Paul Krugman’s latest column is yet another waste of NYT editorial real estate. He take to the the Paper of Reactionary Zeal to blame the Lone Star State’s drop-out rate on its budgetary frugality.
And in low-tax, low-spending Texas, the kids are not all right. The high school graduation rate, at just 61.3 percent, puts Texas 43rd out of 50 in state rankings.
Slight problem here, namely, the cause and effect relationship that Krugman implies. If low state spending leads to high state dropout rates, as Krugman suggests, then riddle me this: Why does California spend more per pupil, yet have a higher dropout rate? And why does New York spend even more per pupil than California and Texas, and also have a higher drop-out rate? And why does the District of Columbia spend almost twice as much money per pupil as Texas, and yet have a much higher dropout rate than Texas?
Don’t take my word for it: Here’s a chart showing the state dropout rates, and here’s a chart showing state spending per pupil. They’re not for the same year, but the trends are fairly consistent year to year. More government spending does not necessarily lead to higher graduation rates. It’s not that simple, especially in states where the requirement to educate the children of illegal aliens grows year by year.
Will there be cuts in education in Texas over the coming two-year period? Yes, undoubtedly there will. Education takes up about 56% of the state’s budget (higher ed plus public ed), so it stands to reason that when the cuts come, some will hit that massive portion of the budget. And some cuts will hit elsewhere. When it comes time to cut education, I hope that legislators and school districts take a very hard look at where the fat really is. In Texas, the fat isn’t necessarily with the teachers, but the administrators. Some Texas school superintendents are making in the neighborhood of $250,000 per year in salary and benefits. I wrote about this last year for PJM:
Round Rock Superintendent Dr. Jesus Chavez has 14 years experience and is the only superintendent who agreed to talk to KVUE about superintendent salaries. His base salary is $250,000 a year.
“I don’t think superintendents get paid too much,” he said. “There is a shortage of superintendents, principals and other top level administrators. So the market and the qualifications that one brings makes it competitive.”
That works out to just shy of six bucks per student.
He’s not even the highest paid super in the area: Austin’s superintendent makes about $276,000 last time I checked. Why are we paying school administrators so much money? And what do salary structures look like at the levels just below superintendent? Are they really worth these extravagant benefits we lavish on them out of the public treasury? I find it pretty hard to justify making local public school bureaucrats rich, especially when taxpayers are hurting and the states are going broke. Perhaps Krugman doesn’t agree, and thinks we should just keep spending more without looking at where the money is going, or the impact it has when it is taken from the taxpayer. If that’s his position, he should make that argument.
With a base salary of $250,000 and an estimated benefit package valued at 45% of base salary, this one superintendent earns about $362,500 a year. (The benefits percentage rate of 40-50% is widely used by both schools and the federal government to estimate benefit value, so I split the difference.)
As a money-grubbing private-sector entrepreneur, I feel so ashamed. How dare I battle to cling to my hard-earned dollars and deny these brilliant pedants their justified rewards? What was I thinking?
I am wondering when Krugman got his Nobel prize. Was it before or after he became a columnist for the NYT. Given how often he makes dumb pronouncements, I would not be surprised if he was undeserving of the award but got it because of his political activism.
Steve: Before.
His prize is in Economics, for work on international trade, and by all accounts it’s well-deserved.
His abuse of its aura in areas he lacks both qualification and competence to pronounce upon is saddening, but nevertheless his Prize is generally held by economists, even ones opposed to his domestic policy positions, as legitimately earned.
You hit the nail on the head. Krugman fall into the typical Intellectual (as in Thomas Sowell’s definition of the term) that becasue he has knowledge in one area, that somehow translates into understanding in another. On most topics, Krugman is “all hat and no horse”.
I’m pretty sure there is no such thing as a Nobel Prize in economics. It’s a prize honoring Nobel, but not one of his actual prizes IIRC.
That’s all hat and no cattle, Mac.
Heh. I call ‘caviling!’.
Horse or Cow, I’ve seen and heard it both ways (Google it). I prefer ‘horse’ and see it as a more appropriate phrasing for reasons that would bore the h*** out of everyone and so will not expand further.
“I am wondering when Krugman got his Nobel prize. Was it before or after he became a columnist for the NYT.”
He got the NYT gig in 2000, and the Nobel Memorial Prize in 2008. But the work for which he was honored was done in the ’80s-’90s.
Weird. Did you actually read the whole piece? He doesn’t blame the budget for the dropout rate. Your post did a great job of knocking down a strawman argument that he wasn’t making.
Is this a response to the whole piece?
I just read the whole column and that is exactly what Krugman says. It’s not the only thing he says, but that is certainly part of his thesis.
I did read the whole thing. And his “theme” was that lower government spending necessarily translated into lower social outcomes. Per pupil spending was tied to drop out rates as if that relationship served as a representative proxy for all social/educational outcomes for children.
BTW, I’ve charted the two data sets on my blog. The small trend that might be inferred suggests that higher per pupil funding equates to a higher drop out rate.
We have our problems down here, but we certainly are not California, Michigan or Washington, D.C.
And in our constitution, we have cannily preserved the legal right to secede. The longer I live, the closer that day seems to come. Wonder what Krugman would think of that.
I bet out dropout rate would improve, though.
Dave we already did that once. Didn’t seem to work out too well from what I was taught…
Seriously though, don’t you think Reconstruction would have settle that issue? Perhaps instead of seceding we can get more right thinking folks elected to take right action.
The numbers listed above are 2001 to 2002 years. Illinois back then spent $8022 per student. The latest number is $10,332……..
I would like to know how the rates are calculated. I am in Houston, and we have a very large illegal alien population that causes all kinds of problems in our schools because they chase free apartment space. In some of the low income parts of town, apartment complexes will offer a month or two of free rent on move-in based upon a commitment to a certain lease term. The illegals sign the lease and move in until they have to start paying rent. Then, they skip out and forfeit the lease.
But on the school rolls, all they know is that the children are no longer in school. And, if they do not re-enroll with the same name in another school within the same school district, I am sure they become listed as dropouts. Myabe I’m wrong, but I’l like to know.
Here’s the link that Mr. Preston appears to have forgotten.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/28/opinion/28krugman.html?_r=1&ref=opinion
“riddle me this”
Frank Gorshin lives!
Reading Krugmen writing on Texas is like reading a victorian spinster writing about the marital customs of the head hunters of Borneo. Like the victorian spinster, he seem ignorant of both generalities and specifics of the subject at hand.
Krugmen doesn’t even take the elementary precaution to isolating variable in his data. He doesn’t do anything to correct for demographics or the fact that Texas, like other borders states, are responsible for the care of lot of people from Mexico. These people start out with 3rd world health and educations and they drag down our stats.
Even without corrections, Texas outperforms all the other three big state on education as well as neighboring states. Corrected for demographics, Texas ranks in the top ten on most education metrics.
The idea that the condition of Texas children is “dire” is risible. Just because Texas spends less does not mean the children are worse off. Cost in Texas are lower and conditions of our communities better. The “bad” side of town in most major Texas cities would pass for lower-middle class or better in the Northeast. We have nothing like the “projects” in Texas. What we call the projects are neat little groups of duplexes.
I would be especially interested to know the source of his claim that, “only 78 percent of Texas children are in excellent or very good health, significantly below the national average.”
It is way, way better to be poor in Texas than any comparable state. Cost of living are less, housing is better and more plentiful, crime is less and most importantly, people can find work. It is better for children to grow up materially deprived but in a household were the adults work than it is for them to have more material benefits but with nobody working.
Hell, I know of “poor” kids in Texas that have ponies! No kid that has a pony is poor in spirit.
There’s a reason Krugman reads like a spinster these days.
We haven’t seen a man this whipped since the second Laura Bush administration.
Figure 4. Elementary-Secondary Per Pupil Current Spending Amounts by State: 2007-08
http://www2.census.gov/govs/school/08f33pub.pdf
NY $17,17
CA $9,863
TX $8,320
TN $7,739
Public High School Graduation Rates
http://www.higheredinfo.org/dbrowser/index.php?submeasure=36&year=2008&level=nation&mode=data&state=0
NY 67.13%
CA 68.17%
TX 65.29%
TN 71.07%
Seems there is little correlation between money spent and graduation rates.
No wait! What was I thinking!
I retract absolutely everything in my previous post. Krugmen is absolutely correct. Texas is a hell hole. All you North Easterners and Californians who know absolutely that a state government needs high taxes, high borrowing to fund a generous welfare system and invasive government, please take heed of Krugmen’s sage advice and stay in the glorious worker’s paradise in which you now reside. Don’t worry about unemployment, government debt or anything else. I am sure the benevolent Democrats will always take care of you no matter what!
Don’t risk the lives of your precious children by migrating to the cruel state of Texas! Oh, how they will suffer just as Krugman describes! How could you be so indifferent to your children’s welfare?
No, seriously, if you think the welfare state is a roaring success stay where you are! Leave the wilds of Texas to those cruel and selfish types who only want to work and create without a care for the less fortunate. In fact, round up all those evil entrepreneurs and ship them off to Texas as if the state was a Gulag in Siberia! That will show those selfish jerk and Texas will get the kind of people its evil deserves.
I lied about the ponies. In truth, roaming packs of starving children have long since hunted down and devoured raw all the ponies.
Krugmen, however, never lies. Seriously, stay where you are.
Roaches, Shannon, don’t forget the roaches. Roaches as big as hamsters, everywhere. That gets ‘em every time.
God, how could I forget about the roaches, our giant radioactive roaches.
Who is Paul Krugman??? Is he even relevant?
Why shy away from suggesting teachers need to take pay cuts, or not get raises, or have their positions cut? There’s nowhere near enough administrators to make a dent in the budget problems, and if Texas is like many or most (all?) other states, teachers have gotten raises through thick and thin, regardless of the economic conditions (perhaps until last year, in some jurisdictions).
Frankly, none of that much matters–states need to cut back, education is probably the largest or second largest line item in every state and the largest line item in just about every local government (that funds schools), and so unless all other governmental priorities are going (to continue) to take a back seat, teachers will feel the pain. Like everyone else has over the past three years.
Krugman is . . . ____________ !
But wisely, he is not in Texas.
For what it is worth, when one adjusts for the demographic makeup of the student population, Texas ranks first in academic achievement among the 50 (or is it 57) states. When making the same adjustment for spending, Texas ranks 31st, indicating that 30 states spend less. Over to you, Dr. Krugman.
To quote Peggy Venerable from Americans for Prosperity Texas: “We should not be paying school administrators more than the Governor.”
What we need is school choice and we need it yesterday. I keep hearing that everything is bigger in Texas. Well, then, let’s have the biggest choice in schools!
“He take to the the Paper” doesn’t make sense.
In Corpus Christi ISD, downtown (Administration office) accounts for over 40% of the entire district’s budget. It’s ridiculous. Also, the administration of the schools (principals) is about as incestuous as they come. As a teacher, you are nothing more than a babysitter. And if you try to teach and expect results from your students, you’d better be ready to defend your grading practices. It’s never the students–it’s always the teacher’s fault. Discipline? HA! Never heard of it in CCISD. Teachers are at the mercy of the kids and the kids know it. And they wonder why students don’t value their education and drop out? Because the whole enterprise is treated like a giant Ponzi scheme–just keep harping on the dropout rate, raise taxes, and pretend that we’re making progress. It’s pathetic.
Is there pressure to give passing grades to those who earn Fs and who earn F—s for effort? Yes indeed.
Useless Administrators when it comes to discipline?
Yes indeed.
I’m all for cuts, but this sounds like salary envy to me.
What is the job of a superintendant or principal? I’m not in the education field but I presume a superintendant is responsible for 10 to 100 physical plants (schools), 100 to 2,000 employees and several thousand customers(students) and the big giant nightmare of dealing with looney parents. Who would take that job if it didn’t pay a lot? It’s basically the job of being the CEO of a corporation.
That’s actually a good point. A superintendent does have upper level executive responsibilities and to get people who actually do that job requires paying the required salary.
However, we should remember that the free-market does not set superintendent salaries and those salaries, along with all other education administrations, has mushroomed way out of line with inflation. That suggest that the lack of economic feedback in government causes salary inflation.
Yea, most companies that have CEO’s that continually raise expenditures and fail to meet growth metrics would find themselves on the losing end of a board vote fairly quickly.
As I see it; Krugman either lacks the ability to do basic research, is too lazy to do basic research, or is playing to his target audience and doesn’t give a damn.
I choose the third option.
Definitely the third option
Wishful thinking Juliemarg.
The problem with government services is the high costs of delivering those services by line workers. You can fight those costs dozens of ways, by salary, benefits and pensions just being part of it, but fight you must.
The problem of administration in delivering those services is that the costs of bureaucracy exarbates the cost problem. The bureaucracy might actually serve some function if it enhanced the effectiveness of the line worker, whether that be teacher, doctor, or social worker. But the bureaucracy funtions mostly to communicate with itself and with the overhead bureaucracies.
Look Krugman is obviously mentally ill.
He showed all the signs with his demented obsession with blaming Sarah Palin for every woe in the world.
Time we start calling a spade a spade. Krugman is a nutcase in need of Pysch help before he goes berserk like the loon in Tucson.
A pretty good portion of Texas’s drop out rate problem can be attributed to the legislature, due to pressure from people like H.Ross Perot, directing Texas public schools to institute a college prep accademic track for EVERY SINGLE STUDENT in public schools. Texas now requires EVERY SINGLE STUDENT to take 4 years in the 4 core courses. That is 4 years of English, Social Studies, Science (including Biology, Chemistry, Physics,and a fourthscience that is post Chemistry in difficulty), and math (Alg1,Geom, Alg2, and a fourth math that is post Alg2 in difficulty). There is very little vocational education left in Texas schools. So what do you think the sons and daughters of last generations high school drop outs are doing? They know good and well they don’t have to have a hs diploma to work entry level jobs in construction, the oilfields, trucking, etc. The Texas state legislature has chosen to legislate intelligence, and ambition upon their juvenile population. And some how it’s the school’s fault when kids choose not to buy.
Krugman’s an idiot…..but he ain’t the only one.
A quick calculation of the correlation between spending per pupil and the drop-out rate is +15%, which leaves 85% of the variation in rates to be explained. Worse, the correlation is a positive number, which means that both variables move in the same direction. So, if a state wants to have the lowest drop-out rate in the country, then it should cut education spending below every other state’s level.
Of course this result doesn’t make much sense because you need to spend something on education, even for home schooling. The t-test for this result shows no statistical significance for this correlation, which means the data don’t show any relationship between spending and drop-out rates. Other things besides per pupil spending obviously affect drop-out rates, but spending is definitely not the answer.
Actually, there is a concept called “addition by subtraction”; Well-known in sports. You get rid of the talented Prima Donna messing up the team chemistry, and despite losing his obvious talent, the team performs better, not worse.
Businesses often perform better by cutting employees. Cutting out most of the bureaucracy gets schools to perform better. Private schools have teachers as 80% of their staff. Public schools have only 50%, and that is at the school level. Then there is the massive admin above.
Your stats are telling you the truth. I think there is a P/Q (Product & Quotient) equivalent here. Spend too much, performance drops off. Spend too little, and again, performance drops off. It’s a bell-curve. Your stats seem to indicate that when we spend less, performance improves, therefore, we are currently spending too much.
Hmm, P’s and Q’s for government performance? There is a Nobel in there for some statistician.
“Round Rock Superintendent Dr. Jesus Chavez has 14 years experience and is the only superintendent who agreed to talk to KVUE about superintendent salaries. His base salary is $250,000 a year.
“I don’t think superintendents get paid too much,” he said. “There is a shortage of superintendents, principals and other top level administrators. So the market and the qualifications that one brings makes it competitive.”
Dr. Chavez sounds like a free marketer to me. Wonder if he’s willing to put his members paychecks where his mouth is.
School systems, even in Texas, are end-stage
political patronage bureaucracies in their
death throes; The same characteristics which
‘qualified’ administrators in the past make
them totally unfit to manage the transition
to the future.
One clue to their cluelessness; They are not
touching the athletics programs.
Texas has loads of ‘administrators’ – lots and lots of them in curriculum. It seems to most of us classroom teachers that their job is to find busy work for classroom teachers to do to justify their existence. Many of them are also working on their phD’s. We have curriculum people for elementary science and elementary math and middle school science and middle school math and middle school language arts and high school science, etc….all of them making more money than classroom teachers. When we got new teks we were told to match up old teks with new teks ( an extremely time consuming activity), when we complained that this was a total waste of time that we would be getting new text books for the following year and this would already be done for us, we were told that we still had to do it because it was necessary to analyze, blah, blah, blah – so we did it. It had to be done by the end of May before school let out. The first workshop that we went to in June – BAM, we were handed a spiral bound notebook of all the new teks lined up with all the old teks – it was a thing of beauty. Way better than what we had patched together in between teaching, grading, and planning. I could probably name at least one example a year, if not more.
What the heck is a “teks” and is it communicable?
If Texas is so bad, as Mr. Krugman asserts … then why do the highly-educated, highly-mobile professionals in the cornucopia of tech firms that make Texas their home, who surely want to see their children succeed as they have, tolerate this situation?
I think that, if your assertions are true, they and their firms would be packing up and leaving … wouldn’t they?
Nope … they’re moving INTO Texas. Can’t say the same for the coastal enclaves of East Marxistan, West Marxistan, and the People’s Republic of Chicago, though.
I live in Plano, Texas and pay rather high property taxes to pay for pretty good public schools. Educational funding is mostly local, not statewide, so state averages are mostly meaningless. Not even sure the local funding numbers mean much. Just like most places in the US, majority black and majority Hispanic public schools in Texas have much higher dropout rates than majority white schools. Asian parents seem to find the top performing schools and buy homes in those neighborhoods. None of this has much to do with ethnicity. The best schools have parents that demand that their kids learn in spite of the school and the worst schools have parents who don’t value academic performance as highly. School performance is and has always been correlated to positive parental involvement, not funding levels.
My wife is a second-year teacher in a Texas school district. Preston is right that Texas needs to make ed budget cuts. In fact, it’s happening already: in my wife’s district, an announcement went out that several hundred jobs needed to be cut. After waiting for people to voluntarily retire and decline to come back next school year, the decision was made to not renew contracts for first-year teachers. Yet another idiotic personnel decision, as teachers were dismissed based not on job performance, but purely on seniority. Makes sense, as it is far easier to manage legally (while Texas is a right-to-work state, the NEA/AFT cabal still wields substantial influence here). At her school, a few principals are also being cut loose. However, not a single administrator, much less superintendent, has gotten the ax, and there’s no reason to suspect they will.
The superintendent of Austin ISD does make well over $200,000 per year. What you do NOT hear is that Austin ISD employs some 12,000 people and that its annual budget is over $900 million each year. And that the average tenure of an urban superintendent is 3 years. I know several people in the private sector who also make over $200,000 per year who have nowhere near that large of a budget and are not responsible for more than 200 employees, plus they have much more job security.
Complain all you want, but Jesus Chavez of Round Rock ISD is right – those are the competitive free market wages for the job of superintendent. It’s a tough job, where every major decision is made in public & is scrutinized mercilessly. Don’t like the salary of your superintendent? Then vote out your school board members & get someone else on the cheap. You just might get what you pay for.
Texas dropout rate compared to similar states:
Dropout rates, states bordering Mexico:
Arizona: 7.6
California: 5.5
New Mexico: 6.1
Texas: 4.0
Dropout rates, Texas and neighboring states:
Arkansas: 4.6
Louisiana: 7.4
New Mexico: 6.1
Oklahoma: 3.5
Texas: 4.0
Dropout Rates, States with more than 9 million people:
California: 5.5
Florida: 3.8
Georgia: 4.6
Illinois: 4.0
Michigan: 7.4
New York: 5.3
North Carolina: 5.7
Ohio: 4.5
Pennsylvania: Not given
Texas: 4.0
—-
Hmm. So when you look at state dropout rates in states with characteristics similar to Texas, Texas shapes up really, really well.
One of the nice things about NCLB, is that you learn which schools are dropout factories.
Also, that blue-collar track thing? Vocational Ed? Those schools were dropout factories, even when they emphasized vocational ed. That’s a fake argument.
Clear out disorganized illegal immigrants- even leave in the organized illegal immigrants- kids make it through the Texas system. My kids sit in classes where the teacher asks what they did for spring break- kids go home to mexico. then they come back.
The clerks at the hospitals, where the anchor babies are born- the clerks are bi-lingual. Do you think they have any sympathy for their co- linguists? They help the moms get gov’t services and gov’t housing. It’s not this big line separating Mexico from Texas. It’s more porous than even Mr Krugman can imagine.
The admin buildings are gorgeous, even when the schools aren’t. The teachers are amazing, even when the administrators aren’t.
Here is a question that no-one is asking: Why have such big school districts? It appears there is a dis-economy of scale. Have there been any studies about the optimal size of a school district?
Both the school districts that I attended growing up had only 1 school in the district that was K-12. Administration was 1 Superintendent, 1 Principal and 1 secretary. Non-teaching staff was 1 janitor.
The superintendent is basically there to do grant proposals and deal with the state regulations, the budget, and the school board. (2 of my brothers are school superintendents.)
Perhaps if state and federal funding was limited to districts with administration budget under 10% and other non-teacher salary items limited to 15% then administration bloat could be reigned in.
thats libs solution for everything is spend, spend, spend. and it has nothing to do with it. sure you want decent schooling, but at a certain point it elies on the students to take advantage. the school itself is onlu 5% of the total educational experience. the student must make up the other 95% by taking advantage. this includes parents getting off their butts and working with teachers and their kids to give them the education they claim is deserved. We have more access to knowledge now, than anytime in history. btw libraries, internet and school programs there is no lack of resources. so why are more and more kids dropping out or not learning? because we have been instilling a sense that stupid is good. half assed is ok as long as you tried. competition is bad, no right or wrong answers. we let students control the classrom and cirriculum. we let unions and idiot teachers get away with passing kids that can’t add 2+2 and say they cannot teach without viagra and cannot be fired for doing poorly. it seems to me that spending is the least of our probs
I personnely, did not get a high school education , I went into the Navy for 20 years , Got my GED and it is worthless. I couldnot apply for several jobs be cause I didnot hav a High School deploma . “And my spelling shows that” I am educated to the tune of never asking the government for any thing . Always employed, Drew one Un employment check in my life time ,”81 now” The over paid personnel of the supervisors is crazy . Most of them are educated fools . No one seems to see the need for dress code. and disapline . They both should be a part of education . If you don’t know how to dress and act what good will an education do you . I just wonder how these educated fools omit the obvious . Control . The basic training in the services do that and in a short period of time , you have a team . There should be no summer school if you did not make the grade , redo that year again .You know it or you don’t , pass.
hey wait we just cut another 31 billion from the budget and most in education so just give us a couple years but im pretty sure our dropout rate will rise