Tuesday, November 15, 2011

The Inevitable Progression of the New Paternalism

Michael Goldstein:

Let’s pause for a second. Imagine if our school were held accountable not for test scores, or for college success, but for labor market outcomes. Median salary. At least in Boston, the obvious move would be to try to figure out how to get your alums gov’t jobs. Cops and firefighters in particular, who typically earn 6-figure salaries in Boston. Various clerks at City Hall seem to do well, too, and teachers average $85,000.

Obviously this doesn’t scale very well across a whole sector. There are a finite number of these jobs. But as an individual school, one could try it.

One thing I wonder about is whether when, for example, these guys decided that they'd make college graduation the one and only goal of education, whether they realized it was complete bullshit that would fall apart pretty much as soon as they'd been running schools long enough to have many kids graduate from college? Or are they really so clueless to be genuinely surprised by this?

Also, Occupy Wall Street and We Are the 99% have probably accelerated the process a bit.

No comments: