harmonicminer

Oops, I just discovered that I inadvertently published a post too soon, that was meant for two days from now, because it’s part two of what I am posting tomorrow.  So I just pulled it, but, no worries, if you’re really missing it, it will be back in two days, in the proper order.

Of course, by then it may be obsolete, since it’s about the BP oil spill, and rumor has it they may be trying to cap it tomorrow…  but somehow I’m not worried.

At last, the Obama administration admits there is something beyond the competence of the federal government.

It can run one of the largest auto manufacturing companies in the world, it can take over US healthcare, it can slow the rise of the seas (well, so Obama claimed, anyway), it can micromanage countless aspects of industries and businesses, large and small, it can dictate all manner of educational policies and mandates, but the  Government can’t push BP aside on the Gulf oil spill

The Obama administration’s point man on the oil spill rejected the notion of removing BP and taking over the crisis Monday, saying the government has neither the company’s expertise nor its deep-sea equipment.”To push BP out of the way, it would raise the question, to replace them with what?” Coast Guard Commandant Thad Allen, who is heading the federal response to the spill, said at a White House briefing.

The White House is facing increasing questions about why the government can’t assert more control over the handling of the catastrophe, which unfolded after a BP offshore drilling rig blew up April 20.

The thing is, the federal government doesn’t know any more about running the nation’s healthcare system, or making GM productive and profitable, or stopping “global warming,” or “managing environmental issues,” or improving education, or growing the economy by dint of positive government action, than it does about capping undersea oil wells, which is a fairly straightforward problem by comparison.  It has had to bow to expertise in private hands, expertise that it does not possess.

It’s a pity that Obama doesn’t have the same accurate self-regard with respect to these other issues, which are simply beyond the sphere of the federal government in general, and Obama and his cronies in particular.  They are truly in over their heads.  They seem to think they can tread water and swim to the shallow end and just touch bottom….  but I think perhaps the water Obama is in is deeper than the uncapped BP oil well in the Gulf.

Don’t get me wrong.  I know there are many smart people in government.  I’m even willing to admit that Obama hired some of them, though presumably only those committed to his ideology, naturally.  The problem is that no one is smart enough, and no one knows enough, nor does any group know enough (not that “groups” know anything, as groups, since they rarely manifest the wisdom of their wisest members) to manage in detail something like the economy, or the health-care system, which simply depend on too many people making too many decisions for too many reasons for anyone to definitively grasp, or quantitatively manipulate, without creating great problems.  Read Hayek, and understand that his argument isn’t just that governments shouldn’t try to manage the economy as much as it is that they can’t, and therefore governments produce effects that are worse than the problems they’re trying to solve, when they try to create particular outcomes.  When they fail, as they inevitably do, they create even greater problems, and frequently greater evil, in trying to make things come out a certain way, anyway.

It isn’t long before governments start to pretend that things have turned out as they planned (the “war on poverty” has really worked out well, hasn’t it?), and then they do even more evil.  Or, sometimes worse, they double down on failed policies, and do even more damage.

When “everyone has healthcare,” who will be responsible for the deaths that occur due to rationing, shortages, and waits, not to mention research that doesn’t happen because the profit incentive is removed?  No one…  because everyone will “have” access to healthcare.  If they live so long.  That is exactly the situation in many nations with some form of nationalized healthcare.  And there is even less chance of getting it right when government is trying to manage the entire economy, not “just” healthcare.

Only the broadest kinds of decisions are appropriate for government in areas like this, not the micro-managing of specific rules, regulations and policies that typically issue forth from Washington, D.C.

The most important thing the feds can do is simply enforce contracts, general rule of constitutional law, and encourage open markets.  But there is always some interest group or other, buying and selling influence, and so it goes, since too many legislators, bureaucrats, and presidents are essentially for sale, though the coin isn’t always money, of course.  Somebody is always willing to distort the system and the process to produce a particular outcome, and even when they mean well, it’s often disastrous, such as the 2008 housing debacle, which flowed from years of trying to pretend that the laws of economics don’t exist.

So it’s refreshing when the government admits it has no idea how to cap an oil leak.  Sadly, it seems to have no desire whatsoever to cap the federal money leak, and that’s going to do more than kill some birds, fish, and seaweed, or disrupt some vacations.

One of the best theories I’ve heard for improving the state of education in America is Improving schools by paying teachers to leave:

I read about a school principal who disliked saying she was firing staff. She preferred the phrase “freeing up teachers’ futures.” That is sort of what Hoover Institution economist Eric A. Hanushek is saying we should do with any new school bailout: use it to pay severance packages for ineffective teachers so they can find their true calling elsewhere.

That is one of several provocative suggestions made by Hanushek on Education Week’s [bias alert-I am on their board] latest back page commentary, “Cry Wolf! This Budget Crunch Is for Real.”

Hanushek is good at being constructively outrageous, like many scholars strolling among the eucalyptus trees in the shadow of Hoover Tower. I gave a rave review last year to his great book with a terrible title, “Schoolhouses, Courthouses, and Statehouses.” This new piece continues his habit of waving uncomfortable realities in our faces, even as we face the prospect of major teacher layoffs.

He summarizes his plan for turning school budget cuts and more federal bailout funds into an opportunity to improve the teaching ranks: “The first-best solution, based on several decades of consistent research findings, is to lay off ineffective teachers selectively while letting class sizes drift up a bit,” he writes. “When the bailout ends, schools would be in a stronger financial position because the permanent teacher workforce would be reduced by the slightly larger class sizes, and this workforce would be of higher quality.”

Hanushek puts his ideas together in a more elegant way than I have, but you get the idea. My first problem with his solution, as he recognizes, is that we are not really sure which teachers are effective and which are not. Most districts have no dependable way to find out.

That’s very true. Further, things aren’t much different in colleges and universities. Yes, there are all kinds of “assessment” systems, ranging from student evaluations compared with national norms to assessments by colleagues and administrators, sometimes even including “objective” measures of student learning with pre-tests and post-tests, “authentic” assessment based on portfolios of student work, scholarly or creative activity of the faculty, etc.  But little of this seems to produce much discernible outcome in the ability to say who is or is not teaching well.  No evaluation systems has yet been devised that cannot be gamed, and a part of the professional development of any faculty member is learning how to do so.

I think the problem of “fixing” education, especially public K-12 education, is akin to the problem of “fixing” the ailing automotive industry in the USA.  That is, no one is smart enough to do it, from the position of a top-down mandate, some new policy directive, or set of directives, that will do the job.   The problems involve too many competing interests, too many misplaced incentives, and too many political forces and special interests, chief among which are the unions and the edu-lobby.

So here is the fix I have in mind.  Don’t fix it.  In fact, stop trying to make it better nationally, via national policy.  The drop in educational effectiveness in the USA is pretty well mapped with the rise of the federal education bureaucracy, if one were to plot a curve of each.  It is an inverse relationship: that is, the more federal dollars have been spent, with federal strings attached, the worse education has become, on average.

So, my humble recommendation, for what it’s worth: repeal every federal education law.  Every single one.  The only exception would be the laws that forbid forced segregation of schools.  Then get rid of the federal Department of Education.  Turn it all back to the states.  Whatever money the feds have been sending to the states should be cut off.  If the states need more money, they can solve it on a state by state basis.  Let the states have control of what they spend, and how they spend it.  I’m guessing that with federal mandates removed, many states will discover that they have enough money to do what they choose to do, since federal money is only about 10% of the national education budget, and since the federal mandates, mostly “unfunded”, amount to a higher percentage than that of state spending.

States might want to consider repealing many of their own education laws, and letting counties and school districts manage things locally.  I have the feeling that a great many counties could solve more of their education problems if they had more room in which to maneuver, unhampered by federal and state mandates, policies, restrictions and assorted impositions.

Yes, if we do this, things won’t be “equal” from state to state, or district to district.  But things aren’t “equal” now anyway, and we are so deep in the muck of disincentives to excellence that it’s impossible to see a way out.

The problem is similar to the comparison of central economic planning to free market capitalism.  As Hayek pointed out, no one is smart enough to do the planning, because no one, individual or central committee, can ever know enough to do it.  This is true for our education mess.

If states and districts had more freedom, they could experiment with various ways of “freeing up teacher’s futures.”

In the meantime, the number of public school teachers who either homeschool their own kids, or send them to private schools, continues to grow.  There is a reason, and it is clear they know something about the reality on the ground.