They are 25.1:1 in 1965, and 15.3:1 today.

BCD simply says that labor-intensive fields in which large productivity gains are not possible must, in order to continue to attract workers, pay wages that track at least reasonably well with wages in the general economy whose level is driven much more by increasing productivity. It would be difficult to see how a field like education could fail to exhibit a significant degree of BCD.

The corresponding teacher/student ratio change (25:1 in 1960, 8:1 today) and the increase in administrators relative to teachers (anecdotal evidence only), would make me think that Baumol’s Cost Disease (hereafter, BCD for short) is a relatively small contributor. Wouldn’t BCD say that the proportion of total resources going to the sector increases as relative productivity falls; here, it’s the actual resources, not the proportion, that is going up.

Harry,
Teacher salaries have gone down relative to those of doctors; stayed about constant with those of average college grads; gone up relative to those of median full-time workers. For my purposes, the last is the key point. (The fact that a median family can’t buy a median education is problematic for a wide variety of political questions.)

I agree that the loss of a captive female workforce has hurt the school system, as has being asked to take over a large variety of functions previously done by mothers. It seems to me, though, that the impact on the school system would be more focused on quality than on cost. (To maintain quality would have increased cost.)

Tripled in constant dollars is what Rothstein said.I’m aware of that. Cost disease is a phenomenon of real labor costs, not just nominal ones. You could look it up, as Yogi Berra would say.

If advantaged kids can learn anything at home that is missing in the curriculum, then it doesn’t matter whether it is history or maths that is cut.

I don’t know if I agree, but I think it is an interesting point. Implicitly, he is saying that advantaged kids will learn these things at home, and that’s probably true to some extent.

I never thought of it this way, but a focus on skills for everyone can well be recipe for class education.

There are at least two meanings to the phrase “fixing schools.” My experience in business and government suggests that when people start talking about “money wasted” in education, they are using the vet’s language on “fixing schools.”

[Which may give a whole new meaning to Gary Larson’s cartoon of one dog talking to another excitedly, about going to the park, and then to the vet to get “tutored.”]

I think the really key point (for me) is in Hess’ first essay; per-pupil spending has tripled since the early 1960’s.

In the early 1960s gasoline was less than $0.50/gallon in most of the U.S. (it was still at $0.25/gallon in Utah by 1973). Milk was $0.60/gallon. Cars went for $3,000, new.

Per pupil spending has only tripled? No wonder education is suffering.

Tripled in constant dollars is what Rothstein said.

“one of my minor betes noir is the frequency with which NPR, when it wants a right winger to comment on an education policy issue, goes to Heritage or Cato, rather than to the AEI”

Kieran: “I can’t imagine what empirical tendencies might have influenced NPR to discriminate in this sort of way.”

I can. The whole d*mn neoconmen movement, and a disasterous war. Add to that such illuminaries as Kevin ‘Dow 36,000’ Haskett, Charles ‘Bell Curve’ Murray, and Charle ‘Dr. Strangelove’ Krauthammer’.

AEI is a very dangerous and very evil brothel. Anybody working there has nothing to complain about reputationally – and that’s if they’re honest.

The last few years have certainly taught me that people who work in brothels are generally not just there to play the piano.

This helps me figure out what Hess and Rothstein have in common. They are both focussed on different ways in which resources are wasted in in-school interventions. Neither deny that it takes a lot of resources to do it well, but both realise that extra resources (and existing resources) can be used more, or less, effectively, and focus attention both on how resources are used sub-optimally and on how they could be used more efficiently. I think they’re both often right (which is why I recommend both books), though it is difficult to convince people to adopt the needed reforms.