Oh, I just LOVE the "think of the children" guilt-trip ads they place on every patch of grass every time a school budget is up for a vote. Per pupil costs are close to the five-digit mark where I live, and continue to climb.
As far as I can tell, good teachers are vastly underpaid people. Unfortunately, the ratio of good teachers to bad is so high that the majority of teachers are so overpaid (cost vs quality of instruction) that its grossly criminal. Everything I've learned has been in spite of the public education system. I was lucky enough to have a few really good teachers when I was in high school. All of them were conservative, and they have all been long term targets of the administration, who does their best to weed them out. Progress, indeed.
Lefties got everything they ever wanted elction-wise last election and they still can't stop bitching and complaining. It's probably a hard transition to make - having people now point out to them that if something is broke, it's up to them to fix it.
New Jersey has conclusively proven this to be B.S.
Thanks to the NJ Supreme Court, state money has been thrown at inner city schools by the $billions. New schools, computers, teachers, swimming pools, and lots and lots of administrators in Newark and Trenton. Meanwhile state money to middle class towns like mine has completely dried up - sending my property taxes even higher.
The result - inner city kids are still poorly educated, they just drop out of freshly built High Schools now. And, the suburbs still crank out well adjusted and educated kids who go on to college and/or the military.
Lefties don't know how to fix anything, they aren't real engineers they're social-engineers - and they don't acknowledge failure, they just re-define it. Everything's just a big Skinner-Box play-pen to them.
... and their failure when the fix doesn't work. That's really a problem when magic doesn't work.
Not at all. Remember, The philosophy cannot be WRONG! If the solution fails, it must be because it was improperly implemented! The solution is to turn up the POWER! (Otherwise known as "escalation of failure.")
A better example is Kansas City - where for 15 years a judge ruled by fiat without any oversight (or to my mind, justification):
In 1985 a federal district judge took partial control over the troubled Kansas City, Missouri, School District (KCMSD) on the grounds that it was an unconstitutionally segregated district with dilapidated facilities and students who performed poorly.
http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-298.html
Kansas City spent as much as $11,700 per pupil--more money per pupil, on a cost of living adjusted basis, than any other of the 280 largest districts in the country. The money bought higher teachers' salaries, 15 new schools, and such amenities as an Olympic-sized swimming pool with an underwater viewing room, television and animation studios, a robotics lab, a 25-acre wildlife sanctuary, a zoo, a model United Nations with simultaneous translation capability, and field trips to Mexico and Senegal. The student-teacher ratio was 12 or 13 to 1, the lowest of any major school district in the country.
The results were dismal. Test scores did not rise; the black-white gap did not diminish; and there was less, not greater, integration.
(I suspect Verbatim Boy will come tell us what a success it was, since it had a single leader with the Right Goals and Hopes and Vision, and after all, none of us were in Kansas and we couldn't possibly know education or spending or....)
McClintock's point of course is that the private markets provide vastly more at a vastly lower cost.
"Apparently the unions believe that with enough of a beating, Gov. Schwarzenegger will see things the same way."
Well, since "beatings" have been working so well for the Left over the last 100+ years to get their way, maybe it's time to use their tactic against them. Problem is, the "beating" he refers to from the unions is that they'll pull their support. Unions control a LOT of political campaign dollars, and member votes.
We asked for this. We have the First Amendment proscribing state-controlled religion so as to avoid; a) government oppression of religion, and b) a government religion becoming a self-serving political force, but now we're faced with the exact same problem the First Amendment was trying to avoid, in the form of state-controlled "education".
We need an addendum to the First Amendment;
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of education, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..."
We also need a congressional panel to explore the options with regard to the elimination of socialist/Fascist/extra constitutional policies and programs nationwide.
Union dues from the Teacher's Union in California is a direct pipeline to political campaigns, that's why they and other Unioons heavily supported the "Universal Pre-School Bill," because it would increase by tens of thousands the number of accredited CA Teachers who taught pre-school - and they needed the dues-funds to fight Schwarzenegger, it failed and they lost.
Meanwhile California's problem is that all that money doesn't even get close to the schools.
It's siphoned-off at every nepotistic, inefficient, over-paid, over-staffed, bloated level of administrative overlap, district by district.
You can do the same thing at class room level.(for the math challenged liberal you might be aurguing with).
Start with the 25 to 30 students per class their always complaining about. Multiply times $10,000 per kid, $250,000-$300,000 per class room. Then start deducting expenses in overly large even numbers. You generally end up with close to 50% just evaporating somewhere in administration.
I can't tell if it's indocrination, or self-medication. But, they never seem get it.
Give the Average workig American a quarter million per class, and they could do a far better job of teaching kids. Make it a hundred thousand and they could still do it better.
Note:
All avatars and any images or other media embedded in comments were hosted on the JS-Kit website and have been lost;
references to haloscan comments have been partially automatically remapped, but accuracy is not guaranteed and corrections are solicited.
If you notice any problems with this page or wish to have your home page link updated, please contact John Hardin <jhardin@impsec.org>
JS-Kit/Echo comments for article at http://smallestminority.blogspot.com/2009/10/moneymoneymoneymoney.html (15 comments)
Tentative mapping of comments to original article, corrections solicited.
Oh, I just LOVE the "think of the children" guilt-trip ads they place on every patch of grass every time a school budget is up for a vote. Per pupil costs are close to the five-digit mark where I live, and continue to climb.
As far as I can tell, good teachers are vastly underpaid people. Unfortunately, the ratio of good teachers to bad is so high that the majority of teachers are so overpaid (cost vs quality of instruction) that its grossly criminal. Everything I've learned has been in spite of the public education system. I was lucky enough to have a few really good teachers when I was in high school. All of them were conservative, and they have all been long term targets of the administration, who does their best to weed them out. Progress, indeed.
Lefties got everything they ever wanted elction-wise last election and they still can't stop bitching and complaining. It's probably a hard transition to make - having people now point out to them that if something is broke, it's up to them to fix it.
"... it's up to them to fix it ..."
... and their failure when the fix doesn't work. That's really a problem when magic doesn't work.
[...] Public schools experiment I'd love to see [...]
That is a brilliant idea. I'd love to see us try it.
New Jersey has conclusively proven this to be B.S.
Thanks to the NJ Supreme Court, state money has been thrown at inner city schools by the $billions. New schools, computers, teachers, swimming pools, and lots and lots of administrators in Newark and Trenton. Meanwhile state money to middle class towns like mine has completely dried up - sending my property taxes even higher.
The result - inner city kids are still poorly educated, they just drop out of freshly built High Schools now. And, the suburbs still crank out well adjusted and educated kids who go on to college and/or the military.
Lefties don't know how to fix anything, they aren't real engineers they're social-engineers - and they don't acknowledge failure, they just re-define it. Everything's just a big Skinner-Box play-pen to them.
And CA isn't far behind NJ.
... and their failure when the fix doesn't work. That's really a problem when magic doesn't work.
Not at all. Remember, The philosophy cannot be WRONG! If the solution fails, it must be because it was improperly implemented! The solution is to turn up the POWER! (Otherwise known as "escalation of failure.")
A better example is Kansas City - where for 15 years a judge ruled by fiat without any oversight (or to my mind, justification):
In 1985 a federal district judge took partial control over the troubled Kansas City, Missouri, School District (KCMSD) on the grounds that it was an unconstitutionally segregated district with dilapidated facilities and students who performed poorly.
http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-298.html
Kansas City spent as much as $11,700 per pupil--more money per pupil, on a cost of living adjusted basis, than any other of the 280 largest districts in the country. The money bought higher teachers' salaries, 15 new schools, and such amenities as an Olympic-sized swimming pool with an underwater viewing room, television and animation studios, a robotics lab, a 25-acre wildlife sanctuary, a zoo, a model United Nations with simultaneous translation capability, and field trips to Mexico and Senegal. The student-teacher ratio was 12 or 13 to 1, the lowest of any major school district in the country.
The results were dismal. Test scores did not rise; the black-white gap did not diminish; and there was less, not greater, integration.
(I suspect Verbatim Boy will come tell us what a success it was, since it had a single leader with the Right Goals and Hopes and Vision, and after all, none of us were in Kansas and we couldn't possibly know education or spending or....)
What, no Tinkerbell chiming in yet?
McClintock's point of course is that the private markets provide vastly more at a vastly lower cost.
"Apparently the unions believe that with enough of a beating, Gov. Schwarzenegger will see things the same way."
Well, since "beatings" have been working so well for the Left over the last 100+ years to get their way, maybe it's time to use their tactic against them. Problem is, the "beating" he refers to from the unions is that they'll pull their support. Unions control a LOT of political campaign dollars, and member votes.
We asked for this. We have the First Amendment proscribing state-controlled religion so as to avoid; a) government oppression of religion, and b) a government religion becoming a self-serving political force, but now we're faced with the exact same problem the First Amendment was trying to avoid, in the form of state-controlled "education".
We need an addendum to the First Amendment;
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of education, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..."
We also need a congressional panel to explore the options with regard to the elimination of socialist/Fascist/extra constitutional policies and programs nationwide.
Union dues from the Teacher's Union in California is a direct pipeline to political campaigns, that's why they and other Unioons heavily supported the "Universal Pre-School Bill," because it would increase by tens of thousands the number of accredited CA Teachers who taught pre-school - and they needed the dues-funds to fight Schwarzenegger, it failed and they lost.
Meanwhile California's problem is that all that money doesn't even get close to the schools.
It's siphoned-off at every nepotistic, inefficient, over-paid, over-staffed, bloated level of administrative overlap, district by district.
You can do the same thing at class room level.(for the math challenged liberal you might be aurguing with).
Start with the 25 to 30 students per class their always complaining about. Multiply times $10,000 per kid, $250,000-$300,000 per class room. Then start deducting expenses in overly large even numbers. You generally end up with close to 50% just evaporating somewhere in administration.
I can't tell if it's indocrination, or self-medication. But, they never seem get it.
In CA administrative consumption borders on 80%.
Give the Average workig American a quarter million per class, and they could do a far better job of teaching kids. Make it a hundred thousand and they could still do it better.
Note: All avatars and any images or other media embedded in comments were hosted on the JS-Kit website and have been lost; references to haloscan comments have been partially automatically remapped, but accuracy is not guaranteed and corrections are solicited.
If you notice any problems with this page or wish to have your home page link updated, please contact John Hardin <jhardin@impsec.org>