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"You spent your school years with teachers paid less and less, trained worse and worse, loaded up with more and more mindless administrative duties, and given less and less real support from administrators and staff."

What evidence does he provide that the decline in quality of education is due to lower budgets? As technology improves we should expect costs to decline. We should expect higher quality for less cost! When this fails to happen it usually because of artificially erected barriers to entry in an attempt to capture rent for a select few. And just who are loading up teachers "with more and more mindless administrative duties"? Taxpayers? Who benefits when it is increasing difficult to acquire the "skills" necessary to become a new teacher?

He doesn't really provide any unique insight besides blaming all of society's ills on tax cuts. Food has gotten cheaper, electronics have gotten cheaper, why has our government gotten more expensive!?

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As technology improves we should expect costs to decline.

Only if you assume labour isn't the prime mover. Assuming that technology improvements help education at all (I'm skeptical -- I learned more about logarithms in math by using an abacus than I did using a calculator), we would ideally want education quality to increase, not decrease. Therefore, we should probably assume costs will stay approximately the same percentage over the years.

One thing I've been thinking about lately is education as related to teacher salaries. In general teacher salaries are pretty poor, but they've always been pretty crappy. However, the civil rights movement has had a big impact since the 50's and there's a big difference. Teaching was and is a female dominated profession -- what's interesting are the opportunities for women since the civil rights act. Now, instead of teaching, the brightest women are more likely to hold more prestigious, higher paying jobs that were previously reserved for white men. In effect, it's as though we were placing a restriction on women that said "If you're smart you can work -- but you can only work as a teacher." I'm not sure how much of a difference this makes, but it seems like it could make quite a bit.

It seems like it would be testable, at least: where do today's teachers stand vis-a-vis their non-teacher classmates? Where did they stand 50 years ago?

A very good idea. I'm not sure those statistics exist at the moment.

In general teacher salaries are pretty poor,...

Yes, but they get great fringe benefits (early retirement, defined benefit pensions) and easy hours. The salaries aren't even that bad if you multiply by (12 months of pay / 9-10 months of work). The underpaid teacher is a myth.

http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf

http://web.missouri.edu/~podgurskym/articles/files/fringe_be...

I guess, but in that case a fringe benefit of my job is that I don't have to deal with shitty kids. ;)

well for what its worth, a lot of studies suggest that you actually get better teachers if you exchange these "fringe benefits" for higher salaries.

Year-round school also appears to have positive educational effects. (Not that the Unions would care.)

[citation wanted]

Not to be wikipedia-style passive aggressive, I'm just genuinely curious and unfamiliar with these studies.

no direct sources off the top of my head but http://fora.tv/2009/07/05/Transforming_the_System_An_Intervi... is a good start

"The salaries aren't even that bad if you multiply by (12 months of pay / 9-10 months of work)."

Huh, I never thought of that, but you're right. If we just pretend that we pay teachers more than we do, they have great salaries.

Salary is time traded for money. Teachers trade 10 months for a certain amount of money, while most other professionals trade 12 months for a greater amount of money. The calculation I propose accounts for this.

You think that teachers have easy hours? Have you ever known any teachers?

When you just look at hours in the classroom it doesn't look that hard. But add in the time for grading and preparing classes, and you find that teachers work long hours.

I don't have any statistics on it, but http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_hours_per_week_do_teacher... is in line with the anecdotes that my mother and sister have given me about how much work teaching is.

I've been a teacher. Teaching sucks.

The hours in the classroom are the hard part. You have to be on your feet actually interacting with kids who don't want to be there for 6-7 hours a day. God help you if you are teaching them something they instinctively hate, like math. The grading and prep is time consuming but not a big deal, you can just do it at home while doing something else. It's low prestige, and the pay is lousy. The pay becomes tolerable if you can stand doing it for 15 years while paying for bogus master's degree classes during the summers. I decided to abandon my bleeding heart and go back to graduate school in computer science. Note: if you want to get paid more off the bat, the trick is to get a master's degree right away and become a special-ed teacher.

In contrast, at almost every programming job I've had there were weeks where I spent 6-7 hours a day doing fuck-all, going to meetings, reading websites, chatting with friends and checking in 10 lines of code and updating the ticket tracker. For this service to humanity I get paid 4 times as much as I did educating the nation's youth.

I've known a few teachers and I used to be a professor myself [1]. Prep takes up very little time after you've already taught a class.

But I'll certainly take your 2 secondhand anecdotes and some random internet guy over a scientific survey done by the BLS.

Incidentally, your random internet guy is pretty obviously exaggerating. He claims 30 min putting grades into the computer. If he has 40 students in his class, then it takes him 45 seconds to type one number into a spreadsheet! (Entering grades took me 3-4 minutes back when I had students.)

[1] Postdoc, actually. A moot distinction for the purposes of this conversation, but I'm not into self aggrandizement.

I've known a few teachers and I used to be a professor myself [1]. Prep takes up very little time after you've already taught a class.

I'll echo this: I'm a grad student in English lit and entering my third year. I've taught Engl 101, 102, and 109 (the honor version); the first year I taught, I spent a lot of time in preparation, thinking about activities, and so on. My second year, somewhat less. Ditto for this year.

That isn't to say I'm not changing things from year to year, because I am, but the big hurdle is at the beginning.

The differences between teaching secondary school and higher education are like night and day. I say this as someone who was definitely a little shit in middle school.

Teachers are only paid for days they work. But school districts are allowed to take that pay and stretch it out over a year.

Not sure why you are multiplying their pay.

Also, I don't know a single teacher who only works their contracted hours each day. My wife works 10 hour days as a teacher, spends unpaid days cleaning her classroom after the school year ends and unpaid days preparing her classroom for the new school year.

Not sure why you are multiplying their pay.

Bakery A charges $9 for 9 muffins. Bakery B charges $12 for 12 muffins. Which bakery is more expensive?

"As technology improves, we should expect higher quality teachers for less cost" --- if and only if we know how to use technology to increase instruction quality. I contend that we have almost no idea about that.

He is right to blame all of California's ills on tax cuts. They and Oregon have had the worst abuses of the proposition system of all the states. Both used to be prosperous with balanced budgets, but had sneaky time-bomb anti-tax measures voted in, which prevented them from raising revenues even as home prices went up (which should increase the amount of tax owed on a property, but didn't) and inflation made existing fixed dollar amounts worth less and less.

The example I know best is Oregon, where a guy named Bill Sizemore (currently indicted for tax evasion) organized and ran a successful campaign for a measure that required a super-majority of registered voters to vote yes in order to pass any tax increase in a non-presidential election year. Thus, not going to the polls counts as a "no" rather than a "I don't care". Another Oregon measure required that the taxed value of a property could rise by no more than 3% per year. Thus, when I owned a house in Oregon, I was only taxed on two thirds of its value (this is slightly pre-bubble, too - now it is much worse!).

Anyhow, lots of this sneaky stuff has led to the states being almost totally broke, and their respective education systems, which were once the best in the nation, are now circling the bowl. Higher ed is holding up better than K-12.

What tax cuts are you talking about? My California state income tax bill (or sales tax) certainly hasn't gone down in recent years. You might be right, but your comment is seeded with anecdotal examples that seem politically partisan ("sneaky?"). "I know a guy who" isn't the best way to prove a point. Instead, numbers showing tax revenue and spending would help illustrate how the financial ills are caused by lower taxes, instead of spending problems.

> What tax cuts are you talking about?

Property taxes.

Property taxes. Income tax and sales tax has had to rise in response. Unless the income tax rate is highly progressive, the net effect is a more regressive tax system.

What evidence does he provide that the decline in quality of education is due to lower budgets?

Academic positions, like any other job, operate within a competitive labor market. Lower budgets mean less money to attract top talent. Cheaper iMacs can't change that.

Certainly. But technology can reduce the amount of labor used. For example, better OCR means typists can do something more valuable. There hasn't been much experimentation in teaching such as using video instructions and that is in part because of a lack of competition. Normally we would expect the marginal productivity of labor to increase with technology level.

> There hasn't been much experimentation in teaching such as using video instructions and that is in part because of a lack of competition.

Higher education does have competition (thousands of universities, both public and private), but technology hasn't brought the costs down there either.

We have no way to control for all of the variables. There are so many factors to why education costs are so inflated, the relative effect of technology on the cost is impossible to determine.

Teaching is a weird beast. Computational techniques have improved, but we haven't improved educational techniques much beyond "smaller class sizes" and "online lectures."

We can talk freely about the academic labor market, but it's hard to pin down what that labor market produces.

Smaller class sizes weren't an anomaly, larger class sizes were. Going through school the sizes increased from 18, then 20, then 30 when I graduated. My brother (2 years behind me) was at 35 and in demand classes (Math, English, and ESOL) were pushing 40.

It doesn't matter how much technology you through at the problem, teaching 40 kids is unsustainable. Teachers burn out, students lose focus, and it only takes 1 bad student to ruin class cohesion.

"As technology improves we should expect costs to decline. We should expect higher quality for less cost! "

Because teachers are technology...?

Also, fun fact here, being "loaded up with more and more mindless administrative duties, and given less and less real support from administrators and staff" is partially due to those lower budgets.

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