15 ms·

A letter to my students

462 points by sunkan 16y ago

abcxyz 16y ago
"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!?
- Locke1689 16y ago
  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.
  - adamc 16y ago
    It seems like it would be testable, at least: where do today's teachers stand vis-a-vis their non-teacher classmates? Where did they stand 50 years ago?
    - Locke1689 16y ago
      A very good idea. I'm not sure those statistics exist at the moment.
  - yummyfajitas 16y ago
    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://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf http://web.missouri.edu/~podgurskym/articles/files/fringe_benefits.pdf http://web.missouri.edu/~podgurskym/articles/files/fringe_be...
    - Locke1689 16y ago
      I guess, but in that case a fringe benefit of my job is that I don't have to deal with shitty kids. ;)
    - DanielN 16y ago
      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.
      - mattmcknight 16y ago
        Year-round school also appears to have positive educational effects. (Not that the Unions would care.)
      - yummyfajitas 16y ago
        [citation wanted] Not to be wikipedia-style passive aggressive, I'm just genuinely curious and unfamiliar with these studies.
- achompas 16y ago
  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.
  - abcxyz 16y ago
    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.
    - _delirium 16y ago
      > There hasn't been much experimentation in teaching such as using video instructions and that is in part because of a lack of competition. Higher education does have competition (thousands of universities, both public and private), but technology hasn't brought the costs down there either.
      - moron4hire 16y ago
        We have no way to control for all of the variables. There are so many factors to why education costs are so inflated, the relative effect of technology on the cost is impossible to determine.
    - achompas 16y ago
      Teaching is a weird beast. Computational techniques have improved, but we haven't improved educational techniques much beyond "smaller class sizes" and "online lectures." We can talk freely about the academic labor market, but it's hard to pin down what that labor market produces.
      - yardie 16y ago
- Avshalom 16y ago
  "As technology improves we should expect costs to decline. We should expect higher quality for less cost! " Because teachers are technology...? Also, fun fact here, being "loaded up with more and more mindless administrative duties, and given less and less real support from administrators and staff" is partially due to those lower budgets.
- pmb 16y ago
  "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 sneaky time-bomb anti-tax measures voted in, which prevented them from raising revenues even as home prices went up (which should increase the amount of tax owed on a property, but didn't) and inflation made existing fixed dollar amounts worth less and less. The example I know best is Oregon, where a guy named Bill Sizemore (currently indicted for tax evasion) organized and ran a successful campaign for a measure that required a super-majority of registered voters to vote yes in order to pass any tax increase in a non-presidential election year. Thus, not going to the polls counts as a "no" rather than a "I don't care". Another Oregon measure required that the taxed value of a property could rise by no more than 3% per year. Thus, when I owned a house in Oregon, I was only taxed on two thirds of its value (this is slightly pre-bubble, too - now it is much worse!). Anyhow, lots of this sneaky stuff has led to the states being almost totally broke, and their respective education systems, which were once the best in the nation, are now circling the bowl. Higher ed is holding up better than K-12.
  - ryanhuff 16y ago
    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 taxes, instead of spending problems.
    - davidw 16y ago
      > What tax cuts are you talking about? Property taxes.
    - pmb 16y ago
      Property taxes. Income tax and sales tax has had to rise in response. Unless the income tax rate is highly progressive, the net effect is a more regressive tax system.
wheaties 16y ago
I 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."
- _delirium 16y ago
  They didn't take out a loan, though--- the generation of Californians he's talking about (pre-1970s) built a bunch of infrastructure while also balancing the state budget.
  - patio11 16y ago
    One quibble: those "balanced" budgets included pension guarantees and other contractual terms offered to state workers (1962: health insurance) which a) cost "nothing" to just write in the paper -- quite easy to balance b) were actuarial suicide c) will never be repealed.
pg 16y ago
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 inflation?
- mkr-hn 16y ago
  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?
  - achompas 16y ago
    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.
    - mkr-hn 16y ago
      That much I knew. But my thinking was that the amount spent and how was a better indicator. If they bring in $5000 in revenue and buy $5000 in golden toilet seats, it's not being spent well. But if that $5000 is going to needed books for schools, it's good.
      - achompas 16y ago
        Agreed. But given that 49 out of 50 states were struggling to fall under budget this past year, we can safely say they're cutting the useful stuff now. Great anecdote from NY State on a recent episode of This American Life ("Social Contract"): Arizona sold their state capitol to cover costs, and now pays rent to use the building.
      - pmb 16y ago
        States can't run a deficit. Money in can never be greater than money out.
KevinMS 16y ago
Perfect timing for this http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100822/ap_on_re_us/us_taj_mahal_schools http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100822/ap_on_re_us/us_taj_mahal...
- mkr-hn 16y ago
  "In Los Angeles, officials say the new schools were planned long before the economic pinch and are funded by $20 billion in voter-approved bonds that do not affect the educational budget." Even in good times that's a lot for a school that will only house 4200 students. That's almost $140k for every student it holds. I wonder how long it's going to take for students going through it to generate enough economic activity to cover it. Is there an economist in the house?
  - mattmanser 16y ago
    $140k per student? Is the school only going to stay open 1 year then?
    - mkr-hn 16y ago
      Last two sentences.
zeteo 16y ago
That song he links to at the end is quite awesome. I guess this is the original version http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP7ggY2cNcs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP7ggY2cNcs
yoyar 16y ago
In socialist systems when the service is originally socialized, where do the professionals come from? Well, they come from the private sector, where people must work their asses off to succeed and only the best and brightest achieve the top positions. So, when government comes in and coerces them to be part of a socialized system, things go very well (for a time); the system is staffed with lots of brilliant, hard working people. Over time, the system is more and more politicized, the hard workers retire or become defeated by all of the bullshit that occurs and newcomers more and more over time become entitled and jaded. Real qualifications become less and less important, unions invade, tenure takes hold... Eventually, the system starts to fail more and more, and the worst type of people inhabit it, because those with principles are long gone or don't want to participate and so the move on to other activities where they are wanted and appreciated. What you are left with is a system inhabited by the most corrupt individuals who are highly skilled at gaming the system to their own benefit with little concern for those who use the system. Take a look around at teachers unions, and any other public service union you can think of. And then the masses yell out "please we need government to come and fix this problem!!!" - Sorry, the solution to the problem is not the problem.
Osiris 16y ago
Education is actually a very substantial part of the California budget. According to http://www.ebudget.ca.gov/agencies.html 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 to the budget. 2) State workers have powerful unions that have burdened the government with an amazing out of debt and future obligations in terms of pension of benefits. No matter what the budget shortfall, the government must meet these obligations. 3) When revenues increased during the DOT COM boom, government was more than happy to spend the increased revenue on new services rather than either decreasing taxes or saving the money in a "rainy day" fund. 4) California is a mess of red-tape and bureaucracy. I'm actually surprised how many startups do business in California and the Bay Area with the all the labor laws and extra benefits that businesses have to pay for that other states don't, like CA SDI that pays for paid leave, while other states don't have it. Also, state land use laws and regulations were directly responsible for the increase in housing prices by making it so difficult to build new developments (among other factors, of course). Californians have burdened themselves with a massive amount of debt and regulations that have severely hampered the ability of businesses to grow and contribute to state job growth. A article posted a few weeks back showed that there's a huge exodus of people from California to other states. I personally left California (East Bay) because I couldn't afford to buy a home and settle down with my family, not to mention the 9.75% sales tax on purchases from Newegg.com!
- _delirium 16y ago
  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 than it's ever been (as far back as I can find data, anyway): Year State funding (2010 $) Enrollment Per-student funding (2010 $) 1965 $1.37 billion 59,000 $23,000 1970 $1.84b 73,000 $25,000 1975 $2.31b 84,000 $28,000 1980 $2.75b 94,000 $29,000 1985 $3.23b 108,740 $30,000 1990 $3.47b 125,044 $28,000 1995 $2.68b 123,948 $22,000 2000 $3.94b 141,028 $28,000 2005 $3.09b 158,933 $19,000 2010 $3.02b 181,520 $17,000 That probably understates the decline somewhat, because the cost of living in California has grown faster than inflation, so funding should probably be adjusted against a wage index of some sort. Going by pure inflation-calculator adjustments like I used in the above table assumes that you can pay staff in 2010 the same salary as they would get 1965, adjusted only for inflation. That would mean getting professors for around $55,000, sysadmins for around $45,000, etc., which you aren't going to have much luck with. Benefits outside this direct funding were much more generous in my parents' generation also--- my dad went to a private university in California with his tuition mostly paid by the state, courtesy of the Calgrants program, which used to pay for any California student with grades above a certain level and with financial need to attend any California university, public or private. So to some extent it is sort of annoying that a generation that benefited from those kinds of programs, getting their degree without incurring student-loan debt, now thinks that they need to be cut.
jerf 16y ago
Edit: You know what? This post sucked. Here's a good link I used while babbling thoughtlessly (unless it wasn't good per _delirium): http://www.dof.ca.gov/budgeting/budget_faqs/information/documents/CHART-B.pdf http://www.dof.ca.gov/budgeting/budget_faqs/information/docu... See my reply to reynolds, which was the only valuable part. The second paragraph is my real point, and I mean that "if" clause.
- reynolds 16y ago
  He mentions in the article that California has plenty of money but aren't spending it on education.
  - jerf 16y ago
    I will admit I'm reading into things a bit by assuming that he's not advocating cutting government back when he says things like "your parents and their parents lashed out at government (as though there were something else that could replace it) with tax limits, term limits, safe districts, throw-away-the-key imprisonment no matter the cost, smoke-and-mirrors budgeting, and a rule never to use the words taxes and services in the same paragraph." That doesn't sound like a fiscally-conservative libertarian to me. If he believes in refocusing the priorities and perhaps even seeing a net spending drop while ending up with more education spending, I would consider that defensible and the numbers I produced can certainly support the position that there is some room for rethinking here. If he believes this should manifest as yet more money given to this government, no, I don't think piling more money on is the solution. That's why I'm looking at the total income for the state rather than exactly focusing on the exact amount dedicated to the worthy tasks. It is only one part of the story.
- _delirium 16y ago
  > on expenditures growing faster than inflation and faster than the growth of the economy I can buy that they've grown faster than inflation, but have they indeed grown faster than the growth of the economy? I haven't been able to dig up good data on what CA state expenditures were as a percentage of state GDP in, say, the 1960s. (They're currently around 24% of state GDP, if you can find something to compare that to.) Incidentally, the document you linked doesn't appear to cover most of the actual budget; it's the kind of fake official budget that's passed every year, which currently covers about 1/4 of actual spending. This site has better estimates for the past 20 years, but doesn't go back past 1992: http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/downchart_gs.php?year=1990_2010&view=1&expand=&units=b&fy=fy10&chart=F0-total&bar=1&stack=1&size=m&title=&state=CA&color=c&local=s http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/downchart_gs.php?year=19...
nazgulnarsil 16y ago
tell me where a man gets his corn-pone and I'll tell you what his 'pinions are.
- shadowfox 16y ago
  ?
  - celoyd 16y ago
    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&ots=Qa8_aEXCbe&pg=PA1#v=onepage&q&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=MEX5JlUu60IC&lpg=PA2&#3...
    - shadowfox 16y ago
      Ah Thanks!
- deleted 16y ago
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dannyb 16y ago
I think that this is somewhat disingenuous for the reasons noted by others, but also the failure of the writer to acknowledge that colleges and universities have embraced business models and focused on revenue generation in ways that distract from the core mission. I hate to say this but while most of the guilt should be borne by fat-cat administrators, faculty are greedy whores who are easily divided and conquered.
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ju2tin 16y ago
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.
shotmaker 16y ago
The real reason ... is administration costs. http://www.goldwaterinstitute.org/article/4941 http://www.goldwaterinstitute.org/article/4941
shmulkey18 16y ago
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 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.
korch 16y ago
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 flawed ideologies. Beating this dead horse is so common that I've learned to tune these from out when NYT, NPR, etc run these formulaic education scare pieces. The flaw is that you just can't compare apples to oranges and expect any kind of meaningful conclusion. In this case, it's cross correlating some super high dimensional manifold from 1964(or whenever) comprised of easily hundreds of thousands of variables, against a similar large manifold(2010). There are just too many totally different variables between then and now for it to be a fair comparison at all. Sure, each side sees what it wants in whatever tiny slice of the data they choose to use. Blame the Mexicans, no blame the Rich, no blame the Liberals, no blame Reagan, ad infinitum. And this guy, a professional in higher education, wants to step out on a far limb to make some grandiose claim about the status of California education. I am more fearful of him ruining his own students by teaching them to mimic his own flawed reasoning than I am of any of his exaggerated, inaccurate conclusions. You know what? More likely than not, the world will keep going the way it has been, people, kids, and education will keep improving, albeit incrementally, and there is not going to be some apocalyptic doomsday in the future of public education in California, or anywhere. In summary, he's basically following the same pattern so many old people follow: somewhere along the way they lose touch with reality, with the youth, get stuck in their ways, and believe the whole world has gone to hell in a handbasket, and all because of some imagined flaw in the entire youth population. Old people forget what it was like to be young, and lose their ability to rapidly adapt and learn as children do. And without fail, each generation grows up to believe they were somehow better than later generations. Bollocks! I used to be with it, but then they changed what "it" was. Now, what I'm with isn't it, and what's "it" seems weird and scary to me. —Abe Simpson
- jurjenh 16y ago
  > 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.
Experimentalist 16y ago
(edit: reply to _delirium, not sure this might be out of order, oops) As you mention, those stats are only for the UC system (no source), but leave out a whole chunk of other relevant data. The author is addressing what he believes is the decline of public educaiton in general in California, not just UC. Some people outside CA may not understand that the UC system (University of California) is only one part of the public college and public education system in California. As far as colleges, California also has substantial state funding for a lot of other non-UC California state colleges (CSU, California State University -- 23 campuses compared to 10 UC) and community colleges. Of course, additional funding goes to non-college education as well, and grants that people receive who attend private colleges and schools. Also future liabilities and pensions which are not included on budget. So my point being--just focusing on your UC stats is misleading. 1. How about the whole California state college system? 2. How about community colleges, vocational education? 3. How about other forms of public education? 4. How about all education grant totals made with public dollars? 5. Also while you are at that, how about adding in future liabilities/pensions which are not included in the yearly budget?
endlessvoid94 16y ago
He bashes the older generation for not spending enough to support the government. Then he excuses them by talking about how they work 2 jobs just to put food on the table. This guy should run for congress.
danbmil99 16y ago
TL, DR: liberal tax & spend is the way O brother! Heed the call and deliver us from the hideous capitalists! Oh BTW check out my new startup, we're going to make a ton of money.
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revoltingx 16y ago
Hippies pretty much ruined it for everyone.
vital101 16y ago
I live in Michigan. It's no secret that Michigan is having severe budget problems. In fact, there are several counties in Michigan (38 comes to mind) that are actually UN-PAVING roads because they are too expensive to maintain. I often wonder how Michigan would look if instead of making tax cuts, and then cutting services, we instead paid .5% more taxes a year to the state. Would it improve our situation? I hope so. At the very least, we might not be un-paving roads.
- antidaily 16y ago
  Un-paving roads? Man, that's depressing.
  - vital101 16y ago
    It's really depressing. I still have a hard time deciding which is worse: bad paved roads or washboarded dirt roads. Decisions decisions...
- protomyth 16y ago
  The raise in taxes might actually have the effect of decreasing the tax base by being the point at which people leave the state. Michigan has a lot of years with a strong Detroit. Now, they have to look at getting new industry and/or belt tightening. It looks like they went for the "in your face" version instead of reducing staff in the counties.
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skowmunk 16y ago
Great candor, great article. Displays some very critical perspectives that people often miss, they want safety, they want good roads, they want good education for their kids, etc, and still not pay the taxes that enable these things. One has to invest now, for a better future. But there is a paradox, I couldn't find an answer. The provision of safety, social support systems, equal opportunities, low cost education, etc are critical to getting out the best of a population of a civilization so that that 'advancement' of that civilzation continues. Yet, the more advanced a civilization becomes, the larger the systems required to sustain that advanced civilzation becomes. And the larger a system becomes, the more in-efficiencies and over heads creep in and the costlier it becomes to sustain that system, at a per-capita level. The more you charge (taxes) the population to sustain that advanced system, the lesser that people will have to spend on themselves, on their own dreams and development. And the less that people spend on their development, the lesser is their ability to contribute to the advancement of the civilization. How does one break this paradox?
kragen 16y ago
There's a lot more discussion of this post at the author's own blog: http://www.samefacts.com/2010/08/education-policy/a-letter-to-my-students/ http://www.samefacts.com/2010/08/education-policy/a-letter-t... Here's the comment I posted: I copied the following figures from the comment at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1631794 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1631794 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) According to the comment thread, the state population increased from 15 717 204 in 1960 to 36 961 664 in 2010, which figures I assume are from the census. My own calculations: that's about 1.7% population growth per year on average (1.017^50 * 15717204 ≈ 36 500 000) so we can interpolate the population in 1966 as 15717204 * 1.017^6 ≈ 17 400 000. That gives a state tax burden of roughly US$1610 per person in constant 2010 dollars. The 2009–2010 tax burden is US$3200 per person. Therefore, at least over the 1966 to 2010 time period, if these figures are correct, then far from being the victims of an "enormous cheat" or "terrible swindle" in which state taxes were cut to the bone by a generation supported by state taxes, necessitating massive cuts in public services, state taxes per capita have nearly doubled during that period, adjusted for inflation using the CPI. Some other possibilities were suggested in the comment thread: • Maybe the CPI isn't the right deflator to use, because most of the state's revenues go to education and health care, not vegetables and beef, and these services have inflated in price much faster than the CPI. However, this doesn't rescue the "terrible swindle ... walking away from their obligations" claim. • Maybe O'Hare isn't referring to public services as they were provided in California during the 1960s but during some earlier period, such as the 1940s. Prof. O'Hare, can you clarify your claims? • Maybe most of the tax money is being wasted on unproductive things such as prisons, managers and administrators, or legislators, rather than being spent on productive things like public education and road maintenance. In this case, there is a "terrible swindle", but the perpetrators are not the voters or the taxpayers but the employees of the government. • Maybe much of the high standard of living some decades ago was paid for by externalities. For example, power plants might have been less expensive to operate before the EPA was established, K-12 schools might have had higher quality when economic opportunities for women outside of them were sharply limited by institutionalized sexism, US military power might have kept the prices of many raw materials artificially low, and unsustainable depletion of fossil fuels might have kept the prices of energy and asphalt artificially low. As some of these externalities have been internalized, taxes would have to rise. For example, to attract the best and brightest women to teaching in K-12 education, the way we used to in the 1950s and 1960s, we'd either need a massive propaganda campaign about the nobility and importance of teachers (comparable to the one we have about soldiers), or we'd need to pay top K-12 teachers US$200 000 a year or more — with a credible commitment to continue to do so for half a century into the future. So, on the face of it, the numbers don't seem to add up to support your claim. Can you help out with that? Other comments related to this question include http://www.samefacts.com/2010/08/education-policy/a-letter-to-my-students/comment-page-1/#comment-45779 http://www.samefacts.com/2010/08/education-policy/a-letter-t... which seems to not be using the same facts as the commenter whose figures I quoted above. The California Budget Project's summary gives a lower number of US$86.8 billion for 2009-10, which is still much larger than the inflation-adjusted per-capita 1966 number: http://cbp.org/pdfs/2010/CaliforniaBudgetBites/100329_budgetmyths.pdf http://cbp.org/pdfs/2010/CaliforniaBudgetBites/100329_budget...
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mudil 16y ago
Manhattan Project cost nearly US$2 billion ($22 billion in present day value).(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project) It employed more than 130,000 people. Many labs and plants built in 1940s for the project are still in use today. We have just spend $760 billion on so-called stimulus. The money is gone, and nothing to show for it. That's how bloated gov't works nowadays, in CA, federal, and all other states. And the letter is calling for more of this! PS Great book on Manhattan project: http://www.amazon.com/Making-Atomic-Bomb-Richard-Rhodes/dp/0684813785 http://www.amazon.com/Making-Atomic-Bomb-Richard-Rhodes/dp/0...
- leot 16y ago
  The reasoning seems to go: 1) The stimulus was supposed to mitigate the effects of the recession, and 2) The recession was still very bad, therefore ======================= 3) The stimulus had no positive effect/was not worth the cost. Now, who wants to play the game "find the fallacy"?
DanielBMarkham 16y ago
I wrote three comments and erased them all before posting. Let's try #4: This thing bugs me in a greater sense than simply the issues or people involved, and here's why: you're paying this guy to petition his students to pay him more. Strip away all the (real) problems and politics and all of that, and you end up with some guy you write a check to who is doing his best to a) call you a slovenly idiot, b) get you to spend more on him and his projects, and c) use his position as educator to influence his students to advance his causes. He may be exactly correct. I don't think he is, but whether he is correct or not doesn't matter. Even if he is 100% accurate in everything he says, it's a conflict of interest. We simply can't have people on the public dole who also are political activists -- even in their spare time. I wish there was some way around this quandary -- the military has higher standards but we still see them getting dragged into various political fights. We have scientists who are activists, teachers who are promoting dissent, and public sector unions who are playing politics with public funds. Again, it's not that I disagree with their politics or efforts. It's that we cannot self-stimulate. The money that comes from taxpayers cannot be caught into a feedback loop to promote even more money coming from taxpayers. The people we entrust with various public functions cannot also be using the stature we give them to score political points. The only exceptions to this are political appointees, whose sole purpose is to play politics and be party hacks. For the rest of them, I am concerned that this is a really bad thing that is only getting worse and worse over time. I really hope some of these professional organizations can come up with appropriate ethical standards. It's like I read the other day: it used to be that scientists told you what "is". Now they tell you what we need "to do". (It was accompanied by an interesting graph from Lexis-Nexis with the frequency of the words "science says we must" which is rising exponentially in popular media.) Aside from the specific politics in this case, the trend here is not good at all.
Starchild 16y ago
It's common knowledge that the founders of the United States favored the separation of church and state because they didn't want government interfering with freedom of religion by telling people what to think. At that time, there were no government-run schools in America. If someone had suggested that government should be involved in running schools, maintain massive "Education Departments", etc., I'm sure Jefferson, Franklin, and the rest would have had the same reaction that they had to the idea of government-run churches. If it is dangerous to a free society for government to be involved in telling people what to think via religion (and it is), how much more dangerous is it for government to be involved in telling many of the youngest and most impressionable members of society what to think? We should demand the separation of school and state and end government control over education in the United States. Schooling is not the only means to getting an education (Mark Twain famously said "Never let your schooling interfere with your education"), but if universal schooling is deemed desirable, you could simply take the amount of money spent by government to run schools and maintain bureaucracies, divide it by the number of students, and issue each student a voucher to spend at the non-government, voluntarily funded community school of their choice. To support freeing children from the dangers of government indoctrination and control, visit and join the Alliance for the Separation of School and State -- http://www.schoolandstate.org/home.htm http://www.schoolandstate.org/home.htm. As authoritarians are so fond of saying, "Do it for the children!" -Starchild, candidate for School Board, San Francisco

462 points by sunkan 16y ago

"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!?

Locke1689 16y ago
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.
- adamc 16y ago
  It seems like it would be testable, at least: where do today's teachers stand vis-a-vis their non-teacher classmates? Where did they stand 50 years ago?
  - Locke1689 16y ago
    A very good idea. I'm not sure those statistics exist at the moment.
- yummyfajitas 16y ago
  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://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf http://web.missouri.edu/~podgurskym/articles/files/fringe_benefits.pdf http://web.missouri.edu/~podgurskym/articles/files/fringe_be...
  - Locke1689 16y ago
    I guess, but in that case a fringe benefit of my job is that I don't have to deal with shitty kids. ;)
  - DanielN 16y ago
    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.
    - mattmcknight 16y ago
      Year-round school also appears to have positive educational effects. (Not that the Unions would care.)
    - yummyfajitas 16y ago
      [citation wanted] Not to be wikipedia-style passive aggressive, I'm just genuinely curious and unfamiliar with these studies.
achompas 16y ago
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.
- abcxyz 16y ago
  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.
  - _delirium 16y ago
    > There hasn't been much experimentation in teaching such as using video instructions and that is in part because of a lack of competition. Higher education does have competition (thousands of universities, both public and private), but technology hasn't brought the costs down there either.
    - moron4hire 16y ago
      We have no way to control for all of the variables. There are so many factors to why education costs are so inflated, the relative effect of technology on the cost is impossible to determine.
  - achompas 16y ago
    Teaching is a weird beast. Computational techniques have improved, but we haven't improved educational techniques much beyond "smaller class sizes" and "online lectures." We can talk freely about the academic labor market, but it's hard to pin down what that labor market produces.
    - yardie 16y ago
Avshalom 16y ago
"As technology improves we should expect costs to decline. We should expect higher quality for less cost! " Because teachers are technology...? Also, fun fact here, being "loaded up with more and more mindless administrative duties, and given less and less real support from administrators and staff" is partially due to those lower budgets.
pmb 16y ago
"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 sneaky time-bomb anti-tax measures voted in, which prevented them from raising revenues even as home prices went up (which should increase the amount of tax owed on a property, but didn't) and inflation made existing fixed dollar amounts worth less and less. The example I know best is Oregon, where a guy named Bill Sizemore (currently indicted for tax evasion) organized and ran a successful campaign for a measure that required a super-majority of registered voters to vote yes in order to pass any tax increase in a non-presidential election year. Thus, not going to the polls counts as a "no" rather than a "I don't care". Another Oregon measure required that the taxed value of a property could rise by no more than 3% per year. Thus, when I owned a house in Oregon, I was only taxed on two thirds of its value (this is slightly pre-bubble, too - now it is much worse!). Anyhow, lots of this sneaky stuff has led to the states being almost totally broke, and their respective education systems, which were once the best in the nation, are now circling the bowl. Higher ed is holding up better than K-12.
- ryanhuff 16y ago
  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 taxes, instead of spending problems.
  - davidw 16y ago
    > What tax cuts are you talking about? Property taxes.
  - pmb 16y ago
    Property taxes. Income tax and sales tax has had to rise in response. Unless the income tax rate is highly progressive, the net effect is a more regressive tax system.

wheaties 16y ago

I 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."

_delirium 16y ago
They didn't take out a loan, though--- the generation of Californians he's talking about (pre-1970s) built a bunch of infrastructure while also balancing the state budget.
- patio11 16y ago
  One quibble: those "balanced" budgets included pension guarantees and other contractual terms offered to state workers (1962: health insurance) which a) cost "nothing" to just write in the paper -- quite easy to balance b) were actuarial suicide c) will never be repealed.

pg 16y ago

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 inflation?

mkr-hn 16y ago
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?
- achompas 16y ago
  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.
  - mkr-hn 16y ago
    That much I knew. But my thinking was that the amount spent and how was a better indicator. If they bring in $5000 in revenue and buy $5000 in golden toilet seats, it's not being spent well. But if that $5000 is going to needed books for schools, it's good.
    - achompas 16y ago
      Agreed. But given that 49 out of 50 states were struggling to fall under budget this past year, we can safely say they're cutting the useful stuff now. Great anecdote from NY State on a recent episode of This American Life ("Social Contract"): Arizona sold their state capitol to cover costs, and now pays rent to use the building.
    - pmb 16y ago
      States can't run a deficit. Money in can never be greater than money out.

KevinMS 16y ago

Perfect timing for this http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100822/ap_on_re_us/us_taj_mahal_schools http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100822/ap_on_re_us/us_taj_mahal...

mkr-hn 16y ago
"In Los Angeles, officials say the new schools were planned long before the economic pinch and are funded by $20 billion in voter-approved bonds that do not affect the educational budget." Even in good times that's a lot for a school that will only house 4200 students. That's almost $140k for every student it holds. I wonder how long it's going to take for students going through it to generate enough economic activity to cover it. Is there an economist in the house?
- mattmanser 16y ago
  $140k per student? Is the school only going to stay open 1 year then?
  - mkr-hn 16y ago
    Last two sentences.

zeteo 16y ago

That song he links to at the end is quite awesome. I guess this is the original version http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP7ggY2cNcs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP7ggY2cNcs

yoyar 16y ago

In socialist systems when the service is originally socialized, where do the professionals come from? Well, they come from the private sector, where people must work their asses off to succeed and only the best and brightest achieve the top positions. So, when government comes in and coerces them to be part of a socialized system, things go very well (for a time); the system is staffed with lots of brilliant, hard working people. Over time, the system is more and more politicized, the hard workers retire or become defeated by all of the bullshit that occurs and newcomers more and more over time become entitled and jaded. Real qualifications become less and less important, unions invade, tenure takes hold... Eventually, the system starts to fail more and more, and the worst type of people inhabit it, because those with principles are long gone or don't want to participate and so the move on to other activities where they are wanted and appreciated. What you are left with is a system inhabited by the most corrupt individuals who are highly skilled at gaming the system to their own benefit with little concern for those who use the system. Take a look around at teachers unions, and any other public service union you can think of. And then the masses yell out "please we need government to come and fix this problem!!!" - Sorry, the solution to the problem is not the problem.

Osiris 16y ago

Education is actually a very substantial part of the California budget. According to http://www.ebudget.ca.gov/agencies.html 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 to the budget. 2) State workers have powerful unions that have burdened the government with an amazing out of debt and future obligations in terms of pension of benefits. No matter what the budget shortfall, the government must meet these obligations. 3) When revenues increased during the DOT COM boom, government was more than happy to spend the increased revenue on new services rather than either decreasing taxes or saving the money in a "rainy day" fund. 4) California is a mess of red-tape and bureaucracy. I'm actually surprised how many startups do business in California and the Bay Area with the all the labor laws and extra benefits that businesses have to pay for that other states don't, like CA SDI that pays for paid leave, while other states don't have it. Also, state land use laws and regulations were directly responsible for the increase in housing prices by making it so difficult to build new developments (among other factors, of course). Californians have burdened themselves with a massive amount of debt and regulations that have severely hampered the ability of businesses to grow and contribute to state job growth. A article posted a few weeks back showed that there's a huge exodus of people from California to other states. I personally left California (East Bay) because I couldn't afford to buy a home and settle down with my family, not to mention the 9.75% sales tax on purchases from Newegg.com!

_delirium 16y ago
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 than it's ever been (as far back as I can find data, anyway): Year State funding (2010 $) Enrollment Per-student funding (2010 $) 1965 $1.37 billion 59,000 $23,000 1970 $1.84b 73,000 $25,000 1975 $2.31b 84,000 $28,000 1980 $2.75b 94,000 $29,000 1985 $3.23b 108,740 $30,000 1990 $3.47b 125,044 $28,000 1995 $2.68b 123,948 $22,000 2000 $3.94b 141,028 $28,000 2005 $3.09b 158,933 $19,000 2010 $3.02b 181,520 $17,000 That probably understates the decline somewhat, because the cost of living in California has grown faster than inflation, so funding should probably be adjusted against a wage index of some sort. Going by pure inflation-calculator adjustments like I used in the above table assumes that you can pay staff in 2010 the same salary as they would get 1965, adjusted only for inflation. That would mean getting professors for around $55,000, sysadmins for around $45,000, etc., which you aren't going to have much luck with. Benefits outside this direct funding were much more generous in my parents' generation also--- my dad went to a private university in California with his tuition mostly paid by the state, courtesy of the Calgrants program, which used to pay for any California student with grades above a certain level and with financial need to attend any California university, public or private. So to some extent it is sort of annoying that a generation that benefited from those kinds of programs, getting their degree without incurring student-loan debt, now thinks that they need to be cut.

jerf 16y ago

Edit: You know what? This post sucked. Here's a good link I used while babbling thoughtlessly (unless it wasn't good per _delirium): http://www.dof.ca.gov/budgeting/budget_faqs/information/documents/CHART-B.pdf http://www.dof.ca.gov/budgeting/budget_faqs/information/docu... See my reply to reynolds, which was the only valuable part. The second paragraph is my real point, and I mean that "if" clause.

reynolds 16y ago
He mentions in the article that California has plenty of money but aren't spending it on education.
- jerf 16y ago
  I will admit I'm reading into things a bit by assuming that he's not advocating cutting government back when he says things like "your parents and their parents lashed out at government (as though there were something else that could replace it) with tax limits, term limits, safe districts, throw-away-the-key imprisonment no matter the cost, smoke-and-mirrors budgeting, and a rule never to use the words taxes and services in the same paragraph." That doesn't sound like a fiscally-conservative libertarian to me. If he believes in refocusing the priorities and perhaps even seeing a net spending drop while ending up with more education spending, I would consider that defensible and the numbers I produced can certainly support the position that there is some room for rethinking here. If he believes this should manifest as yet more money given to this government, no, I don't think piling more money on is the solution. That's why I'm looking at the total income for the state rather than exactly focusing on the exact amount dedicated to the worthy tasks. It is only one part of the story.
_delirium 16y ago
> on expenditures growing faster than inflation and faster than the growth of the economy I can buy that they've grown faster than inflation, but have they indeed grown faster than the growth of the economy? I haven't been able to dig up good data on what CA state expenditures were as a percentage of state GDP in, say, the 1960s. (They're currently around 24% of state GDP, if you can find something to compare that to.) Incidentally, the document you linked doesn't appear to cover most of the actual budget; it's the kind of fake official budget that's passed every year, which currently covers about 1/4 of actual spending. This site has better estimates for the past 20 years, but doesn't go back past 1992: http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/downchart_gs.php?year=1990_2010&view=1&expand=&units=b&fy=fy10&chart=F0-total&bar=1&stack=1&size=m&title=&state=CA&color=c&local=s http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/downchart_gs.php?year=19...

nazgulnarsil 16y ago

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

shadowfox 16y ago
?
- celoyd 16y ago
  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&ots=Qa8_aEXCbe&pg=PA1#v=onepage&q&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=MEX5JlUu60IC&lpg=PA2&#3...
  - shadowfox 16y ago
    Ah Thanks!
deleted 16y ago
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dannyb 16y ago

I think that this is somewhat disingenuous for the reasons noted by others, but also the failure of the writer to acknowledge that colleges and universities have embraced business models and focused on revenue generation in ways that distract from the core mission. I hate to say this but while most of the guilt should be borne by fat-cat administrators, faculty are greedy whores who are easily divided and conquered.

deleted 16y ago

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ju2tin 16y ago

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.

shotmaker 16y ago

The real reason ... is administration costs. http://www.goldwaterinstitute.org/article/4941 http://www.goldwaterinstitute.org/article/4941

shmulkey18 16y ago

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 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.

korch 16y ago

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 flawed ideologies. Beating this dead horse is so common that I've learned to tune these from out when NYT, NPR, etc run these formulaic education scare pieces. The flaw is that you just can't compare apples to oranges and expect any kind of meaningful conclusion. In this case, it's cross correlating some super high dimensional manifold from 1964(or whenever) comprised of easily hundreds of thousands of variables, against a similar large manifold(2010). There are just too many totally different variables between then and now for it to be a fair comparison at all. Sure, each side sees what it wants in whatever tiny slice of the data they choose to use. Blame the Mexicans, no blame the Rich, no blame the Liberals, no blame Reagan, ad infinitum. And this guy, a professional in higher education, wants to step out on a far limb to make some grandiose claim about the status of California education. I am more fearful of him ruining his own students by teaching them to mimic his own flawed reasoning than I am of any of his exaggerated, inaccurate conclusions. You know what? More likely than not, the world will keep going the way it has been, people, kids, and education will keep improving, albeit incrementally, and there is not going to be some apocalyptic doomsday in the future of public education in California, or anywhere. In summary, he's basically following the same pattern so many old people follow: somewhere along the way they lose touch with reality, with the youth, get stuck in their ways, and believe the whole world has gone to hell in a handbasket, and all because of some imagined flaw in the entire youth population. Old people forget what it was like to be young, and lose their ability to rapidly adapt and learn as children do. And without fail, each generation grows up to believe they were somehow better than later generations. Bollocks! I used to be with it, but then they changed what "it" was. Now, what I'm with isn't it, and what's "it" seems weird and scary to me. —Abe Simpson

jurjenh 16y ago
> 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.

Experimentalist 16y ago

(edit: reply to _delirium, not sure this might be out of order, oops) As you mention, those stats are only for the UC system (no source), but leave out a whole chunk of other relevant data. The author is addressing what he believes is the decline of public educaiton in general in California, not just UC. Some people outside CA may not understand that the UC system (University of California) is only one part of the public college and public education system in California. As far as colleges, California also has substantial state funding for a lot of other non-UC California state colleges (CSU, California State University -- 23 campuses compared to 10 UC) and community colleges. Of course, additional funding goes to non-college education as well, and grants that people receive who attend private colleges and schools. Also future liabilities and pensions which are not included on budget. So my point being--just focusing on your UC stats is misleading. 1. How about the whole California state college system? 2. How about community colleges, vocational education? 3. How about other forms of public education? 4. How about all education grant totals made with public dollars? 5. Also while you are at that, how about adding in future liabilities/pensions which are not included in the yearly budget?

endlessvoid94 16y ago

He bashes the older generation for not spending enough to support the government. Then he excuses them by talking about how they work 2 jobs just to put food on the table. This guy should run for congress.

danbmil99 16y ago

TL, DR: liberal tax & spend is the way O brother! Heed the call and deliver us from the hideous capitalists! Oh BTW check out my new startup, we're going to make a ton of money.

deleted 16y ago

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revoltingx 16y ago

Hippies pretty much ruined it for everyone.

vital101 16y ago

I live in Michigan. It's no secret that Michigan is having severe budget problems. In fact, there are several counties in Michigan (38 comes to mind) that are actually UN-PAVING roads because they are too expensive to maintain. I often wonder how Michigan would look if instead of making tax cuts, and then cutting services, we instead paid .5% more taxes a year to the state. Would it improve our situation? I hope so. At the very least, we might not be un-paving roads.

antidaily 16y ago
Un-paving roads? Man, that's depressing.
- vital101 16y ago
  It's really depressing. I still have a hard time deciding which is worse: bad paved roads or washboarded dirt roads. Decisions decisions...
protomyth 16y ago
The raise in taxes might actually have the effect of decreasing the tax base by being the point at which people leave the state. Michigan has a lot of years with a strong Detroit. Now, they have to look at getting new industry and/or belt tightening. It looks like they went for the "in your face" version instead of reducing staff in the counties.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]

skowmunk 16y ago

Great candor, great article. Displays some very critical perspectives that people often miss, they want safety, they want good roads, they want good education for their kids, etc, and still not pay the taxes that enable these things. One has to invest now, for a better future. But there is a paradox, I couldn't find an answer. The provision of safety, social support systems, equal opportunities, low cost education, etc are critical to getting out the best of a population of a civilization so that that 'advancement' of that civilzation continues. Yet, the more advanced a civilization becomes, the larger the systems required to sustain that advanced civilzation becomes. And the larger a system becomes, the more in-efficiencies and over heads creep in and the costlier it becomes to sustain that system, at a per-capita level. The more you charge (taxes) the population to sustain that advanced system, the lesser that people will have to spend on themselves, on their own dreams and development. And the less that people spend on their development, the lesser is their ability to contribute to the advancement of the civilization. How does one break this paradox?

kragen 16y ago

There's a lot more discussion of this post at the author's own blog: http://www.samefacts.com/2010/08/education-policy/a-letter-to-my-students/ http://www.samefacts.com/2010/08/education-policy/a-letter-t... Here's the comment I posted: I copied the following figures from the comment at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1631794 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1631794 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) According to the comment thread, the state population increased from 15 717 204 in 1960 to 36 961 664 in 2010, which figures I assume are from the census. My own calculations: that's about 1.7% population growth per year on average (1.017^50 * 15717204 ≈ 36 500 000) so we can interpolate the population in 1966 as 15717204 * 1.017^6 ≈ 17 400 000. That gives a state tax burden of roughly US$1610 per person in constant 2010 dollars. The 2009–2010 tax burden is US$3200 per person. Therefore, at least over the 1966 to 2010 time period, if these figures are correct, then far from being the victims of an "enormous cheat" or "terrible swindle" in which state taxes were cut to the bone by a generation supported by state taxes, necessitating massive cuts in public services, state taxes per capita have nearly doubled during that period, adjusted for inflation using the CPI. Some other possibilities were suggested in the comment thread: • Maybe the CPI isn't the right deflator to use, because most of the state's revenues go to education and health care, not vegetables and beef, and these services have inflated in price much faster than the CPI. However, this doesn't rescue the "terrible swindle ... walking away from their obligations" claim. • Maybe O'Hare isn't referring to public services as they were provided in California during the 1960s but during some earlier period, such as the 1940s. Prof. O'Hare, can you clarify your claims? • Maybe most of the tax money is being wasted on unproductive things such as prisons, managers and administrators, or legislators, rather than being spent on productive things like public education and road maintenance. In this case, there is a "terrible swindle", but the perpetrators are not the voters or the taxpayers but the employees of the government. • Maybe much of the high standard of living some decades ago was paid for by externalities. For example, power plants might have been less expensive to operate before the EPA was established, K-12 schools might have had higher quality when economic opportunities for women outside of them were sharply limited by institutionalized sexism, US military power might have kept the prices of many raw materials artificially low, and unsustainable depletion of fossil fuels might have kept the prices of energy and asphalt artificially low. As some of these externalities have been internalized, taxes would have to rise. For example, to attract the best and brightest women to teaching in K-12 education, the way we used to in the 1950s and 1960s, we'd either need a massive propaganda campaign about the nobility and importance of teachers (comparable to the one we have about soldiers), or we'd need to pay top K-12 teachers US$200 000 a year or more — with a credible commitment to continue to do so for half a century into the future. So, on the face of it, the numbers don't seem to add up to support your claim. Can you help out with that? Other comments related to this question include http://www.samefacts.com/2010/08/education-policy/a-letter-to-my-students/comment-page-1/#comment-45779 http://www.samefacts.com/2010/08/education-policy/a-letter-t... which seems to not be using the same facts as the commenter whose figures I quoted above. The California Budget Project's summary gives a lower number of US$86.8 billion for 2009-10, which is still much larger than the inflation-adjusted per-capita 1966 number: http://cbp.org/pdfs/2010/CaliforniaBudgetBites/100329_budgetmyths.pdf http://cbp.org/pdfs/2010/CaliforniaBudgetBites/100329_budget...

deleted 16y ago

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mudil 16y ago

Manhattan Project cost nearly US$2 billion ($22 billion in present day value).(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project) It employed more than 130,000 people. Many labs and plants built in 1940s for the project are still in use today. We have just spend $760 billion on so-called stimulus. The money is gone, and nothing to show for it. That's how bloated gov't works nowadays, in CA, federal, and all other states. And the letter is calling for more of this! PS Great book on Manhattan project: http://www.amazon.com/Making-Atomic-Bomb-Richard-Rhodes/dp/0684813785 http://www.amazon.com/Making-Atomic-Bomb-Richard-Rhodes/dp/0...

leot 16y ago
The reasoning seems to go: 1) The stimulus was supposed to mitigate the effects of the recession, and 2) The recession was still very bad, therefore ======================= 3) The stimulus had no positive effect/was not worth the cost. Now, who wants to play the game "find the fallacy"?

DanielBMarkham 16y ago

I wrote three comments and erased them all before posting. Let's try #4: This thing bugs me in a greater sense than simply the issues or people involved, and here's why: you're paying this guy to petition his students to pay him more. Strip away all the (real) problems and politics and all of that, and you end up with some guy you write a check to who is doing his best to a) call you a slovenly idiot, b) get you to spend more on him and his projects, and c) use his position as educator to influence his students to advance his causes. He may be exactly correct. I don't think he is, but whether he is correct or not doesn't matter. Even if he is 100% accurate in everything he says, it's a conflict of interest. We simply can't have people on the public dole who also are political activists -- even in their spare time. I wish there was some way around this quandary -- the military has higher standards but we still see them getting dragged into various political fights. We have scientists who are activists, teachers who are promoting dissent, and public sector unions who are playing politics with public funds. Again, it's not that I disagree with their politics or efforts. It's that we cannot self-stimulate. The money that comes from taxpayers cannot be caught into a feedback loop to promote even more money coming from taxpayers. The people we entrust with various public functions cannot also be using the stature we give them to score political points. The only exceptions to this are political appointees, whose sole purpose is to play politics and be party hacks. For the rest of them, I am concerned that this is a really bad thing that is only getting worse and worse over time. I really hope some of these professional organizations can come up with appropriate ethical standards. It's like I read the other day: it used to be that scientists told you what "is". Now they tell you what we need "to do". (It was accompanied by an interesting graph from Lexis-Nexis with the frequency of the words "science says we must" which is rising exponentially in popular media.) Aside from the specific politics in this case, the trend here is not good at all.

Starchild 16y ago

It's common knowledge that the founders of the United States favored the separation of church and state because they didn't want government interfering with freedom of religion by telling people what to think. At that time, there were no government-run schools in America. If someone had suggested that government should be involved in running schools, maintain massive "Education Departments", etc., I'm sure Jefferson, Franklin, and the rest would have had the same reaction that they had to the idea of government-run churches. If it is dangerous to a free society for government to be involved in telling people what to think via religion (and it is), how much more dangerous is it for government to be involved in telling many of the youngest and most impressionable members of society what to think? We should demand the separation of school and state and end government control over education in the United States. Schooling is not the only means to getting an education (Mark Twain famously said "Never let your schooling interfere with your education"), but if universal schooling is deemed desirable, you could simply take the amount of money spent by government to run schools and maintain bureaucracies, divide it by the number of students, and issue each student a voucher to spend at the non-government, voluntarily funded community school of their choice. To support freeing children from the dangers of government indoctrination and control, visit and join the Alliance for the Separation of School and State -- http://www.schoolandstate.org/home.htm http://www.schoolandstate.org/home.htm. As authoritarians are so fond of saying, "Do it for the children!" -Starchild, candidate for School Board, San Francisco