An article like this without a single reference to the impact and influence of unions is absurd, like trying to explain the workings of the solar system without invoking the concept of gravity.
A letter to my students
71–80 of 186 posts
Re: A letter to my students
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
In general teacher salaries are pretty poor,... 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...
"The salaries aren't even that bad if you multiply by (12 months of pay / 9-10 months of work)." 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.
Salary is time traded for money. Teachers trade 10 months for a certain amount of money, while most other professionals trade 12 months for a greater amount of money. The calculation I propose accounts for this.
Re: A letter to my students
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
In general teacher salaries are pretty poor,... 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...
well for what its worth, a lot of studies suggest that you actually get better teachers if you exchange these "fringe benefits" for higher salaries.
Year-round school also appears to have positive educational effects. (Not that the Unions would care.)
Re: A letter to my students
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Using state figures and the CPI calculator: 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 ou…
Actually, I think you have to go back further. My grandfather, a poor kid from west LA, went to UCLA and then UC Berkeley as an engineering student back in the late 1930s / early 1940s. 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 t…
If you want to see how CA as fucked themselves look at spending on prisons, pensions, and personnel.
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.
Re: A letter to my students
#75The real reason ... is administration costs. http://www.goldwaterinstitute.org/article/4941
Re: A letter to my students
#76Education is actually a very substantial part of the California budget. According to http://www.ebudget.ca.gov/agencies.html it's 31% of the budget, with the next largest expenditure being Health and Human Services. 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 t…
Since he's coming from the perspective of someone noticing a decline in the UC system, he might be partly noticing a shift within the education spending, rather than overall spending declining (and over-generalizing that perspective). Here's some funding data for the UC system, which has a downward trend in per-student terms since around 1990, except for a brief upward blip during the dot-com boom, and is now lower t…
It's interesting that the enrollment has grown much faster than population growth (and I'd suspect, much faster than the population of the age 18-22 population, since there was a bulge in that age group in 1970). So what really may be happening is that the spending is spread thinner, as the "everybody should go to college" meme has spread.
Re: A letter to my students
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Using state figures and the CPI calculator: 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 ou…
Actually, I think you have to go back further. My grandfather, a poor kid from west LA, went to UCLA and then UC Berkeley as an engineering student back in the late 1930s / early 1940s. 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 t…
but that generous spirit that, afaik, built California into a great state -- that's not worth overlooking
Exactly right; and that, not the numbers, is the point of the article.
Re: A letter to my students
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
As technology improves we should expect costs to decline. 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 p…
In general teacher salaries are pretty poor,... 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...
You think that teachers have easy hours? Have you ever known any teachers?
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.
Re: A letter to my students
#79Education is actually a very substantial part of the California budget. According to http://www.ebudget.ca.gov/agencies.html it's 31% of the budget, with the next largest expenditure being Health and Human Services. 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 t…
Since he's coming from the perspective of someone noticing a decline in the UC system, he might be partly noticing a shift within the education spending, rather than overall spending declining (and over-generalizing that perspective). Here's some funding data for the UC system, which has a downward trend in per-student terms since around 1990, except for a brief upward blip during the dot-com boom, and is now lower t…
You just have state funding in there, you have left out tuition, grants and other sources of revenue.
http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/accountability/index/1...
Re: A letter to my students
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Since he's coming from the perspective of someone noticing a decline in the UC system, he might be partly noticing a shift within the education spending, rather than overall spending declining (and over-generalizing that perspective). Here's some funding data for the UC system, which has a downward trend in per-student terms since around 1990, except for a brief upward blip during the dot-com boom, and is now lower t…
You just have state funding in there, you have left out tuition, grants and other sources of revenue. http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/accountability/index/1...
Well yeah, but that was my point: that state funding of the UC system is in decline. Among other things, that leads to students paying higher tuition and graduating with much higher debt than their parents did.