If the U.S. Won't Pay Its Teachers, China Will

It doesn't necessarily mean that the high performing schools are high performing because they have a high tax base, that's just a correlation.

Quality teachers may not be attracted to inner-city schools because of unstated biases, or because they prefer to live in other areas and have short commutes.

Or maybe you have a safety issue due to a school's location or an aging building and high rents that diverts resources towards countermeasures or repairs.

For whatever reason though, busing led to miraculously improved outcomes. Then we stopped doing it for some reason. Now, instead, we make some kids stay in schools where they have six hours of recess or lunch or study hall, then one session with a permanent math substitute with no lesson plans.

So yeah, funding isn't everything--but some schools can't even afford teachers for every hour of the day, or roofs that aren't collapsing. If there is a minimum threshold not being met, funding's probably part of it. The better solution is to just not bar kids who want to learn from functioning schools.

He's not saying that. The idea he's espousing is closer to the idea that there are lots of talented kids in poor districts that get completely left behind because they live in a poor area. The only way to solve that is to provide some funding, and funding is scarce in poor districts.

When you're talking about fundamental education of your population, this is a pretty short-sighted argument. Under-education means fewer skilled workers and more bad decision making, both of which will have an impact on Mr. Rich. Mr. Rich has a personal interest in ensuring a good education for everyone.

Wealthy people will always have nicer cars and better vacations and bigger houses, but that doesn't mean the children of poor people should be relegated to terrible schools where they'll have no future.

We're talking about public education though, ideally, public education would have a universally high standard, and making funding for public education based on something like property values ensures that in certain areas it will be underfunded.

So it's really about whether we take universal public education seriously or if we're just providing education to some and a state sponsored daycare service to others.

Sure, let wealthy ADULTS have more advantages. However, children have no say in their circumstances, so I do think it is right to at least give CHILDREN equal opportunity and resources.

Well that is that the point of a republic/representative democracy/federalism?

Next best thing to finding a philosopher king is to try to create lots of warring interest groups that prevent each other from doing much at all. Or maybe make everything take supermajorities...

In a small setting like a school district, it's not clear there's any way to protect the rights of a minor subset of the population without simply granting them disproportionate power and making the other subset of the population the maligned group.

If group A wants x, and group B wants y, then you can either solve it by majoritarian or anti-majoritarian rules. Depending on the issue, I want majorities to decide in some cases, and not on others. I don't feel like issues of slavery, for example, are appropriate democratic questions.

You could put a special court on top of the structure with the goal of looking out a sort of "Rawlsian fairness," trying to seek the outcome that both parties would agree to if they were both spending some time in each others' shoes.

I'll admit I don't know what the fair resolution should be in a school district where a majority of parents prefer no school taxes and no public schools, just that people seem to get pretty unfairly hurt as this one unfolded.

Section 4 describes how racism (or tribalism or whatever you want to call it) is really natural and healthy, with no references except your own "common sense".

> Now imagine growing up and looking forward to playing on the same football team as your elders in front a cheering hometown crowd. And then that dream is taken away from you by some unelected judge. At his order, another tribe invades, takes your spot on the football team and dates the girl you were wooing. You are not going to like that very much. You might want to join with your tribal brothers and brawl with this opposing tribe in the lunch room. And of course the other tribe is going to fight back.

What the fuck? Why would I want to fight people for being better at football than me? Why would I start a race war because some guy with different skin than me is dating a girl I like? How can you possibly see this as acceptable? You can argue that it's natural, but natural doesn't mean good.

Do you understand that not everybody thinks like this? If a black guy gets promoted over me, I don't get angry at the black tribe for invading my homeland. That line of thinking is, as you say, cartoonishly racist.

And then in your conclusion, you correctly identify racial disparities, and then sort of argue that's the way it should be. The fact that black people do worse than white people in school is a problem worth solving, not a convenient method of grouping students, right? The only way this status quo could be acceptable is if you think black kids are genetically predisposed to be less intelligent. Your article on racism does bring that up, but I can't tell if it's a belief you hold. If you do believe that, you should be more clear about it in this school segregation article, otherwise your conclusions don't make sense.

If you are at a failing school and can get to a good school and want to learn, it seems immoral to force you to stay at the failing school.

Your thoughts about race relations or the quality of particular facilities don't really move me on this point.

Their biggest financial problem was probably their impulse to overspend on big ticket items "because my family is worth it". If I recall correctly, his wife pressures Walter to go to an oncologist that wasn't on their plan. In general, teachers tend to have better than average healthcare options. Chemotherapy for newly discovered cancer is almost always covered. If it's not, local news stations would love a story about a local science teacher who gets cancer that the big bad insurance company won't cover.

Me extrapolating here, but it's possible that they also spent big on different off-plan options for their son.

This was not a net win for society...

Sport is a recent concept invented by the British idle cast, as a way to spend time and money. The world do not have this luxury right now. We need to spend money on education.

By the way, an analysis of the two longest civilisations (Jewish and Chinese) show that both have been obsessed with education, and both did never have a particularly strong focus on "sports".

Maybe in one century it descendants will count how much of our resources we spent in nothing and will laugh (and cry).

Comparing depression era college educated male salaries to the modern workforce is apples and oranges. There were very few college graduates in those days -- and most were teachers. Other professions like law, engineering etc were struggling due to the depresssion.

The modern passage is even more weasel worded. You need the worksheet used to calculate to figure out what that actually means.

Just to clear up a misconception, teachers get a great pension, but (in Ontario at least) they put 10-13% of they're base salary into that pension plan for their entire careers. Anyone who invests that much money into their retirement will do well.

Also, the Ontario teachers pension plan is one of the best investment groups in the world. Many years they see 20+% returns. They own everything. Sports teams, malls, airports- they own the channel tunnel!

Compensation varies greatly by district—typically the worst districts pay the best, but they're still undesirable for teachers because the conditions are terrible—being cursed at and threatened daily by 5th graders (no joke) and witnessing assaults gets old fast.

[EDIT] I should add that their healthcare plans tend to suck and are totally useless (1.5-2x as expensive as other options) for covering one's family, but the retirement's good. They're also better for people planning to take maternity/paternity leave than probably any other employer in the area, especially if you time it so your leave rolls over into Summer and are willing to be docked a couple weeks' pay—you can achieve near-parity with lower end of normal for parental leave in other OECD states that way! What a perk.

http://www.teacherportal.com/teacher-salaries-by-state/

There's a lot that has to happen (work) when the students aren't in school so that teaching can happen.

Absolutely don't knock this. I teach robotics and tech part time to middle schoolers and if there's one thing that has helped me connect more than any other its being a living cartoon. Exaggerate everything. You should be half-way to full clown when lecturing or you're simply not getting through.

To prep for lessons, I don't study circuits, I watch CN. I'm a 40yo man who quotes Rick and Morty and can name all of the Crystal Gems. But it works like crazy.

The outcomes are fairly poor. For students that bother with the ACT the average score is 18, but for Illinois as a whole its 21. 18 is a score that only gets you into the most poorly ranked of colleges. CPS teachers also average 18-19 on the ACT as well. Graduation rate floats are 50% and the powerful Chicago teachers union fights against any performance testing of teachers impossible to implement.

The reality is that we absolutely don't need more education or more education dollars. We need higher quality education. Public sector unions have made sure to make this all about tax dollars, when it should be about teacher performance and student outcomes. This means teachers taking responsibility and administrators firing poor performing teachers. It means a lot of politically difficult things, thus why it doesn't really happen and why anyone with means in Chicago goes to private or charter schools. Or more commonly, white collar professionals move to the suburbs when they have children.

Also the mayor just wrote a op-ed piece against vouchers for private schools. What public school do his kids go to? None. They go to private school in Chicago.