A letter to my students
blogs.berkeley.edu
blogs.berkeley.edu
Are current state revenues lower than revenues in, say, 1960, when adjusted for inflation?
Example: USPS has seen slow/negative net revenue growth, so they're considering cutting Saturday service.
But if that $5000 is going to needed books for schools, it's good.
Great anecdote from NY State on a recent episode of This American Life ("Social Contract"): Arizona sold their state capitol to cover costs, and now pays rent to use the building.
http://www.textbookleague.org/103feyn.htm
At first we weren't supposed to talk about the cost of the books. We were told how many books we could choose, so we designed a program which used a lot of supplementary books, because all the new textbooks had failures of one kind or another.
[...]
[During my time on the commission,] there were two books that we were unable to come to a decision about after much discussion; they were extremely close. So we left it open to the Board of Education to decide. Since the board was now taking the cost into consideration, and since the two books were so evenly matched, the board decided to open the bids and take the lower one.
Mr. Norris, the Pasadena lawyer on the board, asked the guy from the other publisher, "And how much would it cost for us to get your books at the earlier date?"
And he gave a number: It was less!
The first guy got up: "If he changes his bid, I have the right to change my bid!" -- and his bid is still less!
Norris asked, "Well how is that -- we get the books earlier and it's cheaper?"
"Yes," one guy says. "We can use a special offset method we wouldn't normally use . . ." -- some excuse why it came out cheaper. The other guy agreed: "When you do it quicker, it costs less!"
That was really a shock. It ended up two million dollars cheaper. Norris was really incensed by this sudden change.
I do think it's likely they haven't decreased greatly, though--- imo a bigger factor has been that where the money is spent has shifted greatly (less on education, more on cops and prisons, for example).
We have a heckavu budget morass in California. Our ballot initiative democracy has _written into the constitution_ both spending minimums (40% of general budget from Prop 98) for education, and tax maximums. It's a massive vote of no confidence to strip our legislatures of the working room to make a budget.
I'm going to agree with the letter here. Somehow, in California in the 60s, we decided as a state to build the world's best civil infrastructure. We (well my grandparents) built this to benefit residents statewide. The terms of debate have changed from what makes the best place to live, to fear or sounds-nice-but-not-right-nowism.
From 2/3s majorities, to social issues, to pensions, we're in a real hole. But a rebuilt civil infrastructure is necessary, decline is obvious.
1965-1966: $4B nominal ($28B, constant 2010 dollars)
1982-1983: $25.3B nominal ($57.2B)
2008-2009: $144B ($145)
2009-2010: $119.2B ($119.2B)
Even if you adjust for California's prodigious immigration-fueled population growth, spending per person in constant dollars has more than doubled.
You spent your school years with teachers paid less and less.
I feel the urge to get out numbers here, but it would be like shooting fish in a barrel.
It's from a ca.gov domain, so I'm not sure it gets much more authoritative.
You can do your own analysis, but one snapshot would be 137B total spent in 2000-1 to 200B total spent in 2010-11. I chose to include federal funds on the grounds that for the topic in question, that would seem the relevant measure since a lot of those federal funds lately have been for public services, the topic in discussion. http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl shows the inflation rate across that time frame as a 1.27 multiple, vs. a 1.46 multiple in California spending.
You can make the numbers somewhat worse by using 2009-2010's expenditures of 221B; how fair you think that is is up to the reader, I guess. Given that our author probably still thinks that's not enough, arguably that would be a more fair demonstration of what is still apparently not enough money.
All following figures are from US census data:
Total revenue from all taxes per capita 1964: $2182.85 (helpfully provided by the 1964 census).
Total revenue from all taxes 2005: $146,692,000,000
Total resident population of California, 2005: 36,250,000
Total revenue from all taxes per capita 2005: $4,046.68
HOWEVER, what I will never do is frame statistics or data just to fit my argument better. I was curious about this statistic (I don't really believe this tiny bit of data is really evidence for any drastic response) and decided to do the grunt work with the past US census data to satisfy my curiosity, whatever the results.
Also, the US census papers look way better in 1964 than they do in 2005. I think the 2005 documents may have a more legible typeface but it certainly makes me go "ugh." The margins are very bad in the '05 docs, too.
He learned Latin in high school (think inner city kid learning Latin). Grew up with all the airfields in LA and mechanical engineering seemed like the thing, I guess. So despite being interned (he was a Japanese American) he went on to be a very successful engineer and eventually businessman (owned his own hydraulics company, etc.).
It's arguable that a lot of this happened because of a golden age in California's educational system. Same thing with my parents. I've met them and they're idiots -- but at least my father benefited greatly from UC Berkeley (he's a philosophy professor).
I think PG is right to question what exactly is going on. But there really was an extraordinary investment in higher education (for whatever reason) in the early- to mid- 20th century. And arguably, that affected a lot of things which we Californians take for granted.
I think what the OP is trying to say is that our attitude about public education has changed. It was irrational, the level of investment that was made into higher education pre-1980s (both raising and allocating funds). And today's set of challenges may require a different emphasis (e.g., charter schools, leaner campuses, more online learning, etc.) -- but that generous spirit that, afaik, built California into a great state -- that's not worth overlooking.
Prisons (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_incarceration_timeline-... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Incarceration_rate_of_inma...) Just locking up all the bad people sounds like a great idea but it's also ridiculously expensive and provides little long term benefit.
Pensions without appropriate savings represent a huge drain on the government that "suddenly appears" (after 30+ years).
Personnel costs rise not just with inflation but with the completion from the local job market. Unfortunately for the state it can't reduce benefits when times get tough.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_criminal_justice_cost_t...
For fuck's sake, where's the justice? Anyway, the dudes now got over 30 points so maybe my heroic effort did not go in vain. On-topic: unjustly locking up a whole swathe of your citizen's has got to be a drain on resources. Compare US incarceration rates to most Western European countries and think about the consequences for a while.
Exactly right; and that, not the numbers, is the point of the article.
Thanks for the reminder.
What would likely be more effective would be data on changes in teacher salaries over time, changes in administrator salary over time, etc.
This makes a huge difference in the argument if for no other reason than that the increase in revenue over time has been due to increased services (not necessarily relating to the betterment of the state or its educational systems) rather than the deepening of the pockets of existing services in 1964.
If you've got a plan for providing the level of services from the 60s without raising taxes, I'd love to see the details. (Consider pension and healthcare costs now versus then, even accounting for inflation)
Take over healthcare and beat back prices? Hey, I'm all for it, but I think that's gonna cost more in the short term.
I guess you didn't really grok my point about prices not being exogenous entities.
On a more serious note, there isn't one solution. There are hundreds of thousands of ways to spend less and bring more money in. It took this country, and that state, a few decades to get into that mess. It will probably take just as long to get back to the prosperity the 40's and 50's were known for.
(E.g., something like higher post-diagnosis death rates for statistically comparable people?)
It probably would have been cheaper to allow people to have real personal health savings accounts and provide a "last-resort" insurance that pays everything over some amount ($100K perhaps). That last bit probably would bring down premiums because of a max risk.
It'd be almost impossible to quantify - and it is probably only one of several factors - but the take-home point is that increased spending isn't necessarily an indicator of better education.
Population in 1960: 15,717,204 Population in 2010: 36,961,664
$28B for 15.7M people is $1783 per person $119B for 37.9M people is $3140 per person.
And the costs have increased far faster than inflation, so comparing constant dollars is not an apples to apples comparison. Inflation includes a lot of things, but not everything. The state spends a massive portion of its revenues on education and healthcare, those are two things notoriously increasing in price faster than inflation.
It is fashionable to be anti-government, but the the numbers don't seem that bad to me when you look at the whole picture.
I would assume that the government is disproportionately likely to spend on these categories. So isn't this another way to illustrate inefficiency? If there's a correlation between government being a customer, and prices rising while the quality of the end product drops, that sounds like one more argument in favor of lower spending.
(There's a term for this effect, but I'm having trouble finding it again.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease
Baumol's cost disease (also known as the Baumol Effect) [...] involves a rise of salaries in jobs that have experienced no increase of labor productivity in response to rising salaries in other jobs which did experience such labor productivity growth. [...]
Baumol's cost disease is often used to describe the lack of growth in productivity in public services such as public hospitals and state colleges. Since many public administration activities are heavily labor-intensive there is little growth in productivity over time because productivity gains come essentially from a better capital technology. As a result growth in the GDP will generate little more resources to be spent in public sector. Thus public sector production is more dependent on taxation level than growth in the GDP.
How many people have health insurance in the US?
How many of those are government employees? (Answer: far less than half)
Is the government running health insurance? (Answer: no).
EDIT: Wasn't trying to get too political on this. I just find the argument "the government buys some health insurance, so that's why it's expensive" outrageously unpersuasive.
For the change in average levels of education and knowledge, the cause seems pretty obvious to me. If you extended the border of California 400 miles south into Mexico, the average state scores on tests of math, history, and English would obviously go down, simply because of the composition of the population. Similarly, if you move 10 million Mexicans into California, the average test scores of the people living within the borders of California will fall (even if there is no change in the amount of learning for one individual person). In general if you look into correlations between education spending and test scores, there is very little correlation. If you look into the correlation of ethnicity and test scores, its very significant.
However, he does link to real government sources (near the botton), so you can check to see if he weighs by ideology when posting numbers.
Sometimes they end up in disagreement with me, but I always prefer informed and still wrong to uninformed and wrong[1]. :)
[1]Which is not to say these numbers are wrong or right. I'm speaking generally.
My point is simple. You have a group A of 10 million that on average score 450 on the math SAT. You have a group B of 10 milllion that score 500 on average. If you randomly move 5 million from group A to group B, then statistically, the average score of group B will fall to ~481.
Good job, you just discovered that our standardized tests scores are biased in favor of white kids.
A better way to show that standardized tests mean nothing is to have every student take them, but then store them away for the next 40 years. No one knows the results. And then in 40 years correlate the results of these tests with "life success". We've already seen with one similar measure "IQ test", which has little bearing on academic placement, that it turns out to have very little utility in predicting "life success". UPDATE: Link on IQ -- http://www.halfsigma.com/2006/06/high_iq_does_no.html
That article comes right out and says that IQ does not have an effect on life outcomes, if life outcomes are normed for educational attainment. It then goes on to say that IQ does not predict career success, if career success is measured by money and normed for career type. That's like saying air temperature has no effect on snow cover, if snow cover is corrected for season. And altitude.
But sticking with just the article. The point he makes is that its the educational attainment that people pay for, not the IQ score. Now you're saying, "But educational attainment is a product of IQ score". Possibly, but in controlling that factor you can attempt to tease out the extent at which it really is the educational attainment rather than simply the IQ.
A better way to put is that if IQ was in itself the key to life success then it wouldn't matter if you went to college or not. Rather, what the data seems to show is that those with high IQs seem to at least have the wisdom to know that educational attainment will be the key their life success. Quite possibly being tracked into by virtue of a higher IQ.
BUT the data should show that regardless of credential, higher IQ yields more success. But it doesn't show that.
Now there are a lot of factors that potentially come into play. And that was my original point. One can't look at SAT scores and then say, "those with high SAT scores do better in life", when there are so many comingling factors that complicate the equation, and are ridiculously difficult to control for in the real world.
Two grad students at CalTech were having a discussion about what Feynman's IQ must be. They bandied 180... maybe even to 200. When coincidentally Feynman walks right past them.
One of the students pipes up and meekly asks Feynman, "Professor Feynman, what is your IQ?"
Feynman turns around and responds, "120". The grad students have a look of disbelief. To which Feynman adds, "but its all in Physics".
The problem is that a young black kid raised where many are raised, SAT scores not withstanding, likely won't have the opportunities that those I listed had. Let me give a glimpse of Michael Dell's early life, from Wikipedia: "The son of an orthodontist and a stockbroker, Dell attended Herod Elementary School in Houston, Texas. In a bid to enter business early, he applied to take a high school equivalency exam at age eight. In his early teens, he invested his earnings from part-time jobs in stocks and precious metals. Dell purchased his first calculator at age seven and encountered his first teletype machine in junior high, which he programmed after school."
If you go into the inner-cities, this type of early life, even from the bright and ambitious will likely look very different.
And lastly, Asians are disciminated against in a very different way than Blacks are. They are discriminated in the belief that they excel at math and engineering. I've seen first hand, in elementary school, how powerful expectations are (and there is good data around this too).
Any ethnicity can have a scholarly culture, but for people starting out at the bottom, in a new society, it's less common.
There's also a selection bias against those who have not moved up in society. E.g. take a depressed area -- if the people with the gumption to improve their situation do so and leave, what's left? Right, concentrated fail.
That would effect total spending. Whether that means California is doing more for its citizens in this way is a question one can ask.
9.6% of the general fund on corrections/rehab programs
43.4% on K-12 education
14.3% on higher education
http://www.ebudget.ca.gov/pdf/BudgetSummary/SummaryCharts.pd...
California per-pupil spending 2008: $9,015 California’s Annual Costs to Incarcerate an Inmate in Prison: $47,102
http://blogs.sacbee.com/the-public-eye/2010/08/california-pe... http://www.lao.ca.gov/laoapp/laomenus/sections/crim_justice/...
Why should those be, in any way, comparable?
Prisoners need cells, three meals a day, healthcare, clothing, and constant supervision, 24 hours a day. Schoolchildren only need classrooms and supervision for six hours a day five days a week. And prisons can't get away with a 30:1 inmate-to-guard ratio, either. It makes perfect sense that a prisoner should cost more than a schoolkid.
Of course I'm sure California prison guards are still ridiculously overpaid. My personal solution to this conundrum is to outsource California's prisons to Mexico.
Or, put another way, where exactly do you see an extra $100B in CA's budget?
So really, I think it's far more important to question: 1) How has the cost for these public services scaled with the population in the past? 2) Based on that, how do I think the cost of the these public services scale with the population in the foreseeable future? 3) Is this increase in expenditure due to wasteful mismanagement of funds, or a design problem in our cities and services?
http://www.statemaster.com/graph/edu_ele_sec_fin_cur_exp_per...
To turn this into a 'low taxes vs high taxes' debate is kind of deceptive. I think that the point about taxes is that the debate around taxes has essentially become petty and mean-spirited.
If a politician wants to raise taxes (in any way, even on the wealthiest 1 or .1%, who would barely notice), countless will bitch about it, without regard for data or reason (or common sense). It will be a knee jerk reaction.
WRT to his assumptions, I don't think that he is assuming that California is not spending its money wastefully (see his mention of the penal system). There is an argument to be made, however, that it is incredibly difficult to reclaim wasteful spending that has already been done. (California is not going to pardon 60% of its prison population and close its prisons or cancel state pensions).
So the expedient solution, if you believe in spending more on education and social services, would be to tax more. (but no politician in their right mind would say that).
The war on drugs, high incarceration rates, and trumpeting an ideology of low taxes are all politically expedient, but not necessarily expedient with regard to what we actually want to achieve.
In an optimization problem, a nearest neighbor algorithms will generally produce a sub-optimal, but okay result.
This is only true, however, if your nearest neighbor algorithm is using the correct selection heuristic... Garbage in, garbage out.
Our political system needs a new heuristic.
(Assuming P!=NP, and that the governance of California is an NP hard optimization problem...)
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-statebudget-fl,0,95571....
To be fair, the CA real estate boom/bust really did a number on the state's coffers. To ignore the impact of the "great recession" is to not see the problem accurately. The govt relied on increasing property tax revenue that disappeared as quickly as the monopoly money used to pay for it (aka subprime loans) and on state income taxes and sales taxes from workers who quickly lost their real estate bubble jobs. If those workers still had their jobs and homeowners still had their homes, we'd find something else to complain about. Moral of the story is be careful when playing with credit.
There are few major issues with the California budget.
1) Much of the revenue is required by law to be allocated in a certain way. This leaves the government with very little wiggle room to make changes to the budget.
2) State workers have powerful unions that have burdened the government with an amazing out of debt and future obligations in terms of pension of benefits. No matter what the budget shortfall, the government must meet these obligations.
3) When revenues increased during the DOT COM boom, government was more than happy to spend the increased revenue on new services rather than either decreasing taxes or saving the money in a "rainy day" fund.
4) California is a mess of red-tape and bureaucracy. I'm actually surprised how many startups do business in California and the Bay Area with the all the labor laws and extra benefits that businesses have to pay for that other states don't, like CA SDI that pays for paid leave, while other states don't have it. Also, state land use laws and regulations were directly responsible for the increase in housing prices by making it so difficult to build new developments (among other factors, of course).
Californians have burdened themselves with a massive amount of debt and regulations that have severely hampered the ability of businesses to grow and contribute to state job growth. A article posted a few weeks back showed that there's a huge exodus of people from California to other states. I personally left California (East Bay) because I couldn't afford to buy a home and settle down with my family, not to mention the 9.75% sales tax on purchases from Newegg.com!
Year State funding (2010 $) Enrollment Per-student funding (2010 $)
1965 $1.37 billion 59,000 $23,000
1970 $1.84b 73,000 $25,000
1975 $2.31b 84,000 $28,000
1980 $2.75b 94,000 $29,000
1985 $3.23b 108,740 $30,000
1990 $3.47b 125,044 $28,000
1995 $2.68b 123,948 $22,000
2000 $3.94b 141,028 $28,000
2005 $3.09b 158,933 $19,000
2010 $3.02b 181,520 $17,000
Benefits outside this direct funding were much more generous in my parents' generation also--- my dad went to a private university in California with his tuition mostly paid by the state, courtesy of the Calgrants program, which used to pay for any California student with grades above a certain level and with financial need to attend any California university, public or private. So to some extent it is sort of annoying that a generation that benefited from those kinds of programs, getting their degree without incurring student-loan debt, now thinks that they need to be cut.
Interestingly, most of the faster-than-population enrollment surge is in the past 5 years. If enrollments had grown from 1970 to 2000 in line with the results of the 1970 census versus the 2000 census, they would've been 124,000 in 2000, which is not that much lower than the actual 141,000 (that's only a 15% growth in enrollment rates over 30 years).
http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/accountability/index/1...
My father said it best, "I had it great, you're screwed. Thanks for paying for it."
a) cost "nothing" to just write in the paper -- quite easy to balance
b) were actuarial suicide
c) will never be repealed.
What evidence does he provide that the decline in quality of education is due to lower budgets? As technology improves we should expect costs to decline. We should expect higher quality for less cost! When this fails to happen it usually because of artificially erected barriers to entry in an attempt to capture rent for a select few. And just who are loading up teachers "with more and more mindless administrative duties"? Taxpayers? Who benefits when it is increasing difficult to acquire the "skills" necessary to become a new teacher?
He doesn't really provide any unique insight besides blaming all of society's ills on tax cuts. Food has gotten cheaper, electronics have gotten cheaper, why has our government gotten more expensive!?
Only if you assume labour isn't the prime mover. Assuming that technology improvements help education at all (I'm skeptical -- I learned more about logarithms in math by using an abacus than I did using a calculator), we would ideally want education quality to increase, not decrease. Therefore, we should probably assume costs will stay approximately the same percentage over the years.
One thing I've been thinking about lately is education as related to teacher salaries. In general teacher salaries are pretty poor, but they've always been pretty crappy. However, the civil rights movement has had a big impact since the 50's and there's a big difference. Teaching was and is a female dominated profession -- what's interesting are the opportunities for women since the civil rights act. Now, instead of teaching, the brightest women are more likely to hold more prestigious, higher paying jobs that were previously reserved for white men. In effect, it's as though we were placing a restriction on women that said "If you're smart you can work -- but you can only work as a teacher." I'm not sure how much of a difference this makes, but it seems like it could make quite a bit.
Yes, but they get great fringe benefits (early retirement, defined benefit pensions) and easy hours. The salaries aren't even that bad if you multiply by (12 months of pay / 9-10 months of work). The underpaid teacher is a myth.
http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf
http://web.missouri.edu/~podgurskym/articles/files/fringe_be...
Not to be wikipedia-style passive aggressive, I'm just genuinely curious and unfamiliar with these studies.
Huh, I never thought of that, but you're right. If we just pretend that we pay teachers more than we do, they have great salaries.
When you just look at hours in the classroom it doesn't look that hard. But add in the time for grading and preparing classes, and you find that teachers work long hours.
I don't have any statistics on it, but http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_hours_per_week_do_teacher... is in line with the anecdotes that my mother and sister have given me about how much work teaching is.
The hours in the classroom are the hard part. You have to be on your feet actually interacting with kids who don't want to be there for 6-7 hours a day. God help you if you are teaching them something they instinctively hate, like math. The grading and prep is time consuming but not a big deal, you can just do it at home while doing something else. It's low prestige, and the pay is lousy. The pay becomes tolerable if you can stand doing it for 15 years while paying for bogus master's degree classes during the summers. I decided to abandon my bleeding heart and go back to graduate school in computer science. Note: if you want to get paid more off the bat, the trick is to get a master's degree right away and become a special-ed teacher.
In contrast, at almost every programming job I've had there were weeks where I spent 6-7 hours a day doing fuck-all, going to meetings, reading websites, chatting with friends and checking in 10 lines of code and updating the ticket tracker. For this service to humanity I get paid 4 times as much as I did educating the nation's youth.
But I'll certainly take your 2 secondhand anecdotes and some random internet guy over a scientific survey done by the BLS.
Incidentally, your random internet guy is pretty obviously exaggerating. He claims 30 min putting grades into the computer. If he has 40 students in his class, then it takes him 45 seconds to type one number into a spreadsheet! (Entering grades took me 3-4 minutes back when I had students.)
[1] Postdoc, actually. A moot distinction for the purposes of this conversation, but I'm not into self aggrandizement.
I'll echo this: I'm a grad student in English lit and entering my third year. I've taught Engl 101, 102, and 109 (the honor version); the first year I taught, I spent a lot of time in preparation, thinking about activities, and so on. My second year, somewhat less. Ditto for this year.
That isn't to say I'm not changing things from year to year, because I am, but the big hurdle is at the beginning.
Not sure why you are multiplying their pay.
Also, I don't know a single teacher who only works their contracted hours each day. My wife works 10 hour days as a teacher, spends unpaid days cleaning her classroom after the school year ends and unpaid days preparing her classroom for the new school year.
Bakery A charges $9 for 9 muffins. Bakery B charges $12 for 12 muffins. Which bakery is more expensive?
Academic positions, like any other job, operate within a competitive labor market. Lower budgets mean less money to attract top talent. Cheaper iMacs can't change that.
Higher education does have competition (thousands of universities, both public and private), but technology hasn't brought the costs down there either.
We can talk freely about the academic labor market, but it's hard to pin down what that labor market produces.
It doesn't matter how much technology you through at the problem, teaching 40 kids is unsustainable. Teachers burn out, students lose focus, and it only takes 1 bad student to ruin class cohesion.
Because teachers are technology...?
Also, fun fact here, being "loaded up with more and more mindless administrative duties, and given less and less real support from administrators and staff" is partially due to those lower budgets.
He is right to blame all of California's ills on tax cuts. They and Oregon have had the worst abuses of the proposition system of all the states. Both used to be prosperous with balanced budgets, but had sneaky time-bomb anti-tax measures voted in, which prevented them from raising revenues even as home prices went up (which should increase the amount of tax owed on a property, but didn't) and inflation made existing fixed dollar amounts worth less and less.
The example I know best is Oregon, where a guy named Bill Sizemore (currently indicted for tax evasion) organized and ran a successful campaign for a measure that required a super-majority of registered voters to vote yes in order to pass any tax increase in a non-presidential election year. Thus, not going to the polls counts as a "no" rather than a "I don't care". Another Oregon measure required that the taxed value of a property could rise by no more than 3% per year. Thus, when I owned a house in Oregon, I was only taxed on two thirds of its value (this is slightly pre-bubble, too - now it is much worse!).
Anyhow, lots of this sneaky stuff has led to the states being almost totally broke, and their respective education systems, which were once the best in the nation, are now circling the bowl. Higher ed is holding up better than K-12.
Property taxes.
Excerpt:
California is the only Sunbelt state that had negative net internal migration after 2000. All the other states that lost population to internal migration were Rust Belt basket cases, including New York, Illinois, New Jersey, Michigan, and Ohio.
As Tiebout might have guessed, this outmigration has to do with taxes. Besides Mississippi, every one of the 17 states with the lowest state and local tax levels had positive net internal migration from 2000 to 2007. Except for Wyoming, Maine, and Delaware, every one of the 17 highest-tax states had negative net internal migration over the same period.
At that time, there were no government-run schools in America. If someone had suggested that government should be involved in running schools, maintain massive "Education Departments", etc., I'm sure Jefferson, Franklin, and the rest would have had the same reaction that they had to the idea of government-run churches.
If it is dangerous to a free society for government to be involved in telling people what to think via religion (and it is), how much more dangerous is it for government to be involved in telling many of the youngest and most impressionable members of society what to think?
We should demand the separation of school and state and end government control over education in the United States. Schooling is not the only means to getting an education (Mark Twain famously said "Never let your schooling interfere with your education"), but if universal schooling is deemed desirable, you could simply take the amount of money spent by government to run schools and maintain bureaucracies, divide it by the number of students, and issue each student a voucher to spend at the non-government, voluntarily funded community school of their choice.
To support freeing children from the dangers of government indoctrination and control, visit and join the Alliance for the Separation of School and State -- http://www.schoolandstate.org/home.htm. As authoritarians are so fond of saying, "Do it for the children!"
-Starchild, candidate for School Board, San Francisco
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100822/ap_on_re_us/us_taj_mahal...
Even in good times that's a lot for a school that will only house 4200 students. That's almost $140k for every student it holds. I wonder how long it's going to take for students going through it to generate enough economic activity to cover it.
Is there an economist in the house?
So I take nazgulnarsil to mean that the author’s position is a trivial function of who pays him.
I hate to say this but while most of the guilt should be borne by fat-cat administrators, faculty are greedy whores who are easily divided and conquered.
This guy should run for congress.
See my reply to reynolds, which was the only valuable part. The second paragraph is my real point, and I mean that "if" clause.
If he believes in refocusing the priorities and perhaps even seeing a net spending drop while ending up with more education spending, I would consider that defensible and the numbers I produced can certainly support the position that there is some room for rethinking here. If he believes this should manifest as yet more money given to this government, no, I don't think piling more money on is the solution. That's why I'm looking at the total income for the state rather than exactly focusing on the exact amount dedicated to the worthy tasks. It is only one part of the story.
I can buy that they've grown faster than inflation, but have they indeed grown faster than the growth of the economy? I haven't been able to dig up good data on what CA state expenditures were as a percentage of state GDP in, say, the 1960s. (They're currently around 24% of state GDP, if you can find something to compare that to.)
Incidentally, the document you linked doesn't appear to cover most of the actual budget; it's the kind of fake official budget that's passed every year, which currently covers about 1/4 of actual spending. This site has better estimates for the past 20 years, but doesn't go back past 1992: http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/downchart_gs.php?year=19...
So it looks like state spending rose from 11% of total income in 1977 to 14% today. And total income usually grows slightly faster than the economy (economic growth = change total income - change in the price level). Thus state spending has been growing faster than incomes rise, faster than inflation and faster than the economy has been growing.
But there is a paradox, I couldn't find an answer.
The provision of safety, social support systems, equal opportunities, low cost education, etc are critical to getting out the best of a population of a civilization so that that 'advancement' of that civilzation continues.
Yet, the more advanced a civilization becomes, the larger the systems required to sustain that advanced civilzation becomes. And the larger a system becomes, the more in-efficiencies and over heads creep in and the costlier it becomes to sustain that system, at a per-capita level.
The more you charge (taxes) the population to sustain that advanced system, the lesser that people will have to spend on themselves, on their own dreams and development. And the less that people spend on their development, the lesser is their ability to contribute to the advancement of the civilization.
How does one break this paradox?
We have just spend $760 billion on so-called stimulus. The money is gone, and nothing to show for it.
That's how bloated gov't works nowadays, in CA, federal, and all other states. And the letter is calling for more of this!
PS Great book on Manhattan project: http://www.amazon.com/Making-Atomic-Bomb-Richard-Rhodes/dp/0...
1) The stimulus was supposed to mitigate the effects of the recession, and
2) The recession was still very bad, therefore
=======================
3) The stimulus had no positive effect/was not worth the cost.
Now, who wants to play the game "find the fallacy"?
As you mention, those stats are only for the UC system (no source), but leave out a whole chunk of other relevant data. The author is addressing what he believes is the decline of public educaiton in general in California, not just UC.
Some people outside CA may not understand that the UC system (University of California) is only one part of the public college and public education system in California.
As far as colleges, California also has substantial state funding for a lot of other non-UC California state colleges (CSU, California State University -- 23 campuses compared to 10 UC) and community colleges.
Of course, additional funding goes to non-college education as well, and grants that people receive who attend private colleges and schools.
Also future liabilities and pensions which are not included on budget.
So my point being--just focusing on your UC stats is misleading.
1. How about the whole California state college system? 2. How about community colleges, vocational education? 3. How about other forms of public education? 4. How about all education grant totals made with public dollars? 5. Also while you are at that, how about adding in future liabilities/pensions which are not included in the yearly budget?
This thing bugs me in a greater sense than simply the issues or people involved, and here's why: you're paying this guy to petition his students to pay him more. Strip away all the (real) problems and politics and all of that, and you end up with some guy you write a check to who is doing his best to a) call you a slovenly idiot, b) get you to spend more on him and his projects, and c) use his position as educator to influence his students to advance his causes.
He may be exactly correct. I don't think he is, but whether he is correct or not doesn't matter. Even if he is 100% accurate in everything he says, it's a conflict of interest. We simply can't have people on the public dole who also are political activists -- even in their spare time. I wish there was some way around this quandary -- the military has higher standards but we still see them getting dragged into various political fights. We have scientists who are activists, teachers who are promoting dissent, and public sector unions who are playing politics with public funds.
Again, it's not that I disagree with their politics or efforts. It's that we cannot self-stimulate. The money that comes from taxpayers cannot be caught into a feedback loop to promote even more money coming from taxpayers. The people we entrust with various public functions cannot also be using the stature we give them to score political points.
The only exceptions to this are political appointees, whose sole purpose is to play politics and be party hacks. For the rest of them, I am concerned that this is a really bad thing that is only getting worse and worse over time. I really hope some of these professional organizations can come up with appropriate ethical standards. It's like I read the other day: it used to be that scientists told you what "is". Now they tell you what we need "to do". (It was accompanied by an interesting graph from Lexis-Nexis with the frequency of the words "science says we must" which is rising exponentially in popular media.)
Aside from the specific politics in this case, the trend here is not good at all.
Here's the comment I posted:
I copied the following figures from the comment at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1631794
1965-1966: $4B nominal ($28B, constant 2010 dollars)
1982-1983: $25.3B nominal ($57.2B)
2008-2009: $144B ($145)
2009-2010: $119.2B ($119.2B)
According to the comment thread, the state population increased from 15 717 204 in 1960 to 36 961 664 in 2010, which figures I assume are from the census.
My own calculations: that's about 1.7% population growth per year on average (1.017^50 * 15717204 ≈ 36 500 000) so we can interpolate the population in 1966 as 15717204 * 1.017^6 ≈ 17 400 000. That gives a state tax burden of roughly US$1610 per person in constant 2010 dollars. The 2009–2010 tax burden is US$3200 per person.
Therefore, at least over the 1966 to 2010 time period, if these figures are correct, then far from being the victims of an "enormous cheat" or "terrible swindle" in which state taxes were cut to the bone by a generation supported by state taxes, necessitating massive cuts in public services, state taxes per capita have nearly doubled during that period, adjusted for inflation using the CPI.
Some other possibilities were suggested in the comment thread:
• Maybe the CPI isn't the right deflator to use, because most of the state's revenues go to education and health care, not vegetables and beef, and these services have inflated in price much faster than the CPI. However, this doesn't rescue the "terrible swindle ... walking away from their obligations" claim.
• Maybe O'Hare isn't referring to public services as they were provided in California during the 1960s but during some earlier period, such as the 1940s. Prof. O'Hare, can you clarify your claims?
• Maybe most of the tax money is being wasted on unproductive things such as prisons, managers and administrators, or legislators, rather than being spent on productive things like public education and road maintenance. In this case, there is a "terrible swindle", but the perpetrators are not the voters or the taxpayers but the employees of the government.
• Maybe much of the high standard of living some decades ago was paid for by externalities. For example, power plants might have been less expensive to operate before the EPA was established, K-12 schools might have had higher quality when economic opportunities for women outside of them were sharply limited by institutionalized sexism, US military power might have kept the prices of many raw materials artificially low, and unsustainable depletion of fossil fuels might have kept the prices of energy and asphalt artificially low. As some of these externalities have been internalized, taxes would have to rise. For example, to attract the best and brightest women to teaching in K-12 education, the way we used to in the 1950s and 1960s, we'd either need a massive propaganda campaign about the nobility and importance of teachers (comparable to the one we have about soldiers), or we'd need to pay top K-12 teachers US$200 000 a year or more — with a credible commitment to continue to do so for half a century into the future.
So, on the face of it, the numbers don't seem to add up to support your claim. Can you help out with that?
Other comments related to this question include http://www.samefacts.com/2010/08/education-policy/a-letter-t... which seems to not be using the same facts as the commenter whose figures I quoted above.
The California Budget Project's summary gives a lower number of US$86.8 billion for 2009-10, which is still much larger than the inflation-adjusted per-capita 1966 number: http://cbp.org/pdfs/2010/CaliforniaBudgetBites/100329_budget...
—Socrates
The flaw is that you just can't compare apples to oranges and expect any kind of meaningful conclusion. In this case, it's cross correlating some super high dimensional manifold from 1964(or whenever) comprised of easily hundreds of thousands of variables, against a similar large manifold(2010). There are just too many totally different variables between then and now for it to be a fair comparison at all.
Sure, each side sees what it wants in whatever tiny slice of the data they choose to use. Blame the Mexicans, no blame the Rich, no blame the Liberals, no blame Reagan, ad infinitum.
And this guy, a professional in higher education, wants to step out on a far limb to make some grandiose claim about the status of California education. I am more fearful of him ruining his own students by teaching them to mimic his own flawed reasoning than I am of any of his exaggerated, inaccurate conclusions.
You know what? More likely than not, the world will keep going the way it has been, people, kids, and education will keep improving, albeit incrementally, and there is not going to be some apocalyptic doomsday in the future of public education in California, or anywhere.
In summary, he's basically following the same pattern so many old people follow: somewhere along the way they lose touch with reality, with the youth, get stuck in their ways, and believe the whole world has gone to hell in a handbasket, and all because of some imagined flaw in the entire youth population. Old people forget what it was like to be young, and lose their ability to rapidly adapt and learn as children do. And without fail, each generation grows up to believe they were somehow better than later generations. Bollocks!
I used to be with it, but then they changed what "it" was. Now, what I'm with isn't it, and what's "it" seems weird and scary to me.
—Abe Simpson
In the letter he does mention "Every year, fewer and fewer of you read newspapers, speak a foreign language, understand the basics of how government and business actually work, or have the energy to push back intellectually against me or against each other" so maybe it is a little tongue-in-cheek and maybe he is looking for a valid intellectual push back...
Nonetheless, your comment regarding fruit is most apt, as in my eyes, the very nature / focus of academy seems to have changed - from one of developing thinking skills to one of developing people skilled in a certain type of thinking.
This (in my opinion) is the thing that let me down most while I was studying - instead of learning how to approach solving problems, the focus seemed more on learning how to solve certain problems, which I believe will make certain degrees (by year graduated) more-or-less obsolete as the problem domain has shifted on, which may in turn lead to a decline in technological advancement as we'll run into new problems without a clear understanding or process of approaching these situations.
Of course, my view is but one data point in many many thousands, and I studied at Canterbury University in New Zealand.
I can't find a reasonable human being that can agree with the pension system for state employees (I am actually unsure if it applies to teachers), which has to be the biggest money whole I could ever conceive.
Also, I am not sure of the statics, but it is no secret that LA public schools are some of the worst in the country. In the intercity schools anyway. However, I do agree with you that the author doesn't prove his point of declining schools, nor does he prove that increased funding will make them better. He offers this poor anecdote that is obviously politically self-edited.
It's funny how subjects like bad parenting or horrifying home lives never come into this conversation. Which seems to have a strong connection a child's educational success. I don't believe the author intended to go beyond anything other than his experience with his students, which by admissions filtering are hypothetically better than the over student.
Btw, loved the Abe Simpson quote. However, this situation triggers another famous entertainment quote in my mind.
Reporter: "Mr. Norris, how does it feel to have your career not be taken seriously by a younger internet driven generation of 'joke-sters?'"
Chuck Norris: Boys will be boys.
The issue with pensions is that everyone used to do it. Private and public sector both. It's just easier for the private sector to declare bankruptcy and throw away their obligations. Pensions themselves are a giant scam to steal money from future generations. It isn't a failure of government or the public sector. It's a failure of one generation to consider their children or grand children.
The only people who ever thought pensions are a good idea are old or already retired. You're unlikely to meet a person like that.
>It's funny how subjects like bad parenting or horrifying home lives never come into this conversation.
The Leave It to Beaver household never existed. What makes you think home life has degenerated in the last 50 years?
No, everyone didn't do it. At its peak, which was decades ago, 30% of the private sector was covered by pensions and many of them were pretty crappy. Pensions are now fairly rare in the privat sector.
PENSIONS
I didn't mean to criticize all pensions. Just the State of California's where you can retire and make 90% of your PEAK income for rest of your life. It is simply an unsustainable amount given how much the public sector workers make. There was a case a few weeks ago of a police chief from a small town in California who was going to earn ~$900,000 a year in retirement. It is purely ridiculous.
HOMELIFE
I don't think that has degenerated that much. I do think that we see the population of people who are dysfunctional emotionally, socially, and intellectually is growing at a faster rate than those who socially responsible.
I do not have numbers to quote here, but is it unreasonable to assume that main factors that determine children per generation, period (in years) of a generation, and survivability of said generation.
One could argue that survivability is a huge factor when it comes to inner city youth. Gang violence, malnutrition, high infant mortality rate, ext. However, in terms of the total population it is very small.
However, we have a real division in class since the dawn of birth control in our country. One where people wait to have children and build a career and what-not. And another where people do not. There has also been a steady rise in teenage pregnancy. This creates a separation in the rate of a generation.
We can assume that the number of children born per family are close to equal. But the truth is that families that are poorer typically reproduce more. Or maybe, the families that reproduce more are more poor. Or it could be that the people who have more money, have less children.
This all doesn't mean much until you throw in a little human psychology. Given that most family dysfunctions are generational (alcoholism, sexual abuse, ext) and that these dysfunctions are commonly tied children who have poor education scores in poor families. You quickly begin see an inflation of emotionally damaged people, who just quite frankly don't have emotional resources to invest themselves in an education. Every once in a while, you get some that power through, but the human condition only permits so many.
However, why the kids in functional families systems are screwing up in school? I have no idea. If I had to guess, I'd say that the way our brains learn have been changing rapidly since the invention of the internet.
I don't have real numbers, but it also seems like the very rich also have quite a few children. Super rich financial people in NYC have loads of kids, almost like a hobby. I've met super rich guys here who have 8 kids with 3 different wives. It seems to have a lot to do with whether or not your kids are going to effect you negatively economically. Super rich? Who cares... Super poor? who cares. Middle class or even sort of rich? Kids are going to make your life a financial headache.
http://www.russellsage.org/chartbook/householdform/figure4.5...
Shows that poorer households on average have more children. However, it also shows that that population is shrinking in unison. Relatively.
However, addition graphs on the website show how many dysfunctional households there are in poor communities. Which have been growing, so I stand by the original argument.
I don't think this is an accurate description of the article at all. The author is specifically arguing that his generation has violated the social contract that they used to their gain, leaving the current, younger generation holding the bag.
He's not saying "goddamn kids these days"; he's encouraging the upcoming generation to fix what their parents (his generation) have screwed up so that the generation after them doesn't end up shackled in the same way or worse. In fact, he's encouraging them to engage their parents ("they still vote") to help them in fixing things.
And, maybe his generation has spent less time worrying about cracks in sidewalks and potholes in roads because they were investing in things that are now more foreign to an older person. Like biotech, wireless tech, green tech, etc. (I'm sure there are better examples)
BTW - I just used the term "old man" to add impact to my statement. I love my older generation and the insights they bring.
If someone quote "If music be the food of love, play on ..." then they credit Shakespeare (rightly or wrongly) not the fictional Duke Orsino of Illyria.
Sorry, but it bugs me.
Oh BTW check out my new startup, we're going to make a ton of money.