The $1-a-week school | Hacker News Reader

The $1-a-week school

economist.com

47 pointsjimsojim9 comments

I can't really picture a system where 20% of teacher are absent on any given day... and since I can't picture it I feel like I'm not really getting the whole picture. The article just gives a single paragraph to blame the unions and doesn't really dive into the issue. So I looked into it:

http://r4d.dfid.gov.uk/pdf/outputs/systematicreviews/Q39Teac...

The primary reasons for absenteeism seem to be personal/family health (which, granted, that could be bullshit if it was self-reported) and work related requirements (training, etc.)

Several studies showed correlation between poverty and absenteeism, which suggests to me that teachers who have less financial resources to deal with personal issues are going to miss work more often to go deal with those issues.

It was also noted that administrators were absent more often than teachers and the author suggested this as being a factor in teacher absenteeism.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-28684751

http://qz.com/247389/teachers-who-dont-show-up-to-work-cost-...

It's a pretty complex issue to address - clearly if you're working another job to survive (eg farming your own land) then you may need to take time off for harvests and such. If you're in a rural location and your children are sick you may need to take days of to take them to a clinic, etc..

The first question I'd ask, I think, is do the teachers have enough money to pay for all the needs of their families. If you can't attend school for all lessons and survive then there's little benefit in assessing other enticements.

I regret I accidentally upvoted you when I meant to downvote, please excuse the Sony fat fingers. (Don't buy unless it's Nexus or iPhone, kids.)

Your background assumption outside the first world should be that most people are trying to cheat you, most of the time. If this wasn't true the country would already be at least middle income, absent massive fuck ups, (communism included) or recent wars. If you doubt me I invite you to move to the richest city in any poor country.

All that said education isn't as wonderful as one might naively think. Kerala in South India is anomalously well educated compared to its neighbours but about as poor. The main thing motivating their teachers to show up compared to their neighbours is that Keralan parents beat up teachers who don't at least show up for work.

Presumably you mean the reverse (meant to upvote); the GP post seems pretty good.

If you have a monopoly, you charge excess rents and stop innovating. People accept this easily as a fact of private enterprise, which is why we have the state intervene to break monopolies.

Why people can't take this obvious fact and apply it to state-mandated monopolies, like education, is perplexing. There should not be 1 provider of education. We need competition and innovation in education.

State education doesn't have to be bad. It's not like they are granting a monopoly to a private company. Finland for example "ranked sixth in math, second in science and third in reading. By comparison, U.S. students ranked 30th, 23rd and 17th, respectively, of the 65 tested countries/economies."

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/january/finnish-schools-r...

Teachers unions are an artifact of a system modeled on the way things work in wealthy nations where there are a surplus of qualified teachers...e.g. the US where states have factory scale colleges of education in order to churn out new teachers and thereby suppress wages (and historically to provide respectable jobs for women from "respectable" social backgrounds).

It's a model where schoolmasters have Doctorates of Education; local government administrations tend to be relatively less corrupt; the overall cultural identity relatively free from hereditary entitlement; and with a historical ideal of universal franchise.

The idea that education can be provided for $100 per pupil per year doesn't fit the model, and the skew is in economic assumptions in general.

If you want a good book on the subject, check out the Beautiful Tree - http://www.amazon.com/The-Beautiful-Tree-Educating-Themsleve...

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