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A letter to my students

blogs.berkeley.edu

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Re: A letter to my students

#81

Post by ataggart »

eli wrote: post #63
patio11 wrote: post #23

Earlier 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…

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)

Pension and health care outlays are not exogenous givens. The economy is not some external entity which government passively receives prices. Likewise the recession is not some external thing that can be waited-out like a hurricane. Our actions, and particularly those of that blunt club called government, entirely affects what emerges from the market making up the economy.

Re: A letter to my students

#82

Post by maxawaytoolong »

btilly wrote: post #78
yummyfajitas wrote: post #54

Earlier 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...

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 been a teacher. Teaching sucks.

The hours in the classroom are the hard part. You have to be on your feet actually interacting with kids who don't want to be there for 6-7 hours a day. God help you if you are teaching them something they instinctively hate, like math. The grading and prep is time consuming but not a big deal, you can just do it at home while doing something else. It's low prestige, and the pay is lousy. The pay becomes tolerable if you can stand doing it for 15 years while paying for bogus master's degree classes during the summers. I decided to abandon my bleeding heart and go back to graduate school in computer science. Note: if you want to get paid more off the bat, the trick is to get a master's degree right away and become a special-ed teacher.

In contrast, at almost every programming job I've had there were weeks where I spent 6-7 hours a day doing fuck-all, going to meetings, reading websites, chatting with friends and checking in 10 lines of code and updating the ticket tracker. For this service to humanity I get paid 4 times as much as I did educating the nation's youth.

Re: A letter to my students

#83

Post by joevandyk »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #54
Locke1689 wrote: post #5

Earlier 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...

Teachers are only paid for days they work. But school districts are allowed to take that pay and stretch it out over a year.

Not sure why you are multiplying their pay.

Also, I don't know a single teacher who only works their contracted hours each day. My wife works 10 hour days as a teacher, spends unpaid days cleaning her classroom after the school year ends and unpaid days preparing her classroom for the new school year.

Re: A letter to my students

#84

Post by _delirium »

bokonist wrote: post #76
_delirium wrote: post #53

Earlier 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…

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.

True, although the spending is down from 1985-1990 levels even without the per-student calculation. It doesn't seem to be for explicitly partisan reasons either, since the UC system was well-funded under Deukmejian (a Republican) and then had its funding cut under Wilson (also a Republican).

Interestingly, most of the faster-than-population enrollment surge is in the past 5 years. If enrollments had grown from 1970 to 2000 in line with the results of the 1970 census versus the 2000 census, they would've been 124,000 in 2000, which is not that much lower than the actual 141,000 (that's only a 15% growth in enrollment rates over 30 years).

Re: A letter to my students

#85

Post by yummyfajitas »

btilly wrote: post #78
yummyfajitas wrote: post #54

Earlier 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...

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, then it takes him 45 seconds to type one number into a spreadsheet! (Entering grades took me 3-4 minutes back when I had students.)

[1] Postdoc, actually. A moot distinction for the purposes of this conversation, but I'm not into self aggrandizement.

Re: A letter to my students

#86

Post by ataggart »

bokonist wrote: post #76
_delirium wrote: post #53

Earlier 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…

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.

This could additionally be influenced by any number of schemes which increase both the size and number of college loans, e.g., government-guaranteed loans resulting in higher willingness to lend than might otherwise occur. Such subsidies (be they real or perceived) would tend to result in higher tuition rates for private schools, and lower subsidy amounts for state schools.

Re: A letter to my students

#87

Post by celoyd »

shadowfox wrote: post #56
nazgulnarsil wrote: post #39

tell me where a man gets his corn-pone and I'll tell you what his 'pinions are.

?

It’s from an essay of Mark Twain’s* where he talks about how people’s opinions depend on their social situations – where they get their money from, who they talk to, etc. (Corn-pone was a staple food.) It’s a little like the famous Upton Sinclair line: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”

So I take nazgulnarsil to mean that the author’s position is a trivial function of who pays him.

* http://books.google.com/books?id=MEX5JlUu60IC&lpg=PA2&#3...

Re: A letter to my students

#88

Post by yummyfajitas »

joevandyk wrote: post #83
yummyfajitas wrote: post #54

Earlier 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...

Teachers are only paid for days they work. But school districts are allowed to take that pay and stretch it out over a year. Not sure why you are multiplying their pay. Also, I don't know a single teacher who only works their contracted hours each day. My wife works 10 hour days as a teacher, spends unpaid days cleaning her classroom after the school year ends and unpaid days preparing her classroom for the new schoo…

Not sure why you are multiplying their pay.

Bakery A charges $9 for 9 muffins. Bakery B charges $12 for 12 muffins. Which bakery is more expensive?

Re: A letter to my students

#89

Post by yummyfajitas »

DanielN wrote: post #62
yummyfajitas wrote: post #54

Earlier 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.

[citation wanted]

Not to be wikipedia-style passive aggressive, I'm just genuinely curious and unfamiliar with these studies.

Re: A letter to my students

#90

Post by shmulkey18 »

Reality check: "The Big-Spending, High-Taxing, Lousy-Services Paradigm: California taxpayers don’t get much bang for their bucks." http://www.city-journal.org/2009/19_4_california.html

Excerpt:

California is the only Sunbelt state that had negative net internal migration after 2000. All the other states that lost population to internal migration were Rust Belt basket cases, including New York, Illinois, New Jersey, Michigan, and Ohio.

As Tiebout might have guessed, this outmigration has to do with taxes. Besides Mississippi, every one of the 17 states with the lowest state and local tax levels had positive net internal migration from 2000 to 2007. Except for Wyoming, Maine, and Delaware, every one of the 17 highest-tax states had negative net internal migration over the same period.

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