Yglesias might believe this. If he does, he has fallen into a fantasy world of straw men debates.
Hence, they are reticent about charter schools, they would like state-wide funding, they are opposed to school choice not because of the choice, but because they are designed and implemented to suck money from the public coffers while not actually achieving meaningful school choice. These are the debates I hear among leftist education policy experts.
No one thinks it is unreasonable to expect schools to achieve improvements. But Yglesias postures that anyone who thinks that the possibility of gains is not linear, and that structural disadvantages make it increasingly difficult to achieve positive outcomes (the marginal effect of good education is greatest at the middle, it is smaller at the extremes... not very controversial), and who is conservative relative to on-the-table policy proposals is "arguing that it's not reasonable to expect public schools to get good outcomes out of troubled kids."
This is cheap, this is why I stopped reading Yglesias.
p.s. As good a time as any to link to Daniel Denvir's article on the battle over Philly schools.You will find lots of concern and conservatism relative to the proposed reforms, but you will find little in the way of suggestion that it is unreasonable to expect public schools to get good outcomes out of troubled kids.
To an extent, the edu-left has been arguing that it's not reasonable to expect public schools to get good outcomes out of troubled kids and now Romney's arrived with a plan that will in fact give up on that aspiration.One of the reasons I stopped reading Yglesias was not his neoliberalism, which I try generally to follow and at least keep abreast, but rather his tendency to debase the arguments of others. Left-inclined education policy thinkers tend to believe that (1) the primary determinant of education outcomes is the various non-education dimensions of the reproduction of poverty, and that (2) policies that might seem reasonable or even desirable in the abstract are in practices formulated and implemented in such a way that the public ends up distributing money upwards, to the wealthy and private interests. Which is Yglesias' point in this article.
Hence, they are reticent about charter schools, they would like state-wide funding, they are opposed to school choice not because of the choice, but because they are designed and implemented to suck money from the public coffers while not actually achieving meaningful school choice. These are the debates I hear among leftist education policy experts.
No one thinks it is unreasonable to expect schools to achieve improvements. But Yglesias postures that anyone who thinks that the possibility of gains is not linear, and that structural disadvantages make it increasingly difficult to achieve positive outcomes (the marginal effect of good education is greatest at the middle, it is smaller at the extremes... not very controversial), and who is conservative relative to on-the-table policy proposals is "arguing that it's not reasonable to expect public schools to get good outcomes out of troubled kids."
This is cheap, this is why I stopped reading Yglesias.
p.s. As good a time as any to link to Daniel Denvir's article on the battle over Philly schools.You will find lots of concern and conservatism relative to the proposed reforms, but you will find little in the way of suggestion that it is unreasonable to expect public schools to get good outcomes out of troubled kids.
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