Thank you for all that you do. You might be able to get paid more if you worked public- but what keeps you from the system?

German History exists. Your interpretation and conclusions lack causality. There is no knowledge without evidence, merely belief. In your case, fantasy. If you have to shop around for justice, then it certainly doesn’t exist as a universal given. Please feel free to have the last word, because I won’t be commenting again.

One basic tenet of the science of human action, an irrefutable one, is this:

“Humans act.”

By trying to refute this you would engage in an act and thereby prove the statement correct. Some knowledge is indeed based on logic and not open to empirical refutation. Before you jump to conclusions you might want to read up on Austrian Economics a little bit.

You think I invent German history? Here, I even Wiki’d some of it for you:

German Historicism Luminaries:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustav_von_Schmoller

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Sombart

Re: institutions. I will just say this. The demand for justice, protection, sustenance and society is the given. What means humans decide to employ in trying to effect these values can be judged through the lens of economics. In the absence of the state variants of police, courts, schools and armies does not mean an end to justice. It means that the opportunity for more just institutions that deliver on the social demand. Imagine a police force that is not forced on you- but rather you sign-up for its services after shopping around.

The fallacious idea that ‘economics has no laws’ was part of the state ideology taught in late 19th century Germany. There were almost no liberal economists left in teaching positions in the entire empire at that time. Worse, this German “historical school”, which said that economic rules are determined by circumstance, taught the generations of German leaders that lost two wars and destroyed their society through hyper-inflation and fascism.

Indeed, a review of what qualifies as economics today seems like a giant hodgepodge of disagreement and useless hypothesizing. But what needs to be understood is that economics is not empirical- its laws cannot be discovered by review of history or experimentation. Since there is no determinism in human behavior- there can be no laws of history. Likewise, trying to apply lab science to humans can never work. Humans do not have the predictability of physical objects- they are logical beings making decisions. It does not mean they make rational or right decisions- it just means that humans are hard wired to think about things.

Economics is a deductive science- the study of human relationships.

What we know irrefutably is that humans act and act out of a desire for something. Humans use scarce means to try and attain those ends sought. Supply and demand, which follow these realities, ia a law deductively derived, a prioristically. Not inductively.

Therefore, the vast majority of what goes for economics today is really economic history, mathematics, statistics and lots of sophistry (read Paul Krugman’s NY Times articles). Real economics, where supply and demand are law, that leads to conclusions that are anti-socialist, anti-state and pro-liberty, is squelched because it stands as the greatest threat to the statist status quo.

ps. I get a thrill at the possibility of justice- which means ending statism.

You’ve made the same assertions in 10 different ways, never resonding to any questions or comments other than through repetition.

Economics has no laws. At best they are vaguely formed hypotheses. I’ve never seen a field of study so fractured into small groups of thought. And you have it all set up to defend ANY evidence against your market hypotheses by calling the examples unpure or outliers. Which is what you’ve done in every post.

Every claim you make about govt and unions can be made about those who control the markets. Your statements might apply to individuals in a small town agrarian-based economy. The reality is that “saints” in the market are small potatoes, and the winners don’t succeed because they make a superior product or hire the best MBAs. Those strategies aren’t cost effective. Instead, they gobble up competitors using every scam ever imagined until they monopolize the market. They cook the books to fool their investors. Those who profit most are long gone before the stuff hits the fan. Essentially, markets are unaccountable by definition.

Why? To quote you, “because they can.” I get it, you don’t like paying taxes, or government, or unions, or universal education. I can’t imagine any scenario where your “laws” have been or could be put into effect. Do you get a thrill from the possibility of anarchy?

You mention an Education Industrial Complex (EIC) and a paradoxical focus on testing, like ‘ NCLB tweaking’, as obstacles to an educational reform that should focus on human capital. Fair enough.

I agree that the the bureaucrats, administrators and business interests fail in ’self-regulation’. Like its cousin in the defense industry (you rightly point out the MIC), the EIC is a natural development when state control, centralization and conglomeration takes place. The hubris of the education planners, with their so-called scientific management, is also paralleled in the Pentagon. Although the Pentagon’s activities result in waste, murder and destruction. Economically speaking, the whole education endeavor, like the MIC, is akin to fascism.

You say that teachers and unions should have their credibility restored in the public face as a piece of this human capital reform. But unions also create a block against change as a matter of legal ability to do so. That is what unions are about: parasitically exploiting their ability to provide less for a higher price. That is economics. Of course you would observe that “The current system, however, is highly resistant to change.”

All this discussion of ‘human capital’ leads me to believe it is just another socialist euphemism, like the empty term ’stakeholder’. Only when education is returned to civil society- the place where property rights still exist in some degree, where school is not compelled and forced via taxation, unionism and bureaucraticism, will this nation see progress in education.

Essentially, government schools are unaccountable by definition.

But you hit the nail on the head. I do advocate the complete abolition of universal education. It is the only way to increase the real opportunity for education within just limits, accountability and progress. “Universal Education” only means mass schooling accompanied by the economic problems I have already mentioned. UE also means a constant low-level civil war for the control of ideological levers at the points of centralization. Local or national (near) monopolies, almost always created by the state, are destructive of the most basic human rights of life, liberty and property.

Interestingly, the business leaders and other “free market” advocates who have greatly influenced public education policy over the past two decades have not shared with educators this relentless focus on human capital, which is common sense in the best and most innovative companies. Instead their focus for improving schools has been on a stodgy version of standards-based reform, driven by accountability and testing from the top-down. In this view, federal and state education officials and testing companies, along with psychometricians and educational researchers, carefully calibrate incentives and penalties based on test data. Their intent is to pressure schools, principals and teachers to move in the right direction with this simulation of market forces. Whereas the leading companies strategically recruit and develop their talent as the foundation for their competitive strength, these thought leaders and advocates of standards-based reform continue to seek to perfect accountability and assessment, thinking of human capital as an afterthought if at all.

Moreover, our international peers like Finland and South Korea, outstripping us in student achievement in mathematics and science, recruit teachers from among their top college graduates because they have made teaching attractive not just in terms of money but in professional stature and decision-making authority. Yet our business leaders and education researchers have joined with the state education officials in a united front in the campaign to tinker with NCLB accountabiliity. As seen in the proposals for ESEA reauthorization, lobbying groups like Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and National Governors’ Association (NGA) are offering tweaks at the margins of NCLB, suggesting, for example, growth models for accountability to better account for individual student growth, and differentiated consequences for varying degrees of failure to meet Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP). They would bring a substantial increase in the top-down system of testing with their proposal for “multiple measures” (i.e., adding local tests and other measures to the statewide tests for accountability) and the next generation of performance-based assessments. This reform consensus would continue to leave teachers and the public disenfranchised.

This would be more testing, more data, not less. It would make education even more complex, further removed from the simple wisdom gleaned in the McKinsey report that educational excellence depends foremost on investment in quality teachers. The utter failure of the current leaders in education policy to see and pursue investment in human capital reveals the impoverishment of the education bureaucracy. It suffers from a want of imagination, energy and creativity. What can explain this? It may be that business and educational researchers are highly vested in the current system of data-driven, not people-led, accountability and assessment. For business, aside from the obvious self-interest of test publishers and other vendors who profit directly from it, the emphasis on data and the focus on results is to speak their language. It shifts the very discourse about education to the language and methods of business management and thereby allows business leaders to speak from a superior position in shaping schools at the local, state, and national level. Similarly, the educational research world benefits from the current overemphasis on data, for this enables powerful research paradigms and the work of multitudes of scholars and students. Finally, given the exalted position of these two groups, educators themselves are self-selected to positions of authority in the education bureaucracy to the extent that they speak this language of data, accountability, and assessment. This vast preoccupation with testing and building systems of data-driven decision-making is blinding education reformers and leaders from the seminal insight that investment in human capital, recruiting, developing and supporting high quality teachers, is the single-most important factor in supporting achievement, confidence, and self-efficacy for all students. One wonders why the education system fails to act on this insight. It can only be that there is such a closed system of thought.

Given this state of inertia, it would be naïve to think we can reform the education system with mere legislation. Such is the complexity and interdependence of the many parts of this system that reform efforts are unsustainable and quickly overwhelmed by the status quo. The “education industrial complex,” to paraphrase President Eisenhower’s famous warning about the “military industrial complex,” composed of bureaucrats, business leaders, and researchers, is continuing to tighten the bindings of data systems and accountability algorithms. Those closest to students — teachers and principals — are the least influential in this vast enterprise. Their voice is further diluted by the public face of teacher unions, regrettably caricatured in the press as jealously protective of the status quo, of various collective bargaining rights, work rules, pay and seniority. The real challenge of getting meaningful change, one based on investment in human capital, begins with restoring the stature and credibility of teachers and their unions as leaders in support of world-class schools and high quality learning for all students.

The current system, however, is highly resistant to change. In April 2006, in response to yet another error by a testing company resulting in wrong test scores, Secretary Margaret Spellings called the major test publishers to Washington D.C. to demand that they get together and fix these systems. She stated that they needed to create error-free systems to keep the public faith in accountability and assessment. Following this meeting, the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) offered to convene the top state education leaders and the test publishers into a collaborative enterprise to resolve these problems in testing operations. But tellingly, this initiative never got off the ground as there was little real interest in the endeavor. One of the stumbling blocks was the demand by the state testing directors that test publishers include a code of ethics, and in particular a promise that they would no longer directly lobby education chiefs or governors. This missed opportunity to improve the quality and accuracy of the testing systems belies the reality that the education industrial complex is motivated by its own interests, not those of students. Another example of this is when a test publisher tried to rush through data reporting at the request of a state client, foregoing the usual regime of quality control checks, the resulting errors in scores revealed the fragility of these systems. They are increasingly coming under strain as pressure mounts due to the increasing volume of testing and the demand for quicker reporting. Interestingly, over this same period, CCSSO, a non-profit organization, has aggressively pursued business partnerships for revenue, selling access to the education chiefs through various forms of membership and sponsorship to most of the top companies in education, including the major test publishers.

The failure of the testing industry and education chiefs to regulate itself means we can expect further errors, and potential harm to students, every testing season. The implementation of NCLB and the emergence of this education industrial complex has subverted the integrity of testing and disastrously influenced the development of standards, curriculum, and instruction. It has corrupted the very processes of teaching and testing. And most tragically, it has blinded us to the true insight for reform, investment in and support of teachers and principals — human capital — that the top nations and top businesses understand to be the simple commonsense for achieving excellence.