Speaker unverified: belief

Transcript context

…I totally agree with you. That’s why I think that the fundamental educational problem is not in fact a schooling problem. I think that it preexist that. Sure. Now, I feel like this is kind of the conservative merry-go-round where it’s like, what can we do to help with schools? So two of the things that I’ve seen I think that are usually brought up in research is one is air conditioning that children in hotter environments just don’t learn as well. And then the second one is access to food. So kids that are given a breakfast or a lunch that’s provided at school increases educational outcomes. Now, I agree that neither of these things might be determinative in, well, 20% of kids were graduating and now 80% of kids are graduating. Or these kids are all going with their GEDs into the workforce, and now these kids are all suddenly becoming engineers. But in terms of where we can help, do you think there should be some minimum threshold or minimum baseline of… At the very least, every school should have a non-leaky gym or every school should have… If children can’t afford lunch or breakfast like some sort of food provided or every school should have these baseline things? So again, I’m going to quibble with the premise of the question because I think that when it comes to, for example, food insecurity, school food programs… Again, you can always pour money into any program and at the margins create change. I mean, there’s no doubt that pouring money onto anything will create change in a marginal way. The question is how large is the margin and how big is the movement? So the delta is what I’m looking at. I think that you’re starting at a second order question, which is what if we ignore what I would think are the big primary questions of education, namely family structure, value of education at home. How much you have parents who are capable or willing to help with homework? What are the incentive structures we can set up for a society that actually facilitate that? How local communities take ownership of their schools is a big one, right? All of these issues we’re ignoring in favor of, say, “Air conditioning or lunch programs.” And so in a vacuum, if you say air conditioning and lunch programs sounds great in a vacuum. In terms of prioritization of values and cost structure, are those the things that I think are going to move the needle in a major way in terms of public policy? I do not. And in fact, I think that many of them end up being disproportionate wastes of money. I’ve talked before pretty controversially about the fact that an enormous amount of school lunch programs are thrown out. An enormous amount of that food ends up in the garbage can. Is there a better way to do that? If there is a better way to do it, then I’m perfectly willing to hear about that better way to do it. But it seems to me that one of the big flaws in the way that many people of the left approach government is what if we hit every gnat with a hammer? And my question is, what if the gnat isn’t even the problem? What if there is a much bigger substructure problem that needs to be solved in order to… If you’re shifting deck chairs on the Titanic, sure, you can make the Titanic slightly more balanced because the deck chairs are slightly better oriented. But the real question is the water that’s gaping into the Titanic, right?…

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