It's interesting how overly animated he is given that the student is not a child, but you can tell that she is pulled in by all of that energy. But if you look at other videos you'll see that most teachers are a little more contained (and maybe sane-seeming): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Swc0RTrxjpw
The one thing, I saw that in their teacher training they aim for a 70/30 ratio of student to teacher speech and I haven't found any videos where that was the case. Though maybe it is only for more advanced students.
>It's interesting how overly animated he is given that the student is not a child
Absolutely don't knock this. I teach robotics and tech part time to middle schoolers and if there's one thing that has helped me connect more than any other its being a living cartoon. Exaggerate everything. You should be half-way to full clown when lecturing or you're simply not getting through.
To prep for lessons, I don't study circuits, I watch CN. I'm a 40yo man who quotes Rick and Morty and can name all of the Crystal Gems. But it works like crazy.
Our current regrettable situation originates in a century's worth of extremely ambitious educational systems design. Taking a step back from such things doesn't seem like all that bad an idea; we've had enough schoolmen on horseback to last us quite a while.
Completely ignoring what the 25 countries do that rank higher when it comes to education.
You mean have lots of Asian and white students but not so many black ones? Unfortunately it would be kind of racist to do that. Trump is hoping to come up with a plan that helps all Americans, rather than simply excluding the underperforming ones from the stats.
It is fair to have doubts that charter schools will be regulated enough and held accountable by a guy who was largely elected on "getting rid of all that red tape".
When we turn children and education into a commodity, the problem is not going to get better. The system will be turned into a cost center for the country, and we'll get what we deserve per the usual.
Our last "deregulate all the things" president imposed strong regulation on education. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Child_Left_Behind_Act This regulation was moderately successful, particularly for non-Asian minorities:
Our last "regulate all the things" president deregulated education. Unsurprisingly, the sellers of education contributed a lot to his campaign and voted for him.
I understand the parent poster believes that educational techniques are the primary driver of educational performance. I don't think he was suggesting adopting Singaporean demographics.
My phrasing was a snarky way of pointing out that educational techniques don't seem to matter very much, that's all.
What do they do besides make the population so desperate to escape poverty that they will push their kids to the brink of madness to study for exams that are make or break for their lives?
> In the U.S. and Canada, teachers are often underpaid—and many have quit the profession because they couldn't make a decent living
Is there a source for this? I often hear similar notions lamenting the demise of US education spending but from what I can tell, the US spends more than most other countries per student. And spending has been growing in practically every respect
> This graph shows that average education expenditures per pupil (for fall enrollment) rose from $3,400 in 1965 to $8,745 in 2001. This graph shows that spending on education from all sources—local, state, federal, and others—rose from $249 billion in 1990-91 to $442.7 billion in 2000-01 and $501.3 billion in 2003-04. This graph shows that the federal investment in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act rose from under $2 billion in 1966 to $15 billion in 2000 and $25 billion in 2005. [0]
Perhaps teachers are underpaid, but where is the money being spent going?
He had extra expenses due to having a special needs son. His wife was pregnant and presumably not working at the time. Also, they probably had too nice of a house if they had those other financial pressures.
Their biggest financial problem was probably their impulse to overspend on big ticket items "because my family is worth it". If I recall correctly, his wife pressures Walter to go to an oncologist that wasn't on their plan. In general, teachers tend to have better than average healthcare options. Chemotherapy for newly discovered cancer is almost always covered. If it's not, local news stations would love a story about a local science teacher who gets cancer that the big bad insurance company won't cover.
Me extrapolating here, but it's possible that they also spent big on different off-plan options for their son.
> Their biggest financial problem was probably their impulse to overspend on big ticket items
Well, in part they had different accounting of their assets, since the wife viewed his social capital (as a cofounder of a massive biotech conglomerate) as a marketable asset, while his pride drove him to refuse to redeem that and yet spend as if he had access to it anyway.
Walter's pride was not only his tragic flaw, but also a significant financial liability.
I didn't understand why the cofounder biotech conglomerate was necessary, except to give Walter and out he would not take and say 'hey he is smart but choosing a life of crime'
It was necessary in order to present some of Walter White's personality traits - he takes his independence seriously, and he can be very stubborn. It sets the stage for later character development.
The biotech firm was to demonstrate options already taken. He already tried the "right way" to monetize his intelligence.
And then, as the high school teacher, he has already tried "plan B", which is good enough for most people that fail to succeed in the only moonshot they can afford to take in their lifetimes, but it turns out that the healthcare in "plan B" really sucks.
Those aren't just already explored options. They're the control group for Walter's scientific experiment.
His hypothesis is that "There is nothing wrong with me. I'm a genius worth millions of dollars, and It's other people that have been holding me back." And the experiment designed to falsify the hypothesis is to just discard all of society's laws and morality and just get the money by any means necessary.
The strawman argument of the show is that unfairness in society trickles down and becomes crime. Walter never would have become Heisenberg if his business partners hadn't screwed him out of his share of the company.
In the 1970s, the best high school teacher I had spent summers painting parking lots. The year after I graduated, he quit teaching to paint parking lots full time.
Very uncommon opinion (I'm the only one I know to hold it): we should not spend one dime more for sport, especially in education. Kid have a minimal need for physical activities which can be easily fulfilled with some gymnastic, but we are in an age where having muscle is pretty useless.
Sport is a recent concept invented by the British idle cast, as a way to spend time and money. The world do not have this luxury right now. We need to spend money on education.
By the way, an analysis of the two longest civilisations (Jewish and Chinese) show that both have been obsessed with education, and both did never have a particularly strong focus on "sports".
Maybe in one century it descendants will count how much of our resources we spent in nothing and will laugh (and cry).
On the other hand sports bring in insane amounts of money, publicity and status to colleges, especially state schools where without them they probably couldn't compete with private schools.
Also given the rising obesity rates and health concerns related to obesity I would say physical fitness is very important in today's society. Education spending should be improved but education isn't all about studying from books. We need mixture of arts, physical education and formal education.
Unfortunately, I suspect that professional college sports and the physical fitness of real students, are different things. For most students, like the rest of us, college sports is a form of passive entertainment.
I went to a smaller college that did not have professional teams, and I suspect that students were healthier than at the Big 10 university near my house. The sports were pretty much open to all students.
The captain of my college's football team was a physics major. That tells you something about the quality of the football team, the physics program, or both. ;-)
All that considered, I would still rather see higher education and big-time farm-league sports (football & basketball) divorced. Big time sports are nothing but a drag on the mission of education--you basically have semi-pro athletes who never graduate acting like princes and engaging in all kinds of anti-social activities that get overlooked. It's a huge mess and it needs to be cleaned up.
Not only is that money not going to teachers, but you'd still have to adjust it for the cost of living and availability of social support, for it to be meaningful.
I often hear similar notions lamenting the demise of US education spending but from what I can tell, the US spends more than most other countries per student
Spending is not the same as teacher pay. See [1] for a source:
There was a time when it — literally — paid to be a teacher. Unfortunately, that was 60 years ago. In 1940 the average male employee with four or more years of college who did not teach K–12 earned 3.6 percent less than the average K–12 male teacher. [By 2000] the average male with four years of college made a whopping 60.4 percent more than the average male teacher. When the average earnings of male and female teachers are combined and compared with the average pay of all non-teachers with at least four years of college, the difference is 53.5 percent in the year 2000. This actually understates the pay gap because a large proportion of teachers have master's degrees, making them more educated than their comparison group.
That's a passage that needs to be read and parsed very carefully.
Comparing depression era college educated male salaries to the modern workforce is apples and oranges. There were very few college graduates in those days -- and most were teachers. Other professions like law, engineering etc were struggling due to the depresssion.
The modern passage is even more weasel worded. You need the worksheet used to calculate to figure out what that actually means.
But then, what does it mean according to you? To me it still says that salary of the teacher profession has not kept pace with the wage development of similarly-skilled workers.
More recent reports (from the shrill National Post) claim an average salary of almost 87K for secondary school teachers, but they don't state their source information.
Also consider that teachers - like other public sector unions - are one of the last few sectors to get a defined benefit pension plan, a luxury that few others will ever have.
> teachers - like other public sector unions - are one of the last few sectors to get a defined benefit pension plan
Just to clear up a misconception, teachers get a great pension, but (in Ontario at least) they put 10-13% of they're base salary into that pension plan for their entire careers. Anyone who invests that much money into their retirement will do well.
Also, the Ontario teachers pension plan is one of the best investment groups in the world. Many years they see 20+% returns. They own everything. Sports teams, malls, airports- they own the channel tunnel!
They don't trade as such, they buy (a lot) and hold -- and manage what they buy as well, when they can. Basically, it's the Warren Buffet approach to investment, and it took a long time to build from what used to be a more ordinary-looking pension fund wa-a-a-ay back when I was a kid (50 years ago).
I have no idea how they do it. They also committed to more responsible investing after it was noticed they had investments in cigarettes and alcohol- then made more money than before after the changes.
They still have big challenges though, as they have a lot of baby-boomer teachers retiring, living longer, etc. They only real way they stay afloat at all is because teachers are paid pretty well in Ontario, and they get that double-digit percentage of their paychecks. And with the high salary, there's a big over-supply of teachers wanting jobs, so no one is quitting over it.
Honestly, unclear. For one thing school boards are motivated to constrain headcount, since that accounts for a massive proportion of their budget spend. On the other hand, demand - especially in the early years - is incredibly high, though it wanes later. Perhaps someone who works in TDSB or the like will respond with some insight.
Thanks. My wife is French-English bilingual with an interpretation certificate, and she now wants to become a science teacher, and I kinda wanna apply to enter Canada given the recent unpleasantness.
If she's fluently bilingual and skilled you would probably have a much easier time applying via Quebec's immigration program. I assume that you're an engineer, and if so, there are a few startups hiring in Montreal.
I always hear that lament, then I talk to my friends who are teachers.
Most are in my age group (late 30s) and are making $70-85k, with summers and another month of vacation and good pension/healthcare. The only lousy benefit is that maternity leave sucks.
They all are incredibly frustrated with the increasing meddling and red tape attached to federal and state funding. Half the job is paperwork nonsense, which wasn't true even a decade ago.
More like 35K-50K for teachers here in their early to mid 30s. Mid-sized midwestern city, so the cost of housing is low, but that's still not great, especially considering that you need advanced degrees to approach the top end of that range.
Compensation varies greatly by district—typically the worst districts pay the best, but they're still undesirable for teachers because the conditions are terrible—being cursed at and threatened daily by 5th graders (no joke) and witnessing assaults gets old fast.
[EDIT] I should add that their healthcare plans tend to suck and are totally useless (1.5-2x as expensive as other options) for covering one's family, but the retirement's good. They're also better for people planning to take maternity/paternity leave than probably any other employer in the area, especially if you time it so your leave rolls over into Summer and are willing to be docked a couple weeks' pay—you can achieve near-parity with lower end of normal for parental leave in other OECD states that way! What a perk.
While we're at it: I think it's a terrible idea to confine 20-30 5th-graders together. This is the age when interpersonal relationships form, and hierarchies start building.
20 kids of same age have no other way to build a reasonable hierarchy except forming cliques and having fights. They are all peers, painfully pitted against one another.
For most of the human history (and pre-history) kids grew in multi-age groups. This allows older kids assume roles of leaders, care about younger kids and protect them, and teach the younger kids what they already learned (the best way to learn something is to teach someone). The younger kids have some role models before their eyes who they can relate to more easily than to adults.
This setup seems to work well in e.g. Montessori schools. It's sad that the majority of schools do not adopt multi-age groups.
I'm in one of the worst states, but that is essentially the very top of most salary scales. To get there you have to put up with some of the most intrusive management of any profession for 15 years.
Teachers make median income of around 57k[1] in the US and that is on par with other professions with similar educational requirements despite the fact that they don't work nearly 1/4 of the year.
I mean, a lot of comes down to the individual teachers. The good ones, who care about their students, will spend extra time running student groups (drama clubs, etc) and participate in teacher groups. Add in grading and planning on top of that and you can easily be working 12 hour days, easily.
But you can still have plenty of teachers that don't care about making the extra effort.
Tell that to my programming teacher, who also ran the business club twice a week after school and the programming club once a week after school.
In fact, it never really struck me until now how nice he was to stay late. The programming club would be about 2 hours long, and he'd stay another 2 hours after because we all wanted to continue coding together, we couldn't be in the computer lab without a teacher.
Are you sure they weren't taking the tests and homework that they received that day home to be graded, after which they can prepare the lesson plan for the next day and write the next homework and test?
Did they never grade tests or homework? Did they waste time in class with the students to do their grading? Otherwise they were likely working from home.
It's the classic problem. If they are good teachers, they spend time planning for the next year, taking/leading seminars on teaching, and looking for ways to improve themselves as educators. If they are bad teachers, I'm sure many literally do take off the summer and do little/no work.
Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like salaries depend on whether you are the former or the latter.
One side effect of using real estate prices to segregate based on demographics is some districts are very pleasant to work in and high paying and some are very unpleasant and often not as high paying. The kind of kids where Dad make sure the homework is done vs the kind of kids where there is no Dad but you get to wear a bullet proof vest. Dumping money into a district results in administrators soaking it up and no change in results. The only thing that changes results is demographic changes.
The teachers are segregated as much as the kids, such that the PHD in math with 30 yrs experience and a fat paycheck did a good job teaching my high school calculus class, and teachers of somewhat lesser quality are stuck wearing bullet proof vests and having their cars vandalized and stolen. Simultaneously, inside individual districts something akin to communism reigns where the union enforces strict salary discipline based on skill and experience. Its between districts where things get competitive.
Schools are run locally but regulated at state level. My SiL can run her classroom as the locals and her agree, but to renew her state teaching license every couple years she needs X continuing education units per year and her coworkers run the entire range of ant and grasshopper mentality. Its a classic confusion of butts-in-seat with productivity or confusing panic'd last minute cramming with productive effort.
If the license lasts five years between renewals, and career attrition is roughly 10% per year, then the tiny minority of teachers who retire as teachers will have renewed roughly 8 times, while simultaneously a huge fraction of people holding a teaching license are leaving the field or have left the field and are therefore not working very hard on CEU to renew. So its simultaneously true the teachers study and prep constantly and that teacher don't study and prep at all, because a very small fraction of survivors need to while a very large fraction will not survive.
The supply of teachers is too high leading to intentional burnout by management, careers that are shorter than the time it takes to pay off the student loans, and unpleasant working conditions because they can and it reliably produces countable beans. There is no contradiction in stating very few entering the field will be successful, while all who are successful enjoy great rewards. Those who have a very long and well paid NBA career will be quite happy about it; simultaneously almost every kid wanting to be a pro basketball player will not have a long well paid career in the field; the situation is the same for teaching.
But ryandrake didn't say that. 2 weeks is not 1/4 of a year. Many people believe teachers spend the entire 10 weeks of summer vacation literally on vacation, as well as the week of spring and winter break. There's a big difference between 2 weeks and 12 weeks of vacation.
And the pay they are offering teachers really doesn't seem good enough to base a headline around: $14-22/hr depending on incentives: http://t.vipkid.com.cn/faq/payment
Good story about Cindy Mi transitioning her business to online, and also the teachers in the USA now getting 20+ dollars an hour with remote flex time work. Off topic, but as a computer programmer I have been hired twice in the last ten years by customers in China: I told my friends I was trying to reverse the balance of trade imbalance <grin>. Anyway, even with the time zone differences, it was fun.
First, in the US I think we need to convince a substantial chunk of the population that it's not religion that will solve our problems, but better education.
Probably you should start by providing evidence of this. Most of the evidence I've seen suggests we are far past the point of diminishing returns on education, and we should have less education rather than more.
I think what he/she meant is that higher education has become the new high school. What we need is a restoration of secondary school education, not "universal college degrees."
That, and we need to re-value our currency in the same fashion.
Actually I meant that we should probably send fewer people to college and have fewer people graduate high school. Maybe some of them should go to trade school instead, but generally we should just reduce the quantity of education provided.
Most education seems to be wasteful; see Bryan Caplan's writings on the topic, for example.
Why do I get downvoted for offering what is thoughtful criticism? I'm not just some nobody who walked in off the street and I have actual credentials and experience teaching higher education. Furthermore, I am not wishing ill will upon others. I would like to stop the outright fleecing of today's college students, however. It's high time that ended.
Everyone seems to be obsessed with paying more into the education system. Chicago Public Schools have an average teachers salary of around $75,000. This in a city where the average household income is around $43,000. Clearly the money is there and teaching in Chicago isn't some poverty inducing measure.
The outcomes are fairly poor. For students that bother with the ACT the average score is 18, but for Illinois as a whole its 21. 18 is a score that only gets you into the most poorly ranked of colleges. CPS teachers also average 18-19 on the ACT as well. Graduation rate floats are 50% and the powerful Chicago teachers union fights against any performance testing of teachers impossible to implement.
The reality is that we absolutely don't need more education or more education dollars. We need higher quality education. Public sector unions have made sure to make this all about tax dollars, when it should be about teacher performance and student outcomes. This means teachers taking responsibility and administrators firing poor performing teachers. It means a lot of politically difficult things, thus why it doesn't really happen and why anyone with means in Chicago goes to private or charter schools. Or more commonly, white collar professionals move to the suburbs when they have children.
Also the mayor just wrote a op-ed piece against vouchers for private schools. What public school do his kids go to? None. They go to private school in Chicago.
So one important fact is that most of the knowledge taught in school is not directly useful. Combine this with the fact that transfer of learning is almost nonexistent (e.g. http://amzn.to/2hExO6u ) and you discover that most education is wasted.
There is extensive evidence of a sheepskin effect, and most studies of educational effectiveness are consistent with signalling theories and ability bias (more able individuals get educated).
There is likely to be some benefit to education, but it's far less than what politicians currently believe and what current policies are predicated on.
The most moving and informed coverage of the US education system I've heard have all been through This American Life.[0][1][2][3]
Ok, there's an easy four hours of content to listen to. Enjoy!
The short takeaway for me was basically that local funding through property taxes is a terrible idea if you want anything approaching fairness.
If you can afford to live in an area with high property taxes, the US school system is great, your kids probably go to a great school. If you are struggling to get by, though, living in an apartment? Your kids are usually banned from going to that same great school by law.
It's like anti-literacy laws were too obvious, so we just made them more byzantine.
Significantly, on how redlining contributed to the achievement gap. The heartbreaking story of why a girl who wants to go to school down the road is turned away.
A description of another poor high school where the kids basically have recess, lunch, or permanent substitutes all day, because it's failed by local control.
The problem with that conclusion is that some of the highest-funded public schools in the country such as DC are among the worst performers. Funding is not the sole (or even most important) determinant of quality in education.
Do you have a breakdown for how much of DC schools funding makes it to the classroom and to teachers? It's my understanding that administrators soak up a huge amount of budget in many districts.
Administration does take a lot of money, but instruction is somewhere in the 35-53% range. That may sound low, but that's still quite a lot considering it buys only ~60% high school graduation rates -- worse than, for instance, Chile, which costs ~10x less to administer.
Suffice it to say, the operation of these schools is inefficient in the extreme by any way I can measure it. That's why a relatively poor country like China can even generate headlines like this. But the problem persists across private schools, too, largely, so I think it's fair to say this is a tough problem to solve.
Sorry, wasn't clear. This conclusion isn't limited to funding.
It doesn't necessarily mean that the high performing schools are high performing because they have a high tax base, that's just a correlation.
Quality teachers may not be attracted to inner-city schools because of unstated biases, or because they prefer to live in other areas and have short commutes.
Or maybe you have a safety issue due to a school's location or an aging building and high rents that diverts resources towards countermeasures or repairs.
For whatever reason though, busing led to miraculously improved outcomes. Then we stopped doing it for some reason. Now, instead, we make some kids stay in schools where they have six hours of recess or lunch or study hall, then one session with a permanent math substitute with no lesson plans.
So yeah, funding isn't everything--but some schools can't even afford teachers for every hour of the day, or roofs that aren't collapsing. If there is a minimum threshold not being met, funding's probably part of it. The better solution is to just not bar kids who want to learn from functioning schools.
For whatever reason though, busing led to miraculously improved outcomes.
This is asserted in episode 562, but no evidence was cited. I did a deep dive on this myself, reading numerous studies and various books, and in my opinion any link between integration and academic achievement is minimal at best. Read the two books by Raymond Wolters, and then compare with the American Life episodes, and make your own judgement about which side has the more accurate narrative.
Just to clarify: if you rent an apartment that is in an area with high property taxes, you still get to go to the same local school as the people who own their homes.
Yes, but these towns go to great lengths in their zoning codes to exclude affordable apartments. If we could decouple education from locale then maybe there wouldn't be so many municipalities trying to explicitly prevent affordable housing.
And yet those opposed to school choice are the very ones whose contituencies would benefit most. Being against school choice is almost a liberal mantra; likely because the teachers unions are major contributors to Democrat politicians. They also oppose charter schools for the same reason. Look at Elizabeth Warren's flip flop on charter school quotas in Massachusetts; it wasn't an accident hat she received significant campaign donations from teachers unions before she took her 'principled' stand favoring keeping quotas low.
I support free choice in education because it's fair and gives poor students with dedicated parents a chance to get a great education.
I oppose private, for profit charter schools because they are notorious for corruption and poor education in both the college and K-12 sectors.
There are regions where parents can choose the public school their kids attend. My home city does exactly that and is home to some top-notch magnet schools which have graduated several famous individuals.
> I oppose private, for profit charter schools because they are notorious for corruption and poor education in both the college and K-12 sectors.
I've heard the same complaints about corruption in teachers unions and poor education at urban non-charters. Everyone has their own examples for each side of the argument.
I can never tell how much of the pro- or anti- charter allegations are politically motivated or real science.
Best option I have is to rely on actual research. Stanford provides some periodic in depth studies of school performance, and has found that "across 41 regions, urban charter schools on average achieve significantly greater student success in both math and reading."
That's heavily caveated. There are regional variances. Maybe charters don't outpace peers outside of urban environments. Still, it's enough for me not to dismiss them out of hand.
"School choice" is code for rich people sending their kids to private schools and not contribute to the public good, or for businesses trying to squeeze profit out of taxpayer money. I'm sick of that bullshit.
Those apartments are high-rent compared to areas near districts with lesser schools. I guarantee, every realtor factors the local school quality into house valuations.
Not true in MN--you can open enroll your kids in any district. You may not get the exact school you want due to demographics, but it's still a valid counter-example.
By the way, why do you think wealthier people shouldn't get more advantages in life? I'm all for trying to pull people up by their bootstraps, but we can't just level everything out in some misguided attempt at 'fairness.' You will never achieve that fairness. The wealthy will always find ways to gain an advantage.
Sucks about that high school, but a lot of these areas need serious political reform first before anything else can get fixed.
> By the way, why do you think wealthier people shouldn't get more advantages in life?
He's not saying that. The idea he's espousing is closer to the idea that there are lots of talented kids in poor districts that get completely left behind because they live in a poor area. The only way to solve that is to provide some funding, and funding is scarce in poor districts.
> By the way, why do you think wealthier people shouldn't get more advantages in life?
When you're talking about fundamental education of your population, this is a pretty short-sighted argument. Under-education means fewer skilled workers and more bad decision making, both of which will have an impact on Mr. Rich. Mr. Rich has a personal interest in ensuring a good education for everyone.
That's assuming Mr. Rich controls capital. But a lot of Mr Riches aren't actually very rich -- they just happen to be well paid laborers in high prestige fields.
> By the way, why do you think wealthier people shouldn't get more advantages in life?
Wealthy people will always have nicer cars and better vacations and bigger houses, but that doesn't mean the children of poor people should be relegated to terrible schools where they'll have no future.
They're both important, and one could argue that schools are more important to children with less supportive families. You also have to consider what is breaking up the families you appear to be referencing - over-policing, redlining, etc. Even if you come to the conclusion that the poor deserve everything they get (which would be a myopic conclusion), why should children suffer for the sins of their parents?
It's not either/or, it's both/and. Having parents that are willing and able to be involved with their children is huge, but going to a good school is to. The top rated comment linked to a This American Life story on achievement gap and how busing poor black students to white neighborhoods in the 80s and 90s almost magically improved their scores.
Don't forget that part of being an involved parent and making sure your kids get a good education is, critically, getting them in a good school.
True. And the poor have severely amputated family time due to job requirements. If both parents work a combined 3 jobs (and probably don't have the luxury of personal transportation, meaning increased transit times), how many hours are left with their children?
Yes, family education cannot be fully replaced by school instruction. But the reality for many struggling families is that they need as much help from the schools as possible.
I'm very pro-family but I take issue at the wealthy who point their fingers at struggling/broken families who haven't been dealt the same cards in life, and justifying blame by judging their lifestyle.
"under" and "over" fund are subjective measures of nothing. the us spends substantially more per pupil than it did 40 years ago with roughly the same results.
further, we spend more per pupil than other developed countries that are delivering superior results.
Wealthier people do have more advantages in life. It's tautological to the extent that it describes what it is to be wealthy.
We're talking about public education though, ideally, public education would have a universally high standard, and making funding for public education based on something like property values ensures that in certain areas it will be underfunded.
So it's really about whether we take universal public education seriously or if we're just providing education to some and a state sponsored daycare service to others.
But it doesn't matter how it gets funded, it will always be chronically under-funded! I have watched this going on for thirty years! There is something inherently wrong with public education systems. I don't know if it is the unions or what, but no matter how much money we throw at them, they are always under-funded. It's amazing.
If you go and plug the numbers in from 1970 to something that adjusts for inflation to ~2008, it doesn't seem that teacher salaries have really changed that much, maybe a 10% increase on average? Hardly seems like throwing tons of money at the problem.
Yes, the wealthy will always find ways to gain an advantage. That doesn't mean society should design the system to given an inherent advantage to them from the start. At least make the system fair and make the wealthy have to find a loophole.
> By the way, why do you think wealthier people shouldn't get more advantages in life?
Sure, let wealthy ADULTS have more advantages. However, children have no say in their circumstances, so I do think it is right to at least give CHILDREN equal opportunity and resources.
I might argue that children are the responsibility of the parents. As far as equal resources, DC schools spend among the highest per student in the country and yet have some of the worst outcomes.
The problem isn't financial, it's political. There isn't a correlation of budget per student and outcomes. Successful schools aren't the richest schools -- they are the ones with the most involved parents. The problem is cultural as wel as political.
When black kids who like to read and study are bullied because they are accused of 'acting white' -- no amount of money solves that. Look at the academic success of poor Asian kids by comparison. Asian cultures and families prioritize education almost to an obsessive degree. Consider the proportion of Asians in the Ivy League compared to their proportion of the population (even when excluding international students.)
There isn't a correlation? I'll have to look more into that but it seems to me you picked the one notable exception. The cultural problems are describe are the symptoms of much larger problems, particularly systemic and deliberate deprivation of resources and opportunities for more than a century. You are correct to an extent though that part of that problem is political: the lack of political will to spend any amount of money and effort to seriously interrupt that vicious cycle.
Well, we have thrown welfare at what? Three generations now? How has that worked out? It hasn't. We're right back where we began but now with three generations of people who have never worked for a living.
That's because you can't just throw money at people and tell them to better themselves. It starts with drumroll a solid educational and support system. And we've come full circle.
Agree with your point, but bear in mind that any time you use caps lock on the internet for emphasis you start to look like a yelling crazy person and it reduces the impact of your argument regardless of its correctness.
Focus on what I said: You can never achieve that. The wealthy will always find ways to undo whatever leveling you attempt. The elite social class in the US is its own little society and most of us are not in it!
property taxes in the suburbs of denver are on the order of .5% a year. compare that to the suburbs of chicago where they're north of 2% a year. the school quality and education provided are AT LEAST SIMILAR.
the difference in cost is a product of two things: pensions and legacy costs (overly rich in chicago), and population growth. chicago has become a game of musical chairs where the last man standing has to pay the retired teachers. north shore property values reflect this reality.
It tells me how tenuous local government really is, and how usurpation of local government isn't really that terribly difficult.
Yeah, in that case it was Hasidic Jews. I'm shocked that there wasn't more anti-semetic actions, primarily because the Jews there were trying to turn the local educational system into one for them. But I digress; it would, and has been the same for Christian control as well.
So to discuss further; how does one prevent takeovers of simple majority trouncing the significant minority (technically 50% - 1) with onerous laws? How would one make a government that is resistant to takeovers, and still maintain democratic principles? Are those 2 ideas incompatible?
The Federalist Papers have a few good ideas on this.
Next best thing to finding a philosopher king is to try to create lots of warring interest groups that prevent each other from doing much at all. Or maybe make everything take supermajorities...
In a small setting like a school district, it's not clear there's any way to protect the rights of a minor subset of the population without simply granting them disproportionate power and making the other subset of the population the maligned group.
If group A wants x, and group B wants y, then you can either solve it by majoritarian or anti-majoritarian rules. Depending on the issue, I want majorities to decide in some cases, and not on others. I don't feel like issues of slavery, for example, are appropriate democratic questions.
You could put a special court on top of the structure with the goal of looking out a sort of "Rawlsian fairness," trying to seek the outcome that both parties would agree to if they were both spending some time in each others' shoes.
I'll admit I don't know what the fair resolution should be in a school district where a majority of parents prefer no school taxes and no public schools, just that people seem to get pretty unfairly hurt as this one unfolded.
The most moving and informed coverage of the US education system I've heard have all been through This American Life
What makes you think it is the most informed coverage? These episodes only give you one side of the argument. If you want the other side try reading The Long Crusade and/or The Burden of Brown by Professor Raymond Wolters. I also myself wrote a long blog post about integration/desegregation as it happened in Boston, a post based on very credible academic histories, which gives a very different take than the NPR/PBS take: https://devinhelton.com/busing-in-boston
This seems well-researched, and there are some reasonable points, but your section #4 and conclusion really discredit the rest of the article.
Section 4 describes how racism (or tribalism or whatever you want to call it) is really natural and healthy, with no references except your own "common sense".
> Now imagine growing up and looking forward to playing on the same football team as your elders in front a cheering hometown crowd. And then that dream is taken away from you by some unelected judge. At his order, another tribe invades, takes your spot on the football team and dates the girl you were wooing. You are not going to like that very much. You might want to join with your tribal brothers and brawl with this opposing tribe in the lunch room. And of course the other tribe is going to fight back.
What the fuck? Why would I want to fight people for being better at football than me? Why would I start a race war because some guy with different skin than me is dating a girl I like? How can you possibly see this as acceptable? You can argue that it's natural, but natural doesn't mean good.
Do you understand that not everybody thinks like this? If a black guy gets promoted over me, I don't get angry at the black tribe for invading my homeland. That line of thinking is, as you say, cartoonishly racist.
And then in your conclusion, you correctly identify racial disparities, and then sort of argue that's the way it should be. The fact that black people do worse than white people in school is a problem worth solving, not a convenient method of grouping students, right? The only way this status quo could be acceptable is if you think black kids are genetically predisposed to be less intelligent. Your article on racism does bring that up, but I can't tell if it's a belief you hold. If you do believe that, you should be more clear about it in this school segregation article, otherwise your conclusions don't make sense.
Section 4 describes how racism (or tribalism or whatever you want to call it) is really natural and healthy, with no references except your own "common sense".
My view on tribalism is similar to my view on "greed" or "personal self-interest." It exists. We are a tribal species, as any survey of human history will show, from the time of the Chimpanzees onward ( https://www.amazon.com/Demonic-Males-Origins-Human-Violence/... ). Specifically, humans form tribes that are some combination of clan/ethnicity based, or are synthetic tribes based on ideology/beliefs/religion/nationalism. Social policy must be made with awareness of this tribal nature, not in defiance of it. Tribalism can be reduced, channeled, defanged, changed in form (to be non-racially based), but only by being aware of it.
What the fuck? Why would I want to fight people for being better at football than me? Why would I start a race war because some guy with different skin than me is dating a girl I like? How can you possibly see this as acceptable? You can argue that it's natural, but natural doesn't mean good. Do you understand that not everybody thinks like this? If a black guy gets promoted over me, I don't get angry at the black tribe for invading my homeland.
One of the main arguments for integration is needed to fix historical problems of bad race relations. My point is simply that large-scale, forced integration made race relation problems much worse. It created problems where little existed. Yeah, maybe working class teenagers should be less tribalistic and shouldn't think that way. But in the 1970s Boston was a city of tribes, it had neighborhoods of Irish ethnics, Italian ethnics, Jews, and blacks. Just adding 400 kids from another tribe to a school, and creating competition for the things that 16 year old male hominids value, was going to create conflict. I am just pointing out that the "solution" to race problems made race problems worse, and for very obvious reasons. Even if you think that forced integration was a necessary way to break the back of tribalism altogether -- there should have been a plan to actually break tribalism. Just throwing the kids together and putting the two groups in competition was not going to accomplish the goal of breaking tribalism.
And then in your conclusion, you correctly identify racial disparities, and then sort of argue that's the way it should be.
I didn't go into the reasons for the disparities because it wasn't really relevant to the point about de facto segregation. For instance, the NY Times has run a bunch of articles blaming academic gaps on stuff like early childhood nutrition [1], or disadvantaged kids having as many high-quality words spoken to them [2] [3], or not as many books in the house [4]. Conservatives sometimes blame single-parent families and poor attitudes towards education. So let's say that those one of those early childhood or home-based reasons are the reasons for the academic achievement gap. The result is that the achievement gap is already in place by the time the kids are at 8th grade or 10th grade. So just merging the black kids who are two grade levels behind into the same classrooms as white kids isn't going to help the black kids at all. It's just going to make it really hard for the teacher to help kids who will need an entirely different lesson plan.
> My point is simply that large-scale, forced integration made race relation problems much worse. It created problems where little existed.
Are you really arguing that desegregation created these problems? Seems a bit backwards to me. I think it's incredibly obvious that race relation issues existed long before the desegregation of schools.
You could argue that desegregation caused problems for white people where there were none before, but even that I find a bit questionable. There are many disadvantages to growing up in a homogeneous society.
I think everyone agrees that correcting racism, or tribalism if you prefer, is a difficult task, and one that we are still grappling with. Of course, there were other methods of desegregation proposed at the time, but very few were proposed in good faith, and none that I know of were as swift or effective as mass desegregation.
Are you really arguing that desegregation created these problems? Seems a bit backwards to me. I think it's incredibly obvious that race relation issues existed long before the desegregation of schools.
Did you read my post? https://devinhelton.com/busing-in-boston I'm talking mostly about Boston, though I've found the same things when researching other northern cities. I'm not sure about the American south, I haven't studied it enough to either confirm or question the conventional wisdom.
In Boston, there was surely some racial animosity and shit talking before forced busing became a big issue. But it didn't seem to be that bad -- for example there is that quote in my post of the black school teacher who said she never had problems at Southie High before the busing. The busing made relations much worse, and the images we have of people being cartoonishly racist only came after forced busing.
none that I know of were as swift or effective as mass desegregation.
In the northern cities, mass desegregation failed in every single way. It did not improve race relations, it did not make black people better off, it did not result in more integration. Read my post.
>Boston did not have a Jim Crow system – if a black child lived in a white area, he could go to the local mostly white school.
So you are arguing that Boston was so racially tolerant in the 70's that they had no racist policies either explicit or implicit, and that a black kid could go to a white school completely unmolested? That they wouldn't be yelled at or beaten? That they would be welcomed with open arms?
What I wrote is what I wrote, and what argued is what I argued. Boston did not have a Jim Crow system whereby all blacks kids went to black schools and all white kids went to white schools. Schools were assigned by neighborhood, (with some ability for transfers). So if a neighborhood was all white, then you get a very white school. Mixed neighborhoods had more mixed schools. Here is a racial breakdown of the schools, two years before forced busing: https://repository.library.northeastern.edu/downloads/neu:m0...
So what was the experience like of the non-white kids in a majority white school (or vice versa)? That would vary a lot based on the particular school. I certainly do not argue that all schools would "welcome with open arms" outsiders of a different ethnicity. And especially not Charlestown High and South Boston High -- those neighborhood were quite parochial. When Italians started going to Charlestown High for instance, they were called "Wops" and such and there were fights. I don't have any good information on the experience of any black students attending those schools before forced busing. Most black students taking advantage of open enrollment would have gone elsewhere because Charlestown High and South Boston HIgh were crappy and overcrowded.
There was a voluntary busing program in Boston called Project Exodus in the mid 1960s whereby up to 600 black students were bused to mostly white schools. There was a survey of parents, that found ( https://repository.library.northeastern.edu/downloads/neu:m0... ) : "Other findings indicate that the mothers think that grades have improved, the amount of homework the children have to do has increased, their children have more white friends, that there is not a lot of prejudice or discrimination encountered at the new schools. With respect to this last distribution, only seven (or 10%) of the respondents felt that their children encountered a lot of prejudice, fifteen percent thought their children encountered some, while 70 percent thought their children encountered litttle or no prejudice or discrimination"
Your view on tribalism as described here is fine, but the tone of the article is not "tribalism is an unfortunate reality", it's "tribalism is normal and healthy".
> Peace occurs when tribes exist in a stable equilibrium. Peace exists when boundaries are clear, ownership of turf is clear, and when overstepping the boundaries will result in swift and sure retribution, thus making conflict unprofitable.
This worldview has caused so much pain and suffering that I can't really believe you would write it with a straight face. You're basically describing the Cold War as the most stable and peaceful state of geopolitics. You're advocating for all people to define themselves primarily by race, never associate with other races, and violently defend their race when there's an infraction.
> Thus the entire liberal cure for racism, at least in Boston, was actually the cause of the most virulent racism. By forcing these groups together, and putting people in conflict over girls, basketball courts, spots on varsity, etc, the busing created friction and animosity.
Another huge problem with your article, demonstrated here, is that you never once acknowledge a time before 1977. You write as if everything was great, and then those meddling liberals tried to integrate schools and thereby invented racism.
> My point is simply that large-scale, forced integration made race relation problems much worse. It created problems where little existed.
Really, no big problems before desegregation? I know you know this isn't true, why write it? I don't think desegregation is a magic cure any more than you do, and I don't think anyone claims that, although I've never seen Eyes on the Prize. But while segregated schools might have been a nice local minimum of racism, violence, and suffering, they were not anywhere close to the global minimum. Forced integration, while obviously not perfect, was necessary to start solving some big problems, even if it caused some new problems of its own.
> I am just pointing out that the "solution" to race problems made race problems worse, and for very obvious reasons.
No, that's one of your points, but the thesis is much broader. You claim that these beliefs are wrong: "racial segregation was bad, and that efforts to integrate schools were worthy moral crusades."
This worldview has caused so much pain and suffering that I can't really believe you would write it with a straight face. You're basically describing the Cold War as the most stable and peaceful state of geopolitics. You're advocating for all people to define themselves primarily by race, never associate with other races, and violently defend their race when there's an infraction.
Oh come on. I clarified that people can be tribal in different ways -- by national identity, by religion, by polis, by clan, etc. You cannot get rid of people being tribal. You can change the type of tribalism (although that is not easy), but you cannot get rid of it. Since tribalism exists, you have peace when borders are clear, and you have war when borders between tribes are unclear, or when one tribe is actively preying upon another.
The Cold War was violent to the extent that boundaries were not clear. There were lots of fighting over third world countries that weren't clearly owned by either sphere (hence the very definition of the word "third world"). There was global conflict between the USSR and USA because both felt the other was predatory, both thought the other was trying to actively extend its territory. That is not a good equilibrium, that is not a good state of affairs.
Also, conversations are better when you make an effort to read with a little bit of charity. By "boundaries are clear" I do not mean that people should never associate with each other. The US and Canada have a clear boundary, with clear rules for coming across the boundary. That doesn't mean we never associate with Canadians. And if a Canadian commits a crime upon an American, they will be arrested by an armed American and suitably punished. And vice versa. That's a stable, good equilibrium.
Another huge problem with your article, demonstrated here, is that you never once acknowledge a time before 1977....Really, no big problems before desegregation? I know you know this isn't true, why write it?
If we just consider problems of racial animosity in Boston, on a scale of 1 to 10, they were maybe at 3 before forced integration and at 8 afterwards. That is my sense from reading the historical accounts. See the example of the black Southie school teacher who did not notice problems before the forced busing.
Obviously racial problems and disparities across the country go much further back. I intend to write more on that. Follow my blog if you are interested. But this post was already at 15,000 words so I just wanted to focus on the direct before and after impacts of busing in Boston.
Forced integration, while obviously not perfect, was necessary to start solving some big problems, even if it caused some new problems of its own.
No, in Boston, it failed in every single way. And there is no reason to think mass forced integration is necessary or even net helpful with regards to fixing problems of racial disparities.
"Your view on tribalism as described here is fine, but the tone of the article is not "tribalism is an unfortunate reality", it's "tribalism is normal and healthy"."
It's the same thing.
Compare again to greed or selfishness. An excess of selfishness, avarice, is pathological. But having zero regard for self-interest, being altruistic to the extent of self-denial, is also bad. A modest amount of selfishness is natural and healthy.
Traits are healthy when then form a productive, evolutionary stable strategy. If I am ultra-altruistic, that is not stable because those who are more selfish will win out and become dominant. If people are predatory, that is bad because it leads to everyone bringing each other down. If people are modestly selfish, while engaging in reciprocal altruism, and a tit-for-tat (or maybe tit-for-two-tats) strategy against defectors, that is a healthy, productive, and stable strategy.
The same goes with tribalism. Tribalism can generally be defined as forming a tight bond with a group in order to perform coordinated action. If you avoid any form of tribalism as a strategy, then a group that acts tribally will dominate you. Avoiding tribalism is not an ESS. If you are tribal and predate on other tribes, that is also bad, it makes everyone worse off. The healthy strategy is for a tribe to look after its own interest, engage in reciprocal altruism with other tribes, and a tit-for-tat (or maybe tit-for-two-tats) strategy against other tribes that break the peace.
Headline is wildly misleading. The company that is the subject of the article pays $21/hour, which works out to $42,000 a year, probably without benefits. The 25th percentile for a US high school teacher is $45,520, plus significant benefits. Median pay is $57,200.
It sounds like the pay is pretty good compared to other online tutoring stuff. In grad school I was an online tutor for Pearson for 3-4 years and the pay was minimum wage.
I hated every minute of it. You would log onto a creaky old system (one entire year their scheduling system was down and we had to sign up for hours by filling out a google form) then download a rnadomly assigned college paper. You were expected to critique it in 30 minutes and give feedback using their very specific format. There was often little context to the papers or what the actual assignment was. I would often get nursing papers full of all kinds of medical things I didn't know anything about.
Then you would get evaluated by your suprevisor and emails about how long you took per paper. So there was constant pressure and it sucked so much.
Why they have non-experts grading specialized subjects is beyond me. I don't want my physics work graded by the PE teacher or vice versa; unless they're knowledgeable in both.
152 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 147 ms ] threadhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=it5fb0KlUjU
The one thing, I saw that in their teacher training they aim for a 70/30 ratio of student to teacher speech and I haven't found any videos where that was the case. Though maybe it is only for more advanced students.
Overall a really nice platform though!
Absolutely don't knock this. I teach robotics and tech part time to middle schoolers and if there's one thing that has helped me connect more than any other its being a living cartoon. Exaggerate everything. You should be half-way to full clown when lecturing or you're simply not getting through.
To prep for lessons, I don't study circuits, I watch CN. I'm a 40yo man who quotes Rick and Morty and can name all of the Crystal Gems. But it works like crazy.
Donald Trump on education: http://www.ontheissues.org/2016/Donald_Trump_Education.htm
His solution?
School choice, competition.
Completely ignoring what the 25 countries do that rank higher when it comes to education.
You mean have lots of Asian and white students but not so many black ones? Unfortunately it would be kind of racist to do that. Trump is hoping to come up with a plan that helps all Americans, rather than simply excluding the underperforming ones from the stats.
https://web.archive.org/web/20150525165748/http://super-econ...
(Archive search is down, but search archive also for this URL: https://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-abo... )
http://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2014/06/22/mi...
When we turn children and education into a commodity, the problem is not going to get better. The system will be turned into a cost center for the country, and we'll get what we deserve per the usual.
https://www.nber.org/papers/w15531 http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/19345747.2013.878... https://www.nber.org/papers/w20511 https://www.nber.org/papers/w16745 https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/no-child-left-behind-wo...
Our last "regulate all the things" president deregulated education. Unsurprisingly, the sellers of education contributed a lot to his campaign and voted for him.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/obama-signs-n...
It's pretty clear that over the past 16 years, campaign rhetoric doesn't really reflect what will actually happen.
My phrasing was a snarky way of pointing out that educational techniques don't seem to matter very much, that's all.
Is there a source for this? I often hear similar notions lamenting the demise of US education spending but from what I can tell, the US spends more than most other countries per student. And spending has been growing in practically every respect
> This graph shows that average education expenditures per pupil (for fall enrollment) rose from $3,400 in 1965 to $8,745 in 2001. This graph shows that spending on education from all sources—local, state, federal, and others—rose from $249 billion in 1990-91 to $442.7 billion in 2000-01 and $501.3 billion in 2003-04. This graph shows that the federal investment in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act rose from under $2 billion in 1966 to $15 billion in 2000 and $25 billion in 2005. [0]
Perhaps teachers are underpaid, but where is the money being spent going?
[0] https://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/fed/10facts/edlite-chart....
Their biggest financial problem was probably their impulse to overspend on big ticket items "because my family is worth it". If I recall correctly, his wife pressures Walter to go to an oncologist that wasn't on their plan. In general, teachers tend to have better than average healthcare options. Chemotherapy for newly discovered cancer is almost always covered. If it's not, local news stations would love a story about a local science teacher who gets cancer that the big bad insurance company won't cover.
Me extrapolating here, but it's possible that they also spent big on different off-plan options for their son.
Well, in part they had different accounting of their assets, since the wife viewed his social capital (as a cofounder of a massive biotech conglomerate) as a marketable asset, while his pride drove him to refuse to redeem that and yet spend as if he had access to it anyway.
Walter's pride was not only his tragic flaw, but also a significant financial liability.
And then, as the high school teacher, he has already tried "plan B", which is good enough for most people that fail to succeed in the only moonshot they can afford to take in their lifetimes, but it turns out that the healthcare in "plan B" really sucks.
Those aren't just already explored options. They're the control group for Walter's scientific experiment.
His hypothesis is that "There is nothing wrong with me. I'm a genius worth millions of dollars, and It's other people that have been holding me back." And the experiment designed to falsify the hypothesis is to just discard all of society's laws and morality and just get the money by any means necessary.
The strawman argument of the show is that unfairness in society trickles down and becomes crime. Walter never would have become Heisenberg if his business partners hadn't screwed him out of his share of the company.
I think in The Netherlands there is no teacher to be found having a second job in the service sector just for the money.
This was not a net win for society...
http://247wallst.com/special-report/2016/09/20/the-highest-p...
Sport is a recent concept invented by the British idle cast, as a way to spend time and money. The world do not have this luxury right now. We need to spend money on education.
By the way, an analysis of the two longest civilisations (Jewish and Chinese) show that both have been obsessed with education, and both did never have a particularly strong focus on "sports".
Maybe in one century it descendants will count how much of our resources we spent in nothing and will laugh (and cry).
http://www.cheatsheet.com/money-career/ncaa-20-college-footb...
Also given the rising obesity rates and health concerns related to obesity I would say physical fitness is very important in today's society. Education spending should be improved but education isn't all about studying from books. We need mixture of arts, physical education and formal education.
I went to a smaller college that did not have professional teams, and I suspect that students were healthier than at the Big 10 university near my house. The sports were pretty much open to all students.
The captain of my college's football team was a physics major. That tells you something about the quality of the football team, the physics program, or both. ;-)
Spending is not the same as teacher pay. See [1] for a source:
There was a time when it — literally — paid to be a teacher. Unfortunately, that was 60 years ago. In 1940 the average male employee with four or more years of college who did not teach K–12 earned 3.6 percent less than the average K–12 male teacher. [By 2000] the average male with four years of college made a whopping 60.4 percent more than the average male teacher. When the average earnings of male and female teachers are combined and compared with the average pay of all non-teachers with at least four years of college, the difference is 53.5 percent in the year 2000. This actually understates the pay gap because a large proportion of teachers have master's degrees, making them more educated than their comparison group.
[1] http://www.nea.org/home/14052.htm
Comparing depression era college educated male salaries to the modern workforce is apples and oranges. There were very few college graduates in those days -- and most were teachers. Other professions like law, engineering etc were struggling due to the depresssion.
The modern passage is even more weasel worded. You need the worksheet used to calculate to figure out what that actually means.
Non technical white collar gigs don't pay what they used to either.
Here's an article (admittedly from 2012) on teachers salaries in Ontario: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/education/anato...
More recent reports (from the shrill National Post) claim an average salary of almost 87K for secondary school teachers, but they don't state their source information.
Also consider that teachers - like other public sector unions - are one of the last few sectors to get a defined benefit pension plan, a luxury that few others will ever have.
Just to clear up a misconception, teachers get a great pension, but (in Ontario at least) they put 10-13% of they're base salary into that pension plan for their entire careers. Anyone who invests that much money into their retirement will do well.
Also, the Ontario teachers pension plan is one of the best investment groups in the world. Many years they see 20+% returns. They own everything. Sports teams, malls, airports- they own the channel tunnel!
Are they doing well because they know the local market?
They still have big challenges though, as they have a lot of baby-boomer teachers retiring, living longer, etc. They only real way they stay afloat at all is because teachers are paid pretty well in Ontario, and they get that double-digit percentage of their paychecks. And with the high salary, there's a big over-supply of teachers wanting jobs, so no one is quitting over it.
https://www.thestar.com/yourtoronto/education/2015/11/22/fre...
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/toronto/ontario-schools-...
Most are in my age group (late 30s) and are making $70-85k, with summers and another month of vacation and good pension/healthcare. The only lousy benefit is that maternity leave sucks.
They all are incredibly frustrated with the increasing meddling and red tape attached to federal and state funding. Half the job is paperwork nonsense, which wasn't true even a decade ago.
Compensation varies greatly by district—typically the worst districts pay the best, but they're still undesirable for teachers because the conditions are terrible—being cursed at and threatened daily by 5th graders (no joke) and witnessing assaults gets old fast.
[EDIT] I should add that their healthcare plans tend to suck and are totally useless (1.5-2x as expensive as other options) for covering one's family, but the retirement's good. They're also better for people planning to take maternity/paternity leave than probably any other employer in the area, especially if you time it so your leave rolls over into Summer and are willing to be docked a couple weeks' pay—you can achieve near-parity with lower end of normal for parental leave in other OECD states that way! What a perk.
20 kids of same age have no other way to build a reasonable hierarchy except forming cliques and having fights. They are all peers, painfully pitted against one another.
For most of the human history (and pre-history) kids grew in multi-age groups. This allows older kids assume roles of leaders, care about younger kids and protect them, and teach the younger kids what they already learned (the best way to learn something is to teach someone). The younger kids have some role models before their eyes who they can relate to more easily than to adults.
This setup seems to work well in e.g. Montessori schools. It's sad that the majority of schools do not adopt multi-age groups.
http://www.teacherportal.com/teacher-salaries-by-state/
[1]https://www.bls.gov/ooh/education-training-and-library/mobil...
There's a lot that has to happen (work) when the students aren't in school so that teaching can happen.
But you can still have plenty of teachers that don't care about making the extra effort.
In fact, it never really struck me until now how nice he was to stay late. The programming club would be about 2 hours long, and he'd stay another 2 hours after because we all wanted to continue coding together, we couldn't be in the computer lab without a teacher.
Source: am one of said poor spouses.
Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like salaries depend on whether you are the former or the latter.
The teachers are segregated as much as the kids, such that the PHD in math with 30 yrs experience and a fat paycheck did a good job teaching my high school calculus class, and teachers of somewhat lesser quality are stuck wearing bullet proof vests and having their cars vandalized and stolen. Simultaneously, inside individual districts something akin to communism reigns where the union enforces strict salary discipline based on skill and experience. Its between districts where things get competitive.
Schools are run locally but regulated at state level. My SiL can run her classroom as the locals and her agree, but to renew her state teaching license every couple years she needs X continuing education units per year and her coworkers run the entire range of ant and grasshopper mentality. Its a classic confusion of butts-in-seat with productivity or confusing panic'd last minute cramming with productive effort.
If the license lasts five years between renewals, and career attrition is roughly 10% per year, then the tiny minority of teachers who retire as teachers will have renewed roughly 8 times, while simultaneously a huge fraction of people holding a teaching license are leaving the field or have left the field and are therefore not working very hard on CEU to renew. So its simultaneously true the teachers study and prep constantly and that teacher don't study and prep at all, because a very small fraction of survivors need to while a very large fraction will not survive.
The supply of teachers is too high leading to intentional burnout by management, careers that are shorter than the time it takes to pay off the student loans, and unpleasant working conditions because they can and it reliably produces countable beans. There is no contradiction in stating very few entering the field will be successful, while all who are successful enjoy great rewards. Those who have a very long and well paid NBA career will be quite happy about it; simultaneously almost every kid wanting to be a pro basketball player will not have a long well paid career in the field; the situation is the same for teaching.
If they can't find multiple 2 week vacations in that summer they aren't being at all efficient in their planning.
That, and we need to re-value our currency in the same fashion.
Most education seems to be wasteful; see Bryan Caplan's writings on the topic, for example.
The outcomes are fairly poor. For students that bother with the ACT the average score is 18, but for Illinois as a whole its 21. 18 is a score that only gets you into the most poorly ranked of colleges. CPS teachers also average 18-19 on the ACT as well. Graduation rate floats are 50% and the powerful Chicago teachers union fights against any performance testing of teachers impossible to implement.
The reality is that we absolutely don't need more education or more education dollars. We need higher quality education. Public sector unions have made sure to make this all about tax dollars, when it should be about teacher performance and student outcomes. This means teachers taking responsibility and administrators firing poor performing teachers. It means a lot of politically difficult things, thus why it doesn't really happen and why anyone with means in Chicago goes to private or charter schools. Or more commonly, white collar professionals move to the suburbs when they have children.
Also the mayor just wrote a op-ed piece against vouchers for private schools. What public school do his kids go to? None. They go to private school in Chicago.
There is extensive evidence of a sheepskin effect, and most studies of educational effectiveness are consistent with signalling theories and ability bias (more able individuals get educated).
https://www.nas.org/articles/The_Sheepskin_Effect
There is likely to be some benefit to education, but it's far less than what politicians currently believe and what current policies are predicated on.
Ok, there's an easy four hours of content to listen to. Enjoy!
The short takeaway for me was basically that local funding through property taxes is a terrible idea if you want anything approaching fairness.
If you can afford to live in an area with high property taxes, the US school system is great, your kids probably go to a great school. If you are struggling to get by, though, living in an apartment? Your kids are usually banned from going to that same great school by law.
It's like anti-literacy laws were too obvious, so we just made them more byzantine.
[0] http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/562/t...
[1] http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/563/t...
[2] http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/512/h...
Significantly, on how redlining contributed to the achievement gap. The heartbreaking story of why a girl who wants to go to school down the road is turned away.
[3] http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/534/a...
A description of another poor high school where the kids basically have recess, lunch, or permanent substitutes all day, because it's failed by local control.
Such affluent towns are effectively private schools by other means.
They are a kind of boarding school where the entire family resides.
Suffice it to say, the operation of these schools is inefficient in the extreme by any way I can measure it. That's why a relatively poor country like China can even generate headlines like this. But the problem persists across private schools, too, largely, so I think it's fair to say this is a tough problem to solve.
http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ba745
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2015/06/02/the-...
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/high-school-graduation-r...
http://www.ascd.org/ASCD/images/publications/books/stewart20...
http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/...
It doesn't necessarily mean that the high performing schools are high performing because they have a high tax base, that's just a correlation.
Quality teachers may not be attracted to inner-city schools because of unstated biases, or because they prefer to live in other areas and have short commutes.
Or maybe you have a safety issue due to a school's location or an aging building and high rents that diverts resources towards countermeasures or repairs.
For whatever reason though, busing led to miraculously improved outcomes. Then we stopped doing it for some reason. Now, instead, we make some kids stay in schools where they have six hours of recess or lunch or study hall, then one session with a permanent math substitute with no lesson plans.
So yeah, funding isn't everything--but some schools can't even afford teachers for every hour of the day, or roofs that aren't collapsing. If there is a minimum threshold not being met, funding's probably part of it. The better solution is to just not bar kids who want to learn from functioning schools.
This is asserted in episode 562, but no evidence was cited. I did a deep dive on this myself, reading numerous studies and various books, and in my opinion any link between integration and academic achievement is minimal at best. Read the two books by Raymond Wolters, and then compare with the American Life episodes, and make your own judgement about which side has the more accurate narrative.
I oppose private, for profit charter schools because they are notorious for corruption and poor education in both the college and K-12 sectors.
There are regions where parents can choose the public school their kids attend. My home city does exactly that and is home to some top-notch magnet schools which have graduated several famous individuals.
I've heard the same complaints about corruption in teachers unions and poor education at urban non-charters. Everyone has their own examples for each side of the argument.
I can never tell how much of the pro- or anti- charter allegations are politically motivated or real science.
Best option I have is to rely on actual research. Stanford provides some periodic in depth studies of school performance, and has found that "across 41 regions, urban charter schools on average achieve significantly greater student success in both math and reading."
http://urbancharters.stanford.edu/news.php
That's heavily caveated. There are regional variances. Maybe charters don't outpace peers outside of urban environments. Still, it's enough for me not to dismiss them out of hand.
By the way, why do you think wealthier people shouldn't get more advantages in life? I'm all for trying to pull people up by their bootstraps, but we can't just level everything out in some misguided attempt at 'fairness.' You will never achieve that fairness. The wealthy will always find ways to gain an advantage.
Sucks about that high school, but a lot of these areas need serious political reform first before anything else can get fixed.
He's not saying that. The idea he's espousing is closer to the idea that there are lots of talented kids in poor districts that get completely left behind because they live in a poor area. The only way to solve that is to provide some funding, and funding is scarce in poor districts.
When you're talking about fundamental education of your population, this is a pretty short-sighted argument. Under-education means fewer skilled workers and more bad decision making, both of which will have an impact on Mr. Rich. Mr. Rich has a personal interest in ensuring a good education for everyone.
Wealthy people will always have nicer cars and better vacations and bigger houses, but that doesn't mean the children of poor people should be relegated to terrible schools where they'll have no future.
Don't forget that part of being an involved parent and making sure your kids get a good education is, critically, getting them in a good school.
Yes, family education cannot be fully replaced by school instruction. But the reality for many struggling families is that they need as much help from the schools as possible.
I'm very pro-family but I take issue at the wealthy who point their fingers at struggling/broken families who haven't been dealt the same cards in life, and justifying blame by judging their lifestyle.
further, we spend more per pupil than other developed countries that are delivering superior results.
We're talking about public education though, ideally, public education would have a universally high standard, and making funding for public education based on something like property values ensures that in certain areas it will be underfunded.
So it's really about whether we take universal public education seriously or if we're just providing education to some and a state sponsored daycare service to others.
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d10/tables/dt10_083.asp
If you go and plug the numbers in from 1970 to something that adjusts for inflation to ~2008, it doesn't seem that teacher salaries have really changed that much, maybe a 10% increase on average? Hardly seems like throwing tons of money at the problem.
Sure, let wealthy ADULTS have more advantages. However, children have no say in their circumstances, so I do think it is right to at least give CHILDREN equal opportunity and resources.
The problem isn't financial, it's political. There isn't a correlation of budget per student and outcomes. Successful schools aren't the richest schools -- they are the ones with the most involved parents. The problem is cultural as wel as political.
When black kids who like to read and study are bullied because they are accused of 'acting white' -- no amount of money solves that. Look at the academic success of poor Asian kids by comparison. Asian cultures and families prioritize education almost to an obsessive degree. Consider the proportion of Asians in the Ivy League compared to their proportion of the population (even when excluding international students.)
You can't live forever but I still believe in hospitals.
the difference in cost is a product of two things: pensions and legacy costs (overly rich in chicago), and population growth. chicago has become a game of musical chairs where the last man standing has to pay the retired teachers. north shore property values reflect this reality.
It tells me how tenuous local government really is, and how usurpation of local government isn't really that terribly difficult.
Yeah, in that case it was Hasidic Jews. I'm shocked that there wasn't more anti-semetic actions, primarily because the Jews there were trying to turn the local educational system into one for them. But I digress; it would, and has been the same for Christian control as well.
So to discuss further; how does one prevent takeovers of simple majority trouncing the significant minority (technically 50% - 1) with onerous laws? How would one make a government that is resistant to takeovers, and still maintain democratic principles? Are those 2 ideas incompatible?
Well that is that the point of a republic/representative democracy/federalism?
Next best thing to finding a philosopher king is to try to create lots of warring interest groups that prevent each other from doing much at all. Or maybe make everything take supermajorities...
In a small setting like a school district, it's not clear there's any way to protect the rights of a minor subset of the population without simply granting them disproportionate power and making the other subset of the population the maligned group.
If group A wants x, and group B wants y, then you can either solve it by majoritarian or anti-majoritarian rules. Depending on the issue, I want majorities to decide in some cases, and not on others. I don't feel like issues of slavery, for example, are appropriate democratic questions.
You could put a special court on top of the structure with the goal of looking out a sort of "Rawlsian fairness," trying to seek the outcome that both parties would agree to if they were both spending some time in each others' shoes.
I'll admit I don't know what the fair resolution should be in a school district where a majority of parents prefer no school taxes and no public schools, just that people seem to get pretty unfairly hurt as this one unfolded.
What makes you think it is the most informed coverage? These episodes only give you one side of the argument. If you want the other side try reading The Long Crusade and/or The Burden of Brown by Professor Raymond Wolters. I also myself wrote a long blog post about integration/desegregation as it happened in Boston, a post based on very credible academic histories, which gives a very different take than the NPR/PBS take: https://devinhelton.com/busing-in-boston
Section 4 describes how racism (or tribalism or whatever you want to call it) is really natural and healthy, with no references except your own "common sense".
> Now imagine growing up and looking forward to playing on the same football team as your elders in front a cheering hometown crowd. And then that dream is taken away from you by some unelected judge. At his order, another tribe invades, takes your spot on the football team and dates the girl you were wooing. You are not going to like that very much. You might want to join with your tribal brothers and brawl with this opposing tribe in the lunch room. And of course the other tribe is going to fight back.
What the fuck? Why would I want to fight people for being better at football than me? Why would I start a race war because some guy with different skin than me is dating a girl I like? How can you possibly see this as acceptable? You can argue that it's natural, but natural doesn't mean good.
Do you understand that not everybody thinks like this? If a black guy gets promoted over me, I don't get angry at the black tribe for invading my homeland. That line of thinking is, as you say, cartoonishly racist.
And then in your conclusion, you correctly identify racial disparities, and then sort of argue that's the way it should be. The fact that black people do worse than white people in school is a problem worth solving, not a convenient method of grouping students, right? The only way this status quo could be acceptable is if you think black kids are genetically predisposed to be less intelligent. Your article on racism does bring that up, but I can't tell if it's a belief you hold. If you do believe that, you should be more clear about it in this school segregation article, otherwise your conclusions don't make sense.
My view on tribalism is similar to my view on "greed" or "personal self-interest." It exists. We are a tribal species, as any survey of human history will show, from the time of the Chimpanzees onward ( https://www.amazon.com/Demonic-Males-Origins-Human-Violence/... ). Specifically, humans form tribes that are some combination of clan/ethnicity based, or are synthetic tribes based on ideology/beliefs/religion/nationalism. Social policy must be made with awareness of this tribal nature, not in defiance of it. Tribalism can be reduced, channeled, defanged, changed in form (to be non-racially based), but only by being aware of it.
What the fuck? Why would I want to fight people for being better at football than me? Why would I start a race war because some guy with different skin than me is dating a girl I like? How can you possibly see this as acceptable? You can argue that it's natural, but natural doesn't mean good. Do you understand that not everybody thinks like this? If a black guy gets promoted over me, I don't get angry at the black tribe for invading my homeland.
One of the main arguments for integration is needed to fix historical problems of bad race relations. My point is simply that large-scale, forced integration made race relation problems much worse. It created problems where little existed. Yeah, maybe working class teenagers should be less tribalistic and shouldn't think that way. But in the 1970s Boston was a city of tribes, it had neighborhoods of Irish ethnics, Italian ethnics, Jews, and blacks. Just adding 400 kids from another tribe to a school, and creating competition for the things that 16 year old male hominids value, was going to create conflict. I am just pointing out that the "solution" to race problems made race problems worse, and for very obvious reasons. Even if you think that forced integration was a necessary way to break the back of tribalism altogether -- there should have been a plan to actually break tribalism. Just throwing the kids together and putting the two groups in competition was not going to accomplish the goal of breaking tribalism.
And then in your conclusion, you correctly identify racial disparities, and then sort of argue that's the way it should be.
I didn't go into the reasons for the disparities because it wasn't really relevant to the point about de facto segregation. For instance, the NY Times has run a bunch of articles blaming academic gaps on stuff like early childhood nutrition [1], or disadvantaged kids having as many high-quality words spoken to them [2] [3], or not as many books in the house [4]. Conservatives sometimes blame single-parent families and poor attitudes towards education. So let's say that those one of those early childhood or home-based reasons are the reasons for the academic achievement gap. The result is that the achievement gap is already in place by the time the kids are at 8th grade or 10th grade. So just merging the black kids who are two grade levels behind into the same classrooms as white kids isn't going to help the black kids at all. It's just going to make it really hard for the teacher to help kids who will need an entirely different lesson plan.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/16/opinion/16kristof.html?_r=... [2] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/0...
Are you really arguing that desegregation created these problems? Seems a bit backwards to me. I think it's incredibly obvious that race relation issues existed long before the desegregation of schools.
You could argue that desegregation caused problems for white people where there were none before, but even that I find a bit questionable. There are many disadvantages to growing up in a homogeneous society.
I think everyone agrees that correcting racism, or tribalism if you prefer, is a difficult task, and one that we are still grappling with. Of course, there were other methods of desegregation proposed at the time, but very few were proposed in good faith, and none that I know of were as swift or effective as mass desegregation.
Did you read my post? https://devinhelton.com/busing-in-boston I'm talking mostly about Boston, though I've found the same things when researching other northern cities. I'm not sure about the American south, I haven't studied it enough to either confirm or question the conventional wisdom.
In Boston, there was surely some racial animosity and shit talking before forced busing became a big issue. But it didn't seem to be that bad -- for example there is that quote in my post of the black school teacher who said she never had problems at Southie High before the busing. The busing made relations much worse, and the images we have of people being cartoonishly racist only came after forced busing.
none that I know of were as swift or effective as mass desegregation.
In the northern cities, mass desegregation failed in every single way. It did not improve race relations, it did not make black people better off, it did not result in more integration. Read my post.
So you are arguing that Boston was so racially tolerant in the 70's that they had no racist policies either explicit or implicit, and that a black kid could go to a white school completely unmolested? That they wouldn't be yelled at or beaten? That they would be welcomed with open arms?
So what was the experience like of the non-white kids in a majority white school (or vice versa)? That would vary a lot based on the particular school. I certainly do not argue that all schools would "welcome with open arms" outsiders of a different ethnicity. And especially not Charlestown High and South Boston High -- those neighborhood were quite parochial. When Italians started going to Charlestown High for instance, they were called "Wops" and such and there were fights. I don't have any good information on the experience of any black students attending those schools before forced busing. Most black students taking advantage of open enrollment would have gone elsewhere because Charlestown High and South Boston HIgh were crappy and overcrowded.
There was a voluntary busing program in Boston called Project Exodus in the mid 1960s whereby up to 600 black students were bused to mostly white schools. There was a survey of parents, that found ( https://repository.library.northeastern.edu/downloads/neu:m0... ) : "Other findings indicate that the mothers think that grades have improved, the amount of homework the children have to do has increased, their children have more white friends, that there is not a lot of prejudice or discrimination encountered at the new schools. With respect to this last distribution, only seven (or 10%) of the respondents felt that their children encountered a lot of prejudice, fifteen percent thought their children encountered some, while 70 percent thought their children encountered litttle or no prejudice or discrimination"
> Peace occurs when tribes exist in a stable equilibrium. Peace exists when boundaries are clear, ownership of turf is clear, and when overstepping the boundaries will result in swift and sure retribution, thus making conflict unprofitable.
This worldview has caused so much pain and suffering that I can't really believe you would write it with a straight face. You're basically describing the Cold War as the most stable and peaceful state of geopolitics. You're advocating for all people to define themselves primarily by race, never associate with other races, and violently defend their race when there's an infraction.
> Thus the entire liberal cure for racism, at least in Boston, was actually the cause of the most virulent racism. By forcing these groups together, and putting people in conflict over girls, basketball courts, spots on varsity, etc, the busing created friction and animosity.
Another huge problem with your article, demonstrated here, is that you never once acknowledge a time before 1977. You write as if everything was great, and then those meddling liberals tried to integrate schools and thereby invented racism.
> My point is simply that large-scale, forced integration made race relation problems much worse. It created problems where little existed.
Really, no big problems before desegregation? I know you know this isn't true, why write it? I don't think desegregation is a magic cure any more than you do, and I don't think anyone claims that, although I've never seen Eyes on the Prize. But while segregated schools might have been a nice local minimum of racism, violence, and suffering, they were not anywhere close to the global minimum. Forced integration, while obviously not perfect, was necessary to start solving some big problems, even if it caused some new problems of its own.
> I am just pointing out that the "solution" to race problems made race problems worse, and for very obvious reasons.
No, that's one of your points, but the thesis is much broader. You claim that these beliefs are wrong: "racial segregation was bad, and that efforts to integrate schools were worthy moral crusades."
Oh come on. I clarified that people can be tribal in different ways -- by national identity, by religion, by polis, by clan, etc. You cannot get rid of people being tribal. You can change the type of tribalism (although that is not easy), but you cannot get rid of it. Since tribalism exists, you have peace when borders are clear, and you have war when borders between tribes are unclear, or when one tribe is actively preying upon another.
The Cold War was violent to the extent that boundaries were not clear. There were lots of fighting over third world countries that weren't clearly owned by either sphere (hence the very definition of the word "third world"). There was global conflict between the USSR and USA because both felt the other was predatory, both thought the other was trying to actively extend its territory. That is not a good equilibrium, that is not a good state of affairs.
Also, conversations are better when you make an effort to read with a little bit of charity. By "boundaries are clear" I do not mean that people should never associate with each other. The US and Canada have a clear boundary, with clear rules for coming across the boundary. That doesn't mean we never associate with Canadians. And if a Canadian commits a crime upon an American, they will be arrested by an armed American and suitably punished. And vice versa. That's a stable, good equilibrium.
Another huge problem with your article, demonstrated here, is that you never once acknowledge a time before 1977....Really, no big problems before desegregation? I know you know this isn't true, why write it?
If we just consider problems of racial animosity in Boston, on a scale of 1 to 10, they were maybe at 3 before forced integration and at 8 afterwards. That is my sense from reading the historical accounts. See the example of the black Southie school teacher who did not notice problems before the forced busing.
Obviously racial problems and disparities across the country go much further back. I intend to write more on that. Follow my blog if you are interested. But this post was already at 15,000 words so I just wanted to focus on the direct before and after impacts of busing in Boston.
Forced integration, while obviously not perfect, was necessary to start solving some big problems, even if it caused some new problems of its own.
No, in Boston, it failed in every single way. And there is no reason to think mass forced integration is necessary or even net helpful with regards to fixing problems of racial disparities.
It's the same thing.
Compare again to greed or selfishness. An excess of selfishness, avarice, is pathological. But having zero regard for self-interest, being altruistic to the extent of self-denial, is also bad. A modest amount of selfishness is natural and healthy.
Traits are healthy when then form a productive, evolutionary stable strategy. If I am ultra-altruistic, that is not stable because those who are more selfish will win out and become dominant. If people are predatory, that is bad because it leads to everyone bringing each other down. If people are modestly selfish, while engaging in reciprocal altruism, and a tit-for-tat (or maybe tit-for-two-tats) strategy against defectors, that is a healthy, productive, and stable strategy.
The same goes with tribalism. Tribalism can generally be defined as forming a tight bond with a group in order to perform coordinated action. If you avoid any form of tribalism as a strategy, then a group that acts tribally will dominate you. Avoiding tribalism is not an ESS. If you are tribal and predate on other tribes, that is also bad, it makes everyone worse off. The healthy strategy is for a tribe to look after its own interest, engage in reciprocal altruism with other tribes, and a tit-for-tat (or maybe tit-for-two-tats) strategy against other tribes that break the peace.
If you are at a failing school and can get to a good school and want to learn, it seems immoral to force you to stay at the failing school.
Your thoughts about race relations or the quality of particular facilities don't really move me on this point.
I hated every minute of it. You would log onto a creaky old system (one entire year their scheduling system was down and we had to sign up for hours by filling out a google form) then download a rnadomly assigned college paper. You were expected to critique it in 30 minutes and give feedback using their very specific format. There was often little context to the papers or what the actual assignment was. I would often get nursing papers full of all kinds of medical things I didn't know anything about.
Then you would get evaluated by your suprevisor and emails about how long you took per paper. So there was constant pressure and it sucked so much.
Profit motive? If so it seems short sighted.