Posted on 01/09/2007 8:12:11 AM PST by shrinkermd
...This is the most widely held myth about education in America--and the one most directly at odds with the available evidence. Few people are aware that our education spending per pupil has been growing steadily for 50 years. At the end of World War II, public schools in the United States spent a total of $1,214 per student in inflation-adjusted 2002 dollars. By the middle of the 1950s that figure had roughly doubled to $2,345. By 1972 it had almost doubled again, reaching $4,479. And since then, it has doubled a third time, climbing to $8,745 in 2002.
Since the early 1970s, when the federal government launched a standardized exam called the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), it has been possible to measure student outcomes in a reliable, objective way. Over that period, inflation-adjusted spending per pupil doubled. So if more money produces better results in schools, we would expect to see significant improvements in test scores during this period. That didn't happen...
...One reason for the prominence of the underpaid-teacher belief is that people often fail to account for the relatively low number of hours that teachers work. It seems obvious, but it is easily forgotten: teachers work only about nine months per year. During the summer they can either work at other jobs or use the time off...
The most recent data available indicate that teachers average 7.3 working hours per day, and that they work 180 days per year, adding up to 1,314 hours per year. Americans in normal 9-to-5 professions who take two weeks of vacation and another ten paid holidays per year put in 1,928 working hours. Doing the math, this means the average teacher gets paid a base salary equivalent to a fulltime salary of $65,440.
(Excerpt) Read more at frontpagemag.com ...
A couple years ago I was looking for a solid source for this quote. Sp. if you or anyone can pin this quote down to a verified source, PLEASE ping me.
Congressman Billybob
Actually, I bet it is the student to teacher ratio that is 16 to 1. This is different than class size.
In most public schools the class sizes are still large (25-30) but the ratio's are smaller--the reason for the difference is that there are increasingly more specialist teachers (computer, art, science, math, P.E., etc.) who are only in front of students for a fraction of the day.
One of the most deceptive of education practices is to report student to teacher ratios to parents. Parents think that the lower the number the better for their child, when really it is the lower the number the less efficient they are as a school!
The state reports the "average class size" as 16 students. Their methodology may be what you suggest but that is not the way they present it.
I am always surprised when teacher bashers use this mostly outdated number. In my district teachers work until about June 20 and return to work about August 23; hardly three months. True, teachers have a 7.5 hour workday, though in my district an extra half hour is assumed and written in the contract. As a math teacher, I hardly ever saw anyone in my department leave at the allowed time. Teachers stayed on their own time tutoring students, calling parents, planning lessons, grading tests, etc. Most also took work home.
Almost every AP Calculus (BC) student whom I taught for 20 years scored 3 or above, earning 4 or 8 college credits. I have always wondered about the statistic showing teachers with the lowest SAT scores. Is it possible that this was based on what freshmen planned to take, and not on those who actually became teachers. I cannot speak for elementary teachers, but most of the high school teachers I had the pleasure of working with were very bright.
Of course Singaporeans don't show up on the comparative tests, Asians of all varieties - including utter failures like Hmong with a 3% college graduation rate - make up less than 4% of US high school students.
They and other successful students are statistically buried by the millions of hip-hop culture types who can barely read.
http://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/features/louie12012003.html
an excerpt:
Q: How do 1.5- and second-generation Chinese Americans think about the importance of education? Do their attitudes differ significantly from the attitudes of third-generation Chinese Americans?
A: Second-generation immigrants (American-born children of immigrants) and 1.5-generation immigrants (those who are foreign-born but arrived at an early enough age to be educated and socialized in the United States) fare better educationally than third-generation immigrants. It is believed that both groups benefit from their parents’ immigrant optimism about opportunities in the United States, and they have the English language facility. The immigrant drive may begin to decline among third-generation Chinese Americans, which is not surprising, since they are the children of American-born parents.
As they should. A house-spouse that never works a day in their life can collect survivor's benefits - why not a teacher who didn't pay into social security?
"My wife teaches for 7.5 hours and then comes home and works another 2-3 hours planning, making tests, and correcting tests and homework. She has to work more than 180 days, gets two months off in the summer (not three), and she's required to take classes to keep her certificate current. Her compensation is nowhere near what an engineer with a masters degree would get."
Shave off a month for summer school and that's pretty much what my husband does. That leaves 4 weeks or so vacation time. Better part of that is spent getting caught up on house repair etc, he can't get to during the rest of the time. We actually take 4 days of that time and go somewhere.
It ain't fun and games despite what most would like to spout off about.
Yeah, let's just conviently forget why the teacher wasn't paying into SS.
Because they have a pension. A lot of workers do. Pension and social security are two different things.
I agree that those who don't pay into social security shouldn't collect their own benefits, but we're talking about survivor's benefits. If my wife is a teacher, why shouldn't she be able to collect survivor's benefits on the money I paid in?
Yeah, and in 1979 I bought a brand new top of the line Toyota Celica for under $7000. Try getting anything but a bare bones new car for under $20,000 today.
bump -- later read.
I like vouchers as well, but my fear is that if a private school is getting federal or state dollars via vouchers, that private school may have to follow federal or state mandated programs/lesson plans.
Can you imagine a private, religious school being forced to teach that homosexual relations are normal?
bump
Remember the old adage, "follow the money"
In California, schools get their money based on "Average Daily Attendance" or ADA. A school with 1000 students attending, gets twice the money that a school with only 500 students attending.
Following the money, we see that this is a great incentive to keep disinterested or even troublesome students in the classroom. One would think that with the "group think" attitude of most liberals, that a student that impedes the learning of the remaining students would be sent packing. However, since that problem student is income as long as he shows up for class, the remaining students just have to put up with non-optimal classroom environment.
Next "follow the money" issue. Class size. The less students allowed in a class room, the more teaches you need. An increase in the number of teachers, increases the number of teachers union members. This increase, results in more funds, via union dues, going to the teachers union.
And if union dues are tied to teachers salaries (I don't know if they are or not), we can see a, "follow the money", reason for the constant call for increases in teacher salaries.
Just my opinion, which you get for free, and it's worth every penny.
The fear is legitimate. There is probably no escaping the government leviathan that is responsible for horrible schools in the first place.
Ever heard of the Flynn effect? I.Q.'s have been rising worldwide for at least a century.
We do know two facts:
1.) Student performance is insensitive to class size, over the ranges that exist in the United States.
2.) Smart teachers get measurably better results than dumb teachers.
The only conclusion I can draw is that we should fire the dumber half of the teachers, give their students to the smarter half and return their salaries to the taxpayers.
What follows is from Wikipedia. The last two paragraphs suggest that the "Flynn Effect" may be ending and the reasons thereof.
"...From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search The Flynn effect is the year-on-year rise of IQ test scores, an effect seen in most parts of the world, although at greatly varying rates. It was named by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray in The Bell Curve after the New Zealand based political scientist James R. Flynn, who did much to document it and promote awareness of its implications (Flynn, 1984, 1987). The average rate of rise seems to be around three IQ points per decade. Attempted explanations have included improved nutrition, a trend towards smaller families, better education, greater environmental complexity, heterosis (Mingroni, 2004) and an increased familiarity of the general populus with [IQ] tests.
IQ scores are re-normalized periodically, such that the average score is reset to 100
Proposed explanations
Starting with Thorndike's (1975) discussion of the Binet increases, many possible explanations have been offered but few of these hold up to detailed examination (Neisser, 1998). One possible contributor has to do with nutrition but it has proved just as difficult to identify what these may be as in the case of height increases. For example, there is evidence from Scandinavian countries that IQ scores rose even more, 20 points per generation, following the austerity of occupation during World War II. But the quest for a single-factor explanation of increases in intellectual functioning may be just as unrealistic as a quest for a single factor explanation of the doubling of life expectancy which has occurred over the same period.
In 2001, James R. Flynn and William T. Dickens, a Brookings Institution economist, presented a mechanism by which environmental effects on IQ may be magnified by feedback effects. The paper "Heritability Estimates Versus Large Environmental Effects: The IQ Paradox Resolved"[1] was published in Psychological Review.
Some studies focusing on the distribution of scores have found the Flynn effect to be primarily a phenomenon in the lower end of the distribution. Teasdale and Owen 1987, for example, found the effect primarily reduced low-end scores, resulting in a pile up of moderately high scores, with no increase in very high scores. Colom et al. 2005 found similar results, and presented data supporting the nutrition hypothesis, which predicts that gains in IQ will predominantly occur at the low end of the distribution where nutritional deprivation is most severe. Two large samples of Spanish children were assessed with a 30-year gap. Comparison of the IQ distributions indicated that 1) the mean IQ had increased by 9.7 points (the Flynn effect), 2) the gains were concentrated in the lower half of the distribution and negligible in the top half, and 3) the gains gradually decreased from low to high IQ.
There is, however, very substantial evidence to the contrary - and it comes from an unlikely source. Data re-published in Raven (2000) show that, as Flynn suggested, data reported by many previous researchers that had previously been interpreted as showing a decrease in many abilities with increasing age must be re-interpreted as showing that there has been a dramatic increase in these abilities with date of birth. On many tests this occcurs at all levels of ability. To take an analogy: tall people have got still taller: the whole distribution has moved up.
Possibly related to the Flynn effect is change in cranial vault size and shape during the last 150 years in the US. These changes must occur by early childhood because of the early development of the vault.[2]
Some researchers, such as Arthur Jensen, argue the Flynn effect largely has not changed the general intelligence factor (g), which would mean practical significance of the effect would be limited (Jensen 1987; Rushton 1999). More recent studies have found that g has improved substantially.[1][2]
Studies that make use of multigroup confirmatory factor analysis test for "measurement invariance." Where tenable, invariance demonstrates that group differences exist in the latent constructs the tests contain and not, for example, as a result of measurement artifacts or cultural bias. Wicherts et al. (2004) found evidence from five data sets that IQ scores are not measurement invariant over time, and thus "the gains cannot be explained solely by increases at the level of the latent variables (common factors), which IQ tests purport to measure". In other words, according to this study, some of the inter-generational difference in IQ is attributable to bias or other artifacts, and not real gains in general intelligence or higher-order ability factors.
In the end, as with human functioning more generally, a number of varied phenomena may be contributing to the Flynn effect.
Contrary evidence
The Flynn effect may have ended in some places starting in the mid 1990s. Teasdale & Owen (2005) "report intelligence test results from over 500,000 young Danish men, tested between 1959 and 2004, showing that performance peaked in the late 1990s, and has since declined moderately to pre-1991 levels." They speculate that "a contributing factor in this recent fall could be a simultaneous decline in proportions of students entering 3-year advanced-level school programs for 16–18 year olds."
Another recent study done by Professor of Education Philip Adey and psychology professor Michael Shayer also shows that the Flynn effect may have ended in the United Kingdom. According to Professor Adey, “The intelligence of 11-year-olds has fallen by three years’ worth in the past two decades.” [3] The study compared results of IQ tests taken by 11 year old children in 2005, the mid 1990s, and 1976, showing a precipitous drop in average IQ.
Some have claimed that the Flynn effect was masking a dysgenic decline in human reproduction and that in developed countries the only direction that IQ scores will now move is downwards. However, if the Flynn effect has ended for the majority, it may still continue for minorities, especially for groups like immigrants where many may have received poor nutrition during early childhood.
Interesting. Thanks.
4479 2002 dollars is about 1800 1979 dollars.
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