On the education paradox

Post #6,448 by cforde 8/23/01 12:01:26 PM Reply	On the education paradox [link\|http://technologyreview.com/magazine/sep01/reviews.asp\|How can the same system produce scientific elites and illiterates?] I think he's right about the cause, but fixing it is going to take substantially more effort than he indicates. Old lazy habits are very hard to break. Have fun, Carl Forde
Post #6,452 by Yendor 8/23/01 12:12:52 PM Reply	Summary... The way to a better science-based primary education system is to: Pay teachers more. Respect teachers. The same could be said for improving primary education in general. While I find his intentions good, he hasn't come up with anything new or significant. -YendorMike "The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by the skeptics or the cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need people who dream of things that never were." - John F. Kennedy
Post #6,543 by tonytib 8/23/01 8:02:37 PM Reply	#0: parents who care
Post #6,554 by imric 8/23/01 9:22:09 PM Reply	I've always thought that the problem starts with kids FORCED to go to school. They resent it, and that resentment spills over into the rest of thier lives. 'Punishing' teachers becomes satisfying. I think the stratification by age by the current educational system may have a lot to do with that. Imric's Tips for Living Paranoia Is a Survival Trait Pessimists are never disappointed - but sometimes, if they are very lucky, they can be pleasantly surprised... Even though everyone is out to get you, it doesn't matter unless you let them win.
Post #6,571 by screamer 8/24/01 1:22:49 AM Reply	Re: I've always thought You would have always thought parially correct then, too, sir. As it turns out, public education in this country (USA) started with the "Old Diluder Satan Act" which said that kids should be taught to read the Bible so that Satan could not easily tempt them to sin and evil... It progressed into something akin to "it's important to a democratic society to have an educated populace since they run their own government..." There have been many iterations that basically fell within those two lines of thought (skipping the Industrial Age and the old Liberal Arts vrs. Vocational debates ;-) ), then, in this here century, it turned into a babysitting service, a form of birth control (they can't be copulating if they are sitting in high school), surrogate mom and dad (yes, we should feed these kids since their parents don't), etc... But getting back to your original thought, education is really not about the kids - it's about society... Just a few thoughts, Screamer "Putting the fun back into funatic"
Post #6,594 by neelk 8/24/01 10:47:58 AM Reply	Disagree... ...the median spending on education is $6600 per year per student at the k-12 level. That's plenty of money. To make it concrete, let's suppose that we want a 18:1 student-teacher ratio, and that a teacher costs $60,000 a year to employ, and that a high school costs $20 million dollars to construct and operate over its lifetime of ten years, and serves one thousand students. So, assuming straight-line depreciation for the facilities, we are spending $2000/year/student for physical plant. At an 18:1 student-teacher ratio, the cost of teaching is $3300/year/student. Together that's $5300/year/student, leaving $1300/year/student for books, teaching materials and extracurricular activities, if you are in a typical school district. You are probably boggling at this point, because your public school doesn't do half that well -- the teachers aren't paid that much, the student-teacher ratios are worse, and there is nothing like that kind of spending on teaching materials and extracurriculars. The difference you see is exactly the price of mismanagement and bad incentive structures -- and that mismanagement is due to a) sclerotic and overstaffed school district bureacracies, and b) teachers' unions that oppose any sort of competence requirements or merit pay. Under the current regime, in most school districts it doesn't matter how much money you spend, because it will all get wasted.
Post #6,604 by Another Scott 8/24/01 11:54:37 AM Reply	Not quite so simple, IMO. Hi Neel, I think you're neglecting teacher overhead, benefits, etc. Where I work, the total cost of an employee is about 2.5 times their annual salary. That's probably on the high end, but as you know employees cost much more than their salary (benefits, taxes, retirement, etc.). For some specifics, in my school district (Fairfax County, VA), the total [link\|http://www.fcps.k12.va.us/about/stats.htm#BUDGET\|operating budget] is $1.4712 billion for 165,016 students. $8938 per student. 20,557 full time employees. 238 schools and centers. This budget doesn't include the costs of new schools, etc., which has a separate budget. According to the PDF file linked on [link\|http://www.fcps.edu/DHR/salary/wshbook.htm\|this] page, a starting full time teacher (193 days) starts at $34,069. Someone with a PhD and at the top of the step range can make $76,915. The rate rises a little above $90k for "extended day" and some other positions. I haven't been able to find specifics about what an employee "really" costs, but simply taking the total operating budget and dividing by the 20,557 full time employees only gives $71.6 k. There doesn't seem to be massive overhead waste there (as top salaries are above this average). It's easy say that the school bureaucracies are bloated money-wasters. Things can always be run more efficiently, but there doesn't seem to me to be a vast amount of waste. At least in this case. Cheers, Scott.
Post #6,632 by neelk 8/24/01 2:46:35 PM Reply	Your district looks very good.... There are about 1600 non-school employees, which means that the district administration is about 8% of the district workforce. This is a very good ratio: by way of comparison in the early nineties New York city had 4 administrators for every teacher (and no, that's not a typo!). You inspired me to do some more digging, and it looks like Fairfax has a median household income of $71,000, as compared to the national average of $40,000. This means that Fairfax presumably has a lot of the upper-middle class families that both a) send their kids to public school, and b) have the time and the money to get involved in the local schools. I would guess that the PTOs are very active in your district. However, one of my other guesses -- that Fairfax would have a high voter turnout in local elections -- turned out to be wrong. In the May 2000 local elections, the voter turnout in Fairfax was 10%, as compared to the statewide average of 25%. This surprised me, because I had always thought that active pressure from the community on the school board was essential to making sure the school administration worked properly. I'll have to do some more digging to figure this out. When I get the time, I plan on running a regression between the local election voter turnouts and administrative overhead to see if there is a correlation.
Post #6,639 by Another Scott 8/24/01 3:27:58 PM Reply	Fairfax is an anomaly in many ways. It's got the highest median family income of any county in the country, among the highest per-capita incomes. Half the adult population has college degrees. The county is very proud of the public schools and it gets a lot of attention. [link\|http://www.springfieldvirginia.com/fairfax_county.htm\|[link\|http://www.springfieldvirginia.com/fairfax_county.htm\|http://www.springfi...x_county.htm]] has some stats. I don't claim that Fairfax is average. It isn't. But I don't think that most of the school districts are as bad as DC, Chicago and NY were (and maybe are) as far as administration overhead goes. On voting, well lots of races don't attract a lot of interest. And many local elections (govenor, etc.) don't coincide with national races so often people don't bother. It's unfortunate... Cheers, Scott.
Post #6,597 by GBert 8/24/01 11:29:30 AM Reply	There's more in there One of his major points is that education department programs seem designed to attract and promote scientific illiteracy if not outright fear and loathing of math and science in aspiring teachers. Ramble: I once taught a math-for-ed-majors class at a university towards the end of my grad student days, and I remember feeling at the time that these were the worst math students I'd ever had. They were nice, pretty, attentive, and well-behaved, but they were also profoundly uncurious and unwilling to appreciate any actual math. There was no fun, no exploration, no "aha" moments -- and no expectation that there should be for "normal" people (folks like me who expected math to be fun and at least somewhat interesting in itself were clearly damaged in some way). It was upsetting to know that these people were actually going out of their way to "specialize" in math ed., and that their math anxiety attitude would be part of countless youngsters' introduction to math and science. My own undergraduate school had no ed major -- to get a teaching certificate, you majored in a real subject like everyone else, and took a few ed courses and student teaching in addition to that (an ed minor if you will). Something like this is proposed in the article. Higher pay and respect are only in there to lure actual math and science majors into the teaching profession. The ed program at my alma mater was being shut down twenty years ago, presumably because too few students at the private university were interested in becoming secondary-school teachers. Giovanni
Post #6,610 by GBert 8/24/01 12:41:15 PM Reply	One more comment Just a drop of cold water on the glimpse of promised land he offers at the end... But imagine a world in which teaching in high school is such an attractive profession that it would be worth the trouble of a doctoral level education to get the job. For that to happen, we would have to pay teachers more, at least as much as what graduating doctoral students get. And they should be paid more. But that's not the whole answer. Just as important, schools would have to learn to treat these teachers with professional respect, and society would have to afford them the honor and admiration that professionals expect. This is not unthinkable. Something like it was true in much of Europe before World War II. But it is very far from true in today's United States. The situation in today's Europe may not be as bad as here in the US, but it is definitely no longer as rosy as he says it once was. Also, the high schools it was true for in pre-WWII Europe serviced the intellectual elite, not the working-class masses -- expectations of excellence and the ability to recognize it will be harder to come by these days. Giovanni
Post #6,607 by wharris2 8/24/01 12:18:23 PM Reply	Paradox Across the country, you find schools putting upwards of $8,000 per student into the system and performing terribly - with much lower paying parochial schools, for instance, putting much less into the school but consistantly outperforming the big spenders. Pay teachers more? There are more problems than will be solved by that. French Zombies are zapping me with lasers!
Post #6,613 by boxley 8/24/01 12:46:22 PM Reply	simple answer, public schools have to take everyone so 20 kids in a class cant be taught because little johnny is disruptive and cannot be excluded from that class or segregated with others like him so the rest of the kids can learn. Private schools will just kick little johnnies disruptive ass out. Bring back the concept of the sweathogs, feed em and lock them up for the day and teach the rest of the kids. thanx, bill ex sweathog Our bureaucracy and our laws have turned the world into a clean, safe work camp. We are raising a nation of slaves. Chuck Palahniuk
Post #6,616 by Fearless Freep 8/24/01 1:02:09 PM Reply	or the converse... Since the parents are paying for the schooling directly, they are more likely to be invovled in the child's education and progress in that school Jay O'Connor "Going places unmapped to do things unplanned to people unsuspecting"
Post #6,617 by boxley 8/24/01 1:04:51 PM Reply	very true Our bureaucracy and our laws have turned the world into a clean, safe work camp. We are raising a nation of slaves. Chuck Palahniuk
Post #6,652 by wharris2 8/24/01 4:41:12 PM Reply	Take away the public/private school question for a moment Similar results (although not quite as extreme) can happen between public schools at different levels of spending, too. The local large school district has, I think, the second highest spending per capita than any other school system in the state - yet produces pathetic graduation rates and test scores. Clearly there are other factors involved. And it isn't even an inner city/suburban question - yes, Marva Collins founded a private school, but in working with public schools in some of the seediest areas of Chicago has led those schools to significant improvements in math and reading skills. She's able to take some of the supposedly least teachable kids and teach them. French Zombies are zapping me with lasers!
Post #6,869 by marlowe 8/27/01 5:31:34 PM Reply	Depends on the teachers. I'm all for merit pay for teachers, never mind how the NEA feels about it. Pay the good teachers well, what few there are, and empower them to do their jobs as they see fit. Let the rest get jobs more suited to their abilities. Or if they're too stupid to attempt that, let them starve to death. I served too many years in the public school system to be able to muster any sympathy. [link\|http://www.angelfire.com/ca3/marlowe/index.html\|http://www.angelfir...e/index.html]

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