If these were typical desktop computers, the CPU working at 100% can use some 50 W more than the one staying idle. 5000 computers at 100 % CPU produce then the load of 250 KW, resulting in 6 MWh per day which at 10 cents per KWh costs 600 USD per day, or 220000 USD per year. Finally, 9 years that he did it make almost 2 million dollars (!) for electricity that he managed to spend.
It's not that they're afraid of things they don't understand. It's that there is a certain type of person they generally don't like. In this case it might have been a man that had some sort of intellectual curiosity, maybe a bit eccentric. And they will use their ignorance as a weapon against those people.
The police department knows full well they can determine whether this was a bomb or not. It's within their ability to interview every person he interacted with to find if he claimed it was a bomb at any point. Instead of doing that they will use their lack of knowledge to allow falsehoods to move the investigation.
It was within the ability of the staff to determine the monetary cost of this man's actions. In the very least they could compare the electricity bill during a month he was running SETI versus the next month when he was not. They could calculate the power consumption of the machines.
It's not that they are afraid of knowing. But that knowing or admitting the truthfulness of the facts makes them less powerful as people.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Metropolitan_Statistic...
Ignorance is a source of power only within a like-minded group, and only as long as that group is powerful.
Now get out of there and see where ignorance gets you.
Or wait until that group washes out into the irrelevance of history.
That's all fine and good on a geological scale, but we've been waiting 200+ years for the irrelevance of this particular group, and there's not a hope in sight of it happening any time soon.
PS: Money wasting from their point of view, not making any judgement about SETI here
I did this when I worked as a network administrator for a new school campus. It was folding@home vs. SETI but same concept. Once the administration realized all the computers were running folding@home they compared the bills after turning it off and it was tens of thousands of dollars difference (granted this was 2001 and full-size desktops).
Now, one could say they overreacted, sure, in my case I just got reprimanded and told to uninstall it off all the computers. But firing for costing the district significant amounts of money isn't some testament to the ignorance of the South, unlike the "bomb" clock.
I still don't believe that - unless this was 10k computers+. I'll bet that if you used watts up on an idle computer, then used it on a computer running seti@home I'll bet the difference would only be 100 watt difference at the max (probably more like 50 depending on what is running on the computer).
1) if 1 KWh costs 10 cents, which is reasonable to expect, and the load increases just 50 W.
And for this guy here it's even much more:
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=54609&pos...
His single computer uses 490 Watts when turned on and calculating Seti, and he's keeping it on for 18 hour more per day just for Seti. Only 500 of such computers and such usage patterns make 14000 dollars more per month.
Sure, he didn't make profit from the seti@home instances, but he did it without approval, did ultimately cost the district money, and likely caused other issues along the way (like additional wear-n-tear on the machines)
I wish we could fire teachers for using their computers for Facebook and Amazon shopping during the day.
The internet was also heavily monitored, with a proxy server that required a login to get to forbidden sites. Our IT guy had a pretty good idea of when teachers were getting on facebook etc.
And then you'll hire them?
Gets complicated fast, dunnit?
Also, hard not to feel a little snark in the emphasis and "dunnit", really...
Perhaps they are like farmers we paid to not grow corn in the past.
But that's just for the time-servers, not the dedicated professionals, who are probably the majority.
My wife was on the advisory committee for a local middle school that's struggling. One winner is that they bought SmartBoards for a bunch of classrooms but didn't get stands for them, so they just mothballed them for a year until they could buy stands with the next year's budget.
I wouldnt call someone externalizing costs for whatever noble endeavor responsible or forward thinking.
Most people, be they in the deep south or the northeast have no fucking clue what SETI is and may even have very specific metaphysical opinions on how we should deal with the possibility of alien life that doing this violates. Most people don't care enough about paper to do more than write it off as a normal expense.
I personally think that alien life is everywhere and I can't wait until we discover more evidence of it. But I think SETI is a huge waste of resources that could be spent better elsewhere. Even though I'm pro science, discovery, and utilizing wasted cpu cycles, I still think searching for life this way is a huge waste of time and resources and I'd be pissed if some teacher decided he was going to use the resources I take a part in paying for to do this.
The benefits of this are external while the cost is internal. If you're going to use resources, at least use them to benefits the kids who are in your budge.
http://www.businessinsider.com/researcher-bitcoin-supercompu...
Thousands maybe - definitely not millions as they are claiming. From what I read it was setup to calculate through the screensaver. For most of the day - the computer will be in use and I would imagine/hope that they turn them off when they leave.
5,000 machines churning SETI for nine years? I'd be interested in estimates of cost.
(calculated using $0.06 per kWh, which is rather low for most people in the US)
So, 5,000 machines running 24/7/365 would cost around $1,137,600 annually (5,000 machines * $227.52 per year) in electricity usage alone.
Of that 24 hours per day, we can assume 8 hours of each day the district expected to pay for them to run, so that leaves ~16 hours the district expected the machines to be asleep or off.
24 - 8 = 16 (about 66% of the 24 hour period)
So, the admin was consuming about $12.51 per machine per month the district did not expect.
This comes out to around $750,600 the sys admin potentially cost the district, for a single year. He ran this scheme for 9 years -- so...
$750,600 per year * 9 years = $6,755,400 in additional electricity costs
Keep in mind this is likely rather low, since most places in the US have a significantly higher per kWh fee than the $0.06 per kWh used in these calculations.
I'm certain that this sum alone was enough cause to terminate the sys admin.
Think about all the things the school district could have spent an extra ~$7MM+ on...
PSU's arent light bulbs. A "350 watt" psu doens't draw 350 watts. That's the theoretical maximum you can draw from it. Sure, SETI was probably drawing a higher load than idle, vs off, but I highly doubt it was drawing 100%.
Even more complicated is the heat. If they lived in a cool climate, at least some of the waste heat that was emitted would have been absorbed by the building, which they are (presumably) paying to heat at least a few months of the year.
Edit: also if it was a public school, wouldn't they be off for about 3 months over summer ?
You are right. I was just going off the source I found, which accounted for some of the aspects you point out, but not all. These numbers simply provide a rough estimate, and detail how the sys admin certainly did cost the school district real (and potentially very substantial) sums of money.
> Even more complicated is the heat.
You make a good case for the winter months, but the opposite would hold true for the summer months when the heat becomes a real issue and additional air conditioning may be necessary, etc...
> Edit: also if it was a public school, wouldn't they be off for about 3 months over summer ?
Not necessarily. Usually over the summer months (for a traditional schedule school as opposed to a year-round schedule like many public schools are these days) some of the staff is typically on campus monday-friday doing various administrative tasks, workshops, prepping for the next school session, moving classroom furniture, cleaning, etc... IT staff would be included in this, and therefore we can reasonably assume the sys admin was still running his systems.
Yes, it will draw even more than 350 Watts at full load. 350 is the output power, whereas incandescent lightbulbs are measured in input power. So a 350 watt power supply, depending on efficiency of the PSU anyway, is probably using around 400-500 Watts at the wall at full load.
And that's a pretty awful efficiency you suggest. It may be that bad, but I'd sure hope not.
Talking about power load, though, I have a Kill-A-Watt pass-through power meter, and I have measured power at the wall exceeding the rated output power capacity of an 80% efficient power supply on a computer running at full load (running a graphically and computationally expensive computer game).
A lot of PSUs are pretty inefficient. You can look up the stats. It wasn't until recently that you even had a lot of them earning the 80 Plus "bronze" rating, which is 80% efficiency. There's still plenty with worse efficiency than that. A decade ago, you're probably looking at 60% efficiency on average.
What grandparent commenter showed was the school district's numbers are plausible. I doubt the district entered into a legal battle without first consulting an engineer or two about the electric costs.
HP 6000 Pro SFF - Core2Duo E8400 @ 3GHz - 100% CPU: 70, Idle: 26, Sleep: 2-3, Off: 0-1,
HP 6200 Pro SFF - Core i5 3470 @ 3.2GHz - 100% CPU: 83, Idle: 31, Sleep: 2-3, Off: 0-1,
HP 6300 Pro SFF - Core i5 2400 @ 3.1GHz - 100% CPU: 100, Idle: 30, Sleep: 2-3, Off: 0-1,
It's been a few months now, and I can't remember what I used to max out the CPU. It wasn't SETI @ Home, but it should give you a pretty good approximation. When it was off, it had Wake on LAN enabled, so it still drew some power. But it would fluctuate between 0 and 1.
They may be off for 3 months over the summer. Which might mean they were actually off, or it might mean that they ran 24/7 and NONE of that time was for 'educational' purposes.
15 years ago, the power difference was probably smaller, maybe quite a bit smaller -- modern CPUs are better optimized for low idle power.
Core 2 Duo was <35W TDP and was pretty popular from what I remember. P3 was in the same neighborhood too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CPU_power_dissipation_...
Also, bear in mind that PSUs do not use their full rating unless the hardware they are powering requires it. [0] Your number could easily be double what the machines actually used, if the PSU was somewhat oversized, as they typically are.
[0]: https://superuser.com/questions/106792/does-a-power-supply-d...
That's assuming they didn't use computers. Your calculation assumes that the computer uses a full 350+ watts of electricity. If it had a 350 watt PSU and was drawing that full load - it would shutdown (I've had this happen). Even then the CPU doesn't require 350 watts of power [1]. The only device that I know of that will use and designed to use a full load is a bitcoin miner.
Taking in consideration that these computers might have been left on already. I would argue that he used MAYBE an extra 50 watts of electricity [2]. So assuming $0.10/kw/hr (which is the cost of where I live) - he wasted a whopping $0.12/day or ~$50/year.
You have to take into account if the computers were already on. He didn't waste electricity because someone left their computer on - his "waste" would be electricity use that is above that of an "idle computer". It should also be pointed out that if the computer has Mcafee or some other crappy AV the CPU usage would be 100% anyways due to poor programming of the AV software (I have personally seen this many times and you don't know how many times people complain about their slow computer because the AV is using 100% of the CPU).
There is no way he wasted $7m - and even if he did and no one noticed that is part of a larger problem. Besides they only claim he wasted $1.2m - $1.6m [3] - with no evidence of how they came up with that number. That is saying he managed to waste over $100k/year (over 9 years) in equipment purchases, electricity etc - and NO ONE noticed this? I find it hard to believe that the people managing the budget were like "$100k unaccounted for this year? no big deal...". And even if it was accounted for and signed off - there should be 2 people fired - his and the guy who approved the purchase.
Even from the article:
> would find that in a middle of a lesson, the SMART Board had turned off.
This has happened to me personally on my own laptop. Not because I was mining bitcoins or running seti@home. In fact I've seen them installed and they are such POS that no instructor I know actually uses it as a SMART board.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CPU_power_dissipation_...
[2] http://i.stack.imgur.com/4HQPY.png
[3] http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2009/11/30/20091130se...
~$50 per year per computer * 5,000 computers = $250,000 in additional power consumption per year
He ran this scheme for 9 years:
$250,000 per year * 9 years = $2,250,000 total additional electricity costs
No matter what way you run the math, he blew millions of the school district's budget.
And the school blew millions by not turning off the computers when not in use. Power management is built into Windows - this can easily be done/managed with group policy.
> $250,000 per year * 9 years = $2,250,000 total additional electricity costs
This is all assuming he went around in a ski mask before he left every day and turned on all the computers across the school. Sure he might have used WOL but from the article I don't think he was that devious. From reports of what I read this was something the previous system admin guy did and just passed it along what to do.
I'm not saying he could have wasted money - I'm just giving him the benefit of the doubt and trying to make sure we don't frame him as some sort of criminal mastermind out to rip off this school district. There are a lot of reports out there about this and it's obvious the school wanted to spin it to look like he was the bad guy.
I do believe somewhere someone stated the district had wanted the systems put to sleep (not turned off) and believed it was happening.
Let's say 100W per computer running at full blast, and assume 12 cents per kWh for electricity. Running for 9 years straight, that's about 5 million dollars. If they're running for 16 hours/day then it's more like 3 million dollars. Adjust other factors to taste, but "millions" sounds pretty reasonable.
Where I live, electricity costs about 20 cents per kWh. 0.2dollars * 6000kWh * 365days * 9years = $3.94 million.
Running a processor at an extra (grossly exaggerating here) few watts + an extra 5-10 watts for fans, LEDs, etc don't amount to much. Especially when you consider that all electricity is paid for by the Thousand-Watts/Hour.
Some yes, but there's a lot of difference between a machine idling at 0% CPU and one fully loaded with SETI or Folding and running 100% all the time.
Would be even more worse now with deep sleep states and GPGPU, but even back then the difference between an idle and a fully loaded machine was absolutely significant.
Once those kWh are used in the CPU, they don't just disappear. They become heat.
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/414050/computer-cluster...
[0] http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cpus/2010/04/27/amd-phenom-...
I have no comment for that.
My buddies do the same sort of stuff I do and make 1.5x my salary.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_v._Lower_Merion_School...
Overhear both the Head and It guy responsible would have been fired and be on the "not allowed to work with kids and vulnerable people" list for the rest of their lives. They would have been lucky not to get prosecuted for child porn as well
Actually, I agree with this. I remember when this got big and suddenly every IT department, school, etc had these things installed, clearly without permission. If you tried talking about wasted electricity, added pollution, and the social cost of running power hungry processors 24/7 for "alien points" on their forums (or any forums) you'd be shouted down.
The reality is that sysadmin and helpdesk staff shouldn't have this kind of power. If they want to run these types of things on their employers hardware they need to get permission.
You occasionally hear about this nowadays with Litecoin and Bitcoin mining, but it seems we've learned our lesson here. Power doesn't grow on trees. There are real costs and environmental effects here to seriously consider. This attitude of "fuck you, I understand computers and you don't" really needs to go the way the way of the dodo. Real professionals don't act this way. Also, comparing this guy to a 14 year old who was pulled out of his class and handcuffed for making a clock is fairly weak sauce.
If you look at the average funding per student by state, Texas isn't doing so hot [1], especially for being the second largest state [2]. There's definitely more to it than just funding, but I think that would be a good starting point.
[1] http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/may0...
[2] http://www.ipl.org/div/stateknow/popchart.html
(edit) More recent funding figures, from 2013: http://www.governing.com/gov-data/education-data/state-educa...
We under value in society
1) Education (We make fun of smart people who lack social graces)
2) Science (Scoff at all science and under fund Space Programs)
I ran for local School Board in my city. We are a school district with over 90% qualify for free lunch and extreme poverty. Parents pick Charter School over Public Schools (But Charter Schools under perform on test scores and under pay teachers compared to Public Schools (Money goes to the top in Charter which gets 100% of the child's local funding)) My city per student was the state's lowest at $5,700. The next county over some districts were paying over $28,000 per student. My state has the greatest disparity between haves and have nots.
Our school board loves to point to Teacher Union and Teacher Pensions as the problem. How about just give us the money. We need a change in priorities and not freak out about taxes for education. Sadly I don't see this changing and I don't think funding is the number one factor for educational success but it is an easy thing to measure.
People don't freak out over paying taxes for education. Even if they don't have kids in the system.
They freak out over throwing money at a broken system and the solution isn't to throw more money at it.
Attach a specific dollar amount to a student. Allow that student to go to whichever school they want. End of story.
Stop forcing children to go to broken schools.
In my experience the people who claim the public schools are "broken" the loudest are the least qualified to make such an assessment. Also, public schools reflect the public, as in, you know, society at large. Saying that public schools are broken is essentially saying our basic local systems are broken, and that opens a whole new can of worms regarding inequality, poverty, and social priorities.
The significant problem with your "End of story" type solution is that there are schools which are tantamount to educational fraud based on their religious priorities, and there's no way public monies should enable that type of selectivity. Pay into the public system. If you can afford to keep your child ignorant through religious pursuits, or can afford the opportunity for a selective population experience by way of a private school, that's totally fine, always has been and always will be.
Stop forcing schools to listen to broken people.
Not necessarily.
They have good reason. Much of the money poured into public schooling in the U.S. goes to administration and overhead rather than the direct costs of teaching and student evaluation.
Many parents in this country are desperate to get their children the best education they can, within a certainly dysfunctional, and possibly also corrupt, system.
Part of the problem is that the funding is largely dissociated from effectiveness. The people spending the money have no vested interest in seeing that it is spent appropriately, for the benefit of the children--and the community they will be a part of when they eventually cease to be students.
I am not proposing any fixes. I am simply agreeing with my parent post. Every parent knows that raising local taxes to throw more money at their local schools will not solve anything. Richer neighborhoods will have to subsidize the schools in poorer neighborhoods in order to provide equal access to educational resources to all children.
If you want your kids to have extra opportunities, you can voluntarily give your own money to the PTA for the school they attend. Clearly, having to pay to remove the dents in the school-owned band instruments is a problem of a completely different order of magnitude from students in the classroom not having textbooks, or paper and pencils. Equally clearly, it is a disservice for Louisiana students to get pseudoreligious instruction in science class, as Massachusetts students learn without political interference.
I'm not a socialist, but it is blindingly obvious to me that if the state is to provide public education in any form, it needs to provide equal resources to everyone. It cannot select winners and losers by giving more money to schools where the children of richer people attend, and less money to schools where the children of poorer people attend.
As PP stated, attaching an equal dollar amount to each student, for the sole purpose of paying educational expenses, is one way to improve upon the existing system. It is not necessarily the best way, but better is a good first step on the voyage to good.
It depends on where you live. In Silicon Valley, they have local measures to raise parcel taxes to fund the schools. All money stays in the district and none of it goes to administration.
I was given this option in the third grade. I got a letter from the State Board of Education saying that I had performed exceedingly well on their standardized test and that I was invited to change schools and go to a special program in another town for smart kids.
My parents told me I should do it.
I regret it to this day. I was not equipped to understand the consequences of this choice, was not aware what I was getting into and it basically ruined my education.
Our class was separate from other students at this school. We started at a different time and ended earlier. In general, the rest of the school knew us as "those smart kids" and it took a major toll on my work ethic throughout high school.
No. Please do not give students the choice of which school they go to. They need to learn to get along with students different from them, not self-segregate into classes based on wealth, intelligence, etc.
Fundamentally, we already have school choice. If you have enough money, you can choose your school district by purchasing a house wherever it is that you want to send your children.
That's absolutely revolting.
We are giving choice to those who can afford it and taking it away from those can't. Is that what a public school system should do?
Amen. I'm astounded by the number of people who completely fail to see this very basic point.
I realize that from your perspective, the world if full of imbeciles ... but just for a second, consider that {insert for-profit college name} is providing a service that people want and that's why people are choosing it.
Those people don't care how the money they are paying is divvied up afterward. Whether it goes into the pocket of some administrator or a sports program at a non-profit institution, or into the pocket of some CEO or shareholder at a for-profit one.
They are getting something they want and that's all they care about.
If we had an education system that as a whole, gave people what they wanted, we would all be better off.
Are you aware of how extremely predatory many of these for-profit colleges have been? Their students aren't getting something they want.
I don't disagree with vouchers in general, but you can't just ignore the risks when using public funds to have private institution provide education.
I don't know what this statement means.
If you're suggesting that people attend these institutions and then aren't able to find work in that field, I would say that's true of many other institutions as well.
Those majoring in English in a standard non-profit college aren't likely to become authors or English teachers. Those going to law school aren't likely to become lawyers. So what?
http://www.consumerfinance.gov/newsroom/cfpb-sues-for-profit...
>The Bureau alleges that Corinthian lured tens of thousands of students to take out private loans to cover expensive tuition costs by advertising bogus job prospects and career services. Corinthian then used illegal debt collection tactics to strong-arm students into paying back those loans while still in school.
> Corinthian Colleges, Inc. is one of the largest for-profit, post-secondary education companies in the United States. The publicly traded company has more than 100 school campuses across the country. The company operates schools under the names Everest, Heald, and WyoTech. As of last March, the company had approximately 74,000 students.
Because a teacher's job is customer service and the customer is always right? ;)
Yes?
Good customer service is making sure the customer walks away happy in the long-term. Sometimes you do that by giving homework and tests. They might be miserable in the moment, but they'll be happy in the long-term.
Viewing students as customers may not be ideal, but it's certainly better than seeing them as a burden.
Allow it to go where there is little to no public over sight, no public school board or checks and balances, under performing scores, teachers paid $20,000 less with no pension, and CEOs making millions. Charter Schools are a part of the problem with American education. Sure some Charter Schools are good so are some Public School but as a whole Charter Schools are not for America's children but for the non-profit and for profit companies that run them.
PUBLIC SCHOOLS are the back bone of our educational system and democracy. Sending to school that take monetary advantage of our tax money with no over sight is wrong for everyone but the people who get the money.
Who is running America's Charter School: https://schoolfinance101.wordpress.com/2015/07/22/whos-actua...
A lot of people want "vouchers" so that private schools are more affordable. And plenty of private schools have a good track record, while having similar per-pupil costs as public schools.
If it costs $1000/student/month irrespective of if a child goes to a public school or a private school, why does the state really care which one the child attends? Why not let parents choose the school?
Except it doesn't. In fact, at-risk children going to poorly performing schools cost more per dollar: they need more extra curricular activities, possibly counseling, lower cost lunches, a lower teacher:student ratio, and so on and so forth. More children at poorly performing schools have more problems with their home life, and school is about the only thing other than organized crime that can give them structure.
There was a whole season of The Wire about this.. :)
Because it doesn't cost a flat amount per student. The fact that funding is fixed per student doesn't mean that all students are equally costly to educate, and private schools that don't have a universal acceptance mandate impose selection criteria which tend to select for students which are less expensive to serve, increasing the per-student costs (but not funding!) in the public schools if public funds are used on an equal per-student basis to support students going to those private schools.
As a predatory move to extract value from a very large market, it's commendable capitalism. As a general trend that undercuts the quality of public education nationwide, well, it's very distressing.
The student.
The students are choosing to attend those charter schools. People choose things that are better for themselves. Not always, but often enough that you can safely assume it's true for the majority.
Why are they doing that?
Could it be, that in spite of everything you mentioned ... charters are a better option for the student? Isn't that's what's important?
What's broken with the public education system isn't the funding, not the teachers, not the unions, not the administrators, or the facilities. It's none of those things.
It's demented notion that the system exists for the sake of the teachers/unions/administrators/etc. It doesn't. It exists for the students. Do what's best for them. Let them choose where they spend 12+ years of their life.
Generally not the case. The parents are, usually, choosing.
> People choose things that are better for themselves. Not always, but often enough that you can safely assume it's true for the majority.
You might reasonably make that assumption for cases where the people making the decision are making it for themselves, and with sufficient information and skill to make a reasonable prediction of the utility that will result from each available choice. (A stronger form of this is a central element of rational choice theory, so its common to Econ 101 models of behavior -- and lots of people have internalized these models without understanding the assumptions underpinning them, and how limited they are in the real world.)
I think its far from evident that school choices under the conditions they are actually made meet that description.
The point is: (as dragonwriter mentioned), the student rarely makes this decision. Furthermore, even when the student does, or when the parents of the students do, the decisions that are being made are pretty heftily influenced by advertising, gut instinct, and in-general wrong thinking about education. Take, for example, the weird and broad anti-common-core movement. Parents don't want their kids thinking about mathematics, they want their kids memorizing math facts just like they did when they were in school. Parents are swayed by images of tons of technology being used in these charters, when it turns out that most schools don't use tech all that effectively (they just reproduce old behaviorist models of instruction in an attempt to automatize teaching - recreate the teaching machine as Audrey Watters puts it).
In fact, the recent OECD report about use of technology in classrooms around the world was just making news earlier this week: in schools where there's a lot of 1:1 use of computers, students actually fare more poorly. This isn't surprising to me, or anyone else who studies education and the school systems, because of the point above: those computers aren't being used to improve or extend interactive learning, they're being used to deliver memorization-based, fact-and-repeat instruction. That's the same kind of boring teaching that turned off generations of kids in the past, and we're reproducing it again in classrooms with computers. However, those classrooms are shiny, filled with young, idealistic, often very poorly-prepared teachers and are very photogenic to parents.
Even worse- the charter movement (broadly speaking) has subverted most of the assessment process by ensuring that what is tested is the most flat, boring, and fact-based material around. (This is, incidentally, my own objection to common core- not the standards, but the terribad implementation of those standards in untested and regressive assessments). The assessments are bad, tend to not measure good learning, and instead measure a student's ability to memorize and repeat factual information. When charter schools do well on that front, and when the pro-charter movement gets the entire narrative framed in terms of "bloated, failing public schools", it is not surprising that parents (and grandparents, and students, and so on) are generally mislead by this narrative. It's not surprising that people choose charter schools.
People choose to give their money to University of Phoenix, which is objectively a terrible idea. Marketing works. Shiny pictures of happy kids with laptops learning the basics works to motivate people. The truth is, good education is complex - not even complicated, but complex - and asking the general public to really grok the nuances of it is difficult, especially since everyone has their own experience of what worked for them and things were good enough for me when I was in school, darn it.
A brief aside: there are plenty of good charter schools and charter networks, which are striving to bring high-quality reform-oriented education to everyone, especially underserved minorities. However, these charters aren't the ones I'm talking about. There are plenty more that take district dollars and provide sub-par education, and somehow manage to keep either getting renewed or just change names every three years when they come up for re-accreditation. There's also plenty of poorly-performing public schools and districts. Teachers' Unions aren't a panacea.
Ultimately, the problem from top to bottom is that our school system is in the hands of people who don't actually know much about education. Many board of education positions (especially state levels, which exert a lot of control) are political appointments or elected positions. How many times do you read about stupid stuff some board of ed is doing - rewriting history or requiring creationism or other crapola? Education is complex and nuanced, and people seem to engage in the discussion thinking that there's a Simple Fix for everything.
Charters are just vouchers in disguise, and vouchers are just saying "let the Free Market fix it", because the Free Market is super-great at fixing things like the banking, energy, health care, and housing systems in the US. Other charters have "let's let Technology fix it" ideas or "we're super-rigorous, require dress codes, and provide Discipline by calling all our students Mr. and Miss Lastname instead of having real relationships with our students". There's dozens of silly simple fixes floating around.
And you want parents to navigate all of this? It may be arrogant of me to say it, but I honestly don't think most parents can parse through all the crap. Again, people are still paying money to University of Phoenix, people buy guns thinking it will make them safer, and do dozens of other things that are just plain foolish because people aren't experts in everything. If you could assume that someone had enough understanding of how people learn (at least having read the book... How People Learn, which is still a great primer), you could maybe assume they're going to make good decisions. But this is a decision that (as you point out) will stick with the kid for 13 years proximally, and influence their opportunities for the rest of their life.
We should regulate this market.
That depends; there are lots of different kinds of charters. Charters are public schools that have some exceptions -- enshrined in a particular charter, hence the name -- to the generally-applicable rules for public schools in the jurisdiction. These can be exception in terms of administrative process, specialty curriculum, alternate non-geographic admission criteria, etc.
They can also be exceptions in that the whole operation of the school is contracted out to a private entity, making it essentially a private school where tuition is entirely publicly paid for a cherry-picked student population with less accountability to the public than is usually the case with public schools. But that's not always the case.
I remember both taking off in parallel with very different support basis; the movement for privately operated charter schools has taken off when and where vouchers-for-private-schools haven't succeeded, but the publicly-operated charters that function as alternative-model public schools still exist and are still something that reformers that aren't supporters of the education privatization movement push (and sometimes nearby areas -- possibly even the same districts -- will have both kinds of charters.)
> There's a lot of isomorphic economic policy between the two, although if I had to pick I'd say charters are better than vouchers.
Between vouchers and privately-operated charters, I don't think you can make a useful of which is better; it mostly comes down to conditions, management, and accountability measures; charters probably make it administratively simpler to avoid the worst problems, but also tend to be greater single-point-of-failure systems.
> why does the state really care which one the child attends?
Well I as a tax payer cares. If those school fare even worst and the administration and CEO/President of the foundations makes millions at the expense of children there is a concern.
Public Schools work and have worked for decades. We have a problem with inner city schools and a big part is unfair funding, but killing public schools and give it over to various schools with no public oversight just government over sight is scary. We vote on our School Boards and Directors. We can protest and get Administrators removed. Can't do that to these Charters School. Also privatizing schools will make being a teacher an even worst job.
So Vouchers really will be the new segregation tool for the 21st Century. Your money will be used to send kids to religious schools you don't like teaching Islam, Christianity in all its forms, or who knows what and if they want to teach the children ignorance and hate and you as a tax payer just flipped the bill for this and can't stop it. I can't see a good voucher system that would answer my fears of miss used funds spent on poor education back by people groups that will not teach based on various world views that are not politically correct and just wrong. Our Brain Drain in America will go into Nuclear Meltdown.
To quote the 2002 Supreme Court Voucher Dissent: Justice Breyer on Descent “... all religious institutions cannot be given equal opportunities to the government funding and trying to do so not only turns back the clock on the Constitution, but creates a powder keg in our society.” http://www.pewforum.org/2002/06/28/judgment-day-for-school-v...
Back ground: I went to private school and graduated with a Theology Degree and worked as a Pastor for years. I absolutely know that many in the voucher movement see the Government footing the bill for their Christian Education. You have no idea how deep Crazy Christianity can get (Westborogh is just the tip of the ice berge). They will spew their version of crazy that they got with no academic or logically training to children with your tax dollars paying for it.
And what about the people who don't have some religious agenda, but simply want to get away from crazy school administrations like, well, this one? "We're worried that you might be religious, so we're adamantly against leaving you any option whatsoever to avoid a known bad local school" doesn't exactly make a compelling argument if it's your kid suffering.
FWIW, I did go to a normal, public school. Mine wasn't so bad, but some of the usual idiocy was still present, like getting punished for "fighting" when I was attacked, unprovoked and had not even touched the other party.
Also show one example where vouchers BETTERED students education? It didn't in Switzerland it actually made their scores worse since 1992.
I am in group X and I object to things that you value in group Y. You in group Y object to things that I, in group X, value. What do we do?
Once you have a particular group that claims to have the moral high ground for some nebulous definition of "the high ground" the whole argument is lost because so few people agree on so few things.
I get that creationists are annoying, but I'll give them credit for not demanding that science not be taught, just that they wanted their pet theory taught too. That looks a lot more reasonable (from a certain perspective) than the evolutionists who insist that evolution is the only possible explanation ever, with quite religious zeal, despite having only circumstantial evidence. Evolutionary science is nowhere near as rigorous as physics and won't be for thousands and thousands of years of highly accurate recordkeeping. At that point the creationists will have suffered a thorough defeat, but until then, well, truthfully the science isn't settled. At least to the degree of rigor that I would personally care for.
This was largely demonstrated to be a ruse by so-called "Intelligent Design" proponents in the Kitzmiller v Dover trial[0].
I would respectfully suggest that you haven't really looked into the evidence that carefully if you question the degree of rigor that underpins evolutionary science.
Large parts of evolutionary theory are indeed based on circumstantial evidence. But the quantity of such evidence is so overwhelming[1] that questioning its explanatory power is rather foolish. It's the sort of evidence where coming up with any alternative hypothesis besides evolution quickly becomes an exercise in futility. Unless, that is, you don't care if the hypothesis is testable or not, in which case creationists have many.
Moreover, evolution does not only have circumstantial evidence. You and I are living through the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria - an evolutionary change that is being observed and documented as it occurs. Fruit flies from the same species have been split into physically isolated groups, allowed to breed over many generations, and subsequently reintroduced, only to discover that they had become reproductively isolated.
There's more evidence discussed here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence_of_common_descent
Or here:
http://amazon.com/dp/1416594795/
Or here:
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitzmiller_v._Dover_Area_Schoo...
[1] For example, here's Wikipedia's list of transitional fossils (so-called "missing links" between divergent extant species) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_transitional_fossils
But what I am saying is that physics has a lot more rigor for the claims by virtue of how it works, and what people are looking for there. Evolution is punctuated equilibrium and human beings haven't directly witnessed this to the same degree that people have in physics.
I think the direct witnessing aspect is important, even if others may disagree. The reason I think it's important is that there are other possible though highly improbable explanations for various physical phenomena we see on earth.
If there really was a "guy in the sky" he could have absolutely made a bunch of stuff and "planted the evidence" all over the place to fool people. But if also for some reason, he always handled the laws of physics just the way things are now, we wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
To me it's kind of like the people who suggest that we should try and see if reality is just a simulation being run in a computer. The odds -- at least in my mind -- are absolutely astronomical against. But just because it's a "crazy idea" and there's "no way" it could be true doesn't mean I get to dismiss it offhand and maintain my intellectual integrity.
I don't think this is really true. For most important effects in large domains of physics, directly witnessing the underlying processes is as impossible as directly witnessing the history of evolution (to the extent that "directly witnessing" is even meaningful -- on a detailed level, all witnessing other than of ones own internal subjective mental states is through several layers of indirection.) We witness them indirectly, through various media whose mechanism are explained by other well-tested scientific theories.4
> If there really was a "guy in the sky" he could have absolutely made a bunch of stuff and "planted the evidence" all over the place to fool people. But if also for some reason, he always handled the laws of physics just the way things are now, we wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
IF there's really a "guy in the sky" exercising arbitrary power over the physical universe, even if he had not always handled the laws of physics in the same way, we couldn't necessarily tell the difference, since he would also have the power to make it so that our perception of evidence we examine at any given time (including our present recollection of what we might have done in the past) is always consistent with physical law always having been the same, even if it wasn't, and even if our actual observations in the past would have differed.
I agree that both are incredibly unlikely, but you can't say for certain that it is not so.
1) I think in experimentation charter schools do serve a good purpose, but right now it is the battle of not having another New Orleans (New Orleans has ZERO public schools and its school board has dissolved).
As long as private schools are required to take any comer can cannot charge tuition beyond the per pupil amount.
Somehow I doubt any private school advocate wants actual school choice.
They can afford to send their kids to private school, they believe that school to be superior to the public schools their kids would otherwise attend, so they pay the private tuition. As a parent, I agree with this. I, however, do not have a $400k income with a $169k expense account and a sweet pension plan, like he does.
In short, his kids don't attend public school because he can afford for them to go somewhere better. I am not willing to penalize any child for the sake of their parents' political views (or offices), nor am I willing to restrict people from spending their own money just because they might buy something I don't like.
I could be mistaken, but as far as I am aware no politician (from either side of the aisle) sends their kids to a government school. At least, no politician at the national level (president, congress, etc.).
I am not a fan of having a centralized governmental school system (I think the indoctrination risk is greater, because then there aren't competing institutions around to teach anything different) but it strikes me that any voter who does believe in government schools should demand that their representatives send their own kids to governmental schools as a sign of good faith.
About half of Congress sends their kids to public school.
http://www.publicschoolreview.com/blog/how-many-politicians-...
In the matter of experience in dealing with the issues (and dealing with the Secret Service on security is far from the only one) that attend children of major public figures, no, a school is not a school. And Sidwell Friends, the school that has been attended by every school-age child of a US President since the Nixon Administration is, arguably, sui generis in that regard.
The President not sending his kids to public schools is probably, as much as anything, a service to the public school that they would go to if they weren't going to Sidwell Friends.
Or maybe I hate paying school taxes because the schools promote sports as far more important than academics. End of last year I went to the awards ceremony for top performing students in academics and sports... the difference in treatment left me feeling ill in my gut.
Exercise serves a purpose. I've even remember seeing evidence exercise helps improve learning. And in no way am I against a group of kids playing ball together. But I do not like funding an educational institute which does more to foster sports are being more important than the very stated purpose.
Think about some other good goal. Say feeding starving people. Now imagine if you were forced to pay some charity that was grossly incompetent in how it actually worked. Yes, people got fed, but often after they were negatively impacted in other ways. And that is money that could'be been going to better charities, but you aren't allowed to make such a choice.
Unfortunately, this is unlikely to change given that sports bring in revenue and academics do not.
?!?!
In high schools in the US, academics are intimately linked to funding. Sports are not. I guarantee you no teacher or administrator gives a shit about how much money the Friday night concession stand is bringing in. It probably doesn't even cover the electricity bill for the flood lights.
But they do all care a lot about test scores and other (mostly academically-related) metrics that determine how many millions in state/federal funding they receive.
Sports are one of many ways that students can use their free time to learn to socialize, lead, and work in a group. Those are all important skills that are hard to teach in a classroom, and running a sports team (or robotics team or programming competition team or chess club) is a hell of a lot cheaper than running a classroom. And often far more enjoyable for everyone involved.
And yet these are rare and never given the same prestige that sports does. Being a member of many of those clubs will likely negatively impact your ability to socialize and learn social skills as you will be ostracized by the larger groups.
They are too rare, which is why it's important for (even/especially childless) engineers to be actively involved in the after-school activities offered by surrounding schools.
> and never given the same prestige that sports does.
This might be true in some schools, but in every school I've worked with (which have included everything from blue collar suburb to pretty depressingly poor urban), academics are values much more than sports.
Kids who do well at sports get validation. And they should. Performing well in a competition -- any competition -- requires equal parts skill and dedication.
So why don't academics get the same sort of social validation from adults as sports?
It's worth remembering that the social validation is probably the only validation high school athletes will receive.
In contrast, most people assume that academics will be validated by scholarships, and that the intermediate social validation is therefore unnecessary. That painfully over-estimates the maturity of the typical high schooler (even a bright one), but it's a common mindset.
So it's not that academics isn't valued over sports; rather, it's more like the value of academic achievement is perceived to be self-evident and therefore doesn't require social validation, whereas for sports that's not so much the case.
> Being a member of many of those clubs will likely negatively impact your ability to socialize
That's not true at all! It will absolutely improve your ability to work on problems with a group. No one on a robotics team is going to ostracize someone because they are on a robotics team...
> as you will be ostracized by the larger groups.
Bullies are everywhere in life. Knowing how to live life and get work done in spite of bullying is an important skill.
Recently (well, a few years ago), there was a controversy in my home state about the removal of funding for bus transport to and from magnet schools. I went to one of those magnet schools - as did my two older siblings.
I brought it up talking to my dad (who still lives there), and he said, "well, I don't have a horse in that race anymore."
Meanwhile, those schools' academic ratings are plummeting...
Education is so incredibly important, and honestly the education system here in the United States is abhorrent. Not due to the teachers mind you, but due to the requirements that are being made by legislators.
Testing requirements don't allow for a wide variety of curriculum anymore, students are all taught at the same baseline (lowest common denominator because otherwise it's discrimination) and students are no longer allowed to excel for fear of making their peers uncomfortable.
As a country the United States is not teaching students to think for themselves and challenge viewpoints, instead they are becoming complacent followers. Which is perfect if you want people that can easily be controlled.
http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cmd.asp
Do you think more money is the answer or should we spend smarter?
She makes $35k / year.
If she wasn't lucky enough to have an engineer paycheck behind her life, she simply wouldn't be able to do the job.
It's likely that funding gets allocated in stupid ways, but the whole process is inherently expensive. Managing thousands of employees, dozens of buildings, updating equipment, training, etc, etc. It's a hard problem, and we've basically just decided that only "dedicated" workers should do it, which is code for "willing to be underpaid compared to qualifications".
She makes $35k / year.
How much do teachers in her school system who have 25 years experience make?
The union-mandated tenure system, which prevents young, talented teachers from making even vaguely competitive salaries, but rewards older, mediocre teachers with "time served" is part of what's stopping "more money" from being the answer. Higher teacher salaries under the current system would largely reward the oldest, not the best.
You can pick up some extra stipends if you coach or work in certian departments (STEM) but good luck getting into 6 digits as a Teacher.
When I taught in Massachusetts (where we have a teacher union)[1] pay starts at $36,400 and maxes out at $74,000 (with a PhD) after 19 years.
Turns out that public school salary information is public information. So if you "know" a teacher that is making 6 digits, I challenge you to look up their pay scale and see if you really know what you think you know.
[0] https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B27mc-sxcu8ldW9OTHlLMjZ0SlU... [1] http://www.pittsfield.net/UserFiles/Servers/Server_1051846/F...
When you take into account the shorter work day/work year http://www.uft.org/new-teachers/your-work-day-and-year
really good benefits, including a $50-$60k a year pension (http://www.empirecenter.org/publications/pension-calculator/) and essentially tenure...well, it's not too bad...
Your link says it's 6 hours and 55 minutes, including lunch. So 6 hours and 25 minutes is a work day.
Plus there's 150 minutes a week (2 and a half hours, or 30 minutes per day) for training, professional development, teacher collaboration, parent engagement and other professional activities.
150 minutes for all of that is a joke, and if any teacher was actually following that rule (union or not) then you'd be hearing about it.
What are "other professional activities?
Students that need extra help? Students that need to make up work/tests? Grading homework/tests/quizzes
I have about 150 students. If I give a test, that's 150 tests to grade. If it takes me 1 minute to grade each test, then I've just blown that entire quota of "other professional activities"
But I still do my job.
I grade all those 150 tests. Then I grade the homework that I gave all those students. Then I write my lesson plans for the next classes and I write the next test. And I email/call parents. And I meet with parents. And I see students before/after school to answer their questions and have them make up their work and tests. And I answer emails from students that have questions about their homework.
I spend 6 hours and 25 minutes a day teaching. I spend plenty more time making sure students learn.
But at least I get summer vacation, right? Sure, it's just full of mandatory Professional Development (so I can keep my teacher license up to date) and lesson planning for the next year.
But hey, in New York you can make up to $105k! After 22 years AND earning a PhD (which you paid for with your own money ... and where did you find the time to get that degree?) Rent in NY is 3x rent where I live, but the max $105k isn't even 3x the starting salary of my school district.
Even for someone without more advanced degrees (fyi you do not need a PhD to cap out.) you cap out at $93k. Agreed that teachers (particularly beginner teachers) put in a lot of hours outside school. 10 hours a week? More? So a 40-50 hour workweek during the school year? (But with predictable scheduling, which not all professionals have.)
A roughly $1 MM dollar annuity when you retire isn't so horrible either.
Lesson planning takes less time as you get more experienced, plus you reuse your old lesson plans.
175 hours every five years for required professional development? http://www.uft.org/q-issues/maintaining-your-professional-ce...
Did I miss anything? COL in NYC is definitely higher...but you do not have to live in Manhattan. There are many affordable areas in NYC.
I made waaaaay more money working in industry and never worked anywhere near as hard or long as I do being a teacher.
Sure, lesson planning gets easier. And you can reuse old lesson plans (although, the standards get changed fairly regularly and in my district you need to use "data-driven metrics" to improve your lesson plans year after year, so if you're just reusing lesson plans you get put on the "bad teacher list" in a state with no unions which means no tenure).
Without the PdD, you don't cap out at that 6 digit number. But $93k isn't bad. That's about the entry level salary of a Software Enigneer, right? And you only need to be a teacher for 20 years to earn that. What a deal!
That's probably all a teacher deserves though. As a society we really need incentivise our best and brightest to use their skills to build new ways to share photos.
All I'm saying is that you get what you pay for. If you pay teachers $40k, then you're going to get $40k value.
One of my bêtes noires about the system is that it does not differentiate between a high school teacher getting an advanced degree in STEM versus a kindergarten teacher getting a secondary development blah blah from University of Phoenix.
My personal opinion is that some teachers are underpaid, and some are overpaid. Senior teachers should not be making twice as much as junior teachers, and high school physics teachers should not make the same as kindergarten teachers. Additionally, schools should have some leeway in rewarding better/harder working teachers, instead of the unionized lockstep pay scales.
Yes, programmers make more than teachers, on average. (Though the mean hourly wages are not that different, actually-- http://www.bls.gov/ncs/ocs/sp/ncbl1614.pdf for NY/NJ/CT). So?
Which is why everyone is a "self taught" programmer.
Imaging if you took everyone that posts to Hacker News about how they were the only person in their school that knew how a computer worked and they did all sorts of hacks and had all sorts of fun subverting authority and you went back in time and you gave them a knowledgeable mentor (read: teacher) how much better would they be at programming now?
It's 2015 and we don't have those teachers in our schools. What we have are Math teachers that are being told "We have to have a Computer Science class and we heard that programming is like math, so you're going to be teaching Computer Science next year. Go take a Java course."[0]
Also, unions are not keeping the pay scales the way they are. Texas does not have unions. Texas does not have tenure. Texas still has "lock step pay scales". Unions are not the problem.
Private schools pay teachers less than Public Schools. Private Schools don't have unions. Unions are not the problem.
I don't know what the problem is. I think it has something to do with there being very little respect or prestige for the teaching profession among tax payers (or anybody, really). But the problem isn't unions. If unions were the problem, then the problem wouldn't exist in places where there are no unions.
[0] 100% serious. I had a training this summer where 6 of the other 7 teachers were Math teachers that were told at the end of the year that they would be teaching AP Computer Science and were sent off to take their first ever Java course over the summer.
My girlfriend is a High School teacher in NY, and easily works more than I do. You have to factor in planning and grading which is all done after "work".
Also, most teachers don't need to do as much planning after a few years. Is if fair that longer serving teachers get paid twice as much as new ones, when new ones put in more hours usually? Well...
The school day may be 6.33 hours (including lunch) but do you only count football players as working 3 hours a week when you watch them on TV? Teachers have to do a lot of "under the table" work to make those 6.33 hours (including lunch) happen.
When are those tests getting graded? When are those struggling students getting extra help? When are those lesson plans getting written? When are those parent-teacher conferences happening? When are those teachers going to football games/plays/other events to make connections with the students? When are those teachers writing letters of recommendation for those students? When are those lesson plans being modified to meet the needs of students with IEPs? When are those lesson plans being modified to meet the needs of ESL students? When are the formative and summative assessments being analyzed to modify lesson plans to better meet the needs of the students?
Those 6.33 hours (including lunch) are just the hours that teachers spend in front of the camera. There is so much more work involved to support those 6.33 hours (including lunch). Even for the long tenured teachers. If a teacher is resting on their laurels and just rehashing old lesson plans, then that's one of the "bad ones".
[0] http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/03/30/395322012/the-hidd...
Yes, of course, like I said, there are many outside the class hours. And in fact, 6.33 hours/d are not the "hours in front of the camera" (I assume you mean instructional hours.) The exact number is a bit hazy, due to self-reporting issues, but it seems to be about 700 h/y. http://cbcse.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/The-Mi...
However, if you get offered a 9-5 job for $100,000 and you are looking at making $48,000 after several years experience ... you start imagining what you could do with an extra $50,000 a year. Just think of the compound interest!!!
If you can make lots of money, you almost owe it to yourself to get it. But who does that leave us to educate the kids that are going to run the country when we are old? Do we really want to leave that job up to people who can't do anything but teach (so they live and die by the dreaded tenure system) and people who don't have experience teaching (and will soon leave to make money in industry)?
Also, not all states have unions or tenure (my state included) and those states to not have industry-competitive salaries and they do not provide better educations. If unions were the problem, wouldn't we see better results from non-union states? Wouldn't it behove non-union school districts to out perform/compete union school districts to keep teachers from unionizing? (or is the fact that they can get laws passed saying that teachers cannot unionize better than trying to be competitive in the job seeker market?)
I'd also note that those are salaries (and similar for others in this discussion) are for 187-day school calendars, or 37.4 weeks/year. Generously applying the same rate to a 46 week/year "full time" calendar puts the top end in Round Rock at over $78,000. The median household income in Round Rock is around $70,000[1], suggesting that it isn't outrageous for a couple of married teachers there to earn well above average, even without summer income.
Also, at least in MA, many teachers are not required to pay Social Security tax, but instead pay into a much more generous pension system. Other benefits are also competitive relative to the private sector.
Again, though, I'm all for teachers making more money so more talented people are encouraged to teach. But the tenure system is not the way to get that result.
First: teachers typically work days not on the student's school calendar, so it's more like 39 or so weeks by your calculation.
Second: they work WAY more than an 8 hour day. Last night she did 7am - 4pm in the building, then 2 or so hours at night grading. (and that was a light day since she had gotten her planning done previously this weekend).
Third: summer is where you can finally catch up and plan classes. Girlfriend did a major revamp of her AP US History class so she was in-line with the new standards. Last year was Western Civ revamp. Next year will be the standard US History class.
You're right, benefits are in-line (not better, just in-line) with corporate america. Mediocre, but existing health care. A pension style retirement plan that's reasonable, but at the mercy of underfunding by politicians (which seems to be expected at this point).
In my state, which has comparable starting salaries, $56k assuming they obtained some professional certification along the way. Otherwise, $50k. (For comparison, an engineer straight out of college could expect to make maybe $75k.)
I find the idea that we should destroy the entire school system to ensure that a small handful of undeserving people are not able to serve out their career on a still-very-modest salary quite mad.
No teachers in this district are making money suitable to their training and experience.
Why is tenure-based compensation an efficient use of dollars in primary education but not elsewhere?
That's exactly what it is.
When I was in high school we got a shipping pallet of new $100+ calculus textbooks that sat unused because they were the same as the old calculus textbooks but with material cut out because the curriculum had been dumbed down.
Thank god our teacher saw them as the worthless turds that they were and continued teaching us prohibited advanced material like gasp integration from the old books.
Meanwhile our CS teacher was actually a history teacher who stayed a chapter or two ahead of us in the book because who in their right minds would become a teacher making $50k if they actually knew how to write software?
Imagine building a company where you cannot get rid of incompetent, mediocre and down-right caustic employees because some third party (a union) gets in the way. This company will never amount to anything and will never be able to compete with one where excellence is the goal and people are well paid because they are worth it.
For some reason we seem to be OK with the idea of supporting the unions and lose sight that our goal should be to ensure the kids come out of school with absolute genius level knowledge, experiences and enthusiasm across a range of topics from arts to engineering. Kids ought to leave school with a hunger to succeed and contribute to society resembling a massive buffalo stampede with a purpose. Today a huge swath of them leave school with a "thump" and no passion, direction or real knowledge to guide them forward.
The system is broken.
Public schools will never pay $100k+ to someone to teach Computer Science, so how will they ever get someone that actually knows Computer Science to be a teacher[0][1]? Instead they are offering a $1000 stipend to current Science and Math teachers to take a 1 semester course in Java so they can pass the Computer Science Certification Test and teach Computer Science.
So the future computer science high school students will be getting taught computer science by 10+ year Physics teachers that took a 15 week Java course.
[0] I left a $100k Software Engineering job to become a Computer Science teacher... hoping to make a difference with the diversity issues in our field. Luckily I am married to someone that has a job that can pay the bills.
[1] There are at least 3 open Computer Science teaching positions in my district right now if anyone is interested! And in the next 2 years we will have enough students that we will need another CS teacher at my school.
To me every dollar legitimately (with a HUGE emphasis on the legitimate part) spent in schools is a valuable investment in the future. I hope that is a statement that cannot be disputed.
However, we've performed badly enough and have wasted so much money that we are in a situation where someone who thinks teachers ought to be able to make $150K per year would be laughed out of the room.
We are slowly destroying our country from the inside. And a big part of that is in how we are not educating our kids. And perhaps even our population in general. I mean, the fact that the Theory of Evolution is cause for debate in the US is down-right shameful and a sad indication of just how backwards some of our population is in their thinking.
The problem of schools and education is simple. It get's complicated when we are not united in an understanding of what our objectives should be.
What are they? In my view: science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM) and entrepreneurship. Arts belong in school as well but we are not going to float the boat on arts alone. STEM+E need to be our strong suit and our kids need to be exposed to the arts in order to see, feel and experience the beauty in the human condition.
The problem with education is that old saying "people that can, do; people who can't, teach" but it's more like "people that can, do even if they would be really good at teaching because teaching doesn't pay nearly as much as anything else you can do with the same skills"
The way things are right now, who cares about tenure! If you fire all the bad teachers who are you going to replace them with? The only people that want those jobs are the applicants that weren't as good as the people that just got fired!
And like you said, an additional problem is that every state gets to decide what the goals for education are and those goals can get very political (see: evolution vs creationism, civil war vs war of states rights).
And the biggest blind spot for HN readers concerning education is that most of the students in school are not like you! Public (and some Private) Schools are full of students that would stare blankly into space all day rather than watch one Khan Academy video. It takes a lot of work and effort to provide an education to both the low achieving and the high achieving students, especially with 25:1, 30:1, sometimes 35:1 student to teacher ratios.
I am one of two engineering mentors for our local FIRST FRC robotics team. Brilliant kids fully motivated to learn. I love it. We've built a bunch of neat stuff. I happen to own a lot of nice manufacturing equipment so we've taken advantage of that with the kids learning such things are running CNC and manual milling machines as well as soldering SMT, using DSO's etc.
Anyhow, one day I get hit with this business of having to register as an official school system volunteer in order to be able to be a mentor for the team. Mind you, FIRST has no such requirements, this is the school system bureaucracy meddling with things.
What did it entail? Filling out a bunch of forms that nobody could email me. I had to go to the main office and get them. And then they need to do a full-up background check, blood test and other crap. The process takes months. Oh, yes, and I have to pay for it.
Being that part of my work is in aerospace there are certain things I just can't do, at least not without involving certain checks and balances.
I flat out told the school system folks to go stuff it. I further threatened to fully fund the robotics team myself and pull it completely out of the the school. FIRST does not require teams to be attached to schools, so, technically, we could run it out of my warehouse and we'd be fine. The school folks took a few steps back and figured out a way to allow me to continue to be a mentor (after two years of doing it) without red tape. I suspect someone is making money somewhere by having this team be at the school. We are required to have a teacher associated with the team (one who knows nothing about nothing). My guess is he is getting extra bucks for having his name on a list somewhere.
This is just one example of why they don't attract better talent. We could have a lot more engineering mentors in this team but everyone recoils at some of the red tape they toss in front of you.
I know I and other practitioners could be amazing teachers and sources of inspiration for students. Yet, none of us has any interest in dealing with bullshit. And the school systems are permeated by it.
I mean, imagine the idea of having someone like Elon Musk do a physics lecture at a High School even once per semester. Think of the inspiration and effect that would have on kids. The effect would be very similar if you had passionate practitioners, perhaps less well known than Elon, yet passionate about their work, contribute to the education of our kids.
Money, to some degree, isn't the problem or the solution. We just don't have a good system. Teachers could be professional "inspiration organizers" who pull-in from the local and distant communities with the goal of blowing away kids with the passion, wonder and possibilities of the subject at hand, whether it is music, mathematics or physics. That. Something even a little bit like that. Would be amazing.
I keep in touch with my high school CS teacher and that school now offers four years of CS education with multiple CS teachers. Your profile says you're in Round Rock, I graduated from Seven Lakes near Houston. My experience does not match yours.
[1]: http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/10/why-are...
[2]: http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_28401042/colorado-supreme-...
[3]: http://dianeravitch.net/2014/02/26/breaking-news-new-data-sh...
Is my info bad or does that suggest that more money isn't the problem. Is the problem how the current money is being spent or is it that we need more money. Are those articles making stuff up?
https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66
http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cmd.asp
http://www.oecd.org/edu/skills-beyond-school/48631286.pdf
As for salary I also think it's a crime that teachers get paid so low. At the same time low is probably relative. A teacher in Berlin making $40k a year is doing a lot better than a teach in NYC/LA/SF making $40k a year. I've tried to talk myself into becoming a teacher but salary is a big reason I can't quite get myself to take the leap.
The person in question - coach Bob Hurley, in a decaying New Jersey town - is a retired parole officer, and he's there to keep kids out of prison. So this is is his white whale.
I don't think you can buy that, but you might be able to buy furniture - support systems, assistance, the like - to keep it from being killed off. Instead, we get six-sigma metrification which may well make it worse. At least it Heisenbugs the curriculum and distracts from actual teaching.
Something must be done, this is something, this must be done...
Then again, the canonical teacher is Socrates, and he was forced to drink hemlock...
I think people get embarrassed by being discarded by the sorting-machine and resent the system, even when it's their kids in it. We don't really value education for its own sake - it must be shown to be in service of other societal goals - mainly economic goals. That can get out of control quickly.
It isn't a funding problem. It's a problem with how we spend that money.
If you look at the average funding per student by state, Texas isn't doing so hot [1], especially for being the second largest state [2]. There's definitely more to it than just funding, but I think that would be a good starting point."
I used to think on these lines too. After talking to two teachers in different districts, they both said the same things. More money is fine, but it usually goes to Administration.
The two teachers I knew, and talked to, lived and taught in California. They were both tenured. I talked to them a decade ago. They were both making, I belive 150k a year. At the time, they weren't complaining about wages. In fact, they had no complaints. Maybe, they just got lucky? I don't think money is the answer?
(Actually, I just remembered--my ex'es mother-inlaw was a school teacher, and she told me countless times the money always goes to bloated Administration. I don't know why I just remembered her? She taught high school back east.)
A lot schools/districts that are better spend less money per student than schools that are worse. You should ask David Tarver about it.
Without the ability to get rid of bad teachers as quickly and easily as one can fire bad engineers in the private sector money isn't going to fix a damn thing. It might even make it worst.
Fix that part first.
The incentives are completely upside down when one's entirely avoidable screwups are used as an excuse to ask for more money. That's how we get the current state of public education and, frankly, most levels of government in the United States: hideously expensive bureaucracies run by ignorant jerks for their own benefit.
Under what circumstances would you consider that public schools are a failure and that we should try another approach?
Technology is very esoteric and almost brand new in a sense. It's been as little as two decades since the advent of schools even having computers.
The fact there are misunderstandings, growing pains, and abuse associated with the system that results should be a foregone conclusion.
The answer isn't to give up on the school system or assume bad intentions by administrators, curriculum developers, or legislators. The only thing that can come of that is an even more broken school system.
Tragedy of the Commons and all that. Maybe it's best for society if we don't give up on the public school system, but for my kid, today, given the options I have, is sending them there the best option? Rarely is the answer yes.
However the families most harmed by public school policies are precisely the people who can't afford to unschool or homeschool which is perhaps the saddest part of all of this.
[edit]: spelling
http://www.pbs.org/parents/education/homeschooling/unschooli...
"Unschooling is a branch of homeschooling that promotes nonstructured, child-led learning. There’s no set curriculum or schedule."
If the kid gets into dinosaurs, a regular homeschooling parent might add a dinosaur module to the science/biology part of the curriculum. The unschooling parent might ask, "How would you like it if we took a trip to Utah, to visit an actual dig site?"
If the kid gets into robots, a regular homeschooling parent might add mechanical engineering and electronics to the curriculum. An unschooling parent might bring home a LEGO Mindstorms set and sign the kid up for the robot soccer league run by an adjunct from the local community college.
As I understand it, successful unschoolers rely rather heavily on a whole-family lifestyle commitment, to subtly discourage the kid from choosing to become the world's foremost expert on Minecraft, and learn nothing else. I would, at the least, be compelled to suggest that perhaps my kid should play all the computer games in my personal collection, in chronological order, starting with the Infocom library, progressing through the Sierra/Dynamix era, running through Black Isle and LucasArts titles, and ending with access to my Steam and GOG accounts. I could also hook up my old console systems.
Then I might, ever so subtly, suggest that an encyclopedic knowledge of video gaming, past and present, might be useful to a heavily-followed and well-monetized text or video blogger. Because I am certainly not going to unschool if it won't eventually get the kid out of my basement (and pantry).
Unschooling is a subset of homeschooling.
The rest of the post is rather accurate though, although I would say that with the robotics, the unschooling parent would probably take the kids to a local Radioshack (Or Maplin's, if you're in the UK!) and buy a book on electronics, along with a few bits and bobs (motors, etc), encourage the kid to experiment, and encourage them to join a local engineering group :D
buy a book on electronics, along with a few bits and bobs (motors, etc)
The point here though is that whether you call it Homeschooling or Unschooling it is still a labor intensive process that will likely require sacrifice on the part of the parents. Sacrifices that many times a lower income family can not afford to make.
> Almost all of the respondents, in various ways, wrote about the freedom and independence that unschooling gave them and the time it gave them to discover and pursue their own interests. Seventy percent of them also said, in one way or another, that the experience enabled them to develop as highly self-motivated, self-directed individuals. Many also wrote about the learning opportunities that would not have been available if they had been in school, about their relatively seamless transition to adult life, and about the healthier (age-mixed) social life they experienced out of school contrasted with what they would have experienced in school.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201406/su...
Sure those are not the super fancy private schools, but they will always be out of reach of anything but the very rich.
http://edition.cnn.com/2014/03/04/us/ohio-boy-suspended-fing...
"Yup. That’s who I thought it was."
Almost certainly not known to him before this incident.
http://www.dallasnews.com/news/community-news/northwest-dall...
Conveniently, you ignored the facts and in doing so implicitly mischaractered me as equally lacking in factual basis for my "narrative", which, of course, is absurdly wrong, since my first word, "Exactly" presupposes the parents' citations.
The mystical real issue for which no other explanation is offered is like a textbook example of a political narrative.
Based on the facts in the OP and parent comment, I was disassembling the race-baiting rhetoric as anti-intellectual and fact-less (which, since you missed it, is itself a fact), to refocus on the original issue.
Meanwhile, double-ironically, you again ignore context and facts, equivocate ("real issue"), and wildly mischaracterize me to make an increasingly invalid point based on a fundamental misunderstanding of my comment.
Which exactly is my false conclusion? Weren't you referring to the real issue? Doesn't the determiner in that mean that there is a only a single such thing? Did you offer any basis for the assumption that it was indeed the single real issue? Those are the assumptions of my conclusion.
It's fair if you wrote "the real issue" and actually meant something else, in which case my conclusion would indeed be invalid, but not writing in clear terms hardly puts you in a position to accuse me of equivocation.
Again, for clarity, I am asserting that the original article focuses on student mistreatment and not race, TechCrunch subverts it, and the parent comment refocuses on it. In other words, the "real issue" was pre-established as the context for and precedes my comment. All my comment served to do, was concisely articulate the issue of the preceding contexts, which is self-evident when reworded to be less generic, "Use of institutional force by the police and school officials to suppress or punish divergent student behavior."
I doubt you could concisely articulate anything if your preceding contexts depended upon it.
Umm.... My "preceding contexts depended upon it"? First, as stated, the preceding contexts were not mine. Second, concisely articulating someone else's stance or summary, or a current context, while not easy, is trivially simple.
Here's an example: Contents of Moby Dick => "A whale fishing allegory about the idolization of man's desires and its limitations."
You might want to ignore race [...]
police made repeated mention of his surname.
Now given you are getting all high and mighty bandying around terms like defamation, you going to go calling him a liar?
EDIT 2: Looks like my Edit window timed out. I meant to also update this line as follows:
Neither the original DallasNews article nor the TechCrunch article
makes any such assertion about the officer's use of his surname.
EDIT 3: One last time for clarity, the kid felt his name to be relevant (which still does not mean his name was in fact relevant), but did not assert that the "police made repeated mention of his surname", which, apart from the mischaracterizations, was specifically what I was refuting.
I could have done better however, so in that spirit, here's First Dog on the Moon's take on the event - http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/picture/2015/sep/18...
Not surprisingly, consistent with your weak intellectual arguments and preceding dishonesty, your comic forwards bigotry and ignorance while ignoring every meaningfully accurate portrayal of the truth.
You're a mouthpiece for hatred and ignorance.
My point being, comparing what this kid is going through -- pure racist overreaction -- to a teacher installing seti@home on school computers without permission, isn't a great comparison.
From a previous news article I've read (not linked) - he claimed the previous system administrator told him to do it and he continued following their instructions. Again this has to have some other side to it - because if someone told me to do that and I googled what it was I would definitely question it and bring it to the administration and let them decide what to do (which some reports claim he had permission from previous administration). Originally they reported firing him because of running seti@home - but then they changed their story quickly afterwards.
> My point being, comparing what this kid is going through -- pure racist overreaction -- to a teacher installing seti@home on school computers without permission, isn't a great comparison.
It's a great compare because it shows how out of touch with reality school administration is. Yeah it's two completely different cases - but if common sense was introduced to both then we wouldn't be here discussing it. And this wasn't a teacher - it was a system administrator that was running it for several years. I find it hard to believe that if it truly was using that much more electricity that someone who does the budget for the school didn't catch it right away.
How the fuck are the accoutants supposed to connect "big increases in electricity use" with "unauthorised installation of software on 5,000 school computers"?
Use common sense and ask people? Unless the school is doing something that requires that much electricity - it's probably reasonable to assume that it's the 5000+ devices that consume 300-1kw/hr of electricity.
Unfortunately this is not a lack of intelligence, which in fact it was, but instead it is a Christian right society that fears everything and anything.
The USA has become a country that is now scared of it's own shadow.
The problem started when someone with a Muslim sounding name brought something clicking to the school and naturally everyone though it was Muslim terrorist with a bomb.
Luckily it was not a bunch disenfranchised white youths, carrying hand guns, machine guns and grenades as they would have walked straight through the security check, because they had the correct skin color.
Here is a simple lesson for the people of the USA. Clocks don't kill guns kill.
- A teacher confiscates Linux CDs claiming that the student was essentially distributing illegal copyrighted software - because no software is free [1]
- A system administrator was fired for installing/running seti@home on school computers. There is a lot of controversy about this case - but I read one news article (that I can't find right now) where the administration said they would have been ok with cancer research folding@home rather than searching for aliens with seti@home. This combined with the backpedaling of "oh actually he was a bad employee, stole things, and cost the school millions in extra in electricity costs!" makes me believe that they just wanted to use it as an excuse to fire him and make the position open for a friend/relative. [2].
- Or an honor roll student suspended for buying candy from another student [3]. His statuses were only restored after it caught media attention.
I would go into my rant about the education system but you should just watch this video [4]
[1] http://linuxlock.blogspot.com/2008/12/linux-stop-holding-our...
[2] https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/forum_thread.php?id=5169
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20080313141623/http://edition.cn...
[4] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U