the case for firing 50% of teachers.
how school is a cargo cult.
Trump and Elon are currently on a crusade to reduce the size of the federal government. They’ve attacked PEPFAR, USAID, and other foreign aid programs. But all of these programs only account for, at most, 8% of the total federal budget.1
The “Big Five” of Federal spending are self explanatory: healthcare, social security, military, and interest on the debt. The only one missing here is “income security,” which includes:
Unemployment payments.
SNAP: food assistance.
Supplemental Security Income (SSI): this is in addition to Social Security. It boosts payments to the elderly and disabled beyond what Social Security allows.
TANF: UBI for poor people.
Housing: Section 8, public housing, and elderly housing.
Refundable tax credits: Payments that exceed taxes owed, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit.
There’s nothing on this list about “education” or “foreign aid” or “funding for the environment.”
Elon and Trump’s attitude toward spending is like trying to cut down a tree by clipping off bits of the leaves, while leaving the roots strong and healthy. It’s performative and politically biased. Killing PEPFAR “owns the libs.” Killing foreign aid is “America First.” It has nothing to do with balancing the budget or reducing the debt, and everything to do with political patronage and partisan point-scoring.
I am not in favor of cutting educational spending overall. I think education is an important investment in young adults, which is important given that COVID lockdowns, Medicare, and Social Security are all gerontocratic welfare programs. Giving smart young adults a playground to make friends and connections is a good investment in the future.
However, when we say “education spending,” we have to be careful in not conflating college, which is worthwhile and produces real lifelong increases in income, with elementary school, which is a bloated daycare program.
In this article, I will argue that we should abolish elementary school and middle school, or at least significantly reduce spending on it.
the myth of the “American Idiot”
Since I was a small liberal child, the liberal priests and elders of my public school temple instructed me on the sins of America. Americans were idiots. We were not as good as Canadians or Scandinavians, because they were good Social Democrats, who had rid themselves of the superstition of religion.
On the other end of the spectrum, you had the Bible-thumping, cousin-humping, inbred, deep-fried, brain-dead ruralites of the South. They lived in swamps, sometimes poking their heads above the water in order to catch flies with their frog-tongues. Just like their ancient Celtic ancestors.
The foulest den was Alabama, where the people were barely literate and barely civilized. Alabama was small a step above mud huts and the abacus.
I held all these things to be true, and I think most of my fellow liberals still believe them, at least on some implicit or mythological level. But in comparison with Europeans, Alabama is fantastically rich.
Alabama isn’t far behind Sweden or Germany, and has the same amount of wealth as Finland. If you are a capitalist, you might be thinking that socialism is keeping countries like Sweden, Germany, and Finland artificially poor. Maybe if these countries unleashed the power of the free market, like Alabama, they could be twice as wealthy.
Europe is weighed down by excessive regulation and hampered by an aging population. But if you look at the test scores, it doesn’t seem that these countries are actually being suppressed very much. Americans are just way smarter.
American Asians outscore Asians from Taiwan and Japan;
American whites outscore all European countries;
Mixed-race Americans outscore all European countries except for Estonia and Ireland;
American Hispanics outscore Slovakians, Icelanders, Serbians, and Ukrainians;
American Blacks outscore Greeks, Romanians, Moldovans, Bulgarians, Cypriots, Chileans, Georgians, Macedonians, and Albanians — as well as many Asians, including Kazakhs, Mongols, Malaysians, Thais, Indonesians, Filipinos, Uzbeks, and Cambodians.
So why are Americans so much smarter? Is it our education system, or something else?
What about the teachers?
What about American teachers? Don’t they deserve some credit for America’s outstanding test scores?
The United States is somewhat near the bottom of the list, below France and above Sweden. This data is a bit old, going back to 2009, but PISA scores haven’t changed much since then in their rankings. Hungary is 3rd to last in spending, far behind Greece, so differences in educational spending do not determine educational outcomes.
Some of the worst performing countries spend the most on education as a percentage of GDP, like South Africa. Portugal and Germany are at the top of the list for high income countries, but Germany falls behind Latvia in PISA scores, and Portugal falls behind Germany. The best case for spending in education is South Korea, but Japan spends far less and achieves similar results.
If spending on elementary education has diminishing returns (past a certain threshold) on PISA scores or IQ, then what makes American whites, American Asians, American blacks, and American Hispanics so much better than their racial brethren back home?
why is greece worse than alabama?
Racial gaps between Americans are large and persistent over time. Racial nationalists claim that some races are inherently stupid or impossible to educate. But if this genetic determinism were true, what does that say about Greeks and Mongols? What is holding those groups back from expressing their latent “racial potential” as Europeans and Asians?
Test scores aren’t everything. Iceland is a rich country, despite having relatively low PISA test scores, below American Hispanics and Turkey. Wealth isn’t everything either. Fertility, ethnocentrism, openness, agreeableness, altruism, national cohesion, religiousness, and other traits are important and not captured by these statistics.
Still, when I ask racial nationalists why the Greeks perform so poorly, they tend to default to one of the following claims:
Test scores are fake: black people could never score that high, or Greeks could never score that low.
Greece was invaded by Turks, so Greek people are genetically Turkish, and don’t count as real white people.
Low Greek test scores are real, but they are a special result of unique, particular, historical context.
Greece was hit hard with an economic crisis in 2008, and it has been saddled with debt and austerity, and Greek test scores have been impacted by this state of affairs.
Greeks have been swamped with recent non-white immigration from the 2015 migrant crisis, which is lowering the score further.
Black test scores are real, but are only achievable because America spends a huge amount of money on black education. If other countries spent as much on education, those countries would beat American blacks easily.
Here would be my response:
If PISA test scores are fake, why do they correlate with IQ?
If Greeks are Turkish, what about Romania or Moldova, which were distant from supposed Ottoman immigration? Or Ukraine, with identical PISA scores to American blacks? Is it the 30 year old “horrors of communism”? If communism is so bad, why isn’t China PISA/IQ suffering from “the horrors of communism” today?
I want to investigate these claims further and in greater detail. We will get into a bit of recent Greek history, then make an aside on immigration, before addressing spending on education.
Greek Brain Drain
I don’t believe this sob story about Greeks being unable to pay for “good schools.” Greek GDP per Capita is higher than Hungary, but Hungary has better test scores. Instead, the culprit might be brain drain.
In 2010, the population of Greece was 11.12 million; in 2023, the population was 10.36 million. That’s a decline of 6.83% over 13 years. That’s a greater population loss than what Japan suffered in WWII. This loss occurred disproportionately among high IQ Greeks.
The Impact of Immigration on Greece?
At the same time as Greece has experienced massive brain drain of the top 5% of its population, it has also seen a massive influx of migrants.
However, most of these immigrants, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, didn’t stay in Greece. They made their way up through the Balkans to settle in Germany, Sweden, France, Ireland, or England.
By 2023, the number of migrant children in Greece was only 28,500. This represents only 1.43% of the student population of Greece. I am not sure that these migrant children would be enrolled in Greek schools, as opposed to milling around in detention centers and refugee camps. They probably haven’t made a big impact on PISA scores, while the mass emigration of Greeks of childbearing age between 2010 and 2025 has probably negatively impacted PISA scores in the last 15 years.
Americans have Brain Gain
America has obtained a cognitive advantage over Europeans and even Asian countries (after controlling for race) due to brain gain. Despite Donald Trump’s claim that “they’re not sending their best!” they are, in fact, sending their best.
Migration is expensive, and is only worth it if the cost of migrating can be overcome by future gains. In other words, migration is an investment, which requires short-term sacrifice for long term gain. One of the primary functions of intelligence is to utilize executive function to suffer short term losses in exchange for long term gains, such as in the marshmallow test.2
The act of migration, in itself, is an IQ test. Not a very accurate one, since there is only one question on the test. But the decision to migrate correlates with intelligence.
Whenever a country allows citizens to leave, it is risking losing its most intelligent members. When a country allows people to come in, it is receiving the smartest members of those nations.
Emil Kirkegaard has run an series of simulations demonstrating how selection for higher intelligence is balanced against regression to the mean. In his first model, immigrants who are selected to have an IQ above 110, from a country with an IQ of 70, will regress to an IQ of 92. On the other hand, if the origin population is 85 IQ, with a selection for 110 IQ, the “regressed” IQ will be 101.
The “selective effect of migration” is not so rigorous. It’s a relative test with respect to the original population, not a test with an absolute IQ threshold. African migrants are smarter than Africans, but they aren’t necessarily smarter than Chinese who don’t migrate. Still, the “selective effect of migration” helps explain why every racial group in America (white, black, Hispanic, Asian) is smarter than every corresponding racial group abroad.
The future of intelligent immigrants.
Americans are smarter than everyone else because America has been skimming off the cream of the crop for 400 years. If America stops being the premier destination for immigrants, we should expect all our smart people to leave.
That doesn’t mean that immigration is an unmitigated good. Immigrants tend to use welfare more than native born Americans (smart move, if you ask me). Even if immigrants score higher on IQ tests than their country of origin, this might not outweigh their country score.
Emil Kirkegaard’s survey of Dutch data on immigration argues that most immigrants are a net drain on the state:
The positive contribution of southern and eastern Africa is due to longitudinal data, going back decades. Most of these immigrants are whites who fled various African revolutions, including the end of Apartheid.
Even if the net budgetary impact of immigration is $0, immigration can still be positive, since immigrants live in houses, consume products, and their descendants could (theoretically) be drafted during wartime. When I say “drafted” I’m not suggesting putting immigrants on the front lines, but forcing them into factories, or into public works projects as FDR did with the Civilian Conservation Corps. Technically, forced labor is slavery, but so is the draft, and war is war.
The usefulness of manual labor during wartime can be demonstrated by the mass migrations of blacks out of the South during WWI and WWII. Maybe in the future automation will make manual labor irrelevant, but I would make the opposite case, that AI will make manual labor more important as a limiting factor for economic performance.
The economic consequences of immigration could be mitigated if western nations closed their “open pockets;” restricting welfare to natives only, and assessed a flat tax to all immigrants to account for their use of roads, schools, and medical services.
Prior to 1965, and especially before 1935, there was very little welfare in America at all. Many migrants came and then left to return home because they could not succeed. Immigration to America in the past was much more selective than it is today, and this explains why Americans, of all racial groups, are more intelligent than their peers “back home.”
American schools (K-4) don’t matter at all in determining the intelligence and economic output of Americans. It’s purely a result of migratory selective effects, going all the way back to 1619.
What is to be done?
K-12 spending should be slashed. It is a cargo cult. We now know that school causes kids to commit suicide.
We need less teachers, stupider teachers, and poorer teachers.
Lower the college admissions to age 17. This will reduce K-11 spending by 7.7%.3
Shorten the school day by instituting a “morning study-hall” with recess in the first hour of the day. Mandate that academic instruction times begin no earlier than 9:30am. There’s no point in lecturing while kids sleep through the first class.
Mandate hour-long lunch times. 30 minutes is cruel, unusual, and unhealthy for digestion and socializing. School should facilitate socialization, not punish it.
Mandate an end to academic instruction after 2pm. Allow students to go home; or stay in a study hall until their parents can pick them up; or offer sports practice.
K-11 teachers would be limited to 3.5 hours of instruction, half of their current work hours. The rest would be covered by daycare workers, gym teachers, or sports coaches.
If you go into a K-12 classroom, you will find teachers playing movies; making students do homework; proctoring quizzes. Most time is wasted. Kids could do homework at home; tests can be proctored by non-teachers; movies can be watched at home. Some kids benefit from staying in a study hall after school, because they have abusive parents, but that can be accomplished with afterschool programs rather than with fully-fledged teacher staffing.
With these amendments, we can slash teacher’s salaries by 50%. What will we do with all that extra money?
The Wit Visa
Rather than dumping 3.33% of GDP into K-12, we could get it down to 2.33% of GDP through a combination of fewer teachers, larger classroom sizes, shorter school days, longer lunches, more recess, eliminating senior year, and paying teachers less. This would add $257 billion to the budget.
With this $257 billion, $1 million could be offered to anyone under the age of 30 with an IQ over 120 to live in America. The $1 million would be paid out in monthly installments of $4,167 per month over 20 years, or roughly $50,000 per year.
This would bring in 257,000 new residents per year, or 2.57 million intelligent people over 10 years. This would do more to raise test scores than “raising teacher salaries.”
Given Kirkegaard’s models on regression to the mean, even assuming the original national IQ was as low as 70, this would still result in tremendous upward pressure on American IQ.
Would this work for small countries?
Tuvalu, with its population of 11,396 people, has a GDP of $70 million. Tuvalu spends $2.1 million on K-12 education per year. If it implemented my suggested cuts, it could spend $1 million per year on a “Wit Visa.” Over 100 years,4 8.8% of the population would be “Wit Visa” descendants.
If Tuvalu scrapped public K-12 education entirely, it could achieve a “wit descended” population of 17.6%. If Tuvalu currently has an IQ of 90, and this would raise its IQ to 95.28. In a small country like Tuvalu, this wouldn’t be very impactful, but in a large world-dominant country like America, raising the IQ would have a far greater impact.
With the IQ estimate of 97.7 for America, 100 years of the “Wit Visa” would raise American IQ to 101.6. This would make America the smartest non-Asian majority country in the world after Estonia. However, it should be considered that the Wit Visa would also “brain drain” many countries around the world, including the Asian ones. Not only would America be getting smarter, but everyone else would be getting dumber. Total American victory.
Should we abolish the DOE?
The “Wit Visa” assumes that the purpose of education is to raise intelligence. But education also socializes, nationalizes, and moralizes. Education teaches national myths about diversity, cosmology, and Martin Luther King. Both Nazis and communists used K-12 indoctrination to increase the strength of the party. In a liberal democracy, public education could have a stabilizing effect on political partisanship, and help forge a collective sense of national identity.
But if these are the goals, then it is possible that all of this could be achieved with intensive weekend programs, such as the Democratic Boy Scouts, the Nazi Hitler Youth, or the Communist Young Pioneers. It is not clear that imprisoning children in school for five days a week, seven hours a day is the most efficient “bang for the buck” system for achieving national cohesion and political unity.
How excited am I over the prospect of Trump eliminating the Department of Education? Not very. Federal funding only accounts for 14% of K-12 education. Most of it comes from state and local governments.
There would be a benefit to a National Scouts program that forces American children to form friendships, get physically active, and develop a cohesive national identity. I would prefer that the Department of Education be used to redirect funding for this purpose, rather than abolished entirely.
I am a globalist, meaning that I think that eliminating barriers and boundaries between states is good. Abolishing the Department of Education would empower state governments, which might increase polarization and decrease national unity.
conclusion.
The similarities between K-12 education and the prison system are obvious. Being forced into a small indoor space; being regimented and deprived of agency; being forced to associate in close quarters with people you would rather avoid. I think prison is cruel to criminals — how much more cruel to children!
College, on the other hand, is a wonderful experiment, where young adult get together to form new relationships and new experiences outside their hometown. As a rite of passage, college is important, even if much of the spending is wasted in administrative fees. Obviously, college could be made more efficient, like any government program, but I think the net benefits are worth the inefficiencies.
There are many criticisms of immigration, but it is the only way to quickly and efficiently raise test scores, outside of solving malnutrition or genetic engineering. Chinese GDP per Capita was under $1,000 a year in 2000 (below the current average for Africa); but test scores haven’t improved much since then. All the nonsense about “raising teacher salaries” is teacher union propaganda.
Above all this, how important are test scores anyway? Iceland is lackluster in this department, but is extremely wealthy. Would you rather be more like Iceland, or more like South Korea?
A test-score based immigration system would raise IQ, but it might also breed a more risk-avoidant culture, with Vivek Ramaswamy as its avatar. Is it worth it to gain 3 IQ points if you also lose the disagreeable individualism that made America great?
Immigrants want to move to America, not China. The revealed preference of immigrants is for countries which are a mix of low conformity/agreeableness and high intelligence; not for a mere one-dimensional maximum of intelligence. We should consider that before we construct an immigration system single-mindedly maximized around IQ. My intention with this thought experiment isn’t to endorse maximizing intelligence, but to prove how, if that was your goal, K-12 spending is an inefficient method.
It’s closer to 0.4%, but when I point this out, Republicans claim that there are “40 other programs just like USAID.” Well, if so, it’s 8% of the total budget. Not going to solve the debt problem.
I would not pass this test, since I thought it was spelled “marshmellow.”
Sometimes I amaze myself with my own brilliance.
Assuming assimilated fertility to replacement rate.
honestly, most High school teachers could be eliminated if we just stopped letting students be pieces of shit.
I could easily teach a classroom of 50 highschool boys if you let me slap the shit out of the fuckups. OR we just don’t make high school mandatory and lower the age of entering the workforce to 14 and then kick out the fuck ups.
Either way would get things done better.
As I recall, USA doesn't do PISA sampling properly. It's a few states only. Looks like the US blacks are an elite sample in PISA (mean IQ equivalent about 93). I haven't looked into the details.