer believes that we “suffer” due to what he calls the cult of smart but has no idea how much more we’d suffer under his utopian vision.

We should focus on the problem he identifies—bad educational policy that works against those who aren’t academically talented—and forget about his ruinous solution for it.

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