A letter to my students
blogs.berkeley.edu
A letter to my students
1–10 of 186 posts
Re: A letter to my students
#2"You spent your school years with teachers paid less and less, trained worse and worse, loaded up with more and more mindless administrative duties, and given less and less real support from administrators and staff."
What evidence does he provide that the decline in quality of education is due to lower budgets? As technology improves we should expect costs to decline. We should expect higher quality for less cost! When this fails to happen it usually because of artificially erected barriers to entry in an attempt to capture rent for a select few. And just who are loading up teachers "with more and more mindless administrative duties"? Taxpayers? Who benefits when it is increasing difficult to acquire the "skills" necessary to become a new teacher?
He doesn't really provide any unique insight besides blaming all of society's ills on tax cuts. Food has gotten cheaper, electronics have gotten cheaper, why has our government gotten more expensive!?
Re: A letter to my students
#3I think the author is mistaken. You see, what happened in years past is that they "took out a loan" to pay for now with the promise that they'd pay it later. However, later has come and now those that benefited the most can't understand why those that have to pay for it need to tighten their belts. None of us want to stop paying for it but we've learned what they haven't: you have to live within your means.
My father said it best, "I had it great, you're screwed. Thanks for paying for it."
Re: A letter to my students
#4There are two ways CA could be doing less for its citizens. They could be raising less money, or spending it more wastefully. The writer seems to assume all the problems he observes are due to the former and none to the latter. The first step in verifying his claims would be to check whether the state's revenues are in fact lower.
Are current state revenues lower than revenues in, say, 1960, when adjusted for inflation?
Re: A letter to my students
#5"You spent your school years with teachers paid less and less, trained worse and worse, loaded up with more and more mindless administrative duties, and given less and less real support from administrators and staff." What evidence does he provide that the decline in quality of education is due to lower budgets? As technology improves we should expect costs to decline. We should expect higher quality for less cost! W…
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 percentage over the years.
One thing I've been thinking about lately is education as related to teacher salaries. In general teacher salaries are pretty poor, but they've always been pretty crappy. However, the civil rights movement has had a big impact since the 50's and there's a big difference. Teaching was and is a female dominated profession -- what's interesting are the opportunities for women since the civil rights act. Now, instead of teaching, the brightest women are more likely to hold more prestigious, higher paying jobs that were previously reserved for white men. In effect, it's as though we were placing a restriction on women that said "If you're smart you can work -- but you can only work as a teacher." I'm not sure how much of a difference this makes, but it seems like it could make quite a bit.
Re: A letter to my students
#6"You spent your school years with teachers paid less and less, trained worse and worse, loaded up with more and more mindless administrative duties, and given less and less real support from administrators and staff." What evidence does he provide that the decline in quality of education is due to lower budgets? As technology improves we should expect costs to decline. We should expect higher quality for less cost! W…
What evidence does he provide that the decline in quality of education is due to lower budgets?
Academic positions, like any other job, operate within a competitive labor market. Lower budgets mean less money to attract top talent. Cheaper iMacs can't change that.
Re: A letter to my students
#7Perfect timing for this
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100822/ap_on_re_us/us_taj_mahal...
Re: A letter to my students
#8There are two ways CA could be doing less for its citizens. They could be raising less money, or spending it more wastefully. The writer seems to assume all the problems he observes are due to the former and none to the latter. The first step in verifying his claims would be to check whether the state's revenues are in fact lower. Are current state revenues lower than revenues in, say, 1960, when adjusted for inflati…
I don't know much about economics, so I'm probably missing something obvious. How is revenue linked to how much a government is doing for its people?
Re: A letter to my students
#9There are two ways CA could be doing less for its citizens. They could be raising less money, or spending it more wastefully. The writer seems to assume all the problems he observes are due to the former and none to the latter. The first step in verifying his claims would be to check whether the state's revenues are in fact lower. Are current state revenues lower than revenues in, say, 1960, when adjusted for inflati…
I don't know much about economics, so I'm probably missing something obvious. How is revenue linked to how much a government is doing for its people?
Government revenue (usually: taxes) funds the services governments provide for its people.
Example: USPS has seen slow/negative net revenue growth, so they're considering cutting Saturday service.
Re: A letter to my students
#10"You spent your school years with teachers paid less and less, trained worse and worse, loaded up with more and more mindless administrative duties, and given less and less real support from administrators and staff." What evidence does he provide that the decline in quality of education is due to lower budgets? As technology improves we should expect costs to decline. We should expect higher quality for less cost! W…
What evidence does he provide that the decline in quality of education is due to lower budgets? Academic positions, like any other job, operate within a competitive labor market. Lower budgets mean less money to attract top talent. Cheaper iMacs can't change that.
Certainly. But technology can reduce the amount of labor used. For example, better OCR means typists can do something more valuable. There hasn't been much experimentation in teaching such as using video instructions and that is in part because of a lack of competition. Normally we would expect the marginal productivity of labor to increase with technology level.