Conservatives Should Know What They’re Conserving
Photo by Matthew T Rader, https://matthewtrader.com, CC BY-SA 4.0
After a week spent attacking a Baphomet figure in the Iowa State Capitol, the Biden administration’s Christmas video, and a Democratic staffer’s sex tape, conservative media seems to have found its latest victim — Delta Airlines.
In a now-viral video posted December 18th, the Babylon Bee’s Ashley St. Clair alleged that her Delta flight from Phoenix to New York was carrying an unspecified (but large) number of undocumented migrants. Since then, St. Clair, as well as FOX News, have gone on the warpath against the airline. Even Elon Musk has gotten involved. As a result, online conservatives are taking credit for Delta’s three percent decline in stock price over the past several days, though this decline is arguably part of an industry-wide trend going back months.
Nevertheless, conservatives’ internet crusade against Delta continues unabated. St. Clair, as well as many of her followers, now call on conservatives to boycott the airline entirely. What no one has pointed out, however, is that Delta has no say in who buys their tickets. The U.S. federal government has been purchasing migrants’ seats on commercial flights since 2006, and a Delta flight from Phoenix to New York is neither new nor unusual. Delta has no authority to enforce immigration laws on its own accord.
The issue of whether conservatives should support ending migrant flights is beside the point. So is the fact that other conservatives are now praising Delta Airlines staff who “shut down” a customer that claimed to have been misgendered. The real problem is that conservative media has capitalized on party prejudice to sell a salty story — whether the details are accurate or not. And constituents are eating it up.
Conservatives are supposed to stand for tradition, order, and prudence. If conservatives want any chance of balancing the progressive movement’s utopian impulses, they must first go to the trouble of doing their own research so we know what is actually being conserved — otherwise the conservative media will continue to feed the movement rage-bait that only serves to make people unnecessarily angry. If conservatives want to reclaim the movement’s soul, they’ll need to change course.
Immigration is not the only arena in which conservatives have a knowledge gap. Conservatives (including yours truly) often critique school districts’ poor financial choices without recognizing that their spending is subject to state and federal regulation. This also applies to foreign affairs, where conservatives have strong opinions despite limited content knowledge, as well as popular culture, where conservatives reflexively oppose anything that’s currently new or popular, the latest example being Taylor Swift.
In fairness, this problem is not unique to conservatives. Americans in general think they know more about politics, culture, and policy than they actually do, and often use explicitly partisan sources to buttress their claimed expertise. Importantly, this tendency is consistent regardless of political ideology and affiliation — in other words, conservatives and progressives are equally likely to be misinformed and double-down on that misinformation when confronted.
This state of affairs is clearly a recipe for more drama and less effective governance. Moreover, it makes the two parties’ underlying assumptions and principles completely indistinguishable. Conservatives have a genuine opportunity to create a movement that is willing to hunker down and do the good work, but nobody seems willing to take advantage of it.
Already, this problem has caused concern at the ballot box, as voters are rightfully demanding better candidates. More than anything else, Americans want a good, competent government that demonstrates a clear understanding of the issues that matter. But now, more than ever, all conservatives offer voters is internet drama and a less-than-stellar understanding of public policy. Unless that candidate runs in a safe red district, that attitude isn’t going to fly with the average American.
Changing course won’t be easy. Rage-bait gets clicks, and clicks get money. That means conservative media have an obvious incentive to maximize the rage and no obvious incentive to prioritize the arduous — and sometimes boring — work of policy. Unfortunately, until this incentive structure changes, grifting will be an ever-present specter within the conservative movement.
Without a change, however, conservatives will never be able to address the two questions that form the movement’s heart: What is it that we want to conserve, and how, exactly, do we get there?
Conservatism is not doomed. There is plenty of potential for conservatives to recapture their heyday. But getting riled up at Delta Airlines over poorly understood issues is counterproductive. If conservatives want to return to power, they will not only have to learn about the institutions and systems they want to conserve, but also how to market them to the American people.
So what do you think conservatives should be conserving and how should they do it?Report
That’s up to conservatives to decide.
If it were me deciding, it would be the values and principles behind the United States’ unique liberal founding, properly understood, but reasonable people can disagree to a certain extent.
But there is no conservatism right now. Only reactionary behavior being given the conservative nomenclature. That’s the part that’s destructive.Report
I was expecting a bit more from someone who used to work in republican politics, which is not really a field that attracts leftists.Report
Before even worrying about the electoral outcomes you have to figure out what you want to *do* with power.
Right now all I gather from it is “punish our enemies,” which is reactionary rather than conservative.
If you want an orthodox conservative tradition, derive some ideas from Burke and Kirk. If you want a more distinctly American flavor, get your ideas from the Adamses, de Tocqueville, or even old liberals like Jefferson and Van Buren (because I will die on the hill that American conservatism, at least pre-Trump, was fundamentally liberal).
But in any case a healthy political movement needs concrete first principles, and conservatives don’t have any right now.Report
I would argue that you have that exactly backwards, and that principles should cause the formation of political movements, and unless there are principles…what is even the movement for?
The idea that a movement should exist without any principles and go _search them out_ is very silly. Why is there even a movement there to start with? What is it doing, what is it accomplishing?Report
This makes sense, which is what’s wrong with it. There shouldn’t be a movement without principles, and yet there is, in fact, a movement, even though it has nothing that can be described as “principles.” Ressentiment is not a principle, but it seems to be enough to sustain a movement.Report
It’s noteworthy that the American conservatives have no existing exemplar they can point to of their preferred state of affairs.
Liberals of course can point to the Scandinavian countries for the social welfare state, or Canada or Australia or any number of other modern industrialized countries. And these countries are all imperfect in many ways but they are all real and existing and can be discussed in concrete terms.
Conservatives by contrast can only speak in vague platitudes about some idealized Eden and can only speak in terms of what they object to, and what they reject, leaving the term “conservatism” defined by resentment and grievance rather than any positive vision.
This is why we say they are a revolutionary faction because they reject the legitimacy of the existing order. They can’t negotiate or compromise because they don’t have specific goals in mind, only the disempowerment of those currently in charge.Report
Yup.
Say what you want about a Barry Goldwater, William F. Buckley, John McCain, etc, but they had coherent (often competing) versions of what they wanted, often rooted in American history.Report
But even then the ideas, though coherent, were hypothetical, more like the hated Socialists than anything resembling a Burkean preservation.
Part of this is because if they were forced to pick an actual example of their preferred state, it would be embarrassing.
They might for example, declare that things pre-New Deal were preferred, but then become embarrassed to have the actual pre-New Deal conditions of society brought into view.
If they supported any foreign governments, they were almost always of the embarrassing variety such as South Africa or the Marcos’ Phill[pines or Pinochet’s Chile.
So with Buckley, Goldwater, and Reagan, the vision had to always be some gauzy abstraction, a sort of conservative version of True Socialism. Always in the future, always incipient, and, as society moved culturally to greater liberalism, the vision evolved to greater and more unrealistic social engineering.Report
You have a point with Buckley and McCain.
I will, however, maintain that Goldwater did have a preferred state, and that he was a sort of confused Jeffersonian. The problem is that he, unlike, say, Martin Van Buren, who operated at a similar time of rapid political change, was unable to formulate that preferred state in a manner with which people could identify. He was individually brilliant but didn’t have the charisma, tact, or savvy for the presidency.Report
A few other thoughts-
The Burkean conservatives were conserving actual existing tradition, meaning the established order of their time.
Conservatism thereby envisions itself as representing the majority or dominant group, defending against attacks from without.
But contemporary conservatives have grasped that they are no longer the majority. They talk about the “long march” of liberals through culture and institutions like academia and the corporate world.
Buckley grasped this in 1952 when he wrote God And Man At Yale. Goldwater grasped this in 1964 when he broke with the Eisenhower consensus of acceptance of the New Deal.
Reagan was able to use his charisma and popularity to paper over this, but McCain and the later Tea Party/ Trumpists reverted to the Goldwater form of being at odds with the established order.
And as David Frum has observed, this then forces a conservative to either accept being a minority party hoping to compromise with the liberals, or to reject democracy altogether and institute their preferences by force.Report
Frum’s observation is a good one, and I do think American conservatives have to accept the country’s innate liberalism, meaning that religious/traditional social orders will never have the same cultural clout as they would in, say, Hungary.Report
Pointing to various foreign socialist experiments that have melted down the economy and saying we don’t want that works pretty well.Report
In that case, one would want to point to other nations, all of which have the highest standards of living and greatest degree of freedom in the history of humanity and seek to emulate their success.Report
“Highest standards of living”
Dude, when you visit friends in Europe, they ask you to not take hot showers.Report
I dunno. I was in Germany in October and nobody gave me a hard time about it.
I’d say the real trouble is that a lot of Americans seem unable to tell the difference between, say, France and Venezuela. This plays out in different but nevertheless stupid ways depending on which side of the aisle one is.Report
You know the German word for “wimp”? It’s “Warmduscher”.
I am not making this up.Report
Ha I know! This from the people that won’t crack a window on a train in May because they think they’ll catch cold!Report
I’ve been in several European countries over the years and have never had any difficulty taking hot showers. Maye we just have different friends.Report
Oh but surely, when you showed them Hershey bars and nylon stockings, all the European women wanted to sleep with you, right?Report
Nylon stockings and food were measures of wealth and currency during WW2. However I think we’re past those days.Report
…I’m going to have to rethink my investment portfolio.Report
Now I know what I was doing wrong.Report
There is a ton of bait and switch in these sorts of conversations.
Policy X will have outcome Y… but for it to work, policy X assumes you also have A,B,&C which the US would never tolerate.
Tiny population with a massive amount of mineral extraction as a percentage of the economy. Mono-culture. Economic freedom that the people proposing X would never allow.
Or alternatively, often the “socialist policies” are the claimed to be in highest standard living countries aren’t actually socialist. “Hight-Tax high-social-safety-net” policies are different from “Low economic freedom socialist” policies.Report
There can be an interesting juxtaposition where the places out there trying true controlled economies in practice being more like crony capitalism, with juiced in oligarchs getting rich off dirty activities like resource extraction and the liberal social democracies of the world being more market oriented in certain ways than the US. It’s a nuanced conversation that for whatever reason we struggle to have.Report
You haven’t done any work here.
For example, a national health service like the UK, or Canada, or Germany.
What preconditions does it need to prevent it working here?
“Monoculture” doesn’t exist in any of those countries, none of them are any more dependent on resource extraction than the US, and even then, you haven’t done any work to show why culture or resource extraction is even a relevant variable.
Not to mention the fact that you could easily just reverse this argument:
“Sure, markets work in the US, but they can’t work here in Cuba because monoculture resource extraction tiny population. Plus, we have lots of coastline, and it is a truth universally acknowledged that market economies can’t work where there is lots of coastline.”Report
For example, a national health service like the UK, or Canada, or Germany. What preconditions does it need to prevent it working here?
The preconditions it needs are low existing health care costs and/or lack of existing gov intervention. Here we’d need a political willingness to disrupt breathtakingly large amounts of the economy.
Examples of national health care services have expanded access but don’t have a history of lowering costs. They have locked in existing low costs at the expense of increasing wait times.
If the problem we’re trying to solve is prices that are too high, then this gov agency is going to have the task of reducing the pay and/or destroying very large numbers of well paid jobs, multiple points of GDP worth.
The level of political pain created by doing that is much higher than our politicians can bear. We’d have to have multiple generations of politicians lose their jobs, and they can’t even stand up to Trump.
Alternatively, if the plan is to just expand access without reducing costs, then we need a way to pay for it without breaking the budget. The amount of money is so high we’d need to redirect Social Security or something else on that scale.
More realistically, fixing our current system will require more market, less gov regulatory capture, and less price fixing.Report
Your last sentence is a good example of my assertion that conservatives are in the same position as socialists, in that you can’t point to any working models of what you want, but can only assert hypotheticals and abstract theory.
Unless you want to point to US healthcare pre-Obamacare or senior healthcare pre-Medicare, or old age pensions pre-Social Security, but those wouldn’t be a very good sales pitch would it?Report
We have hundreds of years of experience with markets and market disfunctions across the entire globe.
You have to raise the goal posts pretty darn high to claim I have no examples on how markets work and what they can be expected to do.
Especially they already work in the US with plastic surgery. The expected outcome is high quality, high access, and low prices.
Much more importantly the counter argument is… what? That our politicians really do have the stomach to destroy the tens of millions of well paying jobs that it would take to bring us to Germany’s HC model?
Markets have a better record for destroying jobs than Politicians do.Report
Conservatives have traditionally pointed to 19th century United Kingdom, at least in it’s domestic policies, as their ideal night watchman state.Report
(they have?)Report
From the perspective of a lifelong Liberal Democrat, conservatives wish to conserve the wealth and power of the wealthy and powerful. They do this through religion, rage, and tax cuts.Report
I can’t tell if this is satire or not. I’m not trying to be mean. But your first few paragraphs basically say Conservatives are uninformed, angry, prone to believe falsehoods, and care more about being angry than knowing things. Then you say we should somehow respect and uphold this kind of movement because its “gone off the rails”. But, like…isn’t that basically saying that these folks are conservative because of all those negative things you listed out and that they don’t actually have a goal anymore?
You laid out a very good case that there is a group, called conservatives, that are lashing out at things they don’t understand and then make gestures towards conserving things or “doing good work”. My take away from your article is that the first step towards doing good work is to stop being conservative. Thoughts?Report
My argument is that most people who call themselves conservative (including most of modern “conservative” media) aren’t actually conservative because they don’t believe in conserving anything. They just react to things that happen in the world without any sense of cohesion or any first principles.
There is an actual conservative intellectual tradition. You can use the Edmund Burke/Russell Kirk line, which values prudence, moderation, and social tradition above all else. You can use the John Adams/Alexis de Tocqueville line, which has similar values, but also embraces liberal tenets like natural rights, natural equality, and a reluctant embrace of democracy. You can even argue for Jeffersonianism-as-conservatism because a lot of our institutions derive from the early Democratic-Republican Party.
It’s possible to derive a solid political movement from that. It can propose incremental reforms, and allow room for innovation while keeping history in mind. But nobody wants to do that because yelling at Delta Airlines is easier and more lucrative.Report
I think that is kind of driving home the initial point of my comment. You’re saying modern conservatives (in this case anyone that isn’t willing to vote Democrat for the reasons you listed) have little to nothing to do with those ideals from Burke,Adams, Kirk, etc and instead are simply reactionaries that are befuddled by silly things like the Delta story et. al.
Does that not then beg the question: Why do only the “conservatives” seem have this issue? Why is it only those that wish to identify with the ideals that you champion in your post have these silly greivance-as-policy positions? Why are those that DO uphold those ideals seem to be more than happy to embrace these enablers with the Delta story instead of, as you say, embracing these ideals and standing for something?
I have reasons that I think explain this phenomena really well, but I’m genuinely interested in your perspective as to why this is the way it is.Report
Progressives and now many doctrinaire libertarians have the same problem, I think!
I got into this a little bit in another comment, but I think the progressives and libertarians have an excuse. Progressives (speaking in generalities here) perceive the world as a fundamentally unjust place that requires significant sociopolitical and institutional reforms in order to achieve justice. Institutional knowledge is not as important when your ultimate goal is to redefine the status quo.
It’s similar with the Rothbardian types, but their end goal is a political society that reflects a certain assortment of normative principles. Massive and rapid changes and reforms, perhaps even to the point of revolution, are justifiable in establishing that political society. Again, institutional knowledge isn’t as important in this framework.
But conservatives are ostensibly supposed to defend institutions, or at least a certain set of principles that undergird those institutions. In order to do that effectively, you need deep institutional knowledge. You need to know how things work and why they are they way they are. Conservatives have completely forgotten how to do that.Report
So your main point here seems to be that all of this bad stuff you listed out in the article aren’t actual conservative priorities. Thus, when we’re arguing about solutions or different behaviors, we’re actually arguing for them to return to that ‘conservatism’ you’re talking about.
I think that runs into a bit of a “no true scotsman” issue, and I’ll posit this: The reason these folks claim conservatism is not just because they oppose what they perceive to be as “liberalism” or “progressivism”, its because they never truly stood for those things in the first place. Every grievance piece you’ve pointed to has been tailor made to appeal to ‘conservatives’ by re-writing or ignoring history so that what folks believe they are conserving never actually existed. Essentially, a fundamental aspect of conservative appeal has been and continues to be, seemingly, a rewrite or omission of history in favor of an idealized society that ought not be changed lest that revised history-as-made be derailed. Even though that history never existed.
Basically its a lie to appeal to the most base impulses of uneducated, uncritical people, based on your articles points. IF that is true, and all of these folks are hoodwinked or otherwise bamboozled, what does conservatism really stand for if not the protection of entrenched power with these nonsense grievances being dangled like car keys to children? How is this an argument FOR conservatism? What exactly are they returning to if they never believed in these institutions in the first place?Report
Arguing that the forest needs to be burned down because it MUST grow back better without any clue about where we are, how we got here, and the predictable flaws in what is being attempted is a lot less reasonable than arguing that the forest doesn’t need to be burned down.Report
Ehhh to take your analogy further, we know a lot more about growing forests and how to plan them better. Saying to burn one down and we are starting from nothing is a bit silly. Every culture or economy has gone through revolutions, revisions, and are built upon the ruins of the previous system, often better than before. To dismiss those looking to change it sounds a lot like apologetics for the status quo.Report
The status quo is better than we’ve ever seen in history.
Redoing things “from ruins” without having realistic expectations of the outcomes is highly likely to create more problems than it fixes, if it does fix any problems.Report
Modern conservatives want to conserve white male political, economic and sexual power. It’s not that hard to understand.Report
And cultural appropriation!Report
I’m not sure what “conservatives” is even supposed to mean, here. Just “all those bad people I don’t like”, I guess.Report
I nominate this for the most vacuous example of “both-sides-ism” ever:
“Moreover, it makes the two parties’ underlying assumptions and principles completely indistinguishable.”
(And the author clearly doesn’t believe it’s true because it would mean that one could simply replace “conservatives” with “people” throughout without changing the meaning.)Report
I sort of understand where you’re coming from, and my initial draft of this article included a comment on this.
But put simply, progressives have an excuse. Details don’t matter as much when your political movement is built around rebuilding institutions from the ground up and ameliorating all injustice.
Conservatives don’t have an excuse .Report
“Conservatives don’t have an excuse”: that should have been the title for the piece. The “what are conservatives conserving” thing is something of a cliche by now, and the article doesn’t even really address it.
I think the problem facing conservatives doing media is that conservatism is antithetical to “mass” anything. Conservatism naturally fits at the family or community level. We’ve had a couple of public W’s recently (Dobbs and a few boycotts) and now we, or our media, are convinced we’re supposed to play the activism game the way the left side does. I’m happy when we have national victories, but then we’re supposed to get back to the local work.Report
You know, in hindsight, you’re probably right. I should have leaned into that more.Report
The real problem is that conservative media has capitalized on party prejudice to sell a salty story — whether the details are accurate or not.
This is more a modern media thing than a Conservative thing.Report
Not all that modern. Goebbels understood and exploited this very well. See: https://www.vox.com/2018/9/19/17847110/how-fascism-works-donald-trump-jason-stanleyReport
This is more a modern media thing than a Conservative thing.
My hot take is that Republicans have outsourced much more of their partisan organization and policy development to media outlets over the past 20 years than Democrats have.
This all happened at a time where the whole media ecosystem was evolving rapidly, in directions that have not overall been beneficial if you want to understand what’s actually happening in the world, and where conservative media was really ahead of the curve on some of the most baleful trends, like being captured by audience preferences.
There are downsides to turning a major political party into a content mill.Report
A big part of the problem with figuring out what conservatism means comes from your observation that C’s need to counter Progressives. Prog’s are a small very loud on social media slice of the left side of the spectrum. They have no actual concrete power but can whip up celeb’s and influencers. Many are just raging loons no different in style from alex jones or tucker. Conservative media is addicted to rage bait so they look to the loudest far out people for fuel. So they have a weird idea of what people all over the left think or want. There are far far more generic liberals or squishy moderates who lean left then prog’s. But conservatives would , seemingly, rather not talk at and with people closer to their beliefs and who dont’ terrify them.Report
Yes. Everything you said, yes.
I would even lump myself in with those squishy moderates that conservatives need to convince nowadays, but I think the country in general would be better off with a healthy conservative movement. Every country needs progressives and conservatives. But they also need to be reasonable.Report
Agreed we, and every country, needs conservatives and progs/libs. Indeed our lack of a healthy conservative movement truly hampers the US.
Good piece and thanks. Good to have more sane people around.Report
Every country needs progressives and conservatives.
[citation needed]
More seriously, no, we don’t.
What countries need are different groups of people who want to solve problems in different ways, but are willing to recognize what is and isn’t a problem. Or, to rephrase, they need to understand both what the American people want and what would make things better objectively, and thread that needle, or convince the people, or something.
The people being elected on the right are incredibly bad all that. They identify things that are not even vaguely problems, like ‘There are children asking to be called by different names and pronouns at school and teacher are doing that’, and, like you said, ‘Delta airlines is carrying people from one airport to another via airplanes’, and flip the hell out about them. They ignore actual problems like ‘bridges falling down’ and ‘actual child labor’.
And note I said _people being elected_. It matters not a damn what random internet people think, random internet people are lunatics.
This isn’t to say elected Democrats don’t ignore actual problems, but it’s generally exactly because they _also_ are too conservative. It is rather annoying that a lot of the problem of Democrats is just that they _also_ have been convinced to be conservative.
If there was some conservative party that actually proposed solutions to problems in ‘conservative ways’ (Whatever those are), and tried to do those things, they almost certainly could make them happen. Instead, they only propose those things to undermine progressive proposals, and when they accidentally stumble into one that will work or even just would pass, they leap away from it like a burning eye on the stove. There’s a whole list of conservative things we did because conservatives proposed it as a joke to counter progressive stuff, progressives took it seriously, and it ended up as a law without conservative support!
The problem, of course, is that a lot of the ‘conservative intellectual tradition’ has no opinions about huge amounts of modern politics, and if anyone tries to claim it does, it’s just slamming reactionary politics into the framework with no consideration if it fits.Report
If you don’t know what ‘conservative ways’ are, then how can you tell if Democrats are too conservative? If you can’t distinguish between joke proposals and well-intentioned proposals, how can you comment on which is which? This isn’t an academic question or word game. If you’re sincerely unable to describe your opponents’ position then you can’t really provide meaningful commentary on it. For all you know, you’re wrong. If you can describe your opponents’ position, then you’d be the one playing rhetorical games (which is fine, but it’s only rhetorical games rather than a policy discussion).
I think most of us here actually understand what post-WWII American conservatism is.Report
I think most of us here actually understand what post-WWII American conservatism is.
Indeed we do.Report
If you’re sincerely unable to describe your opponents’ position then you can’t really provide meaningful commentary on it.
It would be a great help if the opponents could concretely describe their own positions. There are probably reasons that they don’t.Report
Forget about positions.
We can very, very, accurately describe their policy.
Every week there is a new horror story about their policy, and the impacts.Report
It’s useful to remember the Republican Party had no platform in 2020.Report
I didn’t say I didn’t know what they were, I put that in quotes because it is a garbage term that almost always means ‘Whatever isn’t the current progressive solution being proposed that conservatives want to not happen’.
Why do you think _I_ cannot do that?
It is _elected Democrats_ who all too often take proposals that exist merely as a rebuttal to actual competent Democratic propsals, and say ‘Yes, we can do it the way the Republicans are proposing’, and conservatives flee form the thing they themselves invented. The Affordable Care Act, carbon taxes, infrastructure bills, the list goes on and on.
I can debate proposed policy just fine without describing the nonsensical incoherent ‘philosophy’ that created the policy.
Well, the writer of this piece seems confused, maybe you could explain it to him.Report
The writer of the piece doesn’t seem confused; he seems frustrated that conservatives are failing to articulate conservatism. And – again – if you’re disputing the idea that conservatism is well-defined, then you can’t claim to understand it. It’s just incoherent. It can’t be both something you understand and garbage that people say rather than agreeing with you.
As for those specifics you listed, we’ve recently discussed on this site how the ACA isn’t based on conservative principles. Both sides agreed to that. Carbon taxes have been discussed by conservatives; you’re right. But “infrastructure bills”? Your list only has three items before you declare that it could go on and on, so did you have to pad it with “infrastructure bills”?Report
Why yes, he is. And so are a great many of the rest of us, yet no one here who claims to be a conservative wants to give us the succinct list. Even now, you refuse to tell us what you – as a conservative – wish to consevre.
See, base don laws passed it appears that American conservatives want to:
1) Conserve a gender order where women are subservient to men; lack economic or political power; have little to no control over their own bodies; and do not eclipse males power in the political or judicial arena.
2)Conserve a racial/ethnic/class order where any person of color is less successful then any white person, and where white males re the most politically successful of all.
3) Conserve a sexual order where the LGBTQ+ community does not exist openly; can not seek specific medical treatment, and must quietly endure and and all political, judicial and legal sanctions placed against it.
4) Conserve a community order where good education is only reserved for those who can economically invest in it, and where the actual truth of our nation’s history is hidden away when it makes white men look bad, or allows for the equality of people of color ar women.
5) Conserves a medical system where rich and upper class white people ahve easy access to any and all medical care but anyone of lower class or differing race must compete for remaining medical services on a “market” basis staked against them.
Fascinatingly, modern American Conservatives DO NOT seem to want to conserve the post-war tax scheme which allowed significant public investment which in turn create the middle class.
Now, if you want to have a policy debate, engage with my specific observations- which are again based on laws passed a the state and federal level by politicians elected under a “conservative” banner. Give specific answers in return. don’t go waving this all away with your usual and often oblique references to Haidt.
Or, admit that modern conservativism wants all these things. We can engage with either. But the “you just don’t understand, so I can’t possibly” is tiresome.Report
RE: gender order
For abortion, Team Blue is pro-choice, which is actually a policy position (so good work).
For “getting rid of the wage gap”, Blue is going to pretend that it’s caused by sexism and outlaw that again.
My solution is to do nothing. Given that it’s caused by personal choices there is no solution that doesn’t break lots of other more important things. Not all inequalities need to be fixed.
RE: Conserve a racial/ethnic/class order
Does Blue have a solution here other than pretend that culture has no impact on outcomes ergo the outcomes are caused by racism?
RE: Conserve a sexual order
For the gays the genii is out of the bottle and not going back. Good work, you win and we’re all better off.
For trans Blue is pretending really hard that a “female” with a penis should be allowed to complete with other female athletes. Red is opposed to that because it’s nuts.
For trans youth we’re not sure what best practices are. I’ll reserve judgement for a few years.
RE: Conserve a community order where good education is only reserved for those who can economically invest in it
Considering that Blue’s areas of control are just as segregated if not more, I’m not sure if Blue has a solution here other than to pretend it’s Red’s problem.
My solution is other people adopt my culture and cultural habits.
The root problem isn’t money or the funding of schools. The root problem is other people’s kids learn better when they’re in a classroom with mine. However mine do better if they’re in a classroom without disruptive kids.
RE: Conserves a medical system
My solution is putting a lot more market into the system.
Team Blue’s solution typically involves pointing to other countries and pretending that we have some way to pay for it or expanding access will somehow lower costs or our politicians can trivially destroy multiple GDP percentage points worth of jobs.Report
How many times have we talked policy? You know what policies I hold to. I don’t agree with how you’ve framed them, but the policies themselves, you know or can approximate. I have articulated how I see my positions connected, and we’ve all discussed that too. So you can’t say that conservatives don’t articulate their beliefs. If you could say that then you wouldn’t have that list of policy points you wanted to hit in response to me.
That’s the confusing part. We’ve had the same conversations a hundred times. You don’t like my answers, but you can’t say I don’t answer. I mean, you’ve answered me dozens of times and I acknowledge it. Why don’t you acknowledge how many times I’ve answered you?Report
Regardless of how many times we have talked, I took the time to write a list of what conservatives seem to be after based I. The laws they are passing. I invited correction, addition, any sort of thing.
Yet I got another deflection. Another attempt to turn the work back on me. Which certainly backstops Chip’s declaration that conservatives don’t want to declare openly and succinctly what they want. And ironically none of the conservatives here would accept such sloppy work from me or Chip or any of the liberals here.
Nice try I guess.Report
If you get to nut pick then so does the other side.Report
He isn’t nutpicking. He’s claiming he’s already told me what his nuts are, and so he has no obligation to restate them. While insisting that I have to restate mine each and every time.Report
i was excited reading through all these comments and seeing someone earnestly engaging.
What you got back were conflations, straw men, non sequiturs, and grievances alongside healthy doses of bigotry and homophobia.
This is what I was getting at with my response to the OP of the article. Conservatives or those that call themselves that really need to articulate exactly how and why they don’t want all of the bad things they see occuring or that others point out. Instead they just throw up their hands as if its just all out of their hands and its some mysterious “other” doing things.
It would be sad if it wasn’t so intentionally pernicious. When you look at all of these purported intellectuals they point to, they all make the exact same arguments and misconstructions to justify their awful results. I know I’m new here but I genuinely expected better here. Thanks for the posts Phil.Report
“It would be sad if it wasn’t so intentionally pernicious. When you look at all of these purported intellectuals they point to…”
Please stop reading Reddit so much. It’s giving you the idea that vocabulary implies intelligence.Report
The people want less taxes and more benefits.
They also want [their narrow sliver of society] to get more gov support.
And behind it all we have the [current group of politicians] who need to justify their existence.
Big picture we either don’t have serious problems or we don’t want them solved. Thus drama rules.Report
We don’t want to pay the cost of solving them. Hence why tax cuts are so popular.Report
It was much easier to define conservatism in a way that could appeal to a broad coalition when you were opposed to communism. They had a couple generations of politics on Easy Mode due to the Cold War.
In particular, when the enemy is an explicitly totalitarian form of progressivism, you get to claim any classically liberal value as something that you’re trying to conserve. Stuff that you, as a conservative, might not otherwise like so much (like, say, the endless churn and displacement that capitalism gets you, for better and worse) is vastly better than the alternative you’re opposing (it’s really hard to find anything nice to say about command economies).
They kept looking for new totalitarian threats once the USSR blew up, and those totalitarian threats kept looking less threatening, less totalitarian, or (usually) both.Report
It’s not surprising that conservativism has become this.
“What have conservatives conserved?” is a question that conservative leaders can’t answer. What’s interesting to me is that liberals/progressives can’t answer it satisfactorily either.
Wanna know why we got Trump? Clinton is one answer. Bush is the other.Report
Most of us non-conservatives are resisting doing that because we actually wanted to see what conservatives come up with.
I have a feeling that a lot of conservatives would vastly disagree with what I see them ‘conserving’, but that would give them an exit for this discussion, where they get to argue with me what they don’t stand for, instead of explaining what they do. So I’m not going to. I really hope no one else does, either.
Conservatives: What is it that you want to conserve, and how, exactly, do you get there?Report
The great divide between good policy and not isn’t conservative v liberal.
Bad policy’s fathers are special interests, magic thinking, emotional thinking, trying to use the gov to fix problems the gov is creating and/or non-problems, and politically created drama. I’m sure I’ve missed a few parents but that’s a good start.Report
Want to conserve? A high-trust/high-collaboration society. If not that, hold the line on wherever we are in the medium-trust/medium-collaboration society. If not that, slide down the gradient a little more slowly.Report
I have no idea what a ‘high-collaboration society’ is supposed to be. Using the normal meaning of collaboration, there has never been a world where people collaborated more, or with more people. I have a flat piece of glass and plastic that I can push some parts of and cause the end result of a global supply chain of food cooked and carried to my front door. This is the end result of _hundreds of of thousands_ of people collaborating in microscopic amounts, from the people who mined rare earth minerals for my cell phone to the people who put up cell towers to the people who wrote code for the shipping company to some manager who scheduled shifts at Taco Bell to the Uber Eats driver. It is nearly incomprehensible how many people worked together to make that Crunchwrap Supreme show up in only thirty minutes after I wanted it! It might literally be millions of people.
I very much doubt that is what you mean by high-collaboration society, but I have no idea what you do mean.
As for high-trust, I don’t doubt everyone wants a high-trust society, but there is a pretty big problem there: We’ve never actually had a high-trust society to conserve, and at this point we run into the problem that, as usual, conservatives are only talking about the history of white straight men.
Tell me if a Black man living in 1962 thought he lived in a high-trust society? Or a woman in 1962 who has to flee to Nevada for six weeks to take advantage of divorce and residency laws to actually divorce her husband?
It is way more accurate to say that conservatives want to conserve a society where _they_ are trusted.Report
It’s the second half of the two things that work in tandem.
One of the wacky things about capitalism is that it allows for medium-trust/high-collaboration. “I, Pencil” and all that.
Tell me if a Black man living in 1962 thought he lived in a high-trust society? Or a woman in 1962 who has to flee to Nevada for six weeks to take advantage of divorce and residency laws to actually divorce her husband?
Hell, ask a Black man living in 2024 if he thinks he’s living in a high-trust society.
Or a woman in 2024 if she thinks she’s living in one.Report
so why would conservatives want to preserve a high trust-high collaboration society which doesn’t exist and has never existed?Report
Here, let me copy and paste what I said:
Report
Wait, you’re trying to tell us that conservatives want to “hold the line on wherever we are in the medium-trust/medium-collaboration society”??
Conservatives are trying to do this?Report
Are you conflating “conservatives” with “conservative politicians”?
I mean, if you are, you’re probably laughing at the thought that this is what conservative politicians are doing.
Which goes back to the whole “what have conservatives conserved?” criticism.Report
Both definitions are laughable.
Like, even in the most idealized first principle way, the idea that conservatism seeks to “hold the line on wherever we are” on the trust scale is flatly contradicted by conservatives themselves.Report
Well, there are also a bunch of reactionaries who say stuff like “we’re going in the wrong direction and we need to go back”.
That’s certainly true.Report
Which, if it has anything whatsoever to do with trust or collaboration, means reverting to lower trust and less collaboration.Report
If the argument is that we have more Trust/Collaboration than we did decades ago, that’s an argument that needs support.Report
You need to tell us where the goalposts are first. “Trust and collaboration” can be interpreted to mean different things.
You made an assertion that conservatism wants to retain current levels of trust and collaboration.
You made a second assertion that returning to some unspecified prior state of affairs would increase levels of trust and collaboration.
Can you give us some examples of this?
Like, just one or two should suffice.
And you can use either abstract first principles, or actual policy, I don’t care.
Just explain what you are talking about and give examples.Report
It’s true, they can. I’d say that “trust” would be like “a willingness to rely that a co-player in an iterated game will not defect”.
If you want to use a practical example of this, the whole “drug testing if you get welfare benefits” thing.
This might fall under “trust but verify”.
The idea is “I will give you welfare benefits if you do your part and not just get stoned and watch cartoons on the couch”.
And this usually turns into a “how dare you?” food fight when it comes to privacy and whatnot and accusations of bad faith and what have you.
Which, wackily enough, confirms the priors of the folks who are being asked to provide benefits to others who are less fortunate.
The attitude “I have to get drug tested to work at my job. You should get drug tested to get welfare” is one that is understandable (if distasteful).
Do you want collaboration? Sure, establish trust.
That’s just a quick example off the top of my head, though.Report
So, conservatives not trusting people to get benefits without proving they are drug-free is an example of…what now?Report
“Trust but Verify”.
You know, by establishing trustworthiness, collaboration is offered.Report
So your idea of high trust is a situation where everyone is assumed guilty until they can prove otherwise?Report
Well, it’s a gradient rather than a toggle.
I’d say that my idea of “high trust” is one where trustworthiness is demonstrated and the system can be left alone without worry that it will be gamed.
Refusal to demonstrate trustworthiness will result in lower trust.
And that sucks.Report
So like, refusing to allow a search of my home or car or phone results in lower trust?
And who is this unnamed party that has lower trust- the government or employer?Report
So like, refusing to allow a search of my home or car or phone results in lower trust?
Why are they searching your home? Is it because you asked them for money?
If not, I’d say that the fact that they want to search your home is a violation right there.
I’d say that making the request at all is a violation of trust.
“Who is this unnamed party that has lower trust?”
Under what circumstances?
When I was asked to pee in a cup as a condition of employment, that was my employer.
Apparently we have a “drug-free workplace” and that’s enforced lightly by making me pee in a cup once a decade ago (but I have to pee on command if required).Report
I think the way you’re framing this is in an inherently “Low trust” scenario. The example given is a de facto untrustworthy one and rather relies on a sense of hierarchy and control than collaboration. A better example would be “should we drug test AT ALL” rather than comparing it to “i had to give up privacy so others should too”. The fact that there is some qualification for benefits at all is inherently creating a low-trust system.Report
It goes hand-in-hand with the collaboration, I think.
“Leave me alone and I will leave you alone” == low collaboration.
It’s when we start having to interact that we start playing the iterated game.
You gonna collaborate or defect?
Now let’s play again. And again. And again.Report
This is reversing cause and result.
We have sub-cultures that are shockingly dysfunctional. Not having filters for benefits enables dysfunctional behavior and dysfunctional cultural norms.
The problem isn’t that I don’t trust all sub-cultures, the problem is I shouldn’t.Report
As a matter of policy, are you in favor of drug addicts collecting welfare and not working?
Team Red is clearly opposed. Team Blue seems to want to be in favor but also doesn’t want to own it.Report
Yes, I want people to be able to spend their assistance however they want.
If they want to blow it on fudge rounds and weed, that’s their choice.Report
That’s fine, but if the same group of people are always getting “assistance”, then we are moving past “help in times of need” and to “supporting a dysfunctional culture”.
That implies the level of assistance should be low.Report
This is the downside of “we all have responsibilities to each other”.Report
This exchange between Jaybird, me, you and Jason illustrates perfectly conservatives’ idea of “trust”.
In the conservatives’ view, people generally can’t be trusted to manage their affairs responsibly and so all sorts of safeguards and rules need to be put in place to control people’s behavior and make sure they are obeying.
I’m not saying this is right or wrong, I’m just establishing the baseline.Report
You misunderstand the order of operations.
“If you want me to do X for you, you must do Y for me first.”
You may not see it that way, but you should understand that they see it that way.Report
We all understand it perfectly.
The conservative view is, as you put it, “If you want me to do X for you, you must do Y for me first.”
Engagements are transactional.Report
Yes.
Collaboration sometimes involves transaction.Report
So if that is what you call “high trust” what would you call a situation where you get the goodies and don’t have to do Y or anything else?Report
I’d either guess it was one where trust had already been established *OR* one where the ability to negotiate had been removed from the people asked to foot the bill.
The former would be high trust. The latter would be lower trust.
High collaboration in either case, of course.Report
Right.
The liberal default is that simply by virtue of being human, people can be trusted until they do something to demonstrate otherwise.Report
If X person blows all their monthly allotment on fudge rounds and MJ by the 20th of the month, are you OK with letting them starve till the 1st?Report
In the conservatives’ view, people generally can’t be trusted to manage their affairs responsibly and so all sorts of safeguards and rules need to be put in place to control people’s behavior and make sure they are obeying.
Do you disagree with my statements: “We have sub-cultures that are shockingly dysfunctional. Not having filters for benefits enables dysfunctional behavior and dysfunctional cultural norms.” ???
There is a disconnect between “the same sub-culture of people constantly need aid” and “people can be trusted to manage their own affairs responsibly”.Report
Bingo. Their idea of freedom seems to very much be “within the confines I’m willing to accept or allow” vs “freedom from hierarchy”.
Which is fine, but one of those I’d say is freedom and the other is….something else.Report
Their idea of freedom seems to very much be “within the confines I’m willing to accept or allow” vs “freedom from hierarchy”.
Why does “freedom” include forcing me to pay for other people to be high and jobless?
Far as I can tell, no one is even pretending that this doesn’t happen or that it’s not the expected result.Report
As a matter of policy, what percentage of welfare recipients test positive for banned drugs nationally? Or by state? Or by zip code?
And as a second question, what percentage of welfare recipients are meeting current requirements for working or seeking work while receiving assistance?
Oh, and here’s a really great third question – what percent of recipients fail tests for alcohol?Report
According to CLASP, it’s a little over 10%.Report
No Jay, that’s 11% of people tested, not 11% of welfare recipients. in 2017 TANF had 2.6 million monthly participants on average. those 301 positive tests amount to 0.0116% of all recipients. Which is a really vanishingly small group of people don’t ya think?Report
Oh, you’re right.
I don’t have any measurements of the stuff that wasn’t measured.Report
there’s nothing wrong with your data or its source – your context just needed clarifying.
Which gets at another long running policy frustration of mine – we make laws and spend money while studiously ignoring the data we have.Report
“10% is well within acceptable parameters.”
“10% is not well within acceptable parameters.”
“Yes it is.”
“No it isn’t.”
“Yes it is.”
“No it isn’t.”
“Yes it is.”
“No it isn’t.”
“Yes it is.”
“No it isn’t.”
And so on.Report
“2017 TANF had 2.6 million monthly participants on average. those 301 positive tests amount to 0.0116% of all recipients”
Hold on… you can’t infer that from the article. The article is taking a sample of samples and isn’t able to determine any sort of statistical assessment.
For example, here’s what they report for one of their selected samples:
“Of the 28,828 applicants for WorkForce, North Carolina’s TANF benefits program in 2017, 258 were given drug tests by the Department of Health and Human Services, after receiving a score of eight or more on weighted 10-question survey about drug use. Of those tested, 31 tested positive; another 20 refused to take the test and 171 did not show up to do so.”
As far as I can tell it is a survey of twelve states programs which include inconsistent methods for testing and the ability to refuse the test (as noted above).
Basically both the 10% number and the 0.0116% are useless.Report
You’re deflecting my question about your opinion with a research question.
My answer is you should do your own research and own whether or not you want to give aid to people who are using it to get high.
Further, “percentage of welfare recipients test positive for banned drugs by zip code” probably isn’t a useful metric. In some zip codes the number of people on welfare is very low.Report
My opinion, much like Chip’s, is that people deserve to live whether they make choice I always approve of or not. My zip code statement was a direct dig at you which I guess you missed. And since functional alcoholics get all sorts of welfare assistance – and alcohol is a legal substance you can’t legally test for – my larger point is that we give assistance to all sorts of dysfunctional folks all the time because we have decided their disfunction is societally acceptable.Report
Philip: we give assistance to all sorts of dysfunctional folks all the time because we have decided their disfunction is societally acceptable.
Yes, the world isn’t perfect and policy isn’t always consistent.
However “functional alcoholic” is, by definition, “functional” and not a dysfunctional person.
Philip: people deserve to live whether they make choice I always approve of or not.
“Live” is different from “lifestyle”.
Where it becomes an issue is when you want me to enable them by reaching into my wallet. It especially becomes an issue when we’re talking about cultural habits and disfunction cultures.
We should be asking ourselves why we’re encouraging things that should be discouraged.Report
I’d start by saying that I don’t see giving a drug addict SNAP benefits (which they can’t exchange directly for drugs) as encouraging anything beyond eating, and sometimes eating moderately healthy foods. Now yes, they COULD sell some of that food for very small quantities of drugs, but frankly I’d rather they sell some of their food then their actual bodies. Ditto rent assistance. And lets not forget free meals in public schools – which have been shown time and time again to increase learning success, but go to the children of those addicts you despise.
The challenge in discussing this with you is you have direct family experience with people who are addicts and don’t make economically or ethically good choices, and you assume most people receiving those benefits are that way, even if they aren’t on drugs.
My experience is one of having been on such assistance early in my first marriage when my then wife’s salary as a public school teacher and my salary as a beginning ocean scientist working for a state agency were so low as to allow us to qualify for WIC. Which we used for about a year until I took a second job (and shortly there after was divorced because I wasn’t around enough among other issues).
Framed through your lens, my taking of that benefit was something to be discouraged – I should have tanked my career in favor of something else (though no one in 0ver 30 years has ever told me what that was ) so I could make more money and not need that assistance.
All of which is to say a good many Americans who make choices you want to encourage are still in need of that assistance, and the one who make choices you want to discourage probably have massively expensive medical, psychological and social needs that there is presently no infrastructure to pay for. They don’t have the resources to do anything other then what they are doing from within their addiction, but I don’t see that as a reason to consign them to the gutter.Report
This is what i was getting at in my first few comments. A central conceit of American Conservatism is “There should be those that the law constrains but does not protect and those that the law protects but does not constrain”. It is all about the hierarchy and the personal choice of the conservative to approve or disapprove of each and every thing that goes on in ‘society’.
Note the disdain of ‘drug user lifestyles’ while staying silent on alcohol as you noted. Note the immediate moral atomization of choices instead of treating people as complex individuals that still have needs, despite good or bad choices when it comes to healthcare or SNAP benefits. Then its explained away as “well the world aint perfect but where *I* can make a call, i’ll do my best to impose my beliefs!!” The conservative constantly reserves the right to morally veto anything that is done with a tax dollar so long as that particular item is not perceived to somehow slight them either economically or morally.
Its a subjective dehumanization and tribalism dressed up in a faux historical lense that serves to maintain an existing hierarchy that the conservative rightly or wrongly sees themselves in the upper echelons of.
It has to be, because if they engaged with a simple policy question like the one posted; “should we drug test food recipients” there is no answer other than “no” that doesn’t make you a monster.Report
“A central conceit of American Conservatism is ‘There should be those that the law constrains but does not protect and those that the law protects but does not constrain’.”
Have you heard a conservative say that, or are you assuming they think that based on your own framework?Report
What’s striking is to take Jaybird’s formulation of state assistance being transactional and apply it the demand for taxpayer dollars for religious schools.
We give your school money, therefore you must conform to moral precepts imposed by the taxpayers…
Because when it comes to the favored ingroup, taxpayer money supports but does not bind, and when it comes to the hated outgroup, taxpayer money binds but does not support.Report
the demand for taxpayer dollars for religious schools.
This isn’t how the people who want to send their kids to religious schools frame it.
Their argument is that their tax dollars should follow their kids to the religious school.
You know the whole “First Amendment” thing? The argument is that sending the kids to a religious school falls under the whole “free exercise” clause.Report
Ok.
So like when the government sends health care dollars, those dollars should follow a woman into an abortion clinic, right?
This is what conservatives believe, right?Report
I don’t know… let me check the Hyde Amendment.
Looks like a “no” for that.
“It’s the exact same thing!”, you may say. Others may say that it is not. Some might even say that the comparison is specious.Report
I bet some people would.Report
According to Chris Conover at Forbes, “taxpayers subsidize roughly 24% of all abortion costs in the U.S. with 6.6% borne by federal taxpayers and the remaining 17.4% picked up by state taxpayers.”
Is that an appropriate number? Should the number be 100%?Report
Imagine arguing to dictate personal health decisions under the 1st amendment while also mandating state funded religious instruction under the 1st amendment and not exploding in irony.Report
Exactly, that’s a good example.Report
Phil: direct family experience with people who are addicts and don’t make economically or ethically good choices, and you assume most people receiving those benefits are that way,
My expectation is a lot of people, probably most, use these programs the way they should be. A year or two and then your economic situation recovers.
Call that group “A”. So it’s a “safety net” and not a lifestyle.
And then we have group “B” for whom the reverse is true. Drugs and or mental illness often play a role. We also have a poverty sub-culture where drug use and other bad choices are encouraged or even expected.
This takes us into whether aid enables bad choices.
The challenge is how to tell the difference between the two situations and what to do about the 2nd group.
If members of the 2nd group’s core problem is they keep getting high, then we need to think about whether aid enables that. Snap has been shown to be very useful but you can’t buy alcohol or drugs with it.
Arguing that people can be trusted to do the right thing without drug tests runs is akin to arguing that Snap should be able to be used to buy alcohol.
I get that not trusting people makes some things harder, but there are groups of people who shouldn’t be trusted.Report
Heh its always great when I posit conservatives want to do something that is bad, and then someone who believes those things comes along, unbidden, and proves my point. Its all about that conservative reservation of right to judge and condemn instead of the ultimate goal of whatever program that they are talking about.
You sound like Immortan Joe from Fury Road “Do not, my friends, become addicted to water. It will take hold of you, and you will resent its absence” except with SNAP or safety net services.Report
Heh its always great when I posit conservatives want to do something that is bad, and then someone who believes those things comes along, unbidden, and proves my point.
I have had 5 pregnant relatives in multiple unrelated branches of the family stay unmarried in order to collect more benefits from the government.
The most eye opening should be my brother. He’s a scary-high-functioning highly-paid PhD engineer who is more of a math guy than I am. He offered to go through the math and made clear math was the driving force.
4 of the 5 later got married, often because of social pressure.
If you want to describe being concerned that we’re paying for things we really shouldn’t as “do something that is bad” that’s fine. But at the end of the day imho the concerns are real and probably legit.Report
If they needed those benefits, why would you be upset about that? Maybe the problem is that the benefits are tied to marriage instead of need. Its interesting you blame them instead of the system. Just like I said, a lot of the ‘conservative’ ideology is about judgement and hierarchy instead of better results.Report
“If they needed those benefits, why would you be upset about that?”
(they didn’t need the benefits. they took the benefits.)Report
they didn’t need the benefits. they took the benefits.
That.
For my brother, it was a min/max game. Probably ditto for two others. The money was useful for him because money is always useful but he would have been fine without it.
For my wife’s relative, they changed their plans because of social pressure and got married.
For my cousin… she didn’t get married at all. Bunch of unknowns here and “what ifs” on what happens if she had more pressure to be functional. I think paying her to sell/use drugs and get pregnant was deep into enabling but that’s me.Report
I am blaming the system. I’m pointing out that it is incentivizing dysfunctional behavior.
Which means worrying about whether “aid” is creating problems should be a thing.
Given that we also have aid being used correctly, the issue becomes how to screen for that and what to do about it.
a lot of the ‘conservative’ ideology is about judgement and hierarchy instead of better results.
We’re using the power of the government to incentivize dysfunctional behavior. Not accepting that as a problem is unlikely to lead to “better results”.Report
According to Jays statistics somewhere above, roughly 0.011% of TANF recipients in 2017 tested positive for drugs. That is a vanishingly small number statistically, and hanging your distrust hat on a group roughly the size of my college graduation class doesn’t make you look good.Report
roughly 0.011% of TANF recipients in 2017 tested positive for drugs.
Adjusted for the sample size this was a scary high number, we tested roughly 0.033%.
Adjusted for selection, i.e. the letting people not show up if they thought they’d be positive, and it is beyond scary.Report
What was the total number of TANF ordered/requested to take drug tests? Of that number how many tested negative?
Another way to put it is of the number ordered/requested to take the drug tests, what was the number that either refused to comply and/or tested positive?Report
One would assume that conservatives would try to elect conservative politicians. In areas where those voters hold sway, politicians of that bent get elected.Report
Sometimes they do.
Sometimes they end up with someone like Dumbya, though.Report
Looking back at W. I actually think he got the sales pitch right in a certain way for what a modern, successful, post cold war conservatism could be. Obviously his presidency was disastrous and will forever be defined by the foreign policy catastrophes and civil liberties infringements, maybe also an ugly asterisk about Katrina, not to mention at the end of the day being in thrall to the same old plutocrats. But it’s funny to think my recollection of the 2000 narrative, when the US was at the top of the world, was about whether there would even be a meaningful difference between a Bush or Gore presidency. Compassionate conservatism with a humble foreign policy and that had turned the corner on free market fundamentalism (aka tax cuts uber alles as the only economic policy) could have some currency if played right. It’s a shame the association completely discredited it as a concept.Report
Wait, you’re trying to tell us that conservatives want to “hold the line on wherever we are in the medium-trust/medium-collaboration society”??
If you want high trust, or even the current level of trust, you need to not proclaim that all cultures are equal and equally worth respect.
When we talk about “high trust”, the normal reason for that is “we want a large safety net that won’t be used unless it’s needed”.
If culture does the heavy lifting there then that’s easy. In theory you could have unemployment payments higher than what someone could earn in a job.
If we have sub-cultures that openly embrace various disfunctions, then we can’t have high trust. Openly embracing those sub-cultures as OK hits the radar as a problem.Report
It allows for zero-trust high-collaboration. Capitalism with consumer protections, at least. Because you can just…pay money and be assured you are getting the goods and services you paid for and need to work with to make more stuff?
I don’t trust anyone who makes any of the things I own, I literally do not even know who they are individually. We have a rather large structure of capitalism and regulation that allows this.
And it’s a same for businesses. Fast food places don’t have to ‘trust’ people supplying beef…there are regulations they trust. Or is _that_ what you mean by ‘trust’, the regulations?
I know that sounds like I’m being pro-regulation, but I’m actually just utterly baffled as to what this discussion is actually about. What does collaboration have to do with trust? What does collaboration have to do with anything? I have absolutely no idea why you think ‘collaboration’ is relevant here or even vaguely under threat to the point that it would somehow need ‘conserving’ by conservatives.
Why don’t you give an example of what a world with _low_-collaboration looks like?Report
“Why don’t you give an example of what a world with _low_-collaboration looks like?”
here’s a pretty good description of a low-trust, low-collaboration attitudeReport
Or, y’know.
We bought some eggs from the store, using the pick-up option. When we got home we found that the carton had been crushed by the watermelon we’d also bought and the eggs were ruined. We logged into the app and said “the eggs were broken” and the store refunded our money immediately.
That’s what a high-trust society looks like.
Or, maybe, high-trust is that when someone says “ech I’m sorry, I only meant that as a joke and didn’t know any different” you believe them; low-trust is that when someone holds their fingers in a funny sort of way you assume it’s a right-wing hand sign and post a picture of it on social media that results in them getting fired.Report
As for that…I’m not really sure how you think that gives a good example of what conservatives want, but my point was not actually ‘There is no high-trust now’.
It is ‘There never actually has been high-trust’. It just vaguely looked like it when communities were small enough that personal reputation was important, but ‘looked’ is the important word there. It wasn’t true.
Because in reality those setups were _incredibly_ biased and randomly ascribed ‘low-trust’ to people in very bigoted ways.
Like, seriously, one of the definition of high-trust society is that banking systems work, right?
Well, I can _prove_ that we have some of the highest level of trust that has ever existed, because before around the 1970s, in a lot of the US, _literally half the people in society were not allowed to have a bank account_. Half the people running around were completely untrusted by banking! Doesn’t sound very high-trust to me.Report
Well, I can _prove_ that we have some of the highest level of trust that has ever existed, because before around the 1970s, in a lot of the US, _literally half the people in society were not allowed to have a bank account_. Half the people running around were completely untrusted by banking! Doesn’t sound very high-trust to me.
I’d use stuff like banking as an example of “collaboration”.
The argument that we’ve got it as good as it’s ever been is an interesting one.
I’m mostly interested in how that particular argument only ever shows up *HERE*.
Wanna discuss various policies? Man, we need to be more like Denmark! We should be more like Germany! We need to be more like Canada! Why aren’t we more like South Korea?!?
Hey. We are the best we’ve ever been.Report
You can argue against his answer, or ask him for clarification. But please acknowledge that it’s an answer?Report
I repeat: I have no idea what a ‘high-collaboration society’ is supposed to be.
The only thing I can up with is…this society. The entire world is linked more and more, in fact, it’s arguable linked too much in a lot of ways (Making it a little fragile, as we saw during covid. I think we all agree we could do with a little more redundancy and a little more local supplies.), and I really feel that is _not_ what Jaybird is trying to say. But I don’t know what is he is trying to say.
I thus cannot accept that part of the answer.
As for ‘high-trust’, that is a completely generic thing that everyone is in favor of. It’s like saying you want to conserve ‘a low murder rate’ or ‘earthquakes not destroying cities’.
Conservativism is a specific political philosophy, it can’t simply be ‘We want a good thing that all people want, like people trusting each other’. To be a political philosophy, it has to _disagree_ in some manner with other political philosophies.
Now, I suspect where conservativism disagrees is _how_ it tries to create (Or keep) a high-trust society, or what it sees as damaging that. Just like some of us might want to reduce the murder rate with less guns, and some with more guns.
And _that_ would be the part that needs to be articulated.Report
See, I keep saying “High-Trust/High-Collaboration” and you keep coming back with “BUT WE HAVE HIGH COLLABORATION!”Report
No one is arguing we have high trust, but we do see Blue argue for high Collaboration or point to societies that are high trust/collab and ask why that can’t work here.Report
Would you say that you don’t understand Jaybird’s answer, or don’t accept that Jaybird’s implications reflect reality? I can look at Philip’s comments and understand them. I don’t think the framework they imply is accurate, but I don’t have to because it’s ok if I don’t agree with him. I guess what I’m getting at is, would you settle for clarity about what conservatives believe, or do you demand that they state something you agree with?Report
Thought of this too late to ETA, but the third possibility is that you may only accept your formulation of conservatism as an answer. As in, if I say anything other than “hating brown people and women” it’ll be considered an evasion.Report
I know I’ve objected to this before, but I don’t like the framing of “what *have* conservatives conserved?”. It’s like asking “what have libertarians liberated?” or “what have socialists nationalized?”.
ETA: For clarity, it’s an acceptable question, but it’s a very different question than “what are conservatives conserving?” or “what do conservatives seek to conserve?”.Report
Asking a group of people to define what they stand for shouldn’t really be this difficult.Report
Individuals who are members of a big tent multi-faction “group” are unlikely to believe all tenants of what other factions are trying to do.
So team blue has the problem that they don’t have a definition for “defund the police” nor do the votes for immigration reform. Not only are you fighting Red but, after we get past the slogans, you’re also trying to get other elements of Blue to sign on.Report
I’m not looking for someone to write a synthesized total thesis on what group X or Y wants, I’m looking for specific answers from specific people on this page that are positing things. You just did it right here with “you don’t have a definition for defund the police”. Like, yes I personally do, I”m sure a lot of other folks who agree with me do. Would I say that everyone who uses that term totally agrees with me? No not at all, but would I maybe say what *I* specifically mean? Sure, but I certainly wouldn’t point to past voting patterns or news reports. I’d go into what I actually want/don’t want.
What I’m seeing here from folks using terms like conservative or “team blue” is just hand wringing about optics instead of actually positing a position. Which to the OP’s point is I think the main point of conservatism: Never define anything, always have a grievance, make up a false history to ‘conserve’ and boom, there you go, anything challenging existing power structures is automatically dangerous. Its a political school of thought that stands for nothing but power and I think the end result is the inability to define values. This is not new, it has always been this way from Mises to Hayek to Haidt to whoever. They all do this because they desire “civilization”but only in a narrative way that benefits people like them, not in a way that reflects reality.Report
Notice the difference in the goal posts here.
For Blue, you are cool with “what *I* specifically mean”.
For Red, you don’t want what the people on this board mean, you want what you couldn’t supply for Blue.Report
You really should stop using Blue or Red here when describing political idealogy. Our two party FPTP system is inherently broken and inherently unrepresentative of what the electorate wants. Any discussion framing choices as binary is going to absolutely misconstrue what is actually being discussed.
Also i don’t know what goal posts have been moved here, there have been at least 3 people on here asking for clarification on issues and the answers have just been tu quoque, obfuscation, or throwing hands up sayin ‘whattya gonna do’. Please help me understand what you mean.Report
RE: clarification on issues
Far as I can tell, Phil is the only one who has asked for clarification with enough detail to see which (set of six) policies he was talking about, I replied.
After that I don’t see what the question is.Report
You can see my response to Phil above and I think you’ll see what I mean.Report
“I’m looking for specific answers from specific people on this page that are positing things.”
mmmhmm
(gives answer)
“You’re wrong! Or you’re lying. And anyway what about these OTHER dudes?”Report
There’s a little bit of hide the ball.
Are we talking about what the politicians want or what the voters want? When we talk about the voters, do we mean the swings or do we mean the ones who show up no matter what? Or are we talking about the people who show up here?
Because, lemme tell ya, none of those people agree with each other.
And if someone points out “people from this section want X”, it’s very easy to point at the people from other sections and say “but these people don’t!”Report
Imagine some undecided voter wandering in here and listening to this nervous evasion.
Meanwhile, Kamala Harris clarifies things:
We want to ban assault weapons. Republicans want to ban books.
We are fighting for working people. Republicans are fighting to cut taxes for our country’s wealthiest people.
We are investing to fight the climate crisis. Republicans are denying climate change.
Elections matter.Report
“Wait. What definition are you using?”
“WHY ARE YOU AVOIDING ANSWERING THE QUESTION!”
“Because I don’t know what definition you’re using.”Report
We’re asking for YOUR assertion, a statement where you guys can make your own definitions and tell us what you mean.Report
Instead of asking me to imagine some undecided voter?Report
Yes Jaybird.
For the 11 millionth time this week.
You.
Not some imagined voter you think you need to speak for.
Not some politician you may or may not actually support.
You.Report
For the 11 millionth time, I point out what *I* think it is and then someone else points out that other people have different definitions or, get this, they disagree with me on what it is.
Earlier, I gave my answer that went something like “Want to conserve? A high-trust/high-collaboration society. If not that, hold the line on wherever we are in the medium-trust/medium-collaboration society. If not that, slide down the gradient a little more slowly.” and people seriously responded with something like “so why would conservatives want to preserve a high trust-high collaboration society which doesn’t exist and has never existed?”
You’d think that that would be a strawman but it happened!
It’s like they’re arguing with a tulpa and they’re upset that the real answers on the screen don’t match the answers they got from the tulpa and, undaunted, they continue with their script anyway.
They’ve been practicing, I guess…Report
“It’s like they’re arguing with a tulpa and they’re upset that the real answers on the screen don’t match the answers they got from the tulpa and, undaunted, they continue with their script anyway.”
as usual with these people, they’ve had this argument in their head with phantom Conservatives so many times that they can’t not follow the plan when they actually get a chance to use it.Report
The confusion arises from your unique definition of “trust” which you outlined above
Which is where the default assumption is that all engagements are transactional and begin with zero trust, until it is constructed.
So for example, if we take that and apply it, we can say that the Patriot Act and TSA are creating a high trust society by scanning everyone who flies and screening every text message and email for suspicious keywords.
You really need to grasp that very few people see things the way you do.Report
Trust doesn’t begin at 100% and go down.
My assumption is that it begins at low (but not zero) number and can be built up from there.
Are you familiar with Warren Buffet? He’s got quotation that goes “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.”
That’s, like, one of my assumptions. It takes years to build trust. It’s not a starting point.
As for “So for example, if we take that and apply it, we can say that the Patriot Act and TSA are creating a high trust society by scanning everyone who flies and screening every text message and email for suspicious keywords”, I’d say that it was a response to, among other things, a handful of people who had shoe and/or underwear bombs who were trying to blow up planes.
It was the defection (in the form of terrorism) that resulted in the transaction “if you want to fly, you have to be wanded first”.
This, like, happened.Report
Yeah I get how you think all that but liberals think differently.
For us, trust does begin at 100% and work down.
You really need to understand that very few people look at checkpoints and body scanners and armed guards barking “Papers please!” and think to themselves, “Wow, we’re really building a high trust society!”Report
Have you seen TSA Precheck? Fill out the forms and you no longer have to take off your shoes.Report
I think the confusion he has is that he wants to conserve some past high trust thing which others point out never existed. If such a state of affairs never existed, and he is committed to conserving it, he still has to answer….what is he conserving.
Its like me saying I want to conserve the United States of Antarctica and getting super upset when you ask me to produce their constitution or documentation when it was founded. I mean, yeah you did ask me another question because my thing was just made up and requires more justification for us to move forward. He isn’t getting that, and takes the additional questions as somehow going around his point when it is addressing it directly in an uncomfortable-for-them kind of way.Report
I mentioned how when conservatives actually make reference to some earlier time, it always ends up a bit embarrassing.
Like, the TSA stuff I mentioned and guards barking “Papers please!” is imagery straight out of a WWII movie or some sci-fi dystopia.
And the drug testing for welfare recipients and the idea of a transactional society is from Dickens, where orphans are given food and shelter, but must work for it to demonstrate trustworthiness.
The whole vision of society is pre-Enlightenment, where there aren’t things called “rights” that are imbued within us at the moment of birth, but instead there are only the privileges of trust which we earn as we go along.Report
Surely you know better by now,Report
Those are slogans, not policies.Report
New here? Great!
American conservatism seeks to preserve the Founders’ vision of limited central government as a way of promoting a society of “laws not men”. This isn’t the same as saying that conservatives believe the worst things the slave-holding Founders believed, however. It does recognize the value of family, community and faith – specifically the Judeo-Christian enlightenment tradition. Conservatives believe in negative rights, not positive. A small centralized government should obey the Constitution as written and spend only what it can afford.
As an intellectual matter, there are conservatives who see freedom as an end in itself, and those who see freedom as the means to the end of a good society. The former are more libertarian and the latter are more socially conservative. As a practical matter, a permissive society tends to encourage behaviour that leads people to government dependence, so the two sides are natural allies. At least that last part is my belief. I also believe that this comment won’t stop anyone from claiming next week that conservatives refuse to tell us what they believe.Report
” This isn’t the same as saying that conservatives believe the worst things the slave-holding Founders believed, however. It does recognize the value of family, community and faith – specifically the Judeo-Christian enlightenment tradition”
Massive citation needed on this statement. Everything that we have seen in American Conservatism from segregated schools, to state funded religion, to the disenfranchisement of as many people as they can get away with absolutely lays directly on top of the worst aspects of the founders. You need to demonstrate how conservatism isn’t that. You also need to show how “only spend what it can afford” means when the founders set up the central bank, ran debt, and minted currency. Remember what I said about creating false history to ‘conserve’, this looks to be another example of that but I’m willing to listen to your explanation.
It is interesting to me that you say conservatives view freedom as an end to itself, I’m curious what that is juxtoposed against. Is there an ideology that thinks freedom is inherently a bad thing (there is an answer here) that you can point to yourself? You also need to explain how freedom as the means to a good society is somehow conservative. A practical example here is say, freedom to marry or create domestic contracts with whomever one may way. If that is a more free society, why do conservatives, social conservatives as you cite, oppose that? This seems to be COUNTER to conservatism, can you clarify?Report
This is why I wanted to make the distinction between “you won’t list your beliefs”, “I don’t agree with your beliefs”, and “these aren’t your real beliefs”.
Also, I don’t think you understood my second paragraph. I said that you can roughly divide conservatism intellectually into two groups, one of which sees freedom as an end and the other of which sees freedom as a means. There are only a few philosophies that see freedom as inherently bad, but that’s not the key distinction I’m making. If a person sees freedom as an end, however, it’s very hard to argue against his freedom to (for example) post ant-vax nonsense. If a person sees freedom as a means to better society, then it’s possible to prioritize.Report
Well you could argue that their posting is limiting the freedom of others by increasing the spread of a deadly disease. So even if they see their freedom as an end, it still can have the result of limiting the other folks’ freedom as an end. That kind of thinking just leads to selfish self destructive societies, whether its vaccines, clean water, etc. etc.
Also why did you blaze past all the other stuff?Report
“you could argue that their posting is limiting the freedom of others by increasing the spread of a deadly disease.”
you mean AIDS?Report
We don’t have segregated schools, state funded religion, or disenfranchisement, so I didn’t think I had to address those points. Beyond that, I don’t think I “need” to demonstrate that conservatism doesn’t include them, because I was trying to encapsulate conservative principles in a few sentences. As for freedom as an end, maybe I should have send “the” end, to distinguish that thinking from the kind that sees a good society as the end goal, and can weigh the value of freedom against other values. I also just noticed that I wrote “ant-vax”, and now I’m picturing what kind of ant-vax conspiracies there are out there.Report
We don’t explicitly have them now, but we did. Conservatives pushed for them and even codified a new religious denomination specifically to uphold it. State funded religion, absolutely, we have in the state of Iowa, Maine, Oklahoma and others public funds going to explicitly religious sectarian and discriminatory schools that specifically exist to get around open books and civil rights legislation. Conservatives again. Disenfranchisement, have you seen how many people of color are routinely pushed off the books by conservative office holders? One could even argue that the entire criminalization of cannabis is explicitly a ruse to do just that, and only conservatives oppose its legalization and/or regulation.
it is going to be very hard for me to have a serious dialogue with someone who just denies reality because its inconvenient for their positions. These things are not niche ideas or new things, they have been around for a century and have been explicitly conservative principals for just as long, come on.Report
I just don’t think that those are fair characterizations. Take your first one, Iowa school funding. Looking around online, it looks like Iowa lets families choose their schools regardless of religion, and funds them proportionately. That’s not state funded religion any more than pastors needing licenses to drive is a religious restriction. It’s certainly not sectarian. No founding father would have a problem with state government doing it.Report
You guys need to get your story straight:
Groups aligned with the conservative legal movement and its financial architect, Leonard Leo, are working to promote a publicly funded Christian school in Oklahoma, hoping to create a test case to change the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the First Amendment’s separation of church and state.
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/29/oklahoma-public-christian-schools-00132534Report
You guys need to get your story straight:
See? We jump pretty quickly from “We’re asking for YOUR assertion” to “Look at these people who aren’t you!” pretty quickly.Report
We jumped from “What is YOUR assertion of what conservatives believe” to “Hey, here is what a bunch of conservatives are saying ” and noting the glaring contradiction.
Yes, American conservatives really do want to have a state funded religion.Report
“Hey, there’s a disconnect between conservatives on the ground and conservatives in power!!!”
Yeah, no crap, sherlock.
That’s why “what have conservatives conserved?” is a question worth wrestling with even for progressives.
It might help explain Trump to them.Report
I didn’t say there was a disconnect, only a contradiction in their words and deeds.
Do you think the conservatives on the ground disagree with this proposal by the Federalist Society?
We have some conservatives right here, maybe we should ask them.Report
only a contradiction in their words and deeds
YES CHIP
THIS IS WHY PEOPLE VOTED FOR TRUMP
BECAUSE THERE WAS A CONTRADICTION BETWEEN THE POLITICIANS’ WORDS AND DEEDSReport
You keep acting like folks are somehow cutting you out of the conversation and not letting you respond. I and others have laid out policy proposals and asked questions, and instead of answering, you throw up your hands.
If you’re upset about something being misattributed or not explained, then please please PLEASE help us set the record straight! What do YOU think about public tax dollars going to private unaccountable religious schools via conservative policy and protections?Report
What do YOU think about public tax dollars going to private unaccountable religious schools via conservative policy and protections?
I’d compare the religious schools to schools in Baltimore first. (We’ve had multiple conversations about the schools in Baltimore.)
In 2017, there were 6 schools that didn’t have a single student proficient in state tests (5 high schools, 1 middle school).
By February 2023? That number is up to 23 (granted, this is for just math, not math and reading… I’m trying to find reading scores and failing).
But having this many schools without a *SINGLE* student testing at proficiency strikes me as a policy failure that is difficult to overstate.
It’s not funding! These schools are in the top quintile of funding in the nation.
(I assume corruption is responsible for some of the gap. How could it not be?)
And, from there, I’d ask something like “What is the point of lower education?” and see if we could definitively hammer out if, maybe, the schools are actually doing what we want them to do.
Silly me, I asked that in 2018. Thanks to COVID-19, we now know that the most important point of lower education is “day care”.
And, yeah. I guess they’re doing a good job of that.
But religious schools could probably do as good a job of providing day care.
And it’s not like you could do worse than “zero percent proficient”.
So when it comes to “public tax dollars going to private unaccountable religious schools”, my first comparison would be to “public tax dollars going to public unaccountable areligious schools”.
What’s the baseline we’re hoping to beat? Is it “zero percent proficiency”? Seems like letting the young earth creationists have a shot couldn’t do much worse than was accomplished over the last half a decade.
Heck, if we wanted to limit it to theory, I’d say that “vouchers” would solve the problem. Money follows the student to their school of choice. That means that the parents would be deciding where the money went (as part of the whole “free exercise” thing) without the money being directly given to the school by the government.Report
I read those articles out of Baltimore, that is awful. That sounds like a massive failure of not just the school administrator and the system but the culture in general. It reads like there is a lot of absenteeism and problems that prevent academic success and these are likely going to have to be resolved by raising the floor instead of funneling dollars to unaccountable religious schools that pick and choose who gets an education.
Your argument is still extremely flawed though. Just because one system isn’t working in one place doesn’t mean that we should automatically flip to one that we know DOESN’T work. What a ridiculous comparison to make.
Also your framing of public education belies exactly what I said conservatives would say: You don’t really believe in the institution or public education, only what can be extracted from it. Why else would you say its simply “day care”?
Long comment short, you seem to be absolutely OK with public dollars going to private sectarian schools because a few schools in Baltimore aren’t doing great. Principals seem to account for little here.Report
Your argument is still extremely flawed though. Just because one system isn’t working in one place doesn’t mean that we should automatically flip to one that we know DOESN’T work. What a ridiculous comparison to make.
We don’t know that it doesn’t work.
Why else would you say its simply “day care”?
Because of the lockdown and Zoom schooling.
Prior to that, I thought that the point of public education was something where the goal was to teach a kid how to:
1. Read a book about as tough as Animal Farm and summarize it
2. Algebra I level stuff
3. Write a five paragraph essay
4. Read a scale, a thermometer, and a measuring flask
I mean, preferably, it’d be *MORE* than that. But I think that if we had kids incapable of doing that at the end of 12th grade that we could easily say the school was a failure.
But the lockdown taught me otherwise.
The point of school is day care.
Long comment short, you seem to be absolutely OK with public dollars going to private sectarian schools because a few schools in Baltimore aren’t doing great.
No, that’s a misframing of what I think. I am absolutely OK with parents deciding to use vouchers to send their child’s tax dollars to the schools the parents think would best educate their children (including if these schools were religious).
I see the intermediation of the parents as changing it from “public dollars going to private sectarian schools” to “free exercise”.Report
As I noted, when in doubt, reframe or recreate the scenario. Reserve the right to personally judge what is and is not acceptable. Decry change or use of technology. Giving money to a religious school or church is now “free exercise” instead of propping up sectarian education and eroding the common good.
It isn’t misframing, its the result of what you’re talking about – the erosion of the public good in favor of perceived personal benefitReport
No, I see the intermediation of the parents as changing it from “public dollars going to private sectarian schools” to “free exercise”.
The fact that the parents are doing it and not the government materially changes the dynamic.Report
Except they are being funded directly from the government with tax dollars, specifically for use at sectarian religious institutions that are explicitly operating to avoid the same regulations, civil and human rights laws, and acceptance standards as the public schools.
Could you imagine if we had a specific department that funneled money away from the local football team to support my members only football team. And they had to give us the best pads and let us play in all the school sports, but we don’t let anyone we don’t want to play with us. That would be absolutely a misappropriation of funds, yet somehow you’re ok with it because “free exercise”.Report
No, they are not. The parents receive the voucher. Then the parents give the voucher to the school.
That is not “directly”.Report
In Michigan there is a bag of money that is strapped to the kid’s head. I don’t get to see it but it follows her around.Report
I think its a very accurate characterization, especially considering the leading conservative groups have made this their explicit goal. Chip Daniels just posted the article below.
This is an explicitly conservative policy designed to funnel public dollars into sectarian institutions. This means that your tax dollars are going to be directly funding discriminatory institutions that are NOT accountable to tax payers. A “conservative” should be FURIOUS about this potential abuse of dollars, but instead, we see folks tap dancing around it with shrugged shoulders and hand waves.
You also didn’t address anything else, why is that?Report
conservative policy designed to funnel public dollars into sectarian institutions.
It’s a bad idea. Less so for the gov and more for the institution. Gov strings always follow gov money. Gov strings are going to include a lot of equality type policies that they’d choke on.
I would also think using tax money to teach children about god expressly breaks separation of church and state.
If it doesn’t then the Church of Satan (an atheist group) will have lots of fun with that and we’ll have the bible thumpers rediscover why they like the first AM.Report
If you think its a bad idea, do you still consider yourself a conservative on this issue?Report
I feel zero need to follow the conservative line, or the liberal line, on any issue.
Public or charter schools are a tool that I use to make my kids functional adults. They work for me, I don’t work for them.
Even a successful school can drop the ball for any specific child, even a child in a high functioning family. Ergo I strongly believe in vouchers.
I sent my kids into public schools. The system has failed for each of them at least once at various times. It’s my job as a parent to step in when that happens and fix things. Normally a visit to the VP is enough.
Once I got into a pissing match with the school administration bad enough that I moved two of my girls to a charter school for two years.
Charter schools are a club to be used by parents like me to beat the school administration until they do things correctly. Having done that I can say that a good charter isn’t better or worse, but they are different.
My understanding of the religious private schools is that they’re just as good as the public and don’t teach insane stuff… but I can also see how opening that door can enable bad players.
I guess big picture I think giving more power to parents and letting them have more control is the way to do things.
Religious schools getting state money is a problem in theory… but good grief, we have places where generation after generation of students get sent into failure factories.
Places like that need competition. I’d rather see non-religious charter schools compete rather than religious schools compete, but if the only local alternative is Catholic I can see how it’d be a lot more practical to just send kids there.Report
That makes a lot more sense than just saying “they are the same”. The issue is of course that every dollar sent to a private school is a dollar taken out of the public common good. Especially when private schools CAN (and often do) teach insane things, can discriminate, and often only pick the students that will make them look better.
The progressive case is that if we treat all schools well, fund them all, hold them to higher standards, and build a stronger infrastructure and community around them, you get less failing schools and the need for “competition” is irrelevant.
Still your answer is better than most, especially as you note that only a privileged few can benefit from it.Report
“The issue is of course that every dollar sent to a private school is a dollar taken out of the public common good.”
This is not accurate. A common good is an educated citizenry; public and private schools participate in this objective. A dollar spent on education advances that common good. It’s wrong to frame the Public Schools themselves as the primary objective.
Which isn’t to say that we oughtn’t fund public schools, but framing them as THE common good we’re funding and that any other dollar spent on a correct common good (Education) as a zero-sum loss is a misuse of the term common good and bad public policy.
We subsidize all sorts of Private Education, especially at the collegiate level… there’s no public policy reason that the only possible Dollar spent has to be spent on the Public School system we currently have.Report
When you take funds from a states coffers, like Iowa and Oklahoma have done, and then allocate those dollars to private religious schools you are taking dollars that were allocated to public school and handing them over to discriminatory institutions. It is no secret that in these states the school budget is capped, but the private vouchers are not – and the private schools then immediately increase tuition. This is well documented.
A common good IS an educated citizenry, and some private schools do that. Awesome! But those same institutions are only able to exist because of carve-outs from state regulations, civil rights laws, and now actual subsidy. That is at odds with the public common good. Its also not applicable to compare primary education with college education since those are funded and budgeted for differently, especially religious institutions. A place like Liberty university is a massive tax haven and money laundering location for wealthy conservatives. A dollar given to an institution like that is one that could have been spent on public good education instead of sectarian sub-par apologetic for example.Report
An educated citizenry is a common good but I don’t think that’s more than tangentially related to what’s going on with this in terms of policy or public sentiment. As implemented public education is a public service, that in order to be successful needs to operate in a manner and at a quality that is satisfactory to the taxpayer and in particular the parents that make use of the service. To wit, the case for public schools needs to be made on those terms if it is going to win out over these types of initiatives.Report
Yes. The question “what is the point of lower education?”, whenever I meditate upon it, should have answers like “educating children” or some stuff like that.
When I encounter answers like “we need to provide middle-class jobs for teachers”, I’m always confused.
The point of having a teacher is to teach.
Not to pay.Report
That’s exactly right. I’m still very sympathetic to the cause of public schools, despite my own choice not to avail myself of them with my children. The reality is that there was a lot of rampant ass showing during covid that needs to be addressed yet seemingly little appetite for doing so.Report
The issue is of course that every dollar sent to a private school is a dollar taken out of the public common good.
In practice this means [a specific child] needs to take one for the collective. That’s a very nasty situation.
If the public schools can’t earn my kid then I shouldn’t be forced to send her there. There are all sorts of corner cases where a specific school can not fit.
Especially when private schools CAN (and often do) teach insane things, can discriminate…
Michigan Charter schools are public. Ergo no insane things, no discrimination, and so on.
the need for “competition” is irrelevant.
This is unrealistic. A lack of competition means a lack of responsiveness from the administration.
Either give me the tools I need to deal with the school administration or I’ll move to a different district.
only a privileged few can benefit from it.
Ideally only a few will need it and “privilege” won’t come into it.
If the schools are terrible, then we’re in lifeboat territory. Just because we can’t save everyone on the Titanic doesn’t mean we should save no one.Report
Why would you counter “private schools can do bad things” with “this one Michigan charter school is public”. Thats literally public school????
The entire framing of this conversation with you is that public school is inherently bad and failing and its John Galt over here finding the proper school. That is how you get generational poverty and crumbling infrastructure: disinvestment because folks with money want to CONSERVE their status.Report
Public school is *NOT* inherently bad. I went to public schools and they were great! High proficiency scores in math and reading, high graduation rates, high rates of students who went on to college after graduation rates.
I merely don’t extrapolate from that to “therefore schools on the other side of the tracks are good too”.Report
Which is why we should work to make all of them good. The disinvestment from public in favor of charter, private, and religious school explicitly does this. It ENSURES the school on the other side of the tracks are not as good. This is why I call into question what conservatives are “conserving”. Remember, we onlygot here because self proclaimed conservatives said they stood for something about public education, and here we are at where others expected conservatives to end up: ” defunding public schools in favor of my religious one is GOOD actually.” This is at odds with the conservatives saying they want to ‘conserve’ public education and the public good is it not?Report
Eh, the schools in Baltimore are in the top Quintile of funding in the country. Montgomery County in Maryland was the fourth highest funded district in the nation in 2020, for example.
I doubt that moving it to third highest will result in significant gains in test scores.Report
Montgomery County is a DC ring suburb, full of highly degreed and highly paid defense contractors, lobbyists, and public servants. It has a very active and engaged parent community. It’s also not anywhere close to being part of the Baltimore universe.Report
Is that something we can look up? Yes, it is!
I suppose 1 out of 5 is hella better than 0 out of 5.
I still look at those numbers and see “FAILURE HOLY CRAP FAILURE” rather than “that’s pretty good for that part of the state”.Report
A lot of states handle charters differently so it’s important to make clear what the basic definitions are. Charter=Public. The local Catholic schools were private.
The entire framing of this conversation with you is that public school is inherently bad and failing
Depends on the schools. My local schools in Michigan were great and I still had to go Charter for two years because my kid became a corner case.
She was young for her age so I had her repeat grade 2… very much against the wishes of the school.
The school admin isn’t stupid, they know “repeating a grade” is going to include “moving the kid and her sister to a different school”. State money follows the kid so the Principal’s budget would be negatively affected.
Making her repeat the grade turned her from C to A. So what was good for the kid wasn’t good for that public school.
Pournelle’s iron law of bureaucracy applies. Normally my kids’ interests are aligned with the school, but not always.
That is how you get generational poverty and crumbling infrastructure: disinvestment because folks with money want to CONSERVE their status.
The question is what is supposed to happen when our interests diverge? If the answer is “my kid is expected to take one for the collective” then that’s unacceptable.
I have the resources to move or go private. The school does what is best for my kids or they don’t get my kids.Report
On a side note I have multiple kids, all girls, so I have a lot of stories on this subject.Report
Great that you have that option, but the challenge is you moving your kids involves money from other kids and other parents as well. Vouchers give their money to you and your money to them and allow you to not actually bear the cost of moving your kids. It significantly distorts the playing field.Report
Vouchers give their money to you and your money to them and allow you to not actually bear the cost of moving your kids.
Please restate how “the cost of moving my kids” is somehow larger than the unit cost per kid.
Eventually my wife and I stopped having kids. Me not sending my kid to school X by moving them is the same as me not having a kid.Report
This sounds like a massive argument for more funding to ALL schools and not have ‘money follow the children’. Everything you’re talking about in these examples are choices, CONSERVATIVE choices, on how schools are funded and what is valued by the districts. Imagine a district structured in such a way that repeating a grade (maybe we should get rid of silo’d grades too!) has no financial impact and is everything to do with the success of your student.
You’re looking at a conservative set up of public school, getting mad about it, and saying its best if we do MORE of that, just in a way that benefits folks with privilege: money, and resources, by further atomizing school funding.
Again, what is being conserved here?Report
Again, what is being conserved here?
In this particular case, the ability of parents to ensure that their own children receive a quality college-prep education.Report
repeating a grade… has no financial impact… and is everything to do with the success of your student.
Repeating 2nd grade means all her friends go to 3rd grade and she does not. This probably results in bullying or other issues unless we switch schools.
So the kid needs to change schools, which means the school loses a kid.
We have money follow the children so the school has some reason to provide value.
If we get rid of that then my local school is better off for my kid leaving.
I really don’t understand the logic behind, “making the school indifferent to parental/student concerns/desires/needs will make the school teach better”.Report
Again, what is being conserved here?
Parental ability to make their kid successful as opposed to having them fail because it’s better for the collective to ignore that specific corner case.Report
Competition is only appropriate where a profit motive exists, and none exists (rightly) for public services. This is the same bad thinking that imperils the Postal Service (which the Constitution mandates government to provide), Amtrak (which few if any private railroads will ever choose to compete with), and even local garbage collection. And oddly enough no one ever seems to question the need for more responsiveness from the military, though it is a government service as well.Report
Competition is only appropriate where a profit motive exists,
Unless a resource is as common as the air, we complete for it. Ants complete with other ants. People complete for mates.
In this case the “resources” are
1) School resources.
Money, Teacher attention, and so on.
2) My kids.
Your kids learn better if they’re in the same room as mine.Report
We should probably mention the number of failing and illiterate students being churned out by private religious schools, like the yeshiva schools in New York which were found to be graduating very obedient but illiterate students.
There isn’t any magic to education. The variables of private versus public union versus nonunion just don’t matter much.
The only consistent variables in predicting student success is the engagement of the parents.Report
The yeshiva students are literate, just not in English or other widespread languages. I understand the impetus for liberals wanting to reform yeshivas but I have very mixed feelings about it. A lot of it seems more like an assault a group they have no romantic affection for while they would be clamoring to have some small Native American group in the Amazon be allowed to remain in their traditional lifestyle untouched by modernity’s assault forever. These groups we hate get exposed to modernity and those groups we see romantically get full protection from modernity is not a great way to handle things.Report
Native American group in the Amazon? Is that yeshiva geography? And if it is in the Amazon, it isn’t our business, any more than the normal educational policies of Brazil are.Report
The answer to that issue is one of accreditation. Tax payer money shouldn’t ever be wasted on Jesus rode on dinosaurs schools, regardless of parental preferences, but plenty of private and parochial schools operate to normal, secular standards. The policy question about public schools as they exist today is really what happens to them writ large if you enable people to take their business elsewhere and a critical mass, including all of the families most invested in education, do so.Report
But no one is proposing to “let them take their business elsewhere”.
Vouchers never cover 100% of the cost, and private schools are not obligated to take anyone who applies.
So the “magic” of vouchers is that they allow the private schools to skim off the top performers and leave the low performers in the hands of the taxpayers.
No one is proposing any universal scheme for education. Its like homelessness, where when you press on the topic of what to do about the poor performers, people eventually just hem and haw and change the subject.Report
Yep.
This.
Totally.
With all its ugly race and class distinctions as well.Report
Are public schools entitled to top performers?
This is a serious question.Report
No.
So even if we allow all the top performers to go elsewhere, the question still remains: how to provide a good education for the low performers.
A question which everyone wants to avoid.Report
how to provide a good education for the low performers.
A question which everyone wants to avoid.
I’d love to explore it.
I do think that part of the solution is treating the students in the schools without top performers differently than how students in the schools with a lot of top performers are treated.
And that always results in people getting offended and asking “WHAT DO YOU MEAN TREATING THEM DIFFERENTLY!!!!” as if maintaining the status quo was the most important thing.
“Well can we fire bad teachers?”
And that always gets into how difficult it is to measure whether a teacher is good or bad (or, God help us, unions).
And, at the end of the day, it’s all about *NOT* changing things. Well, except for funding.
We could always use more funding.Report
Do you need an extension of time? Or maybe to phone a friend?
I mean, how long have you (both you personally and conservatives broadly) been thinking about and commenting about public schools? Decades?
And yet you still act as if this is the very first time anyone has ever asked the question and boy you will sure look into it you betcha and maybe we can study it some more and workshop and brainstorm and throw ideas out there.
And again, by “you” I mean the conservative world in general.
Can you point me to a link of some conservative proposal for how to provide a truly universal system of education that takes care of the low performers?
Can anyone here?
Feel free to go back 50 years because that’s how long conservatives have been complaining about it.Report
And again, by “you” I mean the conservative world in general.
So this isn’t something that I can address, even in theory.
I can point to a handful of studies, a handful of essays that I’ve written, dozens of comments…
And, still, the fact that Mike Pence hasn’t written something will be held against any position taken.
Hell of a trick.Report
Yes, this is exactly what I’ve said.
The conservative world has written volumes, entire library shelves groaning with scathing commentary on public education. They have spent decades and hundreds of millions of dollars on think tanks and studies and lobbying efforts for private and charter schools and all sorts of privatization schemes.
And at the end, after all this time and effort, when someone asks “How do conservatives propose educating the low performers?” all we get is nervous hemming and hawing.
But fear not. A guy on the internet is on the case and has thoughts.Report
And at the end, after all this time and effort, when someone asks “How do conservatives propose educating the low performers?” all we get is nervous hemming and hawing.
They’re probably nervous about being given the Charles Murray treatment.
But I’ve also noticed that we’ve moved to “How do conservatives propose educating the low performers?” and somehow ignoring the number of times that people have talked about stuff like “bring back shop class” and “bring back trade schools”.
“The World Needs Ditch-Diggers Too!” is the Caddyshack meme that I’ve seen a dozen times against people who make these suggestions, of course.
But this suggestion is out there. It’s been out there.
Comparisons to how Germany tracks different student groups. “Gymnasium”, “Realschule” and “Hauptschule”.
“I’M SURE THAT THAT SOUNDS EVEN BETTER IN THE ORIGINAL GERMAN!” is the criticism I’ve seen against that one. Which, I admit, is funny.
But this stuff exists. It has existed. It will continue to exist.Report
The spaghetti isn’t sticking to the wall.
This isn’t an idea, its a word cloud suggestive of an idea yet to be formed.
And again, note that this is the end product of 50 years of concentrated study.Report
“We should have a policy like this other policy that exists elsewhere” is a word cloud?
I’m pretty sure that your standard for something existing is higher than I would be able to provide in a comment.Report
Come on, you can do better responses than this. You sound like you’re reading off of bumper stickers now. Chip asked specific questions and you are only referencing what other people have said or use slogans without pointing him to or formulating any arguments for conservative takes on education.Report
you are only referencing what other people have said
HE WAS COMPLAINING THAT HE DIDN’T HAVE EXAMPLES OF WHAT OTHER PEOPLE HAVE SAID!!!
Seriously, where are the dang goalposts?
Do you want my opinions?
Do you want the opinions of others?
Do you want doctoral dissertations?
What do you want?
Because if Chip asks for X, you complaining that I didn’t give him Y indicates that you’re not following along.Report
Is “Comparisons to how Germany tracks different student groups. “Gymnasium”, “Realschule” and “Hauptschule”” the idea?
Is this what you are presenting?
Then by all means, lets discuss it.
Are you prepared to discuss it?Report
Only if you agree that I am not the first person in the history of discussing education reform in America to make the suggestion.Report
Great!
So that’s a good place to start.
Who is actually making this proposal? A person, a group, an organization, a political party?Report
So the first thing you want to discuss when it comes to the proposal is who is making it?
I’d like to see the next steps for the following answers:
1. Jaybird is making it.
2. Prominent Pipe-smoking Professor in the pages of the Atlantic
3. A queer-coded person of color in a wheelchairReport
Well, this is what I have been asking, if the conservatives generally have any ideas or not.
If the German model is something that is common and prevalent in the conservative world that’s one thing, but if its just something some minority opinion is proposing that’s different.
My point, which you seem to be accepting, is that the conservative movement as a whole doesn’t really have any coherent idea of what to do about low performing students.Report
So now they have to do something AS A WHOLE?
Do the Progressives, as a whole, agree about what should be done about low performing students?
Lemme guess. “More funding.”Report
Yes, they have that as an idea.
You can agree or disagree, but I won’t need to hem and haw for 30 comments trying to evade the question of “What Do Progressives Want To Progress?”
So without further hemming and hawing, what do the conservatives want to do about low performing students?
If its the German Model, lets establish that fact then discuss it.
Or if they need another 50 years, we can say that as well.Report
The problem is that no matter for whatever answer I give you, you will be able to show me a conservative that does not agree! Or worse, one who didn’t say anything about the subject!
So we’re no longer hammering out policies but whether the conservatives are unified about anything regarding education policies as the progressives are that we should give them more money.Report
So you realize that while you have spent all this time hemming and hawing I have been doing your work for you, right?
I couldn’t find any evidence of any major Republican official endorsing a proposal to adopt the German model.
Not at the national level- Trump, DeSantis, Haley.
Not at the state level- Youngkin, Abbot, Ivey.
I couldn’t find any record of a Republican state secretary of education endorsing the idea.
I couldn’t find any Republican Congresspeople or Senators endorsing the idea.
So I’m prepared to say that the answer to my original question: “How do conservatives propose educating the low performers?”
Is, nothing. Just a very concentrated refusal to answer the question.
Which is itself an answer that speaks volumes.Report
Chip, I don’t know where the goalposts are.
Are we discussing:
1. The policy
2. Whether it’s my policy
3. Whether some conservative somewhere has suggested it at some point in time
4. Whether conservatives as a whole suggest this
I would prefer to discuss #1.
I have no idea why #4 could possibly be of interest.Report
#4 was my question, that’s why.Report
Well, let me say:
No. There is no education policy that all conservatives will agree on.Report
Is there a policy which is promoted by say, the Republican who will be selecting the next federal Secretary of Education?
One which is promoted by a Republican state secretary of education?
We could talk about those if you like.Report
Is this year-old Politico article about Donald Trump’s education policy sufficient?Report
“How do conservatives propose educating the low performers?”
Nothing. Just a very concentrated refusal to answer the question.
Which is itself an answer that speaks volumes.Report
So Politico articles talking about Trump’s education policy aren’t sufficient either.
How about this webpage talking about the bills that DeSantis signed into law in Florida?Report
That link is to an OT page on another subject.
In any case, nothing in the Politico article or anything I’ve ever read about DeSantis, had anything whatsoever to do with the question “How do conservatives propose educating the low performers?”Report
Whoops.
That’s laws that he’s passed about reforming education.
OH!!! I GET IT!!!
You’re specifically asking about educating the stupid!!!
Man. Yeah.
Nobody talks about that.
What’s the progressive position on educating the stupid?
“They don’t exist, we just need more funding”?Report
Finally, at long last, we have the actual unvarnished conservative position.Report
Is he wrong?Report
Am I wrong to say that the conservative position on how to educate low performing students is “Hey they’re stupid and we don’t have any ideas!”Report
I meant, do the liberals have alternatives other than to claim there is no problem and/or more funding would fix things?
If memory serves another alternative is to break them up so every classroom has a disruptive student or two… the problem being while they’d benefit from that my kids would suffer.Report
There are always plenty of proposals being floated around and yes, every one of them involves more money, lots of it.
Because dealing with low performing troubled people always takes lots of money.
Allowing a large population of homeless people or mentally ill people or uneducated people leads to all sorts of societal ills, most of which end up becoming a police problem and hey, guess what is the universal solution for crime and disorder?
MONEY, and lots of it.
So we can spend a lot of money and resources dealing with a troubled low performing grade schooler, or spend even more money dealing with a juvenile delinquent, or insanely more money dealing with a gangster.
This is why I connect education to mental illness and addiction and crime because they are all the sorts of problems that even many liberals don’t want to face, not really.
There is always the temptation to be seduced by the “One Weird Trick” ideas that will somehow, magically, whisk all these people away to the cornfield where we never have to deal with them again.
This is why 19th century lunatic asylums and 20th century mental hospitals became snakepits of neglect and abuse because people just wanted to shuffle them off somewhere out of sight.
Even the most ideal highly performing society will always have some percentage of people who fail.
It could be business bankruptcies, divorces, poor students, alcoholics or mentally ill, but these people, and the vast amounts of money needed to deal with them, need to be a perennial line item on our budgets.
So I like to think the progressive idea is for us to grow up, put on our big boy pants, and deal with the problem instead of trying to shirk it.Report
It could be business bankruptcies, divorces, poor students, alcoholics or mentally ill,
If we’re talking about schools then the issue is the “poor”, who are being taught by their parents to fail. And we don’t have a good way to make them succeed against their will.
Throwing money at them without enabling things we shouldn’t is a tough hole to thread. Far as I know we don’t have good solutions after it becomes a culture.
So we give them opportunities and hope that eventually they grow up and take them. But we’re spending vastly more than we were in the 1950’s and the poor are still with us.
So I like to think the progressive idea is for us to grow up, put on our big boy pants, and deal with the problem instead of trying to shirk it.
How is that working out? Are there progressive cities that have thrown money at the problem and broken the culture of poverty?
We have that zero percent success school system which is also one of the four best funded in the US.
If you want to spend huge amounts of money, then it needs to be for success and not for failure. Spending money for failure is wasting resources on virtue signaling. It’s showing that we care while enabling choices that shouldn’t be rewarded.Report
If you want the varnished one, that probably explains a lot.
More funding!
(Oh, and I do have ideas. But they involve stuff like “different tiers of education”.)Report
“How do conservatives propose educating the low performers?”
Name and shame bad cultural values. Establish vouches and other ways to let interested parents flee bad systems to charters.
Hopefully some charter somewhere will find a solution we can steal.
We’ve already tried giving bad schools a lot more money and that hasn’t worked. If gov doesn’t have a solution then it shouldn’t be part of the problem.Report
Hear, hear! Also, stop subsidizing bad cultural values.Report
I’m also in favor of naming and shaming cultural values which lead to a lack of educational achievement.,
Though I am not sure what that would consists of, or how it would be any different than what is being done right now.
I mean, we already have public service ads where hip young people with backwards caps and baggy pants tell kids to stay in school.
More like this?
Is there reason to think this would move the needle on performance?Report
How about “duplicative language”?
“incomplete attribution”?Report
They are answering you, believe them when they tell you the first time. Again as I posited, the conservative mindset is about hierarchy, power, and reserving the right for them, individually and personally, judge others in a way that allows them control over who gets resources.
Naming and shaming bad cultures. We can all guess which cultures they are talking about, what ethnicity they are likely to be, their socioeconomic status, and age, etc. You pointed out that there are social costs for “leaving the ‘stupid’ behind” that are paid later in policing, drug abuse, poverty, etc. etc. But for the conservative that doesn’t matter. Its too far removed, they don’t get the cast judgement or control if we look at it long term or big picture.
No, it has to be individual bad people, or bad parents, or bad cultures that we need to name and shame, THAT’LL fix generations of disinvestment and disenfranchisement for sure! That way the conservative can pat themself on the back for conserving education by simply cutting out undesirables from the common good so their Rockwell painting looks better.
Its kinda gross, but its also what a good third of our country is proud to do. No plans to fix it, but plenty of plans to cast blame and fight against change.Report
Never mind waiting until the first time they tell you, you can decide what they think before they even tell you!Report
You seem to think that it’s a difference between what the two cultures are doing.
It’s not. It’s just a difference between what the two cultures are saying.
By insisting that there isn’t a difference between children who will benefit from a college prep education and children who will benefit from an education with a different focus and then engaging in white flight, you’re doing more harm than the cultures that come out and say “we need to treat people with different abilities differently”.
“NO THEY ALL DESERVE A COLLEGE PREP EDUCATION!” sounds sweet on the tongue and you might even feel better about yourself.
Wait. That might be the goal…Report
What are you talking about? Who said everyone needs to get college prep?Report
The people who are offended that we might treat high performers differently than low performers.
As for “who said everyone needs to get college prep?”, that was once one of the goals for Bill Gates when he was doing his education philanthropy in the early tweens.
Granted, he’s since abandoned that view.Report
What does any of that have to do with what anyone has been talking about in these few hundred comments…what?Report
It has to do with Chip moving the goalposts again.
He was specifically asking about students who were (euphemism).
Nobody wants to talk about students who are (euphemism).
My argument is that we treat students who are (euphemism) differently than students who are not (euphemism).
Like, different tracks.
He specifically switched between individual policies to wanting to know what Conservatives As A Whole thought about it and, lemme tell ya, there aren’t two conservatives who agree on stuff let alone “as a whole”.
And that turned into demands beyond “show me what individual politicians would do about education” to “specifically, talk about students who are (euphemism)!” which is a group that *NOBODY* talks about.
Not even Progressives!
They just segregate their best students away and talk about the importance of everybody getting a good education while their own kids are sequestered away from kids who might benefit from access to theirs.
Part of the eternal problem is the eternal moving of goalposts.
It allows you to complain that I’m talking about *THIS* topic instead of your topic.
Tell me where the goalposts are and I’d be happy to talk about your goalposts.
Until you move them.
Again.Report
What we established is that the most prominent American conservative who supports the German model is an internet commenter named Jaybird*.
Which is fine, and so we can discuss the German model on those terms.
So look, and this may surprise you, I am actually not opposed to the model of different tracks for different students. I personally think there are vast categories of good jobs which do not, and should not need a university degree.
*If anyone can name a more prominent conservative who supports it, I am happy to stand corrected.Report
For the most part, Conservative politicians are *TERRIFIED* to talk about students who are (euphemism).
So they don’t. The best bet is something like “everybody deserves a good education!” or, here’s a blast from the past, “No Child Left Behind!”
And, meanwhile, people send their own kids to the good school district.
Like, this isn’t just in Alabama but also California and Brooklyn and places like that.
It’s just easier.Report
This is what’s called “telling on yourself”.Report
Chip is right, you’re telling on yourself. You don’t actually want to talk about this issue. You keep pointing at Chip or me or Progressives about what ‘they’ would do with their kids or how they don’t like talking about different tracks or whatever. Here he has even agreed with you. Will you now respond to the other parts?
He has asked like half a dozen times for a specific policy that would improve education for all students and you keep coming back with accusations and descriptions of things that you think your opponent might like.Report
He has asked like half a dozen times for a specific policy that would improve education for all students and you keep coming back with accusations and descriptions of things that you think your opponent might like.
And now we’ve pivoted from “low performers” to “all students”.
Okay. Let’s talk about “all students” for a while and then we can complain that I’m not talking about “low performers” anymore.
I don’t know that it’s possible to improve education for “all” students. I don’t even know whether it’s desirable. The kids on my side of the tracks already get a pretty good one!
But, sure.
How’s about something similar to Germany’s tracking system? “Gymnasium”, “Realschule” and “Hauptschule”.
Most students will be assigned “Realschule” and be in the “regular” classes. “Hauptschule” will be given to the “low performers”. “Gymnasium” will be given to a relatively few very high performers. (Like, 16% would probably be too many. 10% is likely to better benefit.)
Most folks would not benefit from stuff like Calculus. Gymnasium would be for the kids that would. Most folks would not benefit from stuff like AP Physics. Gymnasium would be for the kids that would.
Similarly, the kids who would benefit most from Hauptschule would be the ones who would not, not for a second, benefit from reading Wuthering Heights. The focus would be on much more grounded topics with a specific focus on drill-and-kill and employability.
There.
How’s that?Report
So you’re arguing for a system that places children on different tracks based on their perceived ability. I am not entirely sure I agree with that, but at least that is an answer.
HOWEVER, to the other posters’ points, if that is a position you take, and you call yourself a conservative, can you point to other serious conservative thinkers, posters, politicians, writers, etc. that adopt this position.
OR
Is this YOUR position, not one that you find has truck with other conservatives?
If its the second, then the argument being made is that this is not a conservative position. Which means, if it isn’t a conservative position, we are still waiting for an explanation of the conservative position. That is where the frustration comes in.Report
If all you want is a policy that a politician holds, I linked to both Trump and DeSantis.
If you want mine, I posted mine.
If you are upset that Trump and DeSantis do not agree with me, I share your frustration.Report
I think the thrust of the argument is – those guys are leaders of the more conservative party. You have ideas that are different, but are at least ideas.
Why does the conservative party choose the bad plans – privatization of school, vouchers, religious institution funding by the state, defunding public education, segregation, etc – over yours?Report
Because they’re terrified of being called “racist”.
So they just engage in de facto segregation and give crap like “No Child Left Behind” to the schools with “low performers”.
(Don’t get me wrong. This is a popular solution!)Report
Why would they be terrified of being called racist because of the solutions presented, both yours, and the “low performers”?Report
The same reason Democrats spent the second half of the 80s and the early 90’s being terrified of being called “soft on crime”.
It worked. (Well, until it stopped working.)Report
Once again, telling on yourself.
Like, if a conservative said “Hey, lets create a three track system whereby not everyone needs a 4 year university degree, some kids can just learn trade skills!”
And your first instinct is to think, “Wow, people are going to find this racist!”
Why in the world would you jump to this? Unless maybe there is some reason why conservatives themselves are linking the three tracks to race.Report
Again: It’s not just “conservatives”, Chip.
Would that it were!
As it is, it’s happening in places like the Bay Area and Brooklyn.
It is just easier to have segregation than to actually do the work of testing and measuring and sorting based on such things.
Because if you test and measure and sort, you’re going to end up with variance and that variance is going to result in disproportionate distributions among the three groups and suddenly you have to start explaining your methods and deal with questions like “was the test biased?” and hammer out whether a question that asks about a child riding a bicycle over city blocks discriminates against rural children or whether a question about a children collecting eggs from chickens discriminates against urban ones.
Just put all of the black kids into one school.
And you don’t have to worry about any of that crap.Report
Are liberals being unreasonable to suspect conservatives of racial animus when discussing these things?Report
When discussing them?
Or when bringing them up as a distraction?
When discussing them? Not at all.
When bringing them up as a distraction? Hell, every accusation is a confession, I’ve heard it said.Report
I don’t understand, can you explain this a bit more?Report
Sure. Elections are won/lost on stuff like this. If enough elections are lost on it, politicians will start treating it like a third rail.Report
Like what? What is a third rail?Report
Two thoughts:
1. “He legitimately hasn’t heard of this stuff before. This is your opportunity to explain it to him for the first time. Don’t screw it up!”
2. “Of course he’s heard of this stuff before. He’s just hoping that you’ll say something that will allow him to call you ‘racist’ or ‘ableist’.”
Let’s pretend it’s #1.
In the late 80’s, early 90’s, “soft on crime” was pretty much the most horrible attack that a politician could make against another politician. Like, HW Bush got a *LOT* of mileage against Dukakis by bringing up Willie Horton, a criminal who had a weekend furlough and failed to come back. A year later, he committed an awful crime.
Bush attacked Dukakis as “soft on crime” and, dang, it stuck. People who wanted to vote for Bush were energized, people who wanted to vote for Dukakis found themselves on their back foot, and swing voters were more motivated to swing to Bush than to Dukakis.
This resulted in Bill Clinton in 1992 going out of his way to not appear Soft On Crime. When rapper Sistah Souljah gave a comment following one of the 1992 riots where she said something like “Black people kill Black people every day… maybe they should take a week and kill white people.”
A line that will get people sagely nodding in 2015 but, in 1992, had much less balance. It allowed Clinton to attack Sistah Souljah and shore up his bona fides among the swings.
Rickey Ray Rector provides another example. A prisoner on death row who, after a botched suicide attempt, was effectively lobotomized. The anti-death penalty folks argued that the death penalty should only apply to people mentally competent (if it applied to anyone at all, that is) and others argued that, no, Rickey Ray Rector’s crimes were committed when he was mentally competent therefore… blah blah blah. Anyway. Bill Clinton stopped campaigning long enough to fly home to Arkansas to make sure the execution went off without a hitch. And it did.
So, like, the “soft on crime” attacks worked so well that they resulted in the pendulum swinging back among the brighter lights of what was then the future of the democratic party. (The 1994 Crime Bill provides another example.)
The term “third rail” is a metaphor. In subway talk, the third rail is the one with all of the amps in it and, if you touch it, it will harm you. Maybe even kill you.
When a political topic is called a “third rail”, that means that it’s a topic that is *SO* fraught that politicians avoid it entirely because just talking about it will result in harm to their campaigns. Maybe even kill it.
“Racism” in the current year is similar to how “soft on crime” was in the 80’s and early 90’s.
Does that answer your questions?Report
Re: “soft on crime”
It’s important to point out that this messaging was so successful that twenty years later in 2016 people tried to knife Hillary Clinton by bringing up her remarks about “superpredators” and intimate that she was prejudiced against black men, only to find that the black people who’d been around then thought she was right, still did, and their only criticism was that they felt she stopped too soon.Report
No. I asked what part of this is equated to all of that stuff you mentioned. Something being popular or unpopular doesn’t really have any bearing on its truth, right?
If you’re saying its a “third rail” to talk about failing schools or educational reform is akin to racist policies from the 80s and 90s then aren’t you essentially saying that conservative policy is akin to that same policy so we have to keep mum?Report
Something being popular or unpopular doesn’t really have any bearing on its truth, right?
Not at all.
But it’s very easy to run with things that aren’t true for a long time, so long as the things that aren’t true are fashionable.
This seems obvious.
If you’re saying its a “third rail” to talk about failing schools or educational reform is akin to racist policies from the 80s and 90s then aren’t you essentially saying that conservative policy is akin to that same policy so we have to keep mum?
No, that’s not what I’m saying.
You asked what a “third rail” was. I hoped to be explaining it in such a way that would get you to say “yep, I now know what a ‘third rail’ is.”Report
No I asked what you were talking about was a “third rail” regarding education. You said “conservatives are loathe to talk about it lest it be a third rail” and i didn’t know what you meant was a third rail.
You cited a bunch of policy that was somewhat popular, but ended up being bad and/or misrepresented. I do’nt understand what that has to do with this discussion, especially since you seem to be coming from the side of conserving that same bad policy. That is where I’m confused.
Also if something isn’t true or is judged to have been bad or a failure, we shouldn’t go back to that thing, right? Or we should change the parameters and try again, right?Report
Oh, I misread “What is a third rail?”
When it comes to education, I’d say that No Child Left Behind ended up failing worse than the previous policy of Some Children Left Behind.
And so the question is whether we should go back to Some Children Left Behind (something that will not create utopia) or whether we should just get more funding (something that *MIGHT* create utopia), we’re stuck arguing about how raising funding won’t, in fact, create utopia and maintenance of the status quo is toxic.
But any suggestion that things change to something that we know won’t create utopia can be derided as imperfect.
So here we are.Report
So conservative policy enacted by conservative governments were so bad they are third rail, so they don’t want to bring it up again because its so unpopular?
Is that right?Report
Worse than that. Explaining why the policies would be better for everybody involved was a third rail.
Just explaining why we should officially do what we’re already unofficially doing was so toxic that conservative politicians couldn’t talk about it.
And then… at the end of the day… why bother? We’re doing it anyway. Why include it as a policy at all?
Granted: It wasn’t better off for the people at the bottom but… who cares? They don’t vote for conservatives and why should the liberals care? It’s not like they can get *MORE* of the votes from the people being hurt by the status quo.Report
Explaining why the policies would be better for everybody involved was a third rail.
“For some reason, whenever we explain why our policies would be better for everyone, we get called racist.
Is it we who are wrong and our policies are in fact racist?
No. No, it is the citizens who are wrong.”Report
And then… at the end of the day… why bother? We’re doing it anyway. Why include it as a policy at all? Hell, even the progressives are doing it.
Why bother peeing on the third rail?
Granted: It wasn’t better off for the people at the bottom but… who cares? They don’t vote for conservatives and why should the liberals care? It’s not like they can get *MORE* of the votes from the people being hurt by the status quo.Report
“For some reason, whenever we explain why our policies would be better for everyone, we get called racist.
Is it we who are wrong and our policies are in fact racist?
No. No, it is the citizens who are wrong.”Report
No, it is the citizens who are wrong.
Opposing whatever Blue wants to do is racist. It’s a political club that has little meaning.
The rest of the country doesn’t pay attention when Blue claims that math is “racist” or that it’s “racist” for parents to put their kids into good schools.Report
If you’re asking what I think you’re asking, then I don’t think Jaybird answered it. I think you’re asking “what part of being accused of racism for talking about low performers is analogous to being accused of being soft on crime 20 years ago?”. If so, then the answer is: both of these things carry such negative associations with the voters that they make it impossible to carry on a results-oriented debate.Report
1. “He legitimately hasn’t heard of this stuff before. This is your opportunity to explain it to him for the first time. Don’t screw it up!”
2. “Of course he’s heard of this stuff before. He’s just hoping that you’ll say something that will allow him to call you ‘racist’ or ‘ableist’.”
Lesson learned.Report
One thing that’s worth pointing out is that even in Germany Hauptschule isn’t exactly Hauptschule anymore, and has become more controversial as Germany has become home to more non-German ethnic groups, who have ended up over represented versus their share of the population. The question of whether there is a stigma attached to it has become more common along with changes to the demographics of the student body, and even among Germans Hauptschule tends to be the place where the children of those with various social problems end up. I know some German states have gotten rid of them by merging them into Realschule (and I don’t believe they ever had them in the former DDR/East Germany).
Our racial politics are of course much more fraught for a bunch of obvious reasons and it’s hard to see how we’d ever have them here as long as disproportionate impact is a to the legal analysis.Report
*meant to say ‘relevant’ to the legal analysis.Report
“Our racial politics are of course much more fraught”
(spit-take)Report
Heh I wasn’t sure how else to put it. But it’s why I think Jaybird is mostly having the better of this. I agree that conservatives stopped even trying to put anything constructive on the table about education 15-20 years ago. But frankly neither have progressives since the ‘Waiting for Superman’ flavor of it with charter schools and lotteries and evaluation got memory-holed, at least at the national level, when the results it yielded were muddled.
Now as best as I can tell there is a pincer movement with conservatives finding creative ways to stop funding public education altogether and progressives looking for ways to deconstruct it to hide the ball on various achievement gaps.Report
Yeah, the eternal question is “what’s the goal?”
If it’s to help students, we should probably figure out what helps students.
If it’s get more funding, hell. The students don’t matter. Test scores? Pffft. We’re going for a number one draft pick, bay-bay!Report
Yea, it’s where it would be nice to have real leadership from somewhere, helping us get some kind of better vision of what it should look like. Which isn’t to say I totally disregard what Chip and Jason are saying. At minimum what exists today needs some Chesterton’s Fence kind of consideration. There’s no guarantee ripping it down root and branch would be better. It might somehow even be worse, and in those worst of the worst cases it’s always seemed to me that the problems start at the homes, not the schools. At the same time all the doing the same thing and expecting different results or trying to redefine achievement in ways that no one finds credible isn’t doing any favors for the students.Report
The problem is that there are a number of schools that don’t have a single proficient student.
The worst has already happened within these schools.
Ripping it down root and branch is not the solution for schools with, oh, 20% proficiency.
I don’t know how else to deal with schools with zero.Report
Oh I hear you. My take is that we as a society don’t have the stomach for the kind of paternalism it would require to have any chance at fixing that situation.Report
Easier to just pull out of the neighborhood entirely and put your kids in a decent school and talk about the new school having a better drama curriculum.
“The kids are doing The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee this year! Bobby’s playing Mitch Mahoney!”Report
Doesn’t everyone agree on different tracks based on ability, except for a small number of pull-down-the-best extremists?
I think a bigger problem is that you’re asking for a broad conservative solution to a problem that conservatives would be inclined to solve locally or on a case-by-case basis. If a policy only “counts” if it’s accepted universally to be implemented nationally, well, that bakes in a liberal assumption, right?
Personally, I’ve said before that I favor a national GED equivalent. I think that breaks from conservative thinking, although I suspect that homeschooling reform will end up moving a bit in that direction. If homeschooled and privately-schooled kids have a document that certifies that they have basic knowledge and ability, I’d much rather hire them than someone who only has a h.s. diploma.Report
If that were really the case, then Ron DeSantis wouldn’t have had laws passed mandating what’s acceptable and what isn’t in school libraries and classrooms, since a good many Florida communities might disagree with the state.Report
The conservative inclination is to handle something at the lowest possible level. Maybe DeSantis believed that education reform had to be done at the state level: because of the extent of the problem, or the current state laws, or local areas weren’t as familiar with the issues, or a need to confront state teaching organizations. Or maybe he just wanted to do something high-profile to bolster his resume.Report
Yeah, if there’s one thing that shocks and outrages progressives, its a proposal to emulate a northern European country.
This is what I mean about “telling on yourself”, in that you first describe these people as “stupid” then describe your own proposal as something so shocking people might get ostracized over it. You yourself are reluctant to admit to it, like its something shameful, and your referencing Charles Murray doesn’t help.
The German model isn’t bad, and from what I can see most America progressives wouldn’t reject it out of hand…except.
Except your framing of it precisely tracks what we always accuse conservatives of, which is a latent reactionary view of humanity, that some people are just stupid and of lesser worth and that “tracking” is really just a euphemism for erecting a rigid class system.
It doesn’t need to be necessarily. But if one approaches it with the idea of certain people being “stupid” then yeah, its going to be a sh!tshow.
Oh, and you do realize that California in the 1950s devised a three track system of higher ed, roughly modeled after the German system?Report
Bingo, Chip.
I wasn’t gonna let him in on the ‘secret’ that these ideas have been floated before and were specifically dismantled by…..drum roll please…..CONSERVATIVES. Which still leaves us wanting for an answer to the issue with equitable public education.
And spot on pointing out the other part of what i was getting at: The inherent belief that there is a hierarchy and that some people are just inherently stupid/worse/slower than others by virtue of who they are or what race/ethnicity they are. That is the central conceit that conservatives rightfully hide in their language about responsibility and achievement.Report
Jason,
Please read Chip’s post carefully, especially the part where he says that tracking is OK so long as it’s not racist.Report
New York State had one when I went to school there!
It was called “General”, “Regents”, and “Honors”.
But if one approaches it with the idea of certain people being “stupid” then yeah, its going to be a sh!tshow.
Best to call them “low performers” and put them in “General”, I guess.Report
RE: If anyone can name a more prominent conservative who supports it…
Every HS I have seen does tracking, they just don’t admit it.
They’ll have the “normal” math which has the kids who aren’t interested in math and thus not interested in going to college. Then they’ll have the “honors” or whatever class which is the reverse.
And if your kid is serious about school and they get into the wrong track (child #1), then you need to step in and get them switched.
At the extreme (which I’ve seen), you can effectively have two school systems inside of one school.
If you’re interested in keeping your (mostly white) middle class around and preventing them from fleeing the school system, then this is an option.
The problem is your system may make the news every now and then as having your minority students do worse than in Detroit.Report
This sounds sort of like the situation at the high school I attended. It was an interesting experience because I came in after Catholic school for k-8 so neither me nor my parents understood how this worked nor did we get any guidance. Anyway I was always strong at English and Social studies so I enrolled in ‘honors’ for those classes but ‘regular’ for math and science. What I found was that the ‘regular’ classes were full of people ranging from the doing their best with what was just obviously very, very limited aptitude to people sleeping through class or for whom it was hard to tell if they were so antisocial as to not understand where they were or if they were suffering from some kind of serious learning disability. From what I understand remedial was basically a place for mainstreamed people with serious cognitive disabilities and people not quite bad enough to put into the juvenile justice system.
I effortlessly got A+s in the regular classes and the next year it was gently suggested I move to all ‘honors,’ which from my past experience at Catholic school was more like what I’d consider normal/average in terms of difficulty and the behaviof of the students there.
Over time I came to learn that people had quietly been tracked by the public school from a very early age in this manner. The top tier at my high school was GT, which I never took in high school and being the lazy pothead I was I never made a case to my parents (who remained bewildered by the bureaucracy) or anyone else, though I am pretty sure I could have cut it there if I wanted to. My personal achievement in life is comparable to theirs anyway, based on what I know anecdotally and see on Facebook.
This was in one of the top public school systems in Maryland and a better one nationally. I bring it up mainly because I assume this is the kind of hiding the ball that happens in most places, including the best.Report
Depending on your high school, normal math could basically be honors or gifted math elsewhere. Nearly 100% of my town’s high school graduates went on to college even if they were in the normal rather than honors track. At some school the normal courses I mainly took would be considered high level honors courses.Report
And there you go, there are no bad cultures.
The children of my drug dealing/using cousin should be every bit as successful as my own because success is random and/or the fault of society as a whole.
There is no such thing as individual responsibility. Cooking for a motorcycle gang(*) or joining a cult(*) is the fault of other people.
It’s my fault for being judgmental. The predictable outcomes aren’t predictable.
(*) Both RL but different relatives.Report
We already have a culture that names and shames drug users.
We’ve had a War On Drugs for longer than your kids have been alive maybe longer than you’ve been alive.
So you need to get specific and tell us what sort of things government can do, or what we can do as a culture, to reduce the amount of dysfunction.Report
So you need to get specific and tell us what sort of things government can do, or what we can do as a culture, to reduce the amount of dysfunction.
You are the one who claims to have an expensive solution where all we need to do is pay for it. My counter claim is we have some very well funded districts which have some truly terrible results.
My solution is to do what is best for my kids and not worry too much about other people’s bad parenting. We don’t (and shouldn’t) have the tools to deal with it.
My expectation is after enough generations their culture will deal with it’s problems.
The door is open for people to leave that culture. Too many people don’t but the door is open.Report
A certain percentage don’t know the door exists.
Another percentage doesn’t know its open.
Another percentage doesn’t know how to walk through it.
Yelling at them for not doing so helps no one.Report
This doesn’t make sense. Who’s yelling at them? And if the problem is ignorance, then telling them would be the solution.Report
Yelling at them for not doing so helps no one.
The laws of economics and probability are as merciless as the law of gravity.
I’m not the one who enforces them.Report
“They are answering you, believe them when they tell you the first time. Again as I posited, the conservative mindset is about hierarchy, power, and reserving the right for them, individually and personally, judge others in a way that allows them control over who gets resources.”
Are we sure this is an actual person and not just a test of someone’s ML model?Report
We had a discussion on these pages awhile back regarding “learn to code”. It has been suggested that people living in areas that are economically depressed and likely to stay that way due to the local economy being tied to a dying industry (e.g. coal) move away to where the jobs are.
This was met with the objection that family and hearth play have strings that cannot be broken, so moving is unthinkable. Meanwhile, the local economy becomes driven by minimum wages jobs and drug dealing.
Bad cultural values are seemingly impervious to shaming. The explanation can always be given that the shamer just doesn’t understand the values he is trying to shame.
Edited to add:
Which cultural values, in your estimation, are worthy of shame, and how do you propose to use this shame to effect positive change in cultures that currently have them?Report
Which cultural values, in your estimation, are worthy of shame, and how do you propose to use this shame to effect positive change in cultures that currently have them?
The big one is being married before having kids (or at least while raising kids). It’s ironic for me to say that while I’m divorcing my wife but that showcases how one parent can step in when the other fails or falls apart.
The next one is focusing on education and being willing to step in when things go off the rails.
Teaching girl #2 how to count and other math stuff. Making the school put girl #1 in the advanced math class. Holding girl #3 back a year. Too many issues for #4 and that’s a work in progress, probably the most important is getting her depression treated.
My actions have predictable results as far as success goes. Ideally other people will copy them. My children do.
The vast bulk of this has been stupidly cheap and an investment in time and attention rather than money.
As for how to get other people to do this… no clue. I see moral and media backflips to avoid calling dysfunctional behavior what it is. Clearly the core problems are micro-aggressions and math being racist.
I would end the war on drugs but if a sub-culture wants to be violent and dysfunctional then there’s not much to do but arrest them when they step over the line.Report
why do you assume its a conscious Want instead of a simple reaction to circumstances they don’t control?Report
why do you assume its a conscious Want instead of a simple reaction to circumstances they don’t control?
Because if we assume people don’t make choices the wheels come off. For example we shouldn’t arrest people for murder because the attacker didn’t make a choice.
No one has total control over their circumstances. But lacking total control isn’t anything close to having no influence much less having no choices.
Part of culture is you get to make a lot of choices for your children. Deciding to not get involved when the school system drops the ball negatively affects your kids.
Your success being the result of you and your parents’ choices is nowhere close to “success being random”.
My children’s big advantage has been me. Not my money, we’ve been through times when the money was very tight; But my attention, training, values, and the examples I’ve set.
We’ve never come close to figuring out how to compensate for that. There is a vast gulf between children who have involved parents and children who don’t.
The closest that we’ve come is accusations of racism and other attacks which could only be ended by us being less involved and less concerned.
That wouldn’t make various groups more successful but it would close the gap.Report
Jesus christ, can you stop making this same fallacy over and over again. Things aren’t black and white, advocating for a policy to regulate something doesn’t mean the crank is automatically set to 11. Saying “circumstances exist that give people sets of bad choices” isn’t the same as saying “since there are some circumstances that are not fair, we can’t prosecute murder”. This is some serious 4th grade apologetics and it cheapens the discussion and wastes everyones time.Report
The single mom working two jobs just to feed and house her kids has little time to “choose” to be involved. The black man who has to hustle loosies to feed his kids because there are few jobs – and none pay as well as the hustle – has little time to choose to show up at school and demand his children be educated more appropriately.Report
This makes stuff like Baltimore all the more shameful, doesn’t it?Report
And how is it that they are in this situation?
Didn’t bother learning to read or do math and now there are no good jobs? Didn’t get married or have an abortion because of welfare?
If you paint yourself into a corner, then you have no choice but to get your feet wet. The “choice” part was painting yourself into a corner.
and none pay as well as the hustle
Drug dealing pays a lot worse than min wage. Odds are Walmart pays a lot better than “the hustle”, but their skill level (or reliability) is so low Walmart won’t take them.
has little time to choose to show up at school and demand his children be educated more appropriately.
It’s impossible to take time off from “the hustle”? Really? Demanding stuff from the VP has been maybe 4 hours over the last 20 years.Report
Even by your own logic, your proposed solution (“Do what’s right for my kids”) is almost a liberal parody of what conservatives think.
Its the IGMFU theory, where everyone withdraws from community to their own sheltered place.
What makes it absurd is that it doesn’t work. As has been amply demonstrated by history, the kids you leave behind are very much going to be your problem when they become an unemployed and dangerous underclass, and you will then come to the rest of us wanting us to spend money on police to protect you.
So what the rest of us are saying is that if you want the protection and safety that comes with community, you need to become a part of the community.Report
So what the rest of us are saying is that if you want the protection and safety that comes with community, you need to become a part of the community.
Sure. But the whole “We all have responsibilities to each other” sort of crumbles when you aren’t fulfilling your responsibilities to me.
When “We all have responsibilities to each other” ceases to be a maxim for society and becomes a whip that you use to get me to do what you want, you’ve sort of lost all of your leverage.
“Take one for the team” only works if I am a teammate. And if I’m not one, appealing to me to give up more to become one won’t work.
No matter how much you appeal to some vague principle that you yourself don’t also follow.Report
Uh huh.
Now all you need to do is explain how we aren’t fulfilling our responsibilities to you.Report
“You’re screwing up my kid’s education.”Report
I am?
Chip Daniels of Los Angeles California is screwing up someone’s education?
What’s bizarre here is that when a child underperforms at school, conservatives shrug and tell us its not their problem.
But when the child becomes delinquent and breaks into a car, suddenly conservatives scream and demand that everyone pay massive amounts of money to protect the conservative’s car.Report
Watch this pivot. It’s a neat trick.
Question: “Now all you need to do is explain how we aren’t fulfilling our responsibilities to you.”
Answer: “You’re screwing up my kid’s education.”
Response: “I am? Chip Daniels?”
Do you see how quickly we pivoted from “We” to “I” in that exchange?
It’s a neat trick!
What’s bizarre here is that when a child underperforms at school, conservatives shrug and tell us its not their problem.
Oh, is that what’s going on in this conversation?
I thought that the complaint was that when a child underperforms at school, people move to where their children will perform better.Report
So explain who the “we” is in your statement, and how “they” are screwing up your kid’s education.
Then you’re still stuck trying to solve Dark’s conundrum, where when he needs police protection, suddenly we are obligated to provide it.Report
Remember when you said “Now all you need to do is explain how we aren’t fulfilling our responsibilities to you.”
That’s the “we”.
The “we” in that sentence. The sentence that you used.
And the police protection in my part of town, the part of town with the good schools, is pretty good.
It’s one of the reasons to move here, I’m told.Report
Who is the “you’re” in the sentence you used?Report
It’s a reference to the “we” that you used.
It’s a “you (plural)”.
Could be swapped out with “all y’all”.Report
You’re backpedaling.
“But the whole “We all have responsibilities to each other” sort of crumbles when you aren’t fulfilling your responsibilities to me.”
You seem to want to avoid explaining what you mean.Report
In this case, I’m talking about crappy schools that won’t teach my kids.
And you seem to resent that I’m willing to move to a district where my kids will get educated.
Like the other kids in that district are entitled to proximity to my child.Report
Where did I ever say that I resented people moving to a different school?
I’m just saying that moving to another school or no, all citizens benefit from education, and all citizens should pay the costs of providing it, for the same reason we all pay for police protection.
The fact that you don’t like the schools in your area doesn’t alleviate your responsibility to pay for them.Report
Eh, I’d rather move to a different community.
How’s this? You can keep pouring money into the schools though and have districts that are in the highest funding quintiles in the nation and still have zero proficient students…
And you can blame the kids that left instead of the schools.
How’s that?Report
Move all you want, you will still be obligated to pay for the schools wherever you go.
Seriously, this is what I mean when I say that if you just lay out conservative logic it always just proves embarrassing for them.
You guys are talking like sullen teenagers saying they don’t want to do their chores, but goddam, Mom better make a sammich pronto.Report
How’s this? I’ll pay for the ones in my community where my needs will be met.
And you can defend the status quo for the communities where there are zero proficient students.Report
How is that different than what is happening now?Report
Oh, you got me.Report
Chip is laying it out for you and you keep missing the point. You’re ALWAYS going to pay for it in some way. Your responses are just very much “I just want what *I* want and screw everyone else”.
He even gave a good example with the police. Your taxes still go there even if you never call them, yet strangely, you aren’t willing to shop for better police. Same for fire, roads, water, etc.etc.
What exactly are you CONSERVING here other than “what *I*, the conservative personally want”? There is no plan no ideology other than selfishness and exclusion in a lot of these responses.Report
If I’m going to pay for it even if it isn’t educating my children, *I* am not the one breaking the deal by moving.
The deal had already been broken.
What exactly are you CONSERVING here other than “what *I*, the conservative personally want”?
My child’s education.
What do you think you’re progressing?Report
The progress is literally why we have an educational system in the first place.
My ideology and its allies focuses on educating the public to build a better society.
Yours seems to self admittedly be trying to extract and conserve as many resources for yourself or who you see as your tribe at the expense of everyone else.Report
Well, if the only thing that the educational system is succeeding at is paying teachers to show up, I dare say that your progress sucks.
educating the public to build a better society
Man, as it is, you’ve got pockets without a single proficient student.
Maybe get your own house in order?
Yours seems to self admittedly be trying to extract and conserve as many resources for yourself or who you see as your tribe at the expense of everyone else.
The school districts aren’t educating the kids.
Don’t blame this on me.
Physician! Heal thyself!Report
Our “house in order” is EVERYONES house. You’re like that comic about libertarians who demand everyone swim as they shove everyone into the water while they are already geared up with scuba gear so they’re already fine.
That is the framing issue that keeps coming up. You keep sayin g”Get your house in order” or “you guys need to fix”…bro, we’re ALL ‘you guys’. We’re already in this together, all conservatives seem to want to do is pick and choose which parts they want to keep for themselves at the expense of others.
And the rub is that the issue isn’t even that life changing. You don’t even have to stay in a bad school system or stay on a struggle bus. THe issue is that the political actions undermine the entire system so NO ONE will have access to these things. You’re not just picking up stakes and moving, you’re picking up stakes and intentionally hollowing out everyone elses opportunities so NO ONE has stakes.
That is why there is such animosity on this topic, it isn’t zero sum, but conservatives sure as hell try to make it be to justify their behavior.Report
I wrote once here, about how the libertarians can never resolve what I call the Third Party Agency Problem.
Every engagement has three parties- Party A, Counterparty B and the Enforcing Party C.
C is almost always the government, which protects rights, adjudicates disputes, and enforces law and contracts.
Except that libertarians struggle with what to do when party C exercises agency and has goals which are separate and apart from the other parties. In libertarian theory, everyone should have the right to say No”.
But of course, the freedom to enjoy property rights and make contract is limited if the enforcing party ever says “No.”
Like, when the government says “We will only enforce contracts that are between adults” or “We will only provide fire services on condition of you following building codes”.
This agency puts boundaries upon parties A and B, curbing the unlimited freedom to act. Suddenly they have to abide by terms and conditions enacted by a democratic vote over their objections and from which they can’t withdraw.
No surprisingly, a lot of libertarians resolve this by rejecting democracy.Report
This is not a 3rd party problem.
The problem is two groups have conflicting needs / desires.
Less than functional children would benefit if my kid was in their class but my kid would suffer if that happened.
I’m hurting the concept of equality because my kid is high functioning and theirs is low.Report
Again, who the heck is telling you that you can’t leave?Report
A group that the government binds but does not protect and the other group that the government protects and does not bind.
Its weird how we keep coming back to the same initial critiques of the premeses laid out, isn’t it?Report
Conservatives are merely moving to conservative school districts that still teach algebra away from the progressive ones that have stopped teaching algebra.
If your system is so reliant upon conservatives, maybe your system needs to make more of them!Report
This is what I don’t get.
You defiantly declare “The Deal Has Been Broken!” and angrily storm off to another city or state where…you will pay taxes for schools like you always have, comply with laws like you always have, basically just continue to live under the same sort of structure you have always lived under.
So, what force or effect does it have to declare that the “deal has been broken”? It doesn’t come with any demand for any sort of change on anyone’s part. The only one who is doing any change is you.
Its like Steve Carrell facing the camera and shouting “I DECLARE BANKRUPTCY!!”Report
you will pay taxes for schools like you always have, comply with laws like you always have, basically just continue to live under the same sort of structure you have always lived under.
And my children will be educated appropriately where they wouldn’t have been before.
Do you understand that my focus is my child’s education?
I do not mind “we all have responsibilities to each other” if you are meeting yours to me. Sure. Then I will meet mine to you.
Suddenly, when you start failing to educate my children and I move, the problem is with *ME*?
I daresay that you’re ignoring where the problem is.
And, among other things, it has resulted in schools where not a single child is proficient despite having funding in the top quintile of the country.Report
Top quintile would be “top 20%”.
I thought it was one of the 5 best funded schools in the nation.Report
Here’s from the Baltimore Sun:
24,000 divided by 13,000 gives us around .1846 which would be about 18.5%. Which would be the top quintile.Report
Baltimore city schools are totally f’ed up in many ways. I know of specific examples where they cant even pay the correct wage to their employees, and salary changes (which happen every year) take months to be reflected in payroll. Don’t get me started on the Teacher’s union either.
It’s not an issue of funding, it’s an issue of competence.Report
It’s the conservative’s fault for leaving.Report
There haven’t been conservatives in Baltimore (of any magnitude) in decades, but sure, go ahead and blame them.Report
Who in the world is saying you shouldn’t move to where you feel best?Report
Do you just not remember saying stuff like:
So what the rest of us are saying is that if you want the protection and safety that comes with community, you need to become a part of the community.Report
How does that prevent you from moving?Report
Oh, it doesn’t. Moreover, it doesn’t prevent me getting protection and safety that comes with the new community.
It’s just the old one that is screaming that it has lost its “resources”.Report
What resources are they being deprived of?Report
Might be a question for Jason Benell.
But, if I had to guess, the resources would be “my tax dollars” and “my kid”.Report
That simply isn’t true though.
If you move from city to city, you still pay state taxes which are used to help your old school.
If you move state to state, your federal tax dollars are used to support various state school systems.
Dark Matter is still supporting his old school district via all manner of federal programs.
Would you like to engage in a relationship and have a conversation with your fellow citizens about how your tax dollars are being spent?Report
Then what’s the problem when I move to a good school district?Report
My take away is that the system is so good it can’t be left or changed but the outcomes so inequitable it can’t be defended.Report
I dunno.
Ask someone who says its a problem.
But of course, after all this chatter, no one has yet been able to answer my question:
“How do conservatives propose to deal with the low performers?”
I know that you personally want to implement a tracking system and that’s cool.
But I can’t find anyone anywhere who can tell me what a conservative position on low performers is, or what a Republican position is.
They all just seem to want to mumble and hem and haw and change the subject.
Don’t you think that’s weird?Report
“How do conservatives propose to deal with the low performers?”
Same way the progressives do.
Move away. Segregate.
The official position? “Every Child Is Entitled To A Quality Education!”
The unofficial one? “Twenty bucks. Same as in town.”Report
Well you got the first part right, which is that the conservative position is to ignore troubled people then when they become too troublesome, arrest them and put them in jail.
Liberals have a slew of programs and interventions some of which work better than others.
But here’s the thing- even conservatives admit, even if only tacitly, that the “Ignore and Jail” approach doesn’t yield good outcomes.
Exhibit A is your posts on urban ills. If the “Ignore and Jail” approach produced good outcomes, we would have seen it by now.
Even you and Dark Matter can only respond with “well, it works for me and mine” which is a tacit admission that it fails to work society-wide.
So why should anyone listen to conservatives on this issue when their preferred approach has failed so consistently?Report
Yeah, surely they should ignore conservatives and listen to the Californians on how to make a utopia.
The question isn’t “conservatives” vs. “how good it could be in theory”.
It’s “conservatives” vs. “progressives”.
And the progressives kinda have a crapshow going on, Chip.
Seriously. You’ve got the Baltimore stuff, the “getting rid of algebra” stuff, the “let’s dumb down the SATs again” stuff, and it’s started leaking out into the Ivies.
Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.
Instead of moving away to one of those little Mousetrap communities where there is a dearth of new multi-family housing units but surprisingly good schools and good police response times (not that you’ll need that second one).Report
Like, where would we see conservatism producing good outcomes so that we can study it?Report
Those school districts with proficiencies in, oh, the 70’s.
They’re out there!Report
California has those too!
But I wasn’t asking about districts because thats where we started, of people moving to good districts.
I’m asking for evidence that the conservative approach Flight/ Ignore and Jail works.
Look, you are Mr. Scientific Method, right?
Lets put it into Scientific Method terms:
Conservative Hypothesis: If we allow high performing people to flee, the low performing areas will be forced by competition to improve, or be replaced by high performing ones.
So after decades of applying this theory, we would expect to see it happening wouldn’t you agree?
Especially when we have entire states like Texas and Mississippi and Alabama which have been run by conservatives for several lifetimes.
So to test the hypothesis, could we study these states and see if indeed the low performing areas have improved?Report
Conservative Hypothesis: If we allow high performing people to flee, the low performing areas will be forced by competition to improve, or be replaced by high performing ones.
Where in the hell did you get this?
It’s falsified, I tell you that much.
“If we allow high performing people to flee, the low performing areas will be forced by competition to maintain the status quo by not changing anything but screaming for more funding.”
Now *THAT* is one that will get the big green check in the box.
I’d say that the Conservative Hypothesis is “if we leave, we can move to a place that has good schools and our kids will be better off than if we had stayed”.
And the counter-response to this is something like “how dare you, you need to create community, what about our resources” and so on.
I can provide evidence of people rankling at the idea of people engaging in exit, if you’d like.Report
You can change the hypothesis, but all you’re doing is once again sidestepping my question-
“How do conservatives propose to deal with the low performers?”
All you’re saying now is “Lets run away!”
Which is as silly as it sounds.
And it once again, tacitly admits that running away doesn’t produce a good result for society, so once again, why should anyone listen to you guys?Report
Which is as silly as it sounds.
It only sounds silly if you don’t make noises that drown it out. Noises like “MORE FUNDING!” and “RACISM!” and “I WEEP FOR YOU! I DEEPLY SYMPATHIZE!”
If you make those noises loud enough, you can make yourself forget about your own segregation problem.
Even if others keep bringing it up!
And it once again, tacitly admits that running away doesn’t produce a good result for society, so once again, why should anyone listen to you guys?
The stuff that will produce a good result for society is… well, let’s say it’s under dispute.
So, in the absence of being able to institute stuff that will produce a good result for society, why not do what is best for one’s own family, among other families who have similar standards?
You might even be able to enjoy a decent musical every April.Report
Conservatives have been given decades, generations to give us their ideas for what would produce a good result, and all they can say is “We can’t tell you because we would sound like terrible people”
Which is one of those things that to speak it is to refute it.Report
You can’t beat something with nothing.
I have a solution which worked well for me.
Your counter claim is it doesn’t work for everyone.
That’s true. It’s not a perfect solution.
So… what is it that would work for everyone, and why doesn’t it currently work in the nasty Blue enclave schools?Report
We’re coming back around to “conservatives don’t have a grand strategy for everything”. Which will bring us back to d’oh.Report
You already know what it is.
You went to a school with it. You got a job with it. You pay taxes with it.
You’d move your kids to a school district that had it.
And you get upset when you see Conservatives doing it.
When it comes to what Progressives are doing? I admit, I don’t understand getting rid of algebra until 9th Grade.
But I can totally see getting one’s own kid tutored while holding all of the other kids back.
It’s just that *I* am not that ruthless. I’d only withdraw my kid from the school.Report
If we’re in a place where the conservative position is “Something so awful we dare not speak its name” then, I’m feeling pretty good about the future of liberalism.Report
Only one of the two positions entails getting rid of algebra.Report
Only because math is racist.
Their solution for how to make everyone equal is to lower standards so an “A” and a “C” are just as good.
Because racism.Report
I think that’s another component of the issue that isn’t well handled in the political discourse. It can’t be both great equalizer, or at least a common good that raises the basement in a way we all benefit from, yet also a colonialist tool of perpetual oppression and exclusion of (some but not other) racial minorities.Report
At least in my school district, you took algebra in the 9th grade if you were in normal tract and 100% of us went on to university. The 9th grade was Algebra 1, the 10th grade Algebra 2, the 11th grade was Trigonometry, and the 12th grade was Pre-Calculus. For honors kids, lower everything a grade and have 12th grade be Calculus. Algebra in the 9th grade just seems normal to me.Report
I found a list of the “top 25 jobs”. They did some balance of pay, work/life balance, stress, employability, and so on.
24 of the 25 were basically math and the one other was nursing. If we narrow that to one job it would be “learn to code”.
That list was pretty normal for it’s type. The world needs more math now days.Report
No Geometry? That was Grade 10 for us. Algebra, Geometry, Trig, Pre-Calc.Report
Geometry was 8th grade I think or included in Algebra II.Report
I jumped over to the google and put in Algebra 1 and it, apparently, covers stuff like “Evaluating expressions with one variable” (9/X +4 = ? when X is equal to 3 (and 9/X is written as a fraction)), equations with variables on both sides, and linear equations.
That’s stuff that I got in 7th grade (back in the 80’s).Report
I think the core policy question and dispute is less about when the specific milestone is appropriate but more about what direction we’re going in.Report
… more about what direction we’re going in.
Equality.
Progressives want equality of outcome, not opportunity. Anything that gets in the way of that is “racist”.
Thus letting high achievers learn math ahead of the low achievers is racist.Report
Yea I tend to think among the more misguided things we can do as a society is hold back the gifted, or even just the competent achievers, in a Quixotic attempt to change the performance of those who for whatever combination of nature, nurture, or attitude just aren’t getting it done. The only people benefiting from that shit are the Chinese.
To me the answer for that latter group isn’t about academics. Some people aren’t and never will be academically inclined. It’s about what our society provides as a baseline quality of life for those low achievers at the bottom of the pile, and in most of the US what happens to them is still probably morally acceptable in context. Where that’s not the case the problem isn’t about students not getting good grades, it’s about total social breakdown. If they were getting jobs in manual work and making enough to modestly support themselves, as opposed to ending up in jail or shooting each other, no one would care that they can’t do algebra.Report
It will depend upon school district and track. We had Algebra in grade school too; just that HS Algebra was more complex variables… then a ‘weird’ hiatus to do Geometry proofs. I’m told that some districts have put Geometry in year 1, or tried anyway.Report
My high school attempted what they called ‘integrated algebra and geometry’ which was supposed to organize everything by concept. The idea was to do IAG1 freshman year, IAG2 sophomore year and IAG3 junior year. If it worked it was supposed to have the average student ready for calc instead of pre calc senior year. Unfortunately (or fortunately?) the whole thing was declared a failure a little over halfway through my sophomore year at which point IAG2 reverted to a crash course in geometry then we just went on to algebra 2 junior year. Admittedly math was never my strong suit but I’ve always figured this experience was a significant contributor to me testing into below credit level math in college and having to do a remedial course.Report
So why should anyone listen to conservatives on this issue when their preferred approach has failed so consistently?
Team Red is responsible for setting policy in Liberal Enclaves where Team Red hasn’t been dogcatcher for decades?
Red’s solution is for people who care about education to flee to good schools.
Blue’s solution is the same plus pretend that they aren’t doing that and that their virtue signaling programs will work this time.
I wish Blue well, I hope your programs work this time, my last kid will stay in her majority minority well ranked school until she graduates.
If Blue actually fixes this issue then you’ll be solving a whole host social problems and helping vast numbers of people and we’ll have a lot of economic growth.
But I’ve been hearing how [program x] will fix things for decades, I want to see it work for about 10 years before I congratulate you.Report
Same question as above.
There are vast areas of the country where Team Red has had unfettered control for lifetimes.
So is the Flight theory working there, to make low preforming districts better?Report
There are vast areas of the country where Team Red has had unfettered control for lifetimes.
So what? This is a local issue. I’m sure you can cherry-pick a place in Texas that isn’t a Team Blue enclave.
However no one questions that the bulk of places with brutally nasty schools is Team Blue.
You have claimed in this thread Team Blue has solutions while Team Red does nothing.
Team Red has a solution that works for people who care about education (also used by Blue).
Team Blue’s solution for the people who don’t care about education is… what?
If Blue has solutions that work, as opposed to cost a lot and still don’t work, then you don’t need Red to implement them. You can fix Chicago, New York, Baltimore, and so on and show you know what you’re doing.
Implement them, show that they work, and Team Red will gratefully steal them and try to claim credit.
But afaict, Blue doesn’t have better solutions than Red. They just like to claim otherwise. I’d love to be proven wrong.Report
Team Red has a solution that works for people who care about education (also used by Blue).
“People who care about education” don’t need solutions- they already are going to do just fine. Its like saying you have a health care plan for people who are healthy.
Team Blue’s solution for the people who don’t care about education is… what?
Glad you asked!
There are programs that have been proven to make measurable improvements in the lives of the children you are talking about.
Head Start is one, school nutrition is another, day care is another, free contraception is still another. The direct cash payments Biden made during the pandemic literally moved the needle on poverty and benefitted millions of low income people.
These things are not miracle cures, but they each have been proven to help at risk children avoid the cycle of poverty and crime.Report
Head Start is one, school nutrition is another, day care is another, free contraception is still another.
If they are giving my kid a free lunch then they are deep into program creep but whatever.
All of these are aimed at pre-school or earlier, i.e. not helping “low achievers”.
Head Start and Free Lunch have been things for a long time. The current world is after they do their thing.
The other two… won’t end poverty in a century by themselves.
I’m not opposed to any of these, but they’re not even an extra lifeboat for the Titanic. Maybe a half a lifeboat. You have been complaining that Team Red has no way to save everyone.
The direct cash payments… benefitted millions of low income people.
Including me. Might be an issue with a program that counts me as being low income. However we’re not one pandemic away from getting rid of poverty.Report
“How do conservatives propose to deal with the low performers?”
Depends on the situation. There are various problems and they have various solutions. Here are three big categories.
There is a problem with the kid that can be fixed, we fix it. My two youngest fall into that group. Whether that works without an involved parent is dubious.
For kids who are bringing their problems into the classroom and dragging everyone else down, we should be wondering if they should be segregated.
This takes us into lifeboat ethics. I get that not educating them will result in a future problem, but if we don’t know how to educate them then we’re going to go there anyway and we should save/education who we can.
If the school system is well funded and doesn’t have heat, then odds are we have adults behaving badly. Corruption and/or incompetence.
If the gov behaving badly is a serious problem then the solution is to empower parents to vote with their feet. My experience is long before the Public Charter steals all the kids, the school system will reform.Report
what force or effect does it have to declare that the “deal has been broken”? It doesn’t come with any demand for any sort of change on anyone’s part.
You make sure my kid doesn’t have disruptive kids in her classroom or we pull her.Report
There is no plan no ideology other than selfishness and exclusion in a lot of these responses.
My plan is to get a great education for my kids. I would prefer to use public education because it’s cheaper and I’m already paying for it.
A great education, by definition, means not having disruptive children in my kid’s classroom.
And that is the source of the problem right there.
It is not a high bar, nor unreasonable, to insist this. I’m not saying all the kids add to her education, just that they don’t subtract from it.
If the collective can’t or won’t do this then I will move elsewhere and take my tax dollars with me.
I can only control my own actions.Report
Like the other kids in that district are entitled to proximity to my child.
High functioning kids, or even just functional kids, are a resource.
Children with serious social problems learn best if they’re surrounded by kids who aren’t disruptive and who want to learn.
That is the big resource that we’re taking away.
However the ideal number of disruptive kids in my kid’s classroom is zero. If there are 5+ disruptive kids in there then there is no learning.Report
Dark’s conundrum, where when he needs police protection
Amusement. When I called 911 on my wife, 5 cop cars showed up. When we had some random lunatic wandering around harassing people, 2 cop cars started following him.
Whatever your problem is for me in theory, in practice the local murder rate is zero and the cops have bandwidth to respond to issues before they become problems.Report
What vague principle are we talking about here?
Chip isn’t asking you to go join the revolucion. Just maybe pay taxes and support public education for all without obstructing the policies that do so.
What your response reads is less of a high minded conservative argument and more a conscious choice to torpedo community to benefit yourself.
Is that a good position to have?Report
What vague principle?
“So what the rest of us are saying is that if you want the protection and safety that comes with community, you need to become a part of the community.”
I quoted it.
What your response reads is less of a high minded conservative argument and more a conscious choice to torpedo community to benefit yourself.
If the community is torpedoing my child’s education, the community needs to stop doing that.
An appeal to my being a member of the community and so, therefore, my kid has to take one for the team is a crock.Report
What if, and stay with me here, what if the community torpedoing your child’s education…are the people that agree with you and have the GOAL of torpedoing education so they can concentrate resources to themselves.
Does that change your view of things?Report
Sounds like a good reason to move to another school district, no?Report
Then your are simply conceding that you’re not interested in community building or investment or public education. You’re more interested in your own individual perception of success.
Which is fine, thats a valid position to have, but it is not one that supports public education.
Which is why this original article has caused such a problem. It very much seems, as has been posited by many people here, that conservatism and what they are trying to ‘conserve’ is not an alternate or better way to build a society. Rather, its a function to preserve power and hierarchy for themself (the conservative) at the expense of everyone else.Report
In this particular case, I’m already being screwed over and there are communities out there where I won’t be.
“but it is not one that supports public education.”
What if I move to a good school district and start screaming “MORE FUNDING” at the top of my lungs?
Do you think that might help?
Hey, you know what? You could move to Baltimore! Help out those school districts. Do you think that your kids could turn one of those “zero proficient students” schools into one of the “one single proficient students” schools?
I will google moving van companies for you!
Or are you not interested in community building or investment or public education?Report
what if the community torpedoing your child’s education…are the people that agree with you and have the GOAL of torpedoing education so they can concentrate resources to themselves.
This is like saying something can be both Tea and Not-Tea at the same time.
What specifically am I doing that is a problem for the disruptive kids who don’t want to learn?
Refusing to let them subtract from my kid’s education? Something else?Report
I think it’s also a mistake to look at schools in a vacuum. Usually the people evacuating an area are doing it for more reasons than just the schools. Schools are probably in every top 5 list I’ve heard of why people moved out of Baltimore when they decided to have a family but it also typically includes things like being tired of having their car vandalized or living in fear of being mugged after dark.Report
almost a liberal parody of what conservatives think.
Everyone does this. Blue segregation is just as intense as Red. I’m just more self aware and own my actions.
Its the IGMFU theory
No, those people make it harder for others to follow them. I simply care more for my kids than I do for other people’s.
My class is responsible for most of the educationally uplifting activities. The baseball team needs 8+ more kids if the coach’s kid is going to have a team.
What makes it absurd is that it doesn’t work.
Four highly functional daughters suggests it does.
they become an unemployed and dangerous underclass,
They already are. You’re reversing cause and effect.
Further we also already need to spend money on the police because of that. Less so now because crime is going down so maybe they’re learning.
The dangerous underclass eats it’s own.
Violent young men kill each other over “respect”. The safest thing for me to do is not get involved.
Their children don’t want to learn. They can go not learn without disrupting my kids.Report
At this point I should jump in and say that social conservatives believe in doing the work to fix culture, but that’s not a policy thing. Dark Matter or Jaybird may not agree with Adams, but I believe that our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people and is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. Dark, Bird, and I probably all agree that our system doesn’t have the ability to coerce wrong-thinkers into right thinking, and that ultimately no system should attempt to do so.Report
Who defines moral? And considering the number of atheists or agnostics involved in the early formation of our nation why the religious emphasis as well?Report
It is interesting. Maybe Adams had a lot worse perspective than we do, or maybe a lot better.Report
The entire existance of the Southern Baptist denomination was founded specifically to avoid universal education. This is why I brought it up in the first place. The conservative solution to public and universal education is to silo themselves out of it, skimming public funds where it can, and privileging their whims over the public good.
This isnt’ me just saying this to be mean, this is the track record of conservatives on education. This is why I genuinely ask “what are you conserving” when the legacy is bad for education.Report
Which is actually a return to the pre-20th century model of universal education, where those who could afford an education did, while other didn’t. Where cities were rife with mobs of uneducated and frequently violent peasants who had no prospects for betterment.
Or like modern day 3rd World nations which are mired in poverty since they lack an educated workforce.
And like I mentioned before, when conservatives actually point to some earlier era , or other existing place which we can study, it always proves embarrassing for them.
As another conservative might say, we should look at existing structures and question why they were constructed before we tear them down.Report
Exactly. That is why I engaged with this post. I wanted to hear the critiques on what conservatives think of things. Instead, as you say, the past is embarrassing or doesn’t exist, so they back away from that and resort to platitudes and hand waving.
No conservative ever wants to say “I want to conserve how it used to be”.Report
No conservative wants everything as it was, and no liberal wants everything different. That’s not much of an observation though.Report
The conservative solution to public and universal education is to silo themselves out of it… privileging their whims over the public good.
My priority/duty is my kid. I assume other parents’ priority is theirs.
There are lots of people like me, we’re an entire class. We do various educational enhancement things like coach the baseball team.
We’re not opposed to other people’s children doing well. The baseball team needs 8 more kids so they’ll benefit too and that’s good.
Education is a very high priority for me and my class.
If the public schools can meet my standards then that’s great. I personally have sent my kids into public schools after moving to be in district to the best ones.
If they can’t meet my standards, if they’re going to insist on putting my kids in with kids who disrupt my kids’ education, then that’s a problem to be solved.
The obvious solution is to remove my kid from that class. If the public school is willing to do that then great, they can keep my kid (this is known as “tracking”).
If they’re not willing or able to do that then it’s my problem to solve.Report
I’m pretty sure that’s close to what just happened in Arizona and is what is being debated in other red states.Report
“Tax payer money shouldn’t ever be wasted on Jesus rode on dinosaurs schools”
that’s cute. now do madrassas. (make sure you don’t do it racistly!)Report
Why would I care about that?Report
There is an anti-evolution strain in Islam as well as in Christianity. In neither case is it the mainstream view. If a madrassa is teaching bad science in the service of religious dogma, it shouldn’t get taxpayer money.
Does that work for you?Report
“Does that work for you?”
I dunno, an old white dude with a college-degree job telling me how brown Arabs are uneducated religious zealots is not a good look.Report
Reading comprehension again, DD? Do you deny that there is an anti-evolution strain in non-mainstream Islam, as there is in non-mainstream Christianity? Do you think that schools, Islamic or Christian, who teach bogus science for religious reasons ought to get public money to do it? And, if so, why?Report
Yeah; my wife an I were just talking about this. The likely next iteration of Homeschooling will have more uniform and easier to abide by standards of accreditation, progress testing and graduation tests.
We think this is coming and are fine with it in theory… as long as public schools are subject to the same tests and everyone should have to take a HS Graduation test.
The primary objective, of course, would not be to set HS Graduation at the Median, but to set the requirements at – pick a number – the 10th percentile. Most *should* graduate, but 10% (5%? 1%?) won’t. The difference is that while we’re all tested to be above the 10% bar… no institution can just handwave folks through a process and force testing on institutions not themselves.
Similarly, accreditation is standards based and not brick/mortar based; this is 80% of how colleges operate (you can even *pick* who accredits you) and it works fundamentally as a check on process, not on content. I think most people imagine that accreditation implies a stamp of approval on content, but it really only focuses on whether the school is meeting basic requirements for reporting on how their processes work and line up with their mission and some baseline criteria.
So yes, opening-up multiple layers of access to education funding would reasonably be based on these sorts of principles — if you wanted the extra funding.
The ‘danger’ the homeschooling folks anticipate is a sort of ‘testing for thee but not for me’ combined with the sort of regulatory regime we see a lot in Farming — that is, step 1 of the regulatory guide is how big your parking lot must be and where the state inspector’s parking space has to be in relation to their office and private bathroom…
An additional ‘danger’ though would be the content policing… and here you have to abide by ‘The Great Truce’ and stick to basic skills testing… so Yeshiva students would need to learn English, Algebra, some Natural Sciences, and some social studies — enough to master what 10% of the population has to master — but other than that? It teaches what other subjects are important to that community.
Yes, I expect people to focus on EXACTLY WHAT YOU MUST READ TO BE AN AMERICAN … and no, I don’t care that they are wrong before I see their list. And yes, the lists at some schools will be lists that I wouldn’t send my kids to.
The funny thing is that there would potentially even be support for new ideas to address certain concerns about exclusivity… like lottery enrollment for qualified applicants and access to extra funding for special needs.
The pie will get bigger; wetter, and wilder.Report
A bigger, wetter, wilder pie might be good. That said I’m pretty ambivalent about all this as a policy question. My main gripe with the public schools is that they (or at least those local to me) seem to have systematically eliminated all avenues of accountability, which is what I see as the root cause of what we saw during covid.
At the same time I try not to kid myself about what is and isn’t possible. I went with the Catholic school up the street because they showed their true colors (in a positive way) by being available when the kids needed it most, and when I went to talk to them all they wanted to discuss with me was their goal and track record of getting all
of their students at or above grade level in math, reading, and writing. Not having to put my kids in CCD to do their sacraments was a bonus but far from determinative. When I spoke to an administrator at the local public school all he wanted to talk about was other things that I don’t even want go get into lest it derail the topic. Suffice to say I left questioning whether they held educating students as an important part of the mission at all. But that doesn’t mean the students going there are being completely failed or that there is some hypothetical alternative where all of them get better outcomes, especially those that come from homes where the parents can’t or don’t care.
Anyway my goal would never be to use accreditation to regulate homeschooling out of existence even if it isn’t my cup of tea. Just that if we are going to embark on these kinds of larger policy experiments we need to make sure we’re setting some kind of basic objective standards before handing over money to charlatans or the incompetent, and that accreditation can have a role in those efforts.Report
The variables of private versus public union versus nonunion just don’t matter much.
The only consistent variables in predicting student success is the engagement of the parents.
Agreed. Which is why I strongly disagree with any proposal to shield schools from parents or to empower schools at the expense of parents.Report
When my children were of grade and high school ages in the aughts and teens, the parental end of schooling was done at our home. The school end we intentionally stayed out of, figuring they were the professionals. This is in a school system that has a national reputation as being pretty terrible. Both kids are now successful adults, having each gotten a college degree.
If I have a contractor building a garage in the back of my house, I don’t hover over him telling him he’s doing it wrong.Report
Ditto. Our public school system is one of the best in a state that’s not. By Dark’s logic I should never have moved my family here, even with the significant career opportunities it brought both me and my wife, to say nothing of our proximity to my parents.Report
Dark says that the public school system where he lives isn’t good for his kids with a hands-off approach. If you’re confident in what your local schools do without your direct intervention, that’s great.
I know that you’re working from a script here but please try to pay attention to the actual conversation.Report
Dark’s interaction with his kids’ schools is a far cry from what “conservative” activists are doing in schools today. That kind of intervention is not a new thing.Report
By Dark’s logic I should never have moved my family here, even with the significant career opportunities it brought both me and my wife, to say nothing of our proximity to my parents.
Phil, what would you say to the argument that looks at what you’ve said here and says:
Do you have an answer to that?Report
I’m not Phil, of course, but my reading is the his kids went (are going?) to the school available to everyone that lives in that district. Where he lives is immaterial.Report
He moved his family there, though.
Instead of staying where he was and building a community.Report
That is not germane to the point. The move was professional.
To Dark’s credit, at least as far as I can tell, he hasn’t opted out either.Report
Most recent move was from Michigan to Florida (job change) and to public schools…
…however…
I did a lot of research on which school district I wanted to move into. This one is the best in the area and the worst weren’t considered.
When I talk to my neighbors, everyone moved here for the school.
I have also moved by just a dozen miles to change districts in the past. As in, that was the only reason to move. We’ve also done Charter (which is also public but a different district) for two years for two girls.Report
Condolences on the move! 😉
I have no problem at all with anyone seeking out the best school for their kids.
My 2 cents on the whole school thing is do what you need to do, but also don’t complain about the state of what you’re leaving behind (if you do leave) if you didn’t put in at least apply a little bit of the campground rule.Report
If you have never needed to advocate for your kid, then great for you.
But it’s not the system’s fault that daughter #3 was young for her age and needed to be held back. It’s not the school’s fault that #4 has depression which caused problems.
#1 being put in the wrong track for English arguably was their fault but whatever.
The schools are/were very good. In most years I don’t need to get involved.
The problem is if we’re talking about 14 years, then at some point they’re going to do something that is less than optimal.
Big picture they are a tool in my hands but it’s my job (not theirs) to get good outcomes for my kids.Report
It is their job to get good outcomes for my kids – and for all kids. That’s their whole reason for existence.
I really have no idea what that means. My children’s success is in some measure enhanced by me and my wife taking better more highly compensated jobs. Likewise their success in a multicultural world is enhanced by us moving them periodically to different parts of the country or the world. We are working to build community here as we did in Maryland.
This is correct. Our county is broken up into multiple school districts. Our town is one of those districts, and has two elementary schools, a middle school and a highschool. Our small district is well funded though, which is why its a top 10 in the state schools (albeit in a state that is at the national bottom of per student funding).Report
People typically lead with their strongest case, so I addressed that one. I’m assuming that the other states’ stories are similar. Anyway, you didn’t really say anything about segregated schools or disenfranchisement, so I figured you didn’t want to.
About a year ago I blocked Chip after years of bad-faith exchanges, when he stated multiple times explicitly that people who disagree with him don’t deserve good-faith debate. That’s why I didn’t see it.Report
Well, Chip makes a lot of sense now based on the limited responses I’ve seen here.Report
Brother, “these guys are right and smart because they agree with me, the rest of you are wrong idiots” does not present as “I am a smart person worth taking seriously”.Report
Nice to see some new names around here, both as bylines and in the comments. Welcome!
It’s not for me to tell conservatives what they think. At most, it’s for me to see what they do when they have power or influence. If a refocus back on abstract principles helps fashion a coherent governing agenda and muffles the Outrage Of The Day Machine (or the basic governing principle of Cleek’s Law) then great! I don’t have to necessarily agree with the principles or the agenda to welcome such an entry into the public discourse.
I fear, though, that the kind of sober, serious discussion of organizing ideological principles and then coalescing them into policy ideas practical to implement in the real world is never, ever going to be able to compete with the fun and profitability of Getting Folks Mad At Stuff (and Not Caring If It’s Intellectually Dishonest).Report
On the other blog we are having a discussion on whether or not it would be better if America used a more formal tracking method like they do in Europe. American public schools might have normal and honors or advanced classes but outside some big cities, the dumb, average, and intelligent/studious kids are in the same school. Only a few handful of places have magnet public schools for the really gifted kids like New York, Boston, and San Francisco. The way kids are admitted into these selective public schools is heavily contested.
Europe formalizes this more with having gymanasium/lyceums/grammar schools for the intelligent kids bound for university, realschules focused on science for the STEM kids, and some type of trade school/ordinary high school for everybody else. Some Americans think this is horrible system and hurts late bloomers plus they don’t trust America not to organize this in a racist manner. Other Americans, and these include many liberals and Democratic voters, believe that a formalized tracking system rather than unofficial tracking within schools would be better but probably don’t want the full force of the entrance examinations used in other developed democracies.
America is just a big and very decentralized country and this is going to result in a wide variety of school districts. You are going to get high performing school districts in affluent suburbs of major metropolitan area, struggling school districts in very rural and very urban areas for a variety of reason including malign neglect or cultural anti-intellectualism of different varieties, and school districts that are just fine but don’t produce anything really that grand in terms of results.Report
I think this is a good point and a different kind of challenge for a big, small-l liberal, federalized country.
To me the core tension is really that even the people most interested in investing in a stronger, more uniform system are also the most likely to be upset about what such a system would almost certainly reveal. Anyway that disagreement is what creates the opening that those who don’t see the value in public education for whatever reason are always threatening to push us through.Report
As opposed to what our existing system has already revealed?Report
Oh yea. Even with the things we do know the numerous jurisdictions and inconsistencies and confounding variables allow room for all kinds of fudging and fig leaves that I predict would fall apart under a scientifically designed testing and tracking system.Report
As opposed to what our existing system has already revealed?
Schools are mostly a local problem, which makes them a Team Blue thing.
Blaming racism is politically wise. Much wiser than suggesting the culture of the parents has something to do with serious problems. Ditto suggesting gov corruption and incompetence.Report
There are some really big differences between different school districts. Even in affluent suburban settings you can get some big differences despite the fact that the schools are well-funded and trying to get everybody in college. My suburban high school was artsy and intellectual enough to have a full fledged theater program that consisted of a fall play, a student directed one act festival, an improve trope, a student opera, and a spring musical. Plus senior year social studies was basically Introduction to Western Philosophy. The English teachers were allowed to teach novels with explicit sex scenes like Narcissus and Goldman. Other schools in the same county were much more jocky and less intellectually open despite being in the same county and also driven towards college.
These differences were just in one affluent suburban county of New York City. If you had a national and uniform school curriculum with tracking and testing to ensure that plus relatively equal funding and teachers trained to the same standard, as opposed to some schools having the phys ed teacher teach social studies and other schools having a professional, than a lot will be revealed.Report