JayB
Life of the Party
I commend you for taking the time to dive into the literature to inquire about a cause that you care about, and for being willing to carefully evaluate the findings on their own merits. That makes you quite the oddball these days.
For what it's worth when I first heard the "more police, shorter sentences" line I was skeptical of the shorter sentences aspect (until I thought about it for a bit), but part of what was persuasive about the dialogue I was hearing was that serious scholars on the left and right seemed to agree that there was an overwhelming consensus supporting that conclusion in the literature. The fact that neither side was 100% happy with that model but had to grudgingly agree with the findings was also part of what caught my attention, since those on the left weren't automatically predisposed to favor more police, and those on the right weren't automatically predisposed to favor shorter sentences.
There's been such a complete, top-to-bottom collapse in the cultural, political, and judicial consensus that emerged in the 80s and 90s - such as it was - that supported a dispassionate, evidence based approach for law enforcement that at this point the benefits of hiring more police would be substantially muted. I don't expect that to change for at least a decade or more, and I'll likely be dead before things turn around.
I agree with you when it comes to schools and the benefits of education, but there's a distinction between "schooling" and learning, and as with policing, if you disregard the data you can spend significantly more on the former without doing much to increase the latter. There's nowhere where the failure to heed the evidence is more clear than when it comes to reading - and no skill more highly correlated with most of the outcomes we're hoping that schooling will produce, yet schools around the country are persisting in using flawed methods that are driving a multi-generational catastrophe when it comes to teaching kids - especially poor kids - to read effectively. This is another case where serious, principled people on the right and the left agree that there's a vastly more effective way to teach reading, and that the benefits of universally adopting these methods would be profound. Sadly - this is also a case where the presence of this left/right consensus is very unlikely to have any effect whatsoever on public policy. One more case where I've resigned myself to trying to limit the damage that these policies inflict on my family.
This NPR podcast series is a good primer on the topic.
Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong
There's an idea about how children learn to read that's held sway in schools for more than a generation — even though it was proven wrong by cognitive scientists decades ago. Teaching methods based on this idea can make it harder for children to learn how to read. In this new podcast, host Emily...
features.apmreports.org
This blog-post is a good distillation of the evidence on instructional methods from a center-right economist.
Direct Instruction: A Half Century of Research Shows Superior Results - Marginal REVOLUTION
What if I told you that there is a method of education which significantly raises achievement, has been shown to work for students of a wide range of abilities, races, and socio-economic levels and has been shown to be superior to other methods of instruction in hundreds of tests? Well, the...
marginalrevolution.com
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