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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

#111

Post by tremon »

Spooky23 wrote: post #30
tremon wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often hear similar notions lamenting the demise of US education spending but from what I can tell, the US spends more than most other countries per student Spending is not the same as teacher pay. See [1] for a source: There was a time when it — literally — paid to be a teacher. Unfortunately, that was 60 years ago. In 1940 the average male employee with four or more years of college who did not teach K–12 earned 3…

That's a passage that needs to be read and parsed very carefully. Comparing depression era college educated male salaries to the modern workforce is apples and oranges. There were very few college graduates in those days -- and most were teachers. Other professions like law, engineering etc were struggling due to the depresssion. The modern passage is even more weasel worded. You need the worksheet used to calculate…

But then, what does it mean according to you? To me it still says that salary of the teacher profession has not kept pace with the wage development of similarly-skilled workers.

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

#112

Post by squeaky-clean »

ticviking wrote: post #83
Goronmon wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, a lot of comes down to the individual teachers. The good ones, who care about their students, will spend extra time running student groups (drama clubs, etc) and participate in teacher groups. Add in grading and planning on top of that and you can easily be working 12 hour days, easily. But you can still have plenty of teachers that don't care about making the extra effort.

Bluntly teachers who need to work much more than contract hours are not efficient or planning ahead well.

Tell that to my programming teacher, who also ran the business club twice a week after school and the programming club once a week after school.

In fact, it never really struck me until now how nice he was to stay late. The programming club would be about 2 hours long, and he'd stay another 2 hours after because we all wanted to continue coding together, we couldn't be in the computer lab without a teacher.

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

#113

Post by squeaky-clean »

cmdrfred wrote: post #65
jschwartzi wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More like 12-hour days while school is in session.

Not where I went to school, half an hour after the kids left the vast majority of teachers were gone.

Did they never grade tests or homework? Did they waste time in class with the students to do their grading? Otherwise they were likely working from home.

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

#114

Post by squeaky-clean »

ticviking wrote: post #90
ryandrake wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but my parents were both teachers. Summers are spent planning for next year. This idea that teachers get 1/4 of the year off is total fantasy.

As a teacher myself. If they can't find multiple 2 week vacations in that summer they aren't being at all efficient in their planning.

But ryandrake didn't say that. 2 weeks is not 1/4 of a year. Many people believe teachers spend the entire 10 weeks of summer vacation literally on vacation, as well as the week of spring and winter break. There's a big difference between 2 weeks and 12 weeks of vacation.

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

#115

Post by yummyfajitas »

haliax wrote: post #79
yummyfajitas wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably you should start by providing evidence of this. Most of the evidence I've seen suggests we are far past the point of diminishing returns on education, and we should have less education rather than more.

Would you be willing to cite some of this evidence? That's a conclusion I'd be interested to see...

So one important fact is that most of the knowledge taught in school is not directly useful. Combine this with the fact that transfer of learning is almost nonexistent (e.g. http://amzn.to/2hExO6u ) and you discover that most education is wasted.

There is extensive evidence of a sheepskin effect, and most studies of educational effectiveness are consistent with signalling theories and ability bias (more able individuals get educated).

https://www.nas.org/articles/The_Sheepskin_Effect

There is likely to be some benefit to education, but it's far less than what politicians currently believe and what current policies are predicated on.

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

#116

Post by mabbo »

friendly_chap wrote: post #42
mabbo wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> teachers - like other public sector unions - are one of the last few sectors to get a defined benefit pension plan Just to clear up a misconception, teachers get a great pension, but (in Ontario at least) they put 10-13% of they're base salary into that pension plan for their entire careers. Anyone who invests that much money into their retirement will do well. Also, the Ontario teachers pension plan is one of the…

That's fascinating! How is this possible? How come the traders (is that the right terminology) don't get poached by bigger firms? Are they doing well because they know the local market?

I have no idea how they do it. They also committed to more responsible investing after it was noticed they had investments in cigarettes and alcohol- then made more money than before after the changes.

They still have big challenges though, as they have a lot of baby-boomer teachers retiring, living longer, etc. They only real way they stay afloat at all is because teachers are paid pretty well in Ontario, and they get that double-digit percentage of their paychecks. And with the high salary, there's a big over-supply of teachers wanting jobs, so no one is quitting over it.

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

#117

Post by jefurii »

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…

"School choice" is code for rich people sending their kids to private schools and not contribute to the public good, or for businesses trying to squeeze profit out of taxpayer money. I'm sick of that bullshit.

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

#118

Post by devinhelton »

burkaman wrote: post #108
devinhelton wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 happe…

This seems well-researched, and there are some reasonable points, but your section #4 and conclusion really discredit the rest of the article. Section 4 describes how racism (or tribalism or whatever you want to call it) is really natural and healthy, with no references except your own "common sense". > Now imagine growing up and looking forward to playing on the same football team as your elders in front a cheering…

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

My view on tribalism is similar to my view on "greed" or "personal self-interest." It exists. We are a tribal species, as any survey of human history will show, from the time of the Chimpanzees onward ( https://www.amazon.com/Demonic-Males-Origins-Human-Violence/... ). Specifically, humans form tribes that are some combination of clan/ethnicity based, or are synthetic tribes based on ideology/beliefs/religion/nationalism. Social policy must be made with awareness of this tribal nature, not in defiance of it. Tribalism can be reduced, channeled, defanged, changed in form (to be non-racially based), but only by being aware of it.

What the fuck? Why would I want to fight people for being better at football than me? Why would I start a race war because some guy with different skin than me is dating a girl I like? How can you possibly see this as acceptable? You can argue that it's natural, but natural doesn't mean good. Do you understand that not everybody thinks like this? If a black guy gets promoted over me, I don't get angry at the black tribe for invading my homeland.

One of the main arguments for integration is needed to fix historical problems of bad race relations. My point is simply that large-scale, forced integration made race relation problems much worse. It created problems where little existed. Yeah, maybe working class teenagers should be less tribalistic and shouldn't think that way. But in the 1970s Boston was a city of tribes, it had neighborhoods of Irish ethnics, Italian ethnics, Jews, and blacks. Just adding 400 kids from another tribe to a school, and creating competition for the things that 16 year old male hominids value, was going to create conflict. I am just pointing out that the "solution" to race problems made race problems worse, and for very obvious reasons. Even if you think that forced integration was a necessary way to break the back of tribalism altogether -- there should have been a plan to actually break tribalism. Just throwing the kids together and putting the two groups in competition was not going to accomplish the goal of breaking tribalism.

And then in your conclusion, you correctly identify racial disparities, and then sort of argue that's the way it should be.

I didn't go into the reasons for the disparities because it wasn't really relevant to the point about de facto segregation. For instance, the NY Times has run a bunch of articles blaming academic gaps on stuff like early childhood nutrition [1], or disadvantaged kids having as many high-quality words spoken to them [2] [3], or not as many books in the house [4]. Conservatives sometimes blame single-parent families and poor attitudes towards education. So let's say that those one of those early childhood or home-based reasons are the reasons for the academic achievement gap. The result is that the achievement gap is already in place by the time the kids are at 8th grade or 10th grade. So just merging the black kids who are two grade levels behind into the same classrooms as white kids isn't going to help the black kids at all. It's just going to make it really hard for the teacher to help kids who will need an entirely different lesson plan.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/16/opinion/16kristof.html?_r=... [2] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/nyregion/for-poor-schoolch... [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/17/us/quality-of-words-not-q... [4] http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/16/a-book-in-ev...

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

#119

Post by throwaway729 »

coldpie wrote: post #54
hash-set wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not true in MN--you can open enroll your kids in any district. You may not get the exact school you want due to demographics, but it's still a valid counter-example. By the way, why do you think wealthier people shouldn't get more advantages in life? I'm all for trying to pull people up by their bootstraps, but we can't just level everything out in some misguided attempt at 'fairness.' You will never achieve that fai…

> By the way, why do you think wealthier people shouldn't get more advantages in life? When you're talking about fundamental education of your population, this is a pretty short-sighted argument. Under-education means fewer skilled workers and more bad decision making, both of which will have an impact on Mr. Rich. Mr. Rich has a personal interest in ensuring a good education for everyone.

That's assuming Mr. Rich controls capital. But a lot of Mr Riches aren't actually very rich -- they just happen to be well paid laborers in high prestige fields.

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

#120

Post by kombucha2 »

kefka wrote: post #94
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 co…

>Are those 2 ideas incompatible?

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

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