Things Heard: e171v5

7 Comments

1. Ed Darrell says:

   May 9, 2011 at 12:09 pm

   An analogy, think of supermarkets run like schools. Sounds horrible, yes? OK. So why is schooling any different, eh?,/blockquote>

   So, you and Mankiw think students are just pieces of meat, eh?

   I should have known.

2. Mark O. says:

   May 9, 2011 at 1:26 pm

   Ed,
   Now, I’d heard that there were teachers with minimal reading comprehension skills. Is this, then, proof? Look again Ed, in the analogy, the “product” in the schools is education … in supermarkets is food. Students (and parents) in the supermarket analogy are the consumers (like they are in education).

   The question at hand is what distinguishes supermarkets from schools from the point of view of quality. We agree (I’d think) that “government” run food markets would have miserable service and horrible discontinuities of quality between rich and poor neighborhoods, far worse than what the unregulated market provides. So why is it that you expect the government not to provide uneven, expensive, and poor product when education is at hand (an arguably of course this is what we are getting)?

3. Ed Darrell says:

   May 9, 2011 at 4:43 pm

   Think hard about schools run like supermarkets, with the spotted vegetables, grade B eggs, and other “unstraight timber” of products disallowed from the start.

   I’m convinced that not only do you not know schools, you don’t know supermarkets, either.

4. Ed Darrell says:

   May 9, 2011 at 4:43 pm

   I put a link in a post — please check your moderation queue.

5. Mark O. says:

   May 9, 2011 at 5:59 pm

   Ed,
   You’re still barking up the wrong tree. The product at the supermarket are not being compared with the students. The students (and their parents) are the shoppers.

   I didn’t see it in the moderation queue.

   You’d only find those grade B eggs and so on as the product being sold in government monopoly supermarkets. Right? I’m unclear on what point you’re trying to make here.

   Are you pretending that without government regulation we’d be getting grade “B” eggs in stores? Wow.

6. Doug says:

   May 12, 2011 at 7:31 am

   This is Doug. Found this from Ed in the spam queue, rather than the moderation queue. Not really sure why.
   ===
   What is the supply that comes into the supermarket to go to the customer? What is the supply that comes into the school to go to the customer?

   No, you’re calling students meat. You expect that schools should be able to process students and sell them like a piece of meat — or at least, that’s the point of that article.

   And just to be sure I don’t forget, the government-run supermarkets I know of are very popular, competitive, and have a loyal, loyal following — but then, you guys don’t like anything the government does, not even the Army-Air Force Exchange Service. If more supermarkets ran like AAFES, we’d all be a lot better off.

   (You don’t suppose Mankiw and Boudreaux don’t know about AAFES because they didn’t serve in the military, do you? Why don’t they know what they’re talking about?)

   In any case, nothing in education runs like supermarkets. Procter & Gamble doesn’t pay us to put the P&G students at eye level and hide the others on the low shelves. We can’t demand that we get only Grade A kids from the middle schools. We can’t insist that the middle schools use only Grade A kids from their parents. The analogy fails at every level, every way it is turned.

   But of course, complete absence of data has never stopped Mankiw and Boudreaux from making bizarre claims before — but didn’t you at least wonder about where there might be a pilot project to show how private schools and choice can produce better results? Contrary to everything he said in the rest of his writings, Milton Friedman completely abandoned his rules for market testing solutions when it came to schools. Never in the history of the world has a private school system been able to do what America public schools do – including now. Charter schools rank at the bottom of student achievement. Private schools with private tuition are able to do better than public schools only when they are allowed to discriminate against poor students, and cherry pick the kids who don’t need private schools to get good grades.

   Look at the charts in this feature:
   http://www.texastribune.org/texas-education/public-education/is-poverty-the-key-factor-in-student-outcomes/

   Marder’s work confirms what we have found here in Dallas. Our public schools have beaten the charters at every level in performance. We do it cheaper, and better.

   So, it’s not really odd that Boudreaux and Mankiw don’t offer examples. If they did, they’d have to abandon their anti-education, anti-student, anti-American themes.

7. Mark O. says:

   May 12, 2011 at 12:43 pm

   Doug and Ed,
   Doug, thanks for recovering that.

   Ed …

   First, no they (and I) am not equating the students with “meat” or the product being sold. When you go to your barber, “peoples heads” are not the product in question, haircuts are. In supermarkets the product is what is sold. In school the product is education not “children.” Parents produce children, through a process known as ‘reproduction’ (of which you may have heard). Schools do not produce children. Try to understand, schools are not in the manufacturing business. They are (wait for it) in the service industry. In the service industry the product is not the person(s) for whom the service is being provided. The product is, oddly enough, the service being provided.

   The analogy, if you read it more carefully and just a bit more charitably (which is to say not forcing the analogy into unrecognizable forms) is pointing out that government run supermarkets would be uneven and mostly horrible, and cost a lot more. The question posed is what is it about schools that differentiates from supermarkets regarding government intervention? You have not answered that except to say that government sponsored charter schools by one study by a group “uteach” offers that the performance in one situation is not good. How that relates to the question at hand is, however, not so clear.

   If they did, they’d have to abandon their anti-education, anti-student, anti-American themes.

   And, don’t forget the ever-present rhetorical method of the liberal, the unsubstantiated slur and insults.