15-Year-Old Student's Ed Reform Plan
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
We should close all corporate tax loopholes and send the money to schools and require that school funding is not proportional to property tax.
We should institute a minimum wage of ~$12/hr tied to inflation to fight poverty.
The high school curriculum should have alternate vocational and tech skills tracks.
Can you walk me through the economic justification for this?
Edit: realistic numbers of average pay for Walmart is approaching $10/hr making the total cost of a wage hike 10 billion.
Note that this is the biggest retailer in the world, in an economic climate which has been very good for them. (When people become price-conscious, sales move from higher end stores to Walmart.) What is affordable for them right now might not be for other retailers in general, or for them in a different year.
(That said, if every employee cost more, prices would rise and costs would get passed to consumers.)
EBITDA was $36B.
Giving up ~2/3rds of the money available for dividends or reinvestment in the business is not going to fly with the shareholders.
I think that for this discussion Net Income is the more appropriate figure to use given that Walmart's interest, tax, depreciation and amortization add up to tens of billions of dollars.
They booked net income for 2011-12 as $15.6B. So a $20B payrise would put them in the red.
People latch onto Walmart because of the amazing numbers involved. Hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue! Thousands and thousands of stores! Millions of employees!
But the thing is, retail is a really tough business to turn a buck on. After this massive machine has sprint through a year, the result is ... about a 3% profit on revenue.
Compare that with Google: On ~$50B revenue Google walks out with ~$10B of net income. For eight times less revenue Google is still managing to make more than half as much profit as Walmart.
Where are the picket lines outside Google HQ?
Wal-Mart has to hire these workers, but we can be sure if they had any reason to hire fewer of them they would.
Next, the minimum wage will not fight poverty like you think it will. Something like a negative income tax would be more effective. Also, how would you go about paying for a school in a district if not for property taxes? There isn't just an easy solution to that problem.
I do agree with your last point though. Not everyone needs to or should go to college. Beyond that, I think more people should work after high school or take a years break instead of going straight to college so that they can actually think about what they want to do. The fewer people that get saddled with crippling debt and a useless degree, the better.
*My school board was require to print an annual report with the school performance and the average spent on each student. It was something like $6000/year; as a student I don't think they spent a tenth of that on me.
Yes, it is, and it have nothing to do with our funding. The way we teach is extraordinary inefficient and outdated.
For example, spaced repetition is a learning technique that takes advantage of the spacing effect phenomenon that is present in all humans. You know why your teachers told you to study everyday instead of cramming? Well, cramming doesn't help you retain information in the long run! Computers can be used to track every answers and problem, what our weakness are, and to schedule when to review, allowing us to take spaced repetition to its logical conclusion. The computer can generate problems on demand, give out recorded lectures by the very best teacher, and so on.
Spacing effects also implies summer vacation is harmful to knowledge acquisition process unless we continuously practice. When we finish high school and college, decays begin to set in because we stop practicing. The result is that countless generation learned mathematics, history, language art, literature, only to forget upon exiting formal education.
That's why khanacademy is so powerful. They really do leverage computers to generate problems, explain stuff, track your every mistakes, and schedule practices problem using spaced repetition. Right now, long run khanacademy users like me knows more and is the most refreshed on mathematics than the vast majority of high school students and working adults. We practice math problems everyday, thus ensuring that we never forget and be prepared to build a new knowledge as soon as Khan Academy adds new exercises or revise old one.
That's in contrast to going to a very inefficient traditional institutions and receiving a "great education" and then immediately forgetting most of what you're taught. That's a very inefficient way to learn.
What part of learning that doesn't involves remembering and building a foundation on what you have learned? What if you forgot your basic when you have to do more advanced stuff. That is part of the process of "learning".
I don't disagree, but do you have anything to back this up?
I ask because my girlfriend is a teacher, and teaching is a lot harder than most people seem to believe.
Like what? Numbers and studies? Khan Academy said that they have very promising results in which students perform significantly better on standardized tests.
That being said, I already wrote in my post how we can improve efficiency and effectiveness by leveraging computers for all they're worth. I think this is sufficient to show how dated the teaching is done in schools, if not exactly proves how inefficient our school teach. I think it's quite obvious that it's better to watch a recorded lecture than to see the teacher perform the same lecture years after year.
I ask because my girlfriend is a teacher, and teaching is a lot harder than most people seem to believe.
All I am advocating is giving the teachers and students better tools based on cognitive science that we discovered a long time ago. Making sure students get the practice they need on summer vacations and scheduling practice problems to reduce unnecessary studying isn't rocket science.
Originally, I thought it was a money problem, but some schools have a ridiculous budget and are happy to spend them on the same old stuff. Why is no one investing in these things that will apparently improve education?
See, for example, the length of time that it's taken to get synthetic phonics over analytic phonics recognised as better for teaching children to read.
Ah, actually, it's not.
For instance, a number of studies unequivocally showed that an infant learns nothing in front of an televised education program. A young child cannot learn a language from a visual recording, but somehow can if the child sees the same thing live. Somehow the screen seems to screen of the magic.
As we get older and learn to focus our attention ourselves, this becomes less important. But direct human contact, even through a mere lecture, still counts. So my guess is that while mechanised teaching (not just videos —we' have computers for Omega's sake!) has certainly great potential, merely replacing the teacher by a computer, even part time, is probably not optimal.
Without numbers and studies, this sounds like self-selection to me - people doing Khan Academy courses are surely more self-motivated than people attending colleges and universities, a substantial percentage of whom probably don't really enjoy being there.
I think it's quite obvious that it's better to watch a recorded lecture than to see the teacher perform the same lecture years after year.
Do you mean obvious from some study you've heard of, or obvious to you? Because that's not at all obvious to me personally - in fact, the opposite is true. I think I learn much better from in-person lecturers (providing the lecturer is good, which would have to be true in a video lecture too). I think there are two forces at play that make this true - first, the lecturer can gauge the response of the audience and tailor his presentation - timing, level of explanation etc. Second, the atmosphere makes me pay attention more - in much the same way as going to the cinema or to see a play in a theater is more engaging that watching the same thing on TV or YouTube.
I know that basically everything I've said is all anecdote and presumption, but my presumption seem just as valid (to me, more valid :-P) than yours in the absence of hard data.
On your point that we should [give] the teachers and students better tools based on cognitive science that we discovered a long time ago, I wholeheartedly agree, but it needs to be done based on scientific conclusions, not anecdata (yours or mine).
And why should essentially randomly virally selected people be labelled self-selected, any more than any people who answer an ad for a psychological study? From those in the group, statistics can be gleaned by including factors like age and economics.
And there are lots of reasons a lecture you can repeat, stop, talk to a buddy about real-time is better than an assembly-hall lecture. This is obvious to those paying attention to the Khan Academy movement.
Spaced repetition and spacing effect is well known science and it works. For everything else I said, there should be more studies and experiments.
Of course you would say that, since you went to a private high school and received, in your words, a great education. There are many others who were not so lucky (to have parents who could afford private school tuition).
Explain. My experience has been that high school is little more than a legal straightjacket to prevent the archetypal hormone-addled teenager from going off and doing stupid shit or otherwise causing potential problems for themselves.
> The high school curriculum should have alternate vocational and tech skills tracks.
This doesn't happen already? What's the pipeline in your education system for someone who wants to become, say, a diesel mechanic? Can they leave school early and get an apprenticeship?
However, in many respects it is easy for private schools - they have plenty resources, excellent buildings, huge playing grounds and a fairly uniform set of reasonably high achieving parents - who are motivated to encourage their kids to try and excel.
Personally I think we should be gearing curriculums towards what are being defined as the 21st Century Set of Literacies: how well we can find information, validate it, synthesize it, leverage it, communicate it, collaborate with it and problem solve with it.
What's education really for? I'd like to see the focus move from a focus on test scores towards producing future generations who are creative, empathetic, resilient, driven and entrepreneurial.
Without testing, how will we know if we succeeded?
In systems geared around testing, it creates a culture of scarcity in which teachers and schools are competing against each other. This compares with a system such as Finland, where they have no standardized tests (and hence have a more collaborative approach to education) and yet they rate among the world's best for educational outcomes.
Education's a random passion of mine so I've read a lot about it - the Finnish system is just so cool as it focuses on non-cognitive skills more than most systems - growing emotional intelligence and resilience - so it's pretty cool that despite no national testing program (apart from the OECD) they come out really well :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9LelXa3U_I
But this was just platitudes and motherhood statements.
Did you win an essay contest or something?
Everyone's got one.
Public boarding schools.
Lots of folks are hurting financially these days, so there's a lot of distraction for teenagers and not enough structure. Boarding schools will go a long way to solving that.
I also think what Obama mentioned in the SOTU address is a great idea: pre-school for all, not just those who can afford it.
Far from structure, outside of class, it is much easier for students to become distracted, since one residential advisor cannot possibly supervise a hall of 30 students and keep track of there whereabouts and how they're spending time.
It's platitudes because of the vagueness. Students should want to learn, stuff should be relevant, etc etc. These are unmeasurable, untestable and thus irrefutable statements.
Given that education has as an inputs billions of dollars and amongst its outputs the future of civilisation, I don't think it's unreasonable to ask for a little analytical rigour.