Philip Greenspun's Economy Recovery Plan • Hacker News Board

Re: Philip Greenspun's Economy Recovery Plan

#111

Post by fizzer9 » Sun, Jan 04, 2009, 12:15 AM UTC

Prrometheus wrote: post #37

mk wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US may spend a lot of money on education, but there is an underlying problem that isn't addressed in either your comment or Phil Greenspun's argument. K-12 education is primarily funded through property tax. This results in wealthy communities having great schools with tons of resources and poor communities that are using decades old resources and schools that are falling apart. So maybe you are correct in saying…

DC is regularly one of the top 3 school districts in the country in terms of per pupil spending. I don't think you would want to send your children there. There are fundamental incentive problems with public monopolies. When you have a group of dedicated, wealthy, involved parents, these negative incentives can be overcome. However, the system fails your average person, and it surely fails those who need the most hel…

> When you have a group of dedicated, wealthy, involved parents, these negative incentives can be overcome.

I'd go further and say you don't even need the wealth -- just dedicated and involved parents. Success will flow from that. Trouble is, it's a vicious cycle: the kids who need the most help often have the least dedicated and involved parents.

People claim that private schools are better than public for all sorts of reasons, but I think the main reason probably is that the parents who care enough to put their kids in private school usually also care enough to be dedicated to and involved in their child's education.

Re: Philip Greenspun's Economy Recovery Plan

#112

Post by bd » Sun, Jan 04, 2009, 3:30 AM UTC

gaius wrote: post #106

bd wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really believe that they could get away with 95% fraudulent spending? That nobody would notice 95 billion Euro corruption? Or to put it another way, if this is true, it means that they are able to run real EC functions with just 5 billion Euro budget. That would quite efficient indeed.

Nah, it just means (for example) instead of putting function X out to tender, they just gave it to a friend or a family member. The work still gets done, it just could just be done quicker/cheaper/better with more transparency. I don't believe it's literally the case that Neil Kinnock is socking away a billion Euros a year into his Swiss bank account. Interesting to note that practically his entire family are EC empl…

Well, I have zero illusions about top dogs that got their positions by political means/connections.

My whole point was about low ranking civil servants that do the bulk of the nitty-gritty administration work and that all must pass through a highly selective competitive exams (1 in 29 applicants [1] cf. Harvard's 1 in 14 [2]).

And for these people, from my limited anecdotal evidence I got impression that they are indeed efficient, at least for bureaucracy standards.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPSO

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard#Admissions

Re: Philip Greenspun's Economy Recovery Plan

#113

Post by rsheridan6 » Sun, Jan 04, 2009, 7:45 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #49

rsheridan6 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any actual problems with the article that would rate more than a DH0 response? http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

Can we not use shorthand from a blog post where well-established terminology already applies? Almost any fallacy you'd like to point out in someone else's argument here is better explained in the Nizkor list.

There was no fallacy, just an assertion that the article was fluff.

Re: Philip Greenspun's Economy Recovery Plan

#114

Post by frig » Fri, Jan 09, 2009, 9:08 PM UTC

fizzer9 wrote: post #110

frig wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anything, it's almost obvious that almost all American public schools are, in general, "underfunded". Part of having a free market in labor (such as we have) means that, if you're trying to attract people to take on a particular position, you need to offer enough to lure them away from their other options. Public school teachers have good job security and benefits (after awhile), but the starting salary is usually…

> Once you've figured out what it'd cost, then you can start figuring out "is it worth it?" There's more to it than money. Public school teaching is currently a lousy job for a number of reasons: * very large amounts of work to take home * having to deal with complaints from parents and administrators if you raise the rigor of your classes * if you're male, the possibility of losing your career if a female student de…

I checked, and I was a bit off on the numbers.

My basic assumption is that there's a minimal amount of smarts you'd need to have to be capable of being an effective teacher.

I then looked @ people I know who I think have at least that minimal amount of smarts, took their job titles, than was going off of the local salaries for those kinds of jobs.

My mistake was comparing local salaries for those kinds of jobs to the nationwide median for k-12 teachers; since "local" for me means "expensive eastern seaboard city", I'm comparing expensive apples to median oranges, and thus I'm a bit off.

For reference:

http://www.payscale.com/research/US/All_K-12_Teachers/Salary...

That said, I do think people's expectations are off for how much teachers "ought" to be getting paid.

We can probably agree that there's some N for which "you probably have to have been in -- or have been capable of being in -- the top N% of your high school class to be capable of being a good teacher".

We might not agree on that N -- 5%? 15%? 25%? -- but let's look at what each N means if do a naive mapping to individual income levels:

top 5% -> 100k+ top 10% -> ~75k+ top 15% -> ~62.5k+ (I'm ballparking this from the table)

etc., via http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_S...

So pick your top N% and pick a salary range and you've got a ballpark range for what it'd take to staff a school with teachers culled from the top N% of achievers (and note that I'm actually lowballing it: the $ for each N is the minimum amount to put you into the top-N%, not the average or median income of the top N% of earners).

I'll happily admit that the above is a horribly inaccurate ballpark, but it's a place to start from instead of handwaving as to why teachers are/are not paid that much.

As a side note: one of the things that isn't mentioned when looking @ how much school costs in, say, South Korea is that relative salaries are usually higher for teachers than their domestic counterparts, and on top of that due to cultural reasons they're more "respected" by their fellow adults than they are in the USA, which makes it cheaper to attract quality people to be teachers.