Nick Hanauer Redux

Here is the follow-up email from Nick Hanauer, father of I-884, the initiative to increase the state sales tax by a billion dollars a year in order boost education spending. Hanauer and his immediate family have spent more than $350,000 on this initiative. I've been skeptical of the initiative and Hanauer's funding of it and I commend him for his direct responses. His arguments themselves are disappointing. His complete response is in the extended entry. I'll focus here on this quote:

Many business leaders point to the teachers union as THE problem. This is utter bullshit. Does the union suck? Yes. Do they do stupid shit? Of course. Is there waste in Public Ed? You bet. But give me 2 hours in any one of this area's large public companies-Boeing, Microsoft, Safeco, Washington Mutual, and I'll find you idiots who needed to be fired years ago, waste, abuse incompetence. You'd find the same at companies I run too. Blaming the union for entire problems faced by Public Ed is like Detroit saying that the reason their cars sucked in the 70's was the union. History has shown, that mostly, it was management with their heads up their asses. IN the case of Public Ed, management is US. You and me. The voters.

Yes, there is waste, abuse and incompetence in the private sector, but there is also a competitive market for capital and customers. Yes, the American auto giants were mismanaged. But this mismanagement was discovered and eventually corrected because customers had the affordable alternative of Japanese cars. The central problem with public education that Hanauer doesn't seem to care about fixing is that it is a monopoly that is largely unresponsive to its customers.

The part about the voters being the managers of public education is so much puerile horseshit. The voters can at best replace a school board member every four years, and those contests are hardly conducted on a fair playing field. The employee unions have enormous resources to throw into campaigns that ordinary citizens cannot hope to match. Few among us can afford the hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign donations that Hanauer routinely spends, let alone the time it takes to be effective in politics. Even when the voters manage to elect a reformer to the school board , how much good does that really do? Most of the important decisions such as hiring, firing and compensation are determined by collective bargaining agreements and almost entirely out of the hands of elected board members. That's why so many of those with means simply opt out of the public school system for private school yet still pay through the nose in taxes for a system that doesn't meet their children's needs. And that option remains unaffordable to so many who want it and could benefit most.

Read Hanauer's complete e-mail. It not only fails to make the case that spending another billion dollars a year will do the right things to fix the failing public school system we already have -- it tells me that there are few legitimate arguments for the I-884 proposal other than a lot of juvenile idealism and naive fantasies.

Meanwhile, the Seattle Times has endorsed this misguided initiative even though it's reporting hasn't included any balanced criticism of the initiative or its promoters. I guess that's just another example of the "threat to democracy" from the "loss of our Fourth Estate" that Frank Blethen has warned us about.

Hanauer's complete e-mail:

My kids are 4 and 2. They go to pre-school now, but will go to the local public school in shoreline where we live. I am staying out of the charter fight until after the election. I will say that I believe charter schools can be part of a solution but are not THE solution.

I'd like to point out, that the family business was tiny and employed a few dozen people when my brother and I started. We spent 20 years building it to the 350 million in sales and 2000 employees it is today.

So a guy who builds manufacturing companies but who's also run retail, restaurant, high-tech and medium tech companies like me, knows a bit about the value of money and when and where it can usefully be employed.

I am not some left wing, social justice whack-job. I believe that significant and aggressive investments in public education are the shrewdest and highest leverage thing our capitalist democracy can do to kick the crap out of the competition. (Other states and countries)

You can't understand this problem without recognizing that Public ed was specifically designed and funded NOT to educate every child. It was designed that way because at the time (100 years ago) we had a society which required that a majority of citizens NOT be educated. What would an agrarian and industrial society do with a bunch of college grads??

The dirty secret of Education is this, that "educating" white, highly motivated and capable kids from good and supportive families is relatively easy. And you can see from the demographics that kids from nice neighborhoods that go to public school go to college, and kids from poor neighborhoods don't, even though about the same amount of money is spent on them.

Actually, "white" has nothing to do with it. East Asians outperform whites, even though East Asians are, as a whole, poorer, and more likely to be English-learning immigrants. Parental involvement is a huge factor. It's not entirely clear how spending massive sums of money on the children of unmotivated parents without also demanding more of the parents is necessarily the right answer.

It is an arithmetic fact that everywhere in the known universe (within 13.7 billion light years form here) it takes more resources (energy) to push a ball up a hill than to roll a ball down a hill.

Today, 8 of 10 jobs created by our economy require a college education. Yet of 100 kids who enter kindergarten in our state only about 20 will get a 4 year degree.

What does the "8 of 10 jobs" claim actually mean and what is the source? It is implausible that "8 of 10 jobs require college" if only 2 in 10 finish college.

SO you see, we've got a lot of balls to push up a hill. Standards are essential and important, but without more resources to drive academic success deeper into the society where it is harder and more costly, we just will not be able to win in the knowledge economy. The fact that many poor families don't read to their kid makes some people I know mad. They blame the families. But that does not change the fact that it costs about 50K a year to incarcerate people, almost all of whom never graduated from high school.

Many business leaders point to the teachers union as THE problem. This is utter bullshit. Does the union suck? Yes. Do they do stupid shit? Of course. Is there waste in Public Ed? You bet. But give me 2 hours in any one of this area's large public companies-Boeing, Microsoft, Safeco, Washington Mutual, and I'll find you idiots who needed to be fired years ago, waste, abuse incompetence. You'd find the same at companies I run too. Blaming the union for entire problems faced by Public Ed is like Detroit saying that the reason their cars sucked in the 70's was the union. History has shown, that mostly, it was management with their heads up their asses. IN the case of Public Ed, management is US. You and me. The voters.

The challenge for this state and our Nation is to transform Public Ed from an institution that college educates 2 in 10 to one that college educates 8 of 10. To insist that it can do so without more money is naïve or mendacious or both.

Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at September 29, 2004 01:26 PM | Email This