According to this article, Toyota has decided to open a factory in Ontario, Canada despite being offered millions of dollars in subsidies from a number of US states. Toyota claims that increased training costs offset the value of subsidies. However, at least one person decided to be more forthright:
[Gerry Fedchun, president of the Automotive Parts Manufacturers' Association,] said Nissan and Honda have encountered difficulties getting new plants up to full production in recent years in Mississippi and Alabama due to an untrained - and often illiterate - workforce. In Alabama, trainers had to use "pictorials" to teach some illiterate workers how to use high-tech plant equipment.
If you're one of the idiots who thinks you shouldn't have to pay school taxes because you don't have children, read that again. A few times. Or maybe I should make "pictorials" for you to follow along.
Update: the title was meant tongue-in-cheek. I wasn't trying to imply that this is a red state/blue state issue, but that's clearly how it came across. Oops.
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Mississipi has the highest illiteracy rates in the country...including those who are in the pubic school system. It is so bad that the Republican administration placed an income tax on the ballot last year so they could acually fund the public schools at a rate close to the national average....and it was handedly voted down....so they had to cut public education again significantly last year.
Most of my public school experience took place in California, about as Democrat a state as you're likely to find. California is the bogeyman for Republican presidential candidates and the 900-lb. gorilla of Democrat political interests in Washington, DC. I could easily have gone through all that so-called "education" without learning to read, and I was even in school during some of California's periods of greatest funding for public education. I'm mostly self-educated, truth be told, because I read a lot and wasn't content to just "get by" in school. I even managed to get crappy grades a lot of the time and still know at least 98% of the material in class before it was presented or assigned simply because I was interested in learning and my parents valued education regardless of whether public school provided it.
My experience is that public school funding has very little to do with the causes of education quality. I suspect that the main reason high rates of public education funding tend to occur in states with high literacy rates is that high literacy rates tend to occur in areas where the populace values education, and (mostly erroneously) thinks well-funded public education will somehow ensure greater learning in the population. I think this mistaken impression is part of the reason for declining comparative US education quality in relation to other industrialized countries: people place their faith in money thrown at institutions of public education, and ignore the truly important factors, such as fostering a love of, or at least value for, learning in children. That's something that can only be accomplished at home. This is why homeschooled children that come from families where learning is actually valued (and where "homeschooling" isn't taken as an excuse for "extra farm hand") tend to score far better on standardized tests.
If you really want to use "public" funding to increase literacy rates, you'd be better off spending it on influencing popular marketing meant to influence the minds of the credulous public so that they more greatly value education, rather than giving the same money to school boards who will disburse it amongst the administrative staff of schools and spend it on football field upkeep.
But there is a big differece from spending 12K a year per student, funding a full school year of 180 days, buying computers and decent textbooks, and having a student to teacher ratio of 25 to one compared to spending 6K a year per student, cutting the school days down to 160, not having computers accessible, having textbooks from the 1970's and having a 40 to one student to teacher ratio.
Big difference.
It's also possible that it doesn't.
After all, for 3k per year, you could attend a decent community college and, with the leftover 3k, buy a car and still have money for textbooks. I haven't looked into the cost of sending a child to a private pre-college school, but if it's necessarily more than 6k, I'd guess that a lot of that is the fault of market conditions produced by governmental regulations that, coincidentally, allow the quality of schooling you'd find in those 6k/yr public schools you denigrate. Meanwhile, homeschooling is even cheaper, if you've got a parent or other relative who's staying home anyway and is capable of providing education outside the classroom.
That's not even taking into account lower cost of living in those areas, and how that affects how far each dollar goes in providing an education. When I moved from California to Florida (and I wasn't even living in LA, San Diego, or San Francisco — I was in Riverside of all places), each dollar I made was suddenly getting me almost twice as far. Much of that is the fault of a number of factors, to include reduced taxes on almost everything. While it's true that government agencies don't usually have to pay taxes, the companies with whom government agencies do business when they contract for construction, purchase materials, and so on are still paying taxes, and those expenses get passed on to the customer. I can only imagine how much lower the cost of living is in a place like Mississippi, where tax collectors still occasionally disappear when they go try to collect from people living in the back country.
Yes, reduced expense might have an effect on education. It may not be the effect you expect, however. In my case, I'm sure part of the effect would involve more ease of homeschooling, which I'd probably prefer anyway. I certainly don't recall anyone that attended twelve years of public education declaring that it was responsible for teaching them critical thinking tasks and a love of learning. At best, public school seems to provide an apparently convenient daycare service and an education in dealing with bureaucracy and schoolyard justice — which is all too common outside the schoolyard, as well, and thus kind of a valuable lesson at times.
False analogy. Community colleges are also heavily subsidized by the state.
And here's an amusing story: I was in Anchorage a few years ago in a meeting with, amongst other people, Shirley Holloway, the Alaska Education Commissioner. She was explaining the source of many of Alaska's education woes. A number of years prior to our meeting, the Alaskan government decided they were spending too much money on education. So what did they do? They offered early retirement to their highest paid teachers in a cost-cutting effort. The result? Test scores plummeted.
As it turns out, the highest paid teachers were also the most experienced teachers. By insisting on those idiotic standardized tests and getting rid of their best teachers, Alaska saved a ton of money and screwed their students. It was so bad that the legislature was considering letting those teachers come back and keep their retirement.
The moral of this sad little tail? Having studied pedagogy (if only briefly), worked directly with educators and seen how badly well-intentioned people can screw up the system, I can only say that I am terribly suspicious of education "reform" proposed by those with no experience involved with teaching.
Standardized tests have led to teaching how to take tests and not how to learn. Tying teacher salaries to student performance has done a great job of penalizing special ed teachers (who often have a much harder job.) Voucher programs have led to private schools taking good students (because they need to compete and show that their students have higher GPAs) and leave the students who really need help stuck in an already underfunded school system. We also have problems with many textbooks now having factual errors in science, history, and a number of other areas. However, those errors are unlikely to be corrected for a number of reasons (not the least of which is elected school board officials sometimes following a religious agenda which does not serve the student's interests.)
That's a fair point. Then again, vouchers for private school would be an improvement over public schooling, and I'm pretty sure it would result in reduced tax rates to support it.
"They offered early retirement to their highest paid teachers in a cost-cutting effort."
That's asinine, and one of the reasons I'm distrustful of public education: when there's a choice between paying for less administrative overhead and paying for less teacher quality, they'll choose to cut teacher quality every time.
"Standardized tests have led to teaching how to take tests and not how to learn."
Anyone with an even rudimentary understanding of economics should have been able to predict that result, and in fact I (along with many I know, including teachers) did indeed predict that result when standardized testing became de riguer in recent years.
"Voucher programs have led to private schools taking good students (because they need to compete and show that their students have higher GPAs) and leave the students who really need help stuck in an already underfunded school system."
You can blame that on the facts that a broken public education system is there as the catch-all for kids that don't get into private schools and that governmental regulation of private schools produces education metrics that don't measure quality of education.
"We also have problems with many textbooks now having factual errors in science, history, and a number of other areas. However, those errors are unlikely to be corrected for a number of reasons (not the least of which is elected school board officials sometimes following a religious agenda which does not serve the student's interests.)"
I agree, absolutely, with the substance of that. Public school boards never cease to amaze and annoy me.
Oops. I was too vague about that. It was the Alaska legislature who came up with the early retirement plan, not the schools.
If you really don't want to learn, you won't learn. Whether the textbook in front of you is brand new or thirty years old makes no difference if you're unwilling to open it.
But what you've not said is what you think the issues with education really are. Go out and do some reading on this topic. You'll find repeatedly that there's a strong correlation between lower funding of education and poorer education levels. Now if you think there's something other than better funding which is going to improve out-of-date textbooks, over-crowded classrooms, underpaid and overworked teachers and lack of decent school supplies, I'm all ears.
I'd like to hear you lay out succinctly what you think the problem with education really is and what you think needs to be done to fix it.
Ultimately, what's needed is a system with inbuilt, natural motivators for putting money and effort in the right places, not more money heaped in the bureaucrats' laps to distribute as they see fit. You complain about textbooks, crowding, and underpaid teachers, and neglect to pay attention to well-funded football programs, motivation to cram students into classes to increase headcounts for next year's funding, and absurdly high administrator salaries. These things don't get fixed by throwing more money at them: they get fixed by fixing how money is raised and distributed. I've got a hint for how not to fix that, too. Don't shuffle bureaucrats around like deck chairs on the Titanic.
Ultimately, what's needed is a system with inbuilt, natural motivators for putting money and effort in the right places, not more money heaped in the bureaucrats' laps to distribute as they see fit.
No offense, but that's rhetoric, not an answer.
I have no idea how much money is spent on those, so I can't comment. What percentage of school funds do they absorb? What benefits are known to be associated with them? What do we give up as a result?
I have no idea what you're talking about. Are you suggesting that schools are somehow conjuring up students from nowhere?
Where do we want to target our money? On those areas where they will have the greatest effect. Administrator salaries are often targeted by people who fail to realize that these are relatively small percentages of the funding and many of those administrators are being paid salaries comparable to CEO's of small corporations. Of course, that's a good thing because we've had enough brain drain to the private sector and their work is often comparable to that of a CEO, but they have to understand pedagogy in addition to business.
However, let's say that you have your way and hack and slash administrator salaries everywhere. So what? They are usually such a small percentage of overall school spending that there's no significant effect to the budget. So now you've pissed off the people who know the schools the best and you've gained very little for it. If you want best results, target those areas that are known to give the most bang for the buck: adequate school supplies and smaller classroom sizes. Anyone who's studied Economics 101 should know that resources should first be focused on those areas likely to result in the greatest benefit.
No offense, but you're asking the wrong person, then. I'm not the Education Czar (or whatever Bush calls it this week) with the whole statistics-reporting machinery of the government at my disposal, dozens of expert advisory committees, and the power to redirect funding for research into the issue as needed. If you want more than general principles of action, you need to be in Washington DC talking to the people who pretend to know it all. I don't have the five year plan.
"I have no idea how much money is spent on [football programs], so I can't comment. What percentage of school funds do they absorb? What benefits are known to be associated with them? What do we give up as a result?"
I can't answer that on the average, as I haven't really researched it, but at schools I've attended and those against whom they've competed the money blown on team sports tends to grow dramatically between about sixth grade and twelfth, with high school senior class expenditures and infrastructure taking up somewhere between twenty and forty percent of the entire friggin' budget for the school. I actually got a glance at sports expenditures for my high school one year (I ended up in some odd places while working on the yearbook staff) and noticed that varsity football alone was getting thirty percent of operational funds. Other ideas of how much has been spent is more second-hand impressions I got from casual conversation with people who'd know, such as a physics teacher who moved from another school to ours because of a budget dispute.
" I have no idea what you're talking about. Are you suggesting that schools are somehow conjuring up students from nowhere?"
Of course not. Are you trying to create straw men to knock down? I find it difficult to believe you actually think that's what I meant.
I'm suggesting that while teachers keep fighting for smaller class sizes (usually: some of them are on a per capita pay scale and end up conflicted at best), administrators tend to fight for larger class sizes except when it's politically expedient for them to be seen doing otherwise.
"Administrator salaries are often targeted by people who fail to realize that these are relatively small percentages of the funding and many of those administrators are being paid salaries comparable to CEO's of small corporations."
Nice. Somehow, it escapes you that all that money is being allocated to the people in the best position to influence allocation, and that teachers are still disturbingly underpaid in those same schools. Wouldn't you think that the teachers should have first shot at being paid what they're worth or, at least, that they should be paid a percentage of what they're worth roughly equal to the what percentage of their worth the administrators are paid? Instead, we end up with administrators getting about 110% or 120% of what they're worth (compare school administrator credentials to those of well-regarded CEOs of small corporations, some time, then give me that pay comparison again), while teachers are getting paid about 30% to 60% of what they should, or get "early retirement" like in Alaska. Is it any wonder we can only get sucky teachers if we're only going to give the good money to the administrators?
"let's say that you have your way and hack and slash administrator salaries everywhere."
There's a notable difference between "hack[ing] and slash[ing] administrator salaries everywhere" and simply shaving enough off the top so that, along with other cutbacks (such as frivolous "extracurricular activity" nonsense like the next of fifteen school dances this year and getting a "modern" scoreboard in the football field), some money can be spared for teachers' salaries and those much-lamented textbooks. Besides, even if you pulled that off, it doesn't solve the underlying problem: the current funding model is broken, and that's why we end up with a skewed school budget in the first place.
"Anyone who's studied Economics 101 should know that" failing to recognize when a resource distribution model favors corruption it's not going to work out for your idealistic expectations, and needs to be replaced.
The first step I would take would be to fix the "minimum rate" loophole. 2/3rds of large Oregon corporations only pay $10 a year in taxes (the lowest minimum rate in the country). That's because of a state minimum we set a long time ago. If we raised that to only $500 (remember, we're talking large corporations. $500 is a joke for most of them), it's estimated that we would receive an additional $45 million in state revenue (hell, I'd make the minimum tax relative to the gross revenues of the industry. Why Nike should pay $10 dollars in taxes is beyond me.) In fact, if handled properly, this loophole alone could eliminate many of the funding issues for schools.
Next, I would increase cigarette taxes significantly and have the extra revenue plowed into health care and also have a slight increase in gas taxes and have that money put back into mass transit. This won't directly impact school funding, but it will take pressure off of the general fund.
Schools would be mandated to provide healthier diets. If students want caffeine, sugar, and fat-filled snacks, they can bring them from home. Lunches would last at least an hour and teachers would eat with the students. One school in Wisconsin is famous for how such a plan has benefitted students. Of course, the positive effects a healthy diet has on education has long been known. It's a shame we keep ignoring it.
Most mandatory tests would be eliminated (except for the one's that the Feds have foisted off on us.) Those merely encourage schools to teach students how to take the tests. Also, teachers are now fighting like mad to not teach the grades where those tests are required.
Advertising campaigns to get parents more involved would be a huge priority (parents can't see how bad it is unless they show up for their damned PTA meetings.)
For Multnomah county specifically, I would close the loophole where police and fireman can be put on disability and still collect their disability while working full time at other jobs. Our county loses millions to that, but no one seems to want to touch it.
Also, though it would never happen, I would cheerfully say "fuck the feds" and legalize marijuana and other soft drugs and tax them like any other product. We would increase revenue tremendously, possibly lead to a tourist boom and would also have significantly lower prison costs ... all of which could turn into a windfall for schools.
With the extra revenue, I would hire more teachers in lieu of raising salaries.
Yeah, there's more that needs to be done, but that's where I would start if I could.
For the immediate future, I could see jacking up minimum taxes on corporations — especially since as I see it the entire corpus (ha ha) of corporate law is sort of a crime against humanity. Balance that a bit by giving local sole proprietorships a minimum of, say, $1 to stimulate the economy in Oregon, and you may have a winner for part of a ten-year funding stopgap.
I really do have issues with cigarette taxes like that. I mean, really — what's the justification for that? You're applying punitive taxes to something already more highly taxed than almost anything else of comparable market characteristics, and it seems you're taking an "ends justify the means" approach, figuring that since you don't smoke or like smoking it's okay to punish those who do. I'm going to leave healthcare and mass transit alone for now, because that's a far more complex couple of issues than I want to get into right now.
Rather than mandating that schools provide healthier diets, I've gotta wonder why it's the school's job to feed kids at all. If there's going to be food sold, it should be in a manner that makes money for the school, rather than losing it money. The purpose of the school is education, not babysitting. It's in large part the fact that it becomes a de facto babysitter that impels some parents to stop regarding it as valuable aside from the convenience it provides them, or at least that's my wild, unsupported guess. Then again, if the government's going to pay for everything else, I guess a tray of unpalatable "healthy" food isn't too far off the mark from that.
The mandatory tests thing needs to go out with the bathwater, definitely. I'm with you 100% on that. It's asinine, and a bad idea from top to bottom.
Advertising campaigns for something like this sound like a good idea, but I suspect they wouldn't have as significant effect as you might hope if they're run by the government. The AdCouncil is very hit and miss, but as long as they focus on the value of (intellectual) education in any form, whether it be homeschooling, public schooling, private schools, or long lazy summer days in the library or bookstore, I'd be all for seeing them spend some of their largely wasted dough on education ads targeting both parents and students rather than on some of the politically charged crap they try to pass off as public service messages.
I agree 100% on the subject of disability while working full-time jobs, too. I'm also with you on legalizing "soft" drugs.
That's my general take on each major point, I think.
they bad company.....not like us. Must be commies.....
We good cuntry....they bad cuntry. Me pay plenty taxes...they only traters.
I mean, I'm happy for the workers in Ontario and all, but to state that the main reason was because you couldn't find enough workers who are LITERATE? Hell, I get bent out of shape if grammar, spelling, and diction aren't employed correctly.
Scary.
Maybe some people are pissed off about paying taxes for a school system that is still turning out illiterate kids.
And, hey, at least they didn't set up the factory in a 3rd world nation full of starving people.
I have tons of experience in my field and there's no way I would be a teacher. Why? The pay is atrocious. Those who have the most experience in their respective fields simply aren't terribly interested in the pay cut. Yes, there are exceptions, but not enough of them. So if you have any ideas about attracting qualified teachers on current teacher's salaries, I'd love to hear 'em :)
It's a basic tenet of economics that public goods are going to be underfunded. Education is a classic example. When I was working with the Alaskan educators, I listened to many budget horror stories. Off the top of my head, here are a few common issues:
So, off the top of my head, many of the most serious problems that we face seem to come down to issues that are directly tied to budgetary constraints. Our students deserve modern, accurate text books. Our teachers who work long hours for low pay shouldn't be paying for school supplies out of their pockets. Students shouldn't be fed crap for lunch, either, but that's what they often get.
This is the reality of many of our public schools. And it's not just Alaska. I've worked with a number of Oregon educators and heard similar stories here and a good friend is a teacher in Texas and they face similar woes. This is a subject I've been keenly interested in for a long time and frankly, very few people have much knowledge (or interest) about this area. It's depressing.
Frankly, I'm convinced that both Democrats and Republicans are full of it when it comes to education, and should be replaced by economists.