6 ms·

"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 l

by 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.
      - DanielN 16y ago
        no direct sources off the top of my head but http://fora.tv/2009/07/05/Transforming_the_System_An_Interview_with_Michelle_Rhee http://fora.tv/2009/07/05/Transforming_the_System_An_Intervi... is a good start
  - Avshalom 16y ago
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.

by abcxyz 16y ago

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.
    - DanielN 16y ago
      no direct sources off the top of my head but http://fora.tv/2009/07/05/Transforming_the_System_An_Interview_with_Michelle_Rhee http://fora.tv/2009/07/05/Transforming_the_System_An_Intervi... is a good start
- Avshalom 16y ago

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.