School superintendent requests school be turned into prison
holykaw.alltop.com
holykaw.alltop.com
I'm one of those people that, whenever they hear about economic problems, always thinks individuals are responsible. I want to know, am I wrong? Nowhere does it say you need a house with a spare bedroom and a bathroom for each person. You aren't entitled to a car, let alone two. It isn't some birthright that you go on vacation or buy a flat screen through credit.
Education is important. It's also expensive and difficult. Why aren't parents more on the hook? Yes, some parents really, really can't. But most could. It might take substantial life style changes, but the amount of money an average westerner can free up is staggering.
I know michigan is particularly hard hit, so this might not be the most sympathetic example to ask, but I just can't help feeling this way. (and that doesn't change the fact that I think the superintended did a great job, whether I think it's the states problem or not).
Unemployment would go way up, but companies wouldn't be able to find skilled employees. This is already a problem now, imagine how bad it would be in a society with 1/4 of the current high school graduates not graduating.
Then, coming full circle, we would find ourselves paying $30-40k/year to incarcerate more people we could have paid $10k/year to educate.
Education isn't an investment in an individual, it's an investment in a society.
The millions who, for their whole lives, have been poorly educated and are now unemployed (or imprisoned) could be making stuff of value that would ultimately make us all (absolutely) richer. This would increase the absolute wealth of the people-paying-the-bills (the already rich), but would decrease their wealth relative to those around them.
By comparison, the dropout rate in 2008 was 8.0%, down from 11.8% in 1998[1].
Yes. And no. Economic problems arise because of a complex interactions between individuals and institutions. Both share responsibility -- while individuals should never go into a debt that they will likely struggle to repay, institutions shouldn't make it possible, or even easy.
>Nowhere does it say you need a house with a spare bedroom and a bathroom for each person. You aren't entitled to a car, let alone two. It isn't some birthright that you go on vacation or buy a flat screen through credit.
No, it doesn't.
But consider: many people are financially illiterate -- they don't understand just how long it'll take to pay off revolving debt when they are paying interest + 1%, they don't know how to save money, and so on.
And when the credit card company says "don't worry 'bout it, we will give you a year same as cash", they're not going to read the fine print that says if the payment is late even one day the APR resets to 30%.
And when the mortgage company tells them that "housing prices always go up, so you just get the ARM now and refinance later!" they aren't going to think what happens when the bubble bursts.
Now, those people must share some of the blame, not only for what happens to them but what they do to everyone else. But at the same time, we need to ask two important questions:
1. How do we get people to stop living paycheck to paycheck and on easy credit, and start learning to save money, read the fine print, and understand finances?
2. How do we get institutions to provide a more critical evaluation of a persons finances before they offer them a huge loan, both in bad times and in good?
Another thing to remember - all of this credit just inflates the dollar cost of all goods and services - credit card companies get their cut, and the credit is created out of thin air (oversimplification, but it's based on a bank's reserves).
Michigan is A) hard hit and B) elected a fundamentalist lunatic for a governor. The guy's been in office less than 6 months and everyone hates him already, he has an ideological beef with the idea of public education in general and teacher's unions in particular, so he's slashing those budgets even more than necessary to prove his point.
The guy's stats are way off. The average in 2006-2007 was $10,041 [1]. And MI is toward the large end of the spectrum, at $9,912 [2]. And where I live, these numbers are spiraling ever upwards.
Michigan ... elected a fundamentalist lunatic for a governor.
I have a hunch you may be a bit of a fundamentalist yourself.
[1] http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66
[2] http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/27/of-all-states-n...
If you'd like to learn something, suburban school districts are typically way cheaper per student than urban ones, which is why his number is lower than the average and urban ones tend to be higher.
Even for a national number (which you fudged from your own link, heh), that's a phenomenal return on investment, no private schools are nearly that cheap except for catholic schools, and they have an unscalable labor model (cheap nuns aren't in infinite supply).
Supporting public education and the profession of teaching as noble causes that benefit everyone used to be mainstream in this country. If it makes me a fundamentalist now, that's just one more sign of our decline.
He didn't make any claims about the national average, he was making a claim about his district.
False. He made a claim about the State:
The State of Michigan spends annually somewhere between $30,000 and $40,000 per prisoner, yet we are struggling to provide schools with $7,000 per student.
He said "schools", not "my schools". And I provided a MI-specific figure of $9,666 in my response, reproduced here: [1].
Even for a national number (which you fudged from your own link, heh)
False. I copied that from the linked government data [2]:
Current expenditures in constant 2007-08 dollars ... School Year 2006-07 ... 10,041
So, what do you have to say now?
Dummy.
You're a classy guy.
[1] http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/27/of-all-states-n...
If the state average is 9.6k, and his district is suburban, it stands to reason he'd be a fair bit under that at around 7k, esp in michigan where the cities are so f'd up. That would make total sense. Or we could just assume he's talking about something else and lying about it for no reason. Whatever.
Sorry for accusing you of fudging, I misread the stats myself and your attitude didn't generally come across as honest so I was too annoyed to double-check.
Anyways attempted gotcha nitpicking that doesn't change conclusions is way more substantive than actual education policy, I agree that this is awesome. You should work for CNN.
Here is the key. Plenty of school districts get tons of money yet it never reaches the students. The money ends up stuck somewhere in the administration.
Where I grew up the public school district took tax money and built a huge administration building on prime real estate in the cities posh downtown area. This all was while textbooks were falling apart, school buildings were falling down and there was a already a working administration building in a different part of the city. The new building was dubbed the 'Taj Mahal' by local media and it's still a joke.
Public school STUDENTS get the short end of the stick. Public schools as institutions get rich funding streams, second only to Medicaid at the state level.
I'd suggest looking into the $7,500 per student figure as well. Usually when school people look for more money, they lowball that figure by excluding things like capital expenses, administrative expenses and busing.
Teachers and school administrators aren't taking home megabucks -- if they were, that per student figure would be a lot higher. Typically, administrative expenses and busing will be included in that figure but capital expenses are probably not (but the building may be already paid off anyways).
But let me ask this:
Michigan is a state where the average teacher makes $57,958 per year BEFORE benefits (http://www.teacher-world.com/teacher-salary/michigan.html). Benefits that include a lifetime pension after retirement. This is in a state with a median income of $44,627 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michigan)
Yet they rank 30th in education: http://tinyurl.com/5wwq8ep.
I'm not saying teacher's shouldn't be well paid. If they were making 10% over the median income I would have no complaints. But they're well above that and that, as much as the prisons, is why the schools in Michigan have no money.
Likewise, the ranking of 30th... Does that measure the teachers alone or the entire system? If it measures the entire system, how does the funding of $7,000 per student compare to other states? Maybe Michigan is actually doing amazingly well considering its funding. Or maybe not. But that should be the basis of comparison, not comparing their salaries to those of burger flippers in McDonald's.
Teaching is an interesting profession. In fact, teachers are often treated as if they aren't part of the professional class. We call them incompetent, fire the youngest members of the profession first, underpay them, and then public ridicule them.
I would think people who live in the Silicon Valley world would agree: if you want to solve hard problems you need great talent. If you want great talent, you need to attract them, not repel them. Education is a hard problem and we treat teachers like unskilled labor.
They're not. Professionals are liable for malpractice.
> fire the youngest members of the profession first
That's what the teacher's unions demanded in negotation, so if you think that it's wrong....
Teachers want to called "professionals" when negotiating for pay and benefits, but simultaneously want to retain strict union seniority, guaranteed employment and other benefits more commonly associated with regular civil service and blue-collar workers.
I have a half dozen friends who got laid off from teaching jobs this year. These are really smart, bright people who should not have been let go. In the case of one of my friends ALL of the layoffs in his district could have been avoided had the folks with 30+ years who are eligible to retire at 75% pay decided to do so. In the "professional" world, those folks would have been laid off or forced to retire.
Again, solving hard problems means finding top talent. People love to slander teachers as lazy, but what can you really expect from an industry that repels talent - especially young talent. Teachers are vilified are underpaid ($60k is nothing for the type of problem being solved, and many teachers make closer to $30k).
I promise you, if we treated teachers as well as we treated Software Engineers we'd have a much healthier education system.
Sample non-professional behavior:
--- quote [1]
A video [2] posted on YouTube titled "Teacher's Union Gone Wild" claims to capture New Jersey teachers ... using racial slurs and joking about tenure. The undercover video was ... recorded during the New Jersey Education Association's leadership conference this summer.
... Another woman is shown playing a video game laughs that taxpayers are paying her to play it. Another clip shows people sarcastically talking about tenure that it is a "joke" and teachers can do almost anything without being fired.
--- end quote
[1] http://www.myfoxny.com/dpp/news/local_news/new_jersey/teache...
>They're not. Professionals are liable for malpractice. I'm not sure where this definition is coming from. By that definition a software engineer isn't a professional.
At least from Wikitionary (better source?) http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/professional_class
1) A social and economic demographic, commonly identified as part of the upper middle class.
2) (plural) the groups in society composed of highly educated professionals
Even programmers?
So how are teachers not professionals?
> So how are teachers not professionals?
Those are schemes for limiting the number of people who are allowed to teach in certain circumstances. They don't have much to do with quality teaching.
If you disagree, the following questions are relevant.
(1) How often does a regulating body discipline a teacher?
(2) In what circumstances are licenses actually revoked?
Feel free to compare the numbers to the corresponding ones for stock brokers. (I don't think that stock brokers are clean enough, so if teachers are worse....)
This line of reasoning has never made any sense to me -- why does everyone blame the public employees and want to take away their (hardly that great when compared to the rest of the country) salary and benefits? The solution isn't to cut them off at the knees; the solution is to raise everyone else up to the same standards.
If you want someone to blame for this, start with the No Child Left Behind act that forces schools to waste their budgets on meaningless standardized testing, and then penalizes them for it when they do poorly, creating a vicious cycle where a failing school can never become successful because it loses more funding each year. Or you could just go back to the root of the problem and blame the robber barons who, through well-paid lobbyists, have convinced the federal government to dismantle itself and its services year after year since 1980 in the name of the free market. We forgot what happens when corporate influence runs unchecked; we're learning again, and we're learning the hard way. The American experiment is dangerously close to failure.
Oh really? Public employees are far more likely to have pensions than the rest of us. Public employees earn significantly more too and have greater job security.
We blame them because they have a huge effect on who gets elected, which directly affects how much we have to pay for them.
> If you want someone to blame for this, start with the No Child Left Behind act that forces schools to waste their budgets on meaningless standardized testing,
What's your method for determining whether children are learning? We tried trusting teachers and schools - that didn't work.
> Or you could just go back to the root of the problem and blame the robber barons who, through well-paid lobbyists, have convinced the federal government to dismantle itself and its services year after year since 1980
Education spending steadily increased (after inflation) during that time, so if services went down, it wasn't because of spending.
Note that the US Department of Education was a shadow of its current self in 1980, so if you're going to argue that the federal govt has dismantled itself wrt education, you get to explain why it's much bigger wrt education.
The US govt collects about as much in taxes per person as the "high tax/high services" countries. (The US actually collects significantly more per person than Canada.) Yet, we don't get the services. More money can't solve that problem.
Before you start about rates, they're not the only term in the equation. The US collects a smaller fraction of its economy, but it has a larger economy (per person). And, even with much higher rates, the US has never collected more than 22% of the economy in taxes. The sustainable max appears to be around 20%. (People "adjusted" to the 21.9% and got the number back to 20. That's going to happen when the tax code is used to encourage/discourage.)
Good benefits yes, good salary, not so much: http://www.onlinedegrees.org/calculator/degrees/education
for instance. I really have no idea how people complain that teachers are overpaid. It beats picking lettuce, but consider the opportunity cost of a bachelors and a teaching certificate. They could be making a lot more money if they were doing anything else.
I mean, do these people actually know any teachers? Why aren't they teachers themselves if it's so great?
I know for a fact that I'm not a teacher because the pay is shit and I'm not a good enough person to sacrifice my lifestyle for it. At least I can admit that.
> They could be making a lot more money if they were doing anything else.
And we also know that they're getting things that they value more than said "extra money". (The alternative is that they're incapable of evaluating their own utility function.)
That said, I'm willing to pay more to get more. Of course, that means paying other folks, because current salaries are adequate for the current teachers. (You don't want to argue that they'd teach better if they were paid more.)
However, "get more" requires some proof, not a "you'll get better people" argument.
So, how do you propose to measure the benefits that you expect to get from these new teachers? (Surely you're not willing to pay for something that you don't get....)
So you're saying public employees are one of the few segments of the US population who have enough input on how they're compensated (via electoral control of their bosses). If private-sector workers are unable to negotiate comparable compensation for their work, then maybe we should blame labor practices in the private sector. Unionized industries aside, compensation is almost entirely at the discretion of the employer. Isn't that a little screwed up? Again, what I am saying here is that the solution to "hey, those public employees have a better deal" is not "take it away from them", because nobody wins in that case. Instead, demand the same deal from your employer. It really wouldn't hurt their bottom line that much.
> What's your method for determining whether children are learning? We tried trusting teachers and schools - that didn't work.
I will admit that I don't have a real answer to this. But I am a fairly recent graduate of the public education system (finished high school in 2006) and I can tell you that 90% of my graduating class managed to pass the tests but were still complete idiots who couldn't think for themselves. (Sadly, I could say this about at least a few of my fellow UC Berkeley 2010 graduates as well.)
Mandating testing gets you graduates who are good at passing tests. Tests are not the real world.
> The US govt collects about as much in taxes per person as the "high tax/high services" countries. (The US actually collects significantly more per person than Canada.) Yet, we don't get the services. More money can't solve that problem.
Okay, then how do we solve it? For one, we could stop spending a trillion dollars per year on our military. Beyond that, we could probably eliminate a lot of bureaucracy. My high school had a principal and three assistant principals for 900 students. Probably a little unnecessary.
Teachers are not the ones to penalize here, dammit. When I have kids, I damn well want their teachers to be well-paid and happy with their jobs. Forty hours per week for thirteen years is a huge amount of time, and there's a lot that can be done to screw up a kid in that time.
There's a big difference between CA and Ford - I can choose whether I want to take the risk that Ford is doing something dumb.
> Instead, demand the same deal from your employer. It really wouldn't hurt their bottom line that much.
Ah, yet another expert who isn't putting his money where is mouth is.
If you're correct, the consequences (better for you, better for your employees, worse for "bad employers) are pretty close to a moral imperative.
Yet....
> I will admit that I don't have a real answer to this.
Then how do you know that the existing system isn't an improvement?
Note that "{x} is bad" doesn't imply "{y} is good", or even that a good {y} exists.
> But I am a fairly recent graduate of the public education system (finished high school in 2006) and I can tell you that 90% of my graduating class managed to pass the tests but were still complete idiots who couldn't think for themselves. (Sadly, I could say this about at least a few of my fellow UC Berkeley 2010 graduates as well.)
You're talking about folks who could read. I'm concerned with folks who graduated despite not being able to read.
> Tests are not the real world.
Neither is anything else.
> My high school had a principal and three assistant principals for 900 students. Probably a little unnecessary.
Actually, a huge fraction of the money disappears before the school. How much educational benefit do you think that it produces?
> Teachers are not the ones to penalize here, dammit. When I have kids, I damn well want their teachers to be well-paid and happy with their jobs.
I do too, but we're pouring enough money into the system. If you can't make sure that it gets to the right place, you're out of luck.
Why are you more upset with the folks who are unwilling to waste more money than you are with the folks who are wasting the money? The latter are stealing from your (future) kids....
Public sector teachers have to deal with all of the problematic students that private schools can remove or refuse to admit in the first place.
Problematic students exist in private schools and are often backed by serious money. I wouldn't make the generalization that behavior problems are only found in poor people.
Imagine what the state of the software industry would be like if developers were hired like teachers! Anyone with an appropriate qualification would be given an office and told to write code. Every year their salary would go up. The codebase would get worse and worse, and everybody would complain about it but nobody would ever fix it.
Privatise the whole school system, equip children with generous vouchers, let schools compete for students. Throw in an accreditation scheme and a bunch of compulsory examinations upon graduation if you're concerned about quality. And if you must, throw in a government-run "backup" school just for any students who can't get accepted into any private school. I don't see any drawbacks of this plan.
That said, I think teachers are undervalued and scapegoated in society in a lot of ways that certainly harm our ability to produce great teachers.
The interesting thing is that students know perfectly well who the good and bad teachers are. And really, the school principals should know this as well... and if they don't know then they could easily find out just by sitting in on classes and looking at the students' work. It's not really a big problem for a boss to know how well his individual employees are doing, bosses do that all the time.
I had a writing teacher I didn't particularly like, then I got to a good college and found out I was one of the better writers. Turns out she was pretty damn good at her job.
Once a teacher has tenure it is almost impossible to fire them... and they know it. The concept of tenure in general isn't necessarily an issue, it's just an incredibly bad implementation (only takes 3 years! come on!).
http://www.ebudget.ca.gov/pdf/Revised/BudgetSummary/HigherEd...
http://www.paschoolfunding.org/2011/05/2011-2012-budget-upda...
And this isn't about not getting increases--program funding is getting rolled back, and some program funding is getting cut entirely.
http://nces.ed.gov has a lot of the actual numbers as opposed to partisan websites on either side.
PS: I am still trying to find a good source for # of non-teaching staff to teaching staff ratios. I get the feeling it has changed heavily in the last 30 years.
Which is a better investment: keeping bad people out of society /now/, or educating the future generations to keep them from being a bad person? I won't argue that the first one shouldn't happen. But should we really be investing more in the short term than in the long term? Especially when the only benefits in the short term are a society that feels (and might be) safer along with enriched privately run prisons and their employees, and along the long term is a sustainable and expanding economy based on, you know, not imprisoning people.
So, you're now at less per prisoner than per child.
Not that this strikes me as a valid comparison; makes more sense to me that the cost of each should be compared to its own benefits, and to the costs of additional taxation.
Also it appears that public school spending has only gone up over the long term. How about a "thank you for the most funding in 100 years" letter from this administrator? Or perhaps a "I'm sorry we continue to fail at educating despite record funding levels" letter. No?
Oh well I guess he decided to go with "We babysit for 7 hours a day and get three months off, but we should be funded the same as institutions that provide 24x7x365 care of violent adults."
edit: As some of the article commenters have pointed out: 40,000/365/24 = $4.57 per hour 7,000/180/7 = $5.55 per hour
Schools already get paid more per person/hour even using his own numbers.
http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d09/tables/dt09_182.asp http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d09/tables/dt09_059.asp
http://paulgraham.com/articles.html
are any guide to his interests.