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

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

#91

Post by lintiness »

Pharylon wrote: post #64
lintiness wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sorry, but schools are a lot less important than families.

It's not either/or, it's both/and. Having parents that are willing and able to be involved with their children is huge, but going to a good school is to. The top rated comment linked to a This American Life story on achievement gap and how busing poor black students to white neighborhoods in the 80s and 90s almost magically improved their scores. Don't forget that part of being an involved parent and making sure your…

plenty of home schooled kids do just fine without attending "good schools".

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

#92

Post by lintiness »

CJefferson wrote: post #82
lintiness wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sorry, but schools are a lot less important than families.

In that case, let's do inverted funding -- we seriously underfund schools in rich districts, and overfund in poor ones.

"under" and "over" fund are subjective measures of nothing. the us spends substantially more per pupil than it did 40 years ago with roughly the same results.

further, we spend more per pupil than other developed countries that are delivering superior results.

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

#93

Post by hawkice »

jschwartzi wrote: post #51
phd514 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with that conclusion is that some of the highest-funded public schools in the country such as DC are among the worst performers. Funding is not the sole (or even most important) determinant of quality in education.

Do you have a breakdown for how much of DC schools funding makes it to the classroom and to teachers? It's my understanding that administrators soak up a huge amount of budget in many districts.

Administration does take a lot of money, but instruction is somewhere in the 35-53% range. That may sound low, but that's still quite a lot considering it buys only ~60% high school graduation rates -- worse than, for instance, Chile, which costs ~10x less to administer.

Suffice it to say, the operation of these schools is inefficient in the extreme by any way I can measure it. That's why a relatively poor country like China can even generate headlines like this. But the problem persists across private schools, too, largely, so I think it's fair to say this is a tough problem to solve.

http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ba745

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2015/06/02/the-...

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/high-school-graduation-r...

http://www.ascd.org/ASCD/images/publications/books/stewart20...

http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/...

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

#94

Post by kefka »

brownbat wrote: post #21

The most moving and informed coverage of the US education system I've heard have all been through This American Life.[0][1][2][3] Ok, there's an easy four hours of content to listen to. Enjoy! The short takeaway for me was basically that local funding through property taxes is a terrible idea if you want anything approaching fairness. If you can afford to live in an area with high property taxes, the US school system…

I listened to that last one..

It tells me how tenuous local government really is, and how usurpation of local government isn't really that terribly difficult.

Yeah, in that case it was Hasidic Jews. I'm shocked that there wasn't more anti-semetic actions, primarily because the Jews there were trying to turn the local educational system into one for them. But I digress; it would, and has been the same for Christian control as well.

So to discuss further; how does one prevent takeovers of simple majority trouncing the significant minority (technically 50% - 1) with onerous laws? How would one make a government that is resistant to takeovers, and still maintain democratic principles? Are those 2 ideas incompatible?

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

#95

Post by mywittyname »

briandear wrote: post #84
Symmetry wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but these towns go to great lengths in their zoning codes to exclude affordable apartments. If we could decouple education from locale then maybe there wouldn't be so many municipalities trying to explicitly prevent affordable housing.

And yet those opposed to school choice are the very ones whose contituencies would benefit most. Being against school choice is almost a liberal mantra; likely because the teachers unions are major contributors to Democrat politicians. They also oppose charter schools for the same reason. Look at Elizabeth Warren's flip flop on charter school quotas in Massachusetts; it wasn't an accident hat she received significant…

I support free choice in education because it's fair and gives poor students with dedicated parents a chance to get a great education.

I oppose private, for profit charter schools because they are notorious for corruption and poor education in both the college and K-12 sectors.

There are regions where parents can choose the public school their kids attend. My home city does exactly that and is home to some top-notch magnet schools which have graduated several famous individuals.

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

#96

Post by devinhelton »

brownbat wrote: post #21

The most moving and informed coverage of the US education system I've heard have all been through This American Life.[0][1][2][3] Ok, there's an easy four hours of content to listen to. Enjoy! The short takeaway for me was basically that local funding through property taxes is a terrible idea if you want anything approaching fairness. If you can afford to live in an area with high property taxes, the US school system…

The most moving and informed coverage of the US education system I've heard have all been through This American Life

What makes you think it is the most informed coverage? These episodes only give you one side of the argument. If you want the other side try reading The Long Crusade and/or The Burden of Brown by Professor Raymond Wolters. I also myself wrote a long blog post about integration/desegregation as it happened in Boston, a post based on very credible academic histories, which gives a very different take than the NPR/PBS take: https://devinhelton.com/busing-in-boston

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

#97

Post by spacemanmatt »

michael_h wrote: post #36
brownbat wrote: post #21

The most moving and informed coverage of the US education system I've heard have all been through This American Life.[0][1][2][3] Ok, there's an easy four hours of content to listen to. Enjoy! The short takeaway for me was basically that local funding through property taxes is a terrible idea if you want anything approaching fairness. If you can afford to live in an area with high property taxes, the US school system…

Just to clarify: if you rent an apartment that is in an area with high property taxes, you still get to go to the same local school as the people who own their homes.

Those apartments are high-rent compared to areas near districts with lesser schools. I guarantee, every realtor factors the local school quality into house valuations.

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

#98

Post by nine_k »

ashark wrote: post #69
Spooky23 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always hear that lament, then I talk to my friends who are teachers. Most are in my age group (late 30s) and are making $70-85k, with summers and another month of vacation and good pension/healthcare. The only lousy benefit is that maternity leave sucks. They all are incredibly frustrated with the increasing meddling and red tape attached to federal and state funding. Half the job is paperwork nonsense, which wasn'…

More like 35K-50K for teachers here in their early to mid 30s. Mid-sized midwestern city, so the cost of housing is low, but that's still not great, especially considering that you need advanced degrees to approach the top end of that range. 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…

While we're at it: I think it's a terrible idea to confine 20-30 5th-graders together. This is the age when interpersonal relationships form, and hierarchies start building.

20 kids of same age have no other way to build a reasonable hierarchy except forming cliques and having fights. They are all peers, painfully pitted against one another.

For most of the human history (and pre-history) kids grew in multi-age groups. This allows older kids assume roles of leaders, care about younger kids and protect them, and teach the younger kids what they already learned (the best way to learn something is to teach someone). The younger kids have some role models before their eyes who they can relate to more easily than to adults.

This setup seems to work well in e.g. Montessori schools. It's sad that the majority of schools do not adopt multi-age groups.

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

#99

Post by [deleted] »

briandear wrote: post #85
nkrisc wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By the way, why do you think wealthier people shouldn't get more advantages in life? 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.

I might argue that children are the responsibility of the parents. As far as equal resources, DC schools spend among the highest per student in the country and yet have some of the worst outcomes. The problem isn't financial, it's political. There isn't a correlation of budget per student and outcomes. Successful schools aren't the richest schools -- they are the ones with the most involved parents. The problem is cu…

[deleted]

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

#100

Post by devilsbabe »

witty_username wrote: post #89
scott00 wrote: post #78

Headline is wildly misleading. The company that is the subject of the article pays $21/hour, which works out to $42,000 a year, probably without benefits. The 25th percentile for a US high school teacher is $45,520, plus significant benefits. Median pay is $57,200.

The purchasing power of that money is much higher in China.

Yeah but the teachers are in the US, giving classes over the internet.
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