By the way, the reason performance does not improve that much is student's abilities don't improve that much. IQ is on a Gaussian distribution (Bell Curve) and the parameters of this have been known for 100 years. Known in obscure academic articles but known.
Public Schools use to teach the core academics needed to succeed in the working world. Now schools have become involved in social experiments and have taken on the roll of "parent" in much of this country's public school system. There is way too much time given to dealing with social and behavioral problems as compared to direct teaching of academic skills. Having worked in Public Schools for the past 12+ years, this is my observation.
More money is being spent, not on teaching academics, but on dealing with repairing the torn social fabric which used to be taken care of in the home and within the general community.
Add in teachers' pensions, too, often matched by the state, or in the case of CA and some other states, wholly provided by the state. In other words, the state pays for the teachers' retirement, as opposed to workers funding their own 401(k). In CA, the "average" public teacher will get over $500,000 in pension payments over the course of their retirement, for "free".
Having taught high school before, though, I can tell you that the hours are as long as in the private sector, though the point about having the summers off is valid.
The reason performance hasn't improed has nothing to do with IQ and everything to do with a dumbed-down or useless curriculum.
What I have seen is that many teachers have little choice but to ignore 90% of their students, and just focus on the one kid with special needs. I would say that a mainstream class in a public school cannot possibly give these kids what they need. Therefore, when the teacher ignores 90% of the class so that she can focus on one kid with special needs, then 100% of the students are short-changed (at great financial cost, too).
I'd like to see vouchers in place, so that 90% of the kids can go to private schools. The 10% of the students with special needs should go to government schools where everyone on staff is trained to work with special needs kids. I believe it would be cheaper and all the kids would be better off.
No question that teaching salaries have increased, but then they better damn well have since salaries in every other profession have as well, and teaching is a very labor intensive business. It's hit the teaching profession particularly hard because of the womens' movement. There was once a time when a career woman had a choice between being a teacher and being a nurse. As a result, there were a large number of very qualified women in the teaching profession. Not anymore.
Another problem with our schools is that that they have strayed too far from the 3 Rs, and have become mired in the tarbaby of partisan politics. The other problem is that they have put so much pressure on kids to graduate, that they don't acknowledge the fact that some kids just can't handle it, and should not be there. Get the thugs out of the schools, and things will turn around real quick.
You know I think Ann Coulter described it best in her most recent book,...If you went into teaching, because you cared so much about children, you obviously weren't thinking about the paycheck in the very beginning. After all what moron goes into teaching with ideas of making mega bucks from that salary? The unions use the jaded attitude of teachers to their advantage to say "you're worth more than cops and fireman"
--great article--needs a repost--
excellent article.
"When school children start paying union dues, that's when I'll start representing the interests of school children." The words of John Dewey, a founder of America's public education system, also fit nicely into Coulter's state-of-the-classroom address: "You can't make Socialists out of individualists -- children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming, where everyone is interdependent." Coulter responds, "You also can't make socialists out of people who can read, which is probably why Democrats think the public schools have nearly achieved Aristotelian perfection."
Our public school system is a miserable failure. But I would not so quickly point the finger at teachers. Our public school system is a miserable failure because its operation is primarily in the hands of corrupt and incompetent politicians. Our government has become a miserable failure. We spend more for less. Follow the money. If we followed every tax dollar, would we find any government entity that is more effective today than it was a decade ago? Teachers are merely government employees and like all government employees their pay exceeds their effectiveness and value to society by a wide margin.
Maybe I misunderstand. When I went to school everyone learned to read and do basic arithmetic. We learned essential geography and a lot of history. We learned how the American system of government works and studied the Constitution.
Now much of that appears to be lost. Why? It has nothing to do with student abilities, unless kids are actually losing IQ points! I think it has far more to do with unions and the fact that schools are stuck with trying to unscramble the great societal collapse that began in 1963.
Great post. When I moved from Long Island in 2003, the AVERAGE teacher salary in my district was over $85K. Add in the pensions, the post-retiree health care benefits, the sabbaticals, and every summer off, and its not a bad gig at all. Starting salary is pretty low (mid 30s), but if you get to tenure you are set for life. Some of the more experienced teachers (with PhDs) earned over $100k annually.
I knew a husband and wife teacher who live on LI. They bought a ski condo in Vermont so they could spend their considerable free time there. They knew they had a racket.
This kind of argument is silly. Kind of hard to spend hypothetical dollars. Furthermore, it is an appeal to class envy. A better rebuttal to the false notion that teachers are "poor", is the fact that most teachers belong to two income families. My guess is that the average teacher family earns about $65.440 in spendable money. The high-end earners in that category more than double that amount. Teacher salaries are designed to attract those who are looking for a second income. But of course they are quite sufficient for a single person. The only thing is, that the better and brighter single people can usually find a full-time job that pays better, and one does get what one pays for.
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Rather than the exponential growth of doubling at regular intervals, it seems to be merely a linear expansion. The intervals are not constant.
It looks like this:
1945 (ish): $1214
1955 (ish): $2345, up $1131, or $131.10 per year
1972: $4479, up $2134, or $125.50 per year
2002: $8745, up $4266, or $142.20 per year.
In constant dollars, it's still ugly, but using the "doubling" theme with inconsistent (and actually increasing) intervals seems misleading to me.
Get rid of the federal Dept of Education, and some of these problems start to go away. Neuter the teacher's unions, make it easier to get rid of incorrigible students and inappropriate teachers, and empower the remaining teachers and administrators within their own schools (especially against threats of lawsuits), and many more problems magically disappear.
Sadly, nobody in power will entertain such fantasies.
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.