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A letter to my students

blogs.berkeley.edu

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Re: A letter to my students

#101

Post by igravious »

Retric wrote: post #74
tmsh wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 repres…

Pity you had to use such crude language while making your point. I'd like to see these figures per state. And then I'd like to see the percentage of the budget over time that is allocated to locking up citizens.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_criminal_justice_cost_t...

Re: A letter to my students

#102

Post by uxp »

elai wrote: post #93
eli wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So is the implication that the state has grown much more wasteful in its spending over the last few decades? If you've got a plan for providing the level of services from the 60s without raising taxes, I'd love to see the details. (Consider pension and healthcare costs now versus then, even accounting for inflation)

Repair the bugs in the american health care system? Americans spend more per capita yet get worse services.

I'm pretty sure that's working as intended. Might be better off loosening restrictions on how health care providers operate so they can work it out themselves.

On a more serious note, there isn't one solution. There are hundreds of thousands of ways to spend less and bring more money in. It took this country, and that state, a few decades to get into that mess. It will probably take just as long to get back to the prosperity the 40's and 50's were known for.

Re: A letter to my students

#104

Post by jacoblyles »

_delirium wrote: post #53
Osiris wrote: post #28

Education 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…

Maybe the public primary schools have better lobbying apparatuses than the universities.

Re: A letter to my students

#105

Post by davidw »

ryanhuff wrote: post #68
pmb wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"As technology improves, we should expect higher quality teachers for less cost" --- if and only if we know how to use technology to increase instruction quality. I contend that we have almost no idea about that. He is right to blame all of California's ills on tax cuts. They and Oregon have had the worst abuses of the proposition system of all the states. Both used to be prosperous with balanced budgets, but had sne…

What tax cuts are you talking about? My California state income tax bill (or sales tax) certainly hasn't gone down in recent years. You might be right, but your comment is seeded with anecdotal examples that seem politically partisan ("sneaky?"). "I know a guy who" isn't the best way to prove a point. Instead, numbers showing tax revenue and spending would help illustrate how the financial ills are caused by lower ta…

> What tax cuts are you talking about?

Property taxes.

Re: A letter to my students

#106

Post by Locke1689 »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #85
btilly wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

I've known a few teachers and I used to be a professor myself [1]. Prep takes up very little time after you've already taught a class. But I'll certainly take your 2 secondhand anecdotes and some random internet guy over a scientific survey done by the BLS. Incidentally, your random internet guy is pretty obviously exaggerating. He claims 30 min putting grades into the computer. If he has 40 students in his class, th…

The differences between teaching secondary school and higher education are like night and day. I say this as someone who was definitely a little shit in middle school.

Re: A letter to my students

#107

Post by aliston »

joe_the_user wrote: post #65
pg wrote: post #4

There 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 believe California currently spends a similar amount on prisons as on education. I don't believe that was the case in 1962. That would effect total spending. Whether that means California is doing more for its citizens in this way is a question one can ask.

I've heard this point made on a per-individual basis. The numbers I found actually make it look even worse:

California per-pupil spending 2008: $9,015 California’s Annual Costs to Incarcerate an Inmate in Prison: $47,102

http://blogs.sacbee.com/the-public-eye/2010/08/california-pe... http://www.lao.ca.gov/laoapp/laomenus/sections/crim_justice/...

Re: A letter to my students

#108

Post by 3d3mon »

pg wrote: post #4

There 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…

If you try your hand at this "armchair budget analyst" game, you'll learn that its easier practically and politically (yes, politically) to just raise the money, especially in a state like CA:

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-statebudget-fl,0,95571....

To be fair, the CA real estate boom/bust really did a number on the state's coffers. To ignore the impact of the "great recession" is to not see the problem accurately. The govt relied on increasing property tax revenue that disappeared as quickly as the monopoly money used to pay for it (aka subprime loans) and on state income taxes and sales taxes from workers who quickly lost their real estate bubble jobs. If those workers still had their jobs and homeowners still had their homes, we'd find something else to complain about. Moral of the story is be careful when playing with credit.

Re: A letter to my students

#109

Post by c1sc0 »

igravious wrote: post #101
Retric wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 repres…

Pity you had to use such crude language while making your point. I'd like to see these figures per state. And then I'd like to see the percentage of the budget over time that is allocated to locking up citizens. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_criminal_justice_cost_t...

Funny, I didn't notice that bad language at all until I re-read the comment.

Re: A letter to my students

#110

Post by jurjenh »

korch wrote: post #92

Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers. —Socrates These kind of education articles are fucking stupid and only help fan the flames on all sides of deeply f…

> ruining his own students by teaching them to mimic his own flawed reasoning ...

In the letter he does mention "Every year, fewer and fewer of you read newspapers, speak a foreign language, understand the basics of how government and business actually work, or have the energy to push back intellectually against me or against each other" so maybe it is a little tongue-in-cheek and maybe he is looking for a valid intellectual push back...

Nonetheless, your comment regarding fruit is most apt, as in my eyes, the very nature / focus of academy seems to have changed - from one of developing thinking skills to one of developing people skilled in a certain type of thinking.

This (in my opinion) is the thing that let me down most while I was studying - instead of learning how to approach solving problems, the focus seemed more on learning how to solve certain problems, which I believe will make certain degrees (by year graduated) more-or-less obsolete as the problem domain has shifted on, which may in turn lead to a decline in technological advancement as we'll run into new problems without a clear understanding or process of approaching these situations.

Of course, my view is but one data point in many many thousands, and I studied at Canterbury University in New Zealand.

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