Why do people insist on thinking there's a shortage of people who could teach various subjects? Even with government licensing requirements that do little to actually improve teacher quality, there is a surplus for some teaching positions. Of course, there is a shortage of teachers for actual hard subjects, but districts can't pay more by subject taught. So in part, I'd be perfectly happy with more pay for math teacher for instance. Unfortunately, understanding math also lets you realize how ridiculous it is to pay a 4th grade teacher the same as an AP calculus teacher, given the surplus of applicants for one and a dearth of applicants for the other.
Rating teachers based on student test scores, with all it's flaws, is still more effective at measuring teacher quality than going by years of service, degree held, and other continuing education. Teaching just to the test is a feature of bad teachers, regardless. Good teachers cover the subject matter, of which the tested material just happens to be part, meaning that if they do their job test scores will be fine anyways.
There is a surplus of applicants for teaching positions in my area. There would be even more, but the unions have done a great job piling teacher certifications requirements on by influencing the state legislature and otherwise protecting their current members from competition. Schools can be selective in new hires, but most of their criteria are set in cooperation with the union, and current tenured teachers are nearly immune to this competition. Burnt out teachers that the district can't easily get rid of are common
The cost of one starting teacher for one year can get you 2 mobile labs that last 4-5 years. It's still a better return on investment in many cases, barring incompetent IT or unsually bad luck with hardware. I personally prefer static labs, but some schools just don't have the space to spare.
Is your friend's problem a lack of annual pay or a lack of budgeting skills? Without knowing where you live I can't comment on your friend's income, but the district in my home town pays teachers quite well. Judging by some other responses, it's not the only one.
As far as good teachers go, the teacher's unions are really big on paying more for credentials, which is just a worse form of merit pay than all the other merit pay proposals they do their best to squash. Highly educated idiots just aren't that rare, so paying more just for having a master's degree doesn't mean paying more for good teachers. A good teacher is worth quite a bit, but the union doesn't want districts to identify and reward good teachers, because it would exclude a large section of their base from extra funds.
There was nothing the least bit threatening there. His statement indicated that ducking and assessing is more likely to keep him alive than running would. You may disagree, but it's not a threat.
Hansen is prominent, and respected among other catastrophic anthopogenic global warming believers, but he has done things like suggest energy company CEOs be tried for crimes against humanity. His personality alone has likely pushed a lot of people into being more skeptical than they would otherwise be, because he's one of the most visible alarmists.
Hansen has called for CEO's of energy companies to be tried for high crimes against humanity, so he's not exactly a model of restraint. But, granted, that does require working within the system instead of engaging in terrorist acts. However, the post you are responding to did not say such things are necessary, only that such methods would have an immediate measurable effect on it.
He did attempt to claim that failure to act in that fashion proves that there aren't many truly fanatical true believers. He failed to deal with the possibility that AGW true believers might also believe strongly in things such as the rule of the law and would find the deaths caused by the breakdown of such to be even more outrageous than the effects of AGW. I don't think he made the precise excluded middle argument you are railing against, but it's still at least part of the problem with his post.
I wouldn't mind government officials with no external interests if they were content to sit around and do nothing. But they tend to want to be seen doing something, so they insist on finding things that aren't broken to fix. Otherwise their constituents might start wondering what they are being paid for. Having a secondary job indicates some sort of grounding in the real world instead of viewing everything in it as something to be managed.
Measuring the number of jobs handled is a poor idea for poor tech support and politicians, for the same reason. If they do their job right, they shouldn't be busy because most things are chugging along without intervention.
Is it federal funding when the federal government backs nominally privately offered student loans? By, for instance, not allowing most bankruptcies to include them? There are a lot of steps the federal government takes to relieve private banks of the risk that would otherwise be incurred. They turn nominally private loans into a lucrative rent system.
Courts, prisons, jails, etc are not a social effect, they are a government effect. A social effect would be, for instance, the human suffering of the individuals previously on the safety net. Paying a prison to hold people who end up choosing crime after their safety net is cut may be more expensive for any given individual... but only a subset of them would do so, so even on purely utilitarian grounds it may be cheaper overall. Since I'm a libertarian rather than an anarchist, I'm perfectly willing to claim that the bare minimum responsibilites of government are more legitimate than an expansive safety net.
Taxes are force. What gives you, or even the majority, the right to demand that I comply or move? That demand is itself backed up by force. I don't hate democracy in particular, I just recognize that majority support doesn't automatically mean something is moral. Democracy still is better at avoiding certain failure modes than other forms of government. If you separate the program from it's funding, I'm willing to concede that a government program can be beneficial in it's effects. But the taxes used to pay for it are not. You can't objectively subtract the cost of one from the benefit of the other, because the values are subjective. It's not just money on either the cost or benefit side. I personally subjectively value, as an example, limited unemployment benefits more than the cost of providing those benefits. But I recognize that the cost of providing those benefits is coercion, and I'd just as soon allow people the option to forgo both if they so choose.
Also, note the recent furor over someone actually trying to renounce their citizenship to avoid US taxes.
IIRC people with less than high school/GED trend liberal, HS to 4 years of college trend conservative, and grad school trends liberal again. All trends are fairly weak. One source. Others can be found with more searching, and those numbers are old.
I wouldn't extrapolate from your friend. Most red state conservatives would be happy to see the government programs which send so much money their way end. Why does the federal government own and manage so much land in the first place? Should you really hold the cost of maintenance of federal land against the people of the state those lands lie in? Do roads to farms primarily benefit the farmer, or everyone who buys food from them?
The factoid about elderly workers makes sense to me, since urban areas are going to have more jobs which are light on physical labor.
There are some issues with those numbers. My home state of Montana for instance. Who is the primary beneficiary of an interstate through farm areas, the farmers, or the urban dwellers who want food to be shipped cheaply? Should Montana pay for maintenance of land which is federally owned? We have vast national forest regions in addition to glacier national park and a small section of Yellowstone. Are payments to Indian Tribes included? The people in this state would overwhelmingly prefer to end the same programs which are shipping so many funds this way...You might want to consider actually ending those federal programs and let the chips fall where they may.
Back to the original point, even with more federal funds, the lack of people nearby would still leave you more self reliant as an individual. Even Montana has urbanized areas though, which makes it tricky to actually separate rural and urban on a per state basis.
Treating the social effect as a cost is loaded with assumptions. The loss of a safety net costs me nothing if I don't rely on it myself. Ceasing to voluntarily alleviate someone else's suffering doesn't make me responsible for their condition that would also exist even if I didn't. So if they turn around and impose actual costs on me through force, then they are responsible for that decision, not the end of the program. It may be cheaper to provide such programs at least in the short term, but danegeld usually is. That doesn't necessarily mean it's a good idea. Disclaimer: I may not find social saftety nets inherently moral, but their practical effects are ususally such that I don't care about them and don't really mind paying taxes for them. I personally like helping other people out. I just detest it when someone will force someone else to pay for something and then pretend that they are being benevolent themselves
All that being said, I don't think any neat narratives about when political positions get formed will ever be accurate. Life isn't generally that neat. That goes both for the GP's suggestiong about real life starting after college, and your point about
Things like teacher certification, whatever else they do that people find valuable, also reduce the supply of teachers. In my local area, there's still an oversupply, but the union's been pretty effective at keeping rates high, in part because the non-union administrators still make more than them which always gets pointed out when there is a salary issue.
Difficulty is not the only valid metric. Some jobs are easy, but unpleasant, and command more pay because of that.
Except, of course, many teachers work additional time running events in the evenings or teaching summer school, all of which add to their pay and can easily take them above the cap. The pay schedule is only part of the story.
That's a serious misreading, as blacks in texas outperformed blacks in wisconsin. Every racial subgroup in Texas outperformed the same cohort in Wisconsin, eve though the overall average went the other way. Welcome to Simpson's paradox.
Ah, you are conflating "greater scientific literacy" with "shown facts supporting global warning". Greater literacy means greater awareness of the flaws that are present in the science as is (beyond the scope of this discussion, but flaws are certainly known.) as well as greater awareness of the science. The communitarians changed views at a much slower rate, and the change was in favor of CAGW, which they overwhelmingly supported anyways, and consensus, which fit right into their basic world view . The individualists, perhaps because they don't inherently trust consensus by definition, picked up on the flaws and realized the CAGW supporters tend to use stronger arguments than are actually justified and overlook some things.
Why, exactly, did they go for egalitarian communitarians and hierarchical individualists? Most individualists would consider themselves egalitarians. I think there was some internal bias in there.
I was judging by the tax receipts as a portion of GDP for a basic overall tax rate. I don't know of any other single number that's closer, although it's certainly not perfect. The effect of tax changes are not felt instantly, which leads into the next point
At no point has any prominent anti-keynsian predicted that austerity would fix their issues quickly. Changes in policy are rarely felt quickly Unfortunately, we don't have an alternate reality to know what would have happened if they had stayed full keynsian. You can't actually say that the deepening recession is the fault of the austerity. That's like saying getting sicker after taking an anti-biotic is the fault of the anti-biotic. It's worth noting that the strong keynsians have been often wrong as well. I lean towards assuming the system is so inherently chaotic that making confident claims of will or won't happen is based on a pretense of knowledge.
NCLB causes no such thing. Failure to fail is the fault of the administration of various schools, districts, and individual teachers. NCLB does nothing to require that students never get held back a grade. Although it would be better if they could be held back in just one subject. There's a lot to be said for a-la-cart subject level instead of one size fits all grades which expect every 5th grader to be at the same level in every subject.
worth noting, there is nothing in NCLB which demands that you compare 5th graders to 5th graders from year to year to guage AYP. It would be legal to compare students who entered the school system in 2004 from year to year instead. That's not how anyone does it, because that would make NCLB actually sane, and the education establishment wouldn't actually want that. Please note Pournelle's iron law of bureaucracy
No, but being literate is practically a prerequisite for having a basic grasp of science. One should expect lower levels of mastery in more advanced topics.
Anarcho-fascist is an oxymoron. The 2 terms are incompatible. A lot of people have tied themselves in knots to pretend that libertarianism leads to fascism so they can avoid dealing with the fact that the fascists were overwhelmingly closer to the progressives and communists of the era than they were to any sort of anarchism or capitalism.
You seem to be implying that "Let the chips fall where they may" style comments can be somehow linked to fascism. Unfortunately, the fascists were all about government taking care of and controlling it's populace.
I embrace the idea of removing all government subsidies and tax breaks. How does it follow that austerity is immoral? Please provide some argument that doesn't amount to "I personally find the results distasteful".
Government is the #2 cause in the increase in medical costs (#1 is the development of new tests and treatments that arent' just replacing an available option with something cheaper.) What ever else it does (so, regardles of whether you think it's a good idea), strict medical licensing (as supported by the AMA) decreases the supply of medical professionals which increases the cost. Government paid healthcare, and incentives to provide insurance by employers, increases the demand for medical services by reducing apparent price, which increases actual price.
Slashdot Mirror
Why do people insist on thinking there's a shortage of people who could teach various subjects? Even with government licensing requirements that do little to actually improve teacher quality, there is a surplus for some teaching positions. Of course, there is a shortage of teachers for actual hard subjects, but districts can't pay more by subject taught. So in part, I'd be perfectly happy with more pay for math teacher for instance. Unfortunately, understanding math also lets you realize how ridiculous it is to pay a 4th grade teacher the same as an AP calculus teacher, given the surplus of applicants for one and a dearth of applicants for the other.
Rating teachers based on student test scores, with all it's flaws, is still more effective at measuring teacher quality than going by years of service, degree held, and other continuing education. Teaching just to the test is a feature of bad teachers, regardless. Good teachers cover the subject matter, of which the tested material just happens to be part, meaning that if they do their job test scores will be fine anyways.
There is a surplus of applicants for teaching positions in my area. There would be even more, but the unions have done a great job piling teacher certifications requirements on by influencing the state legislature and otherwise protecting their current members from competition. Schools can be selective in new hires, but most of their criteria are set in cooperation with the union, and current tenured teachers are nearly immune to this competition. Burnt out teachers that the district can't easily get rid of are common
The cost of one starting teacher for one year can get you 2 mobile labs that last 4-5 years. It's still a better return on investment in many cases, barring incompetent IT or unsually bad luck with hardware. I personally prefer static labs, but some schools just don't have the space to spare.
Is your friend's problem a lack of annual pay or a lack of budgeting skills? Without knowing where you live I can't comment on your friend's income, but the district in my home town pays teachers quite well. Judging by some other responses, it's not the only one.
As far as good teachers go, the teacher's unions are really big on paying more for credentials, which is just a worse form of merit pay than all the other merit pay proposals they do their best to squash. Highly educated idiots just aren't that rare, so paying more just for having a master's degree doesn't mean paying more for good teachers. A good teacher is worth quite a bit, but the union doesn't want districts to identify and reward good teachers, because it would exclude a large section of their base from extra funds.
There was nothing the least bit threatening there. His statement indicated that ducking and assessing is more likely to keep him alive than running would. You may disagree, but it's not a threat.
Hansen is prominent, and respected among other catastrophic anthopogenic global warming believers, but he has done things like suggest energy company CEOs be tried for crimes against humanity. His personality alone has likely pushed a lot of people into being more skeptical than they would otherwise be, because he's one of the most visible alarmists.
Hansen has called for CEO's of energy companies to be tried for high crimes against humanity, so he's not exactly a model of restraint. But, granted, that does require working within the system instead of engaging in terrorist acts. However, the post you are responding to did not say such things are necessary, only that such methods would have an immediate measurable effect on it.
He did attempt to claim that failure to act in that fashion proves that there aren't many truly fanatical true believers. He failed to deal with the possibility that AGW true believers might also believe strongly in things such as the rule of the law and would find the deaths caused by the breakdown of such to be even more outrageous than the effects of AGW. I don't think he made the precise excluded middle argument you are railing against, but it's still at least part of the problem with his post.
I wouldn't mind government officials with no external interests if they were content to sit around and do nothing. But they tend to want to be seen doing something, so they insist on finding things that aren't broken to fix. Otherwise their constituents might start wondering what they are being paid for. Having a secondary job indicates some sort of grounding in the real world instead of viewing everything in it as something to be managed.
Measuring the number of jobs handled is a poor idea for poor tech support and politicians, for the same reason. If they do their job right, they shouldn't be busy because most things are chugging along without intervention.
Is it federal funding when the federal government backs nominally privately offered student loans? By, for instance, not allowing most bankruptcies to include them? There are a lot of steps the federal government takes to relieve private banks of the risk that would otherwise be incurred. They turn nominally private loans into a lucrative rent system.
Courts, prisons, jails, etc are not a social effect, they are a government effect. A social effect would be, for instance, the human suffering of the individuals previously on the safety net. Paying a prison to hold people who end up choosing crime after their safety net is cut may be more expensive for any given individual... but only a subset of them would do so, so even on purely utilitarian grounds it may be cheaper overall. Since I'm a libertarian rather than an anarchist, I'm perfectly willing to claim that the bare minimum responsibilites of government are more legitimate than an expansive safety net.
Taxes are force. What gives you, or even the majority, the right to demand that I comply or move? That demand is itself backed up by force. I don't hate democracy in particular, I just recognize that majority support doesn't automatically mean something is moral. Democracy still is better at avoiding certain failure modes than other forms of government. If you separate the program from it's funding, I'm willing to concede that a government program can be beneficial in it's effects. But the taxes used to pay for it are not. You can't objectively subtract the cost of one from the benefit of the other, because the values are subjective. It's not just money on either the cost or benefit side. I personally subjectively value, as an example, limited unemployment benefits more than the cost of providing those benefits. But I recognize that the cost of providing those benefits is coercion, and I'd just as soon allow people the option to forgo both if they so choose.
Also, note the recent furor over someone actually trying to renounce their citizenship to avoid US taxes.
IIRC people with less than high school/GED trend liberal, HS to 4 years of college trend conservative, and grad school trends liberal again. All trends are fairly weak. One source. Others can be found with more searching, and those numbers are old.
I wouldn't extrapolate from your friend. Most red state conservatives would be happy to see the government programs which send so much money their way end. Why does the federal government own and manage so much land in the first place? Should you really hold the cost of maintenance of federal land against the people of the state those lands lie in? Do roads to farms primarily benefit the farmer, or everyone who buys food from them?
The factoid about elderly workers makes sense to me, since urban areas are going to have more jobs which are light on physical labor.
There are some issues with those numbers. My home state of Montana for instance. Who is the primary beneficiary of an interstate through farm areas, the farmers, or the urban dwellers who want food to be shipped cheaply? Should Montana pay for maintenance of land which is federally owned? We have vast national forest regions in addition to glacier national park and a small section of Yellowstone. Are payments to Indian Tribes included? The people in this state would overwhelmingly prefer to end the same programs which are shipping so many funds this way...You might want to consider actually ending those federal programs and let the chips fall where they may.
Back to the original point, even with more federal funds, the lack of people nearby would still leave you more self reliant as an individual. Even Montana has urbanized areas though, which makes it tricky to actually separate rural and urban on a per state basis.
Treating the social effect as a cost is loaded with assumptions. The loss of a safety net costs me nothing if I don't rely on it myself. Ceasing to voluntarily alleviate someone else's suffering doesn't make me responsible for their condition that would also exist even if I didn't. So if they turn around and impose actual costs on me through force, then they are responsible for that decision, not the end of the program. It may be cheaper to provide such programs at least in the short term, but danegeld usually is. That doesn't necessarily mean it's a good idea. Disclaimer: I may not find social saftety nets inherently moral, but their practical effects are ususally such that I don't care about them and don't really mind paying taxes for them. I personally like helping other people out. I just detest it when someone will force someone else to pay for something and then pretend that they are being benevolent themselves
All that being said, I don't think any neat narratives about when political positions get formed will ever be accurate. Life isn't generally that neat. That goes both for the GP's suggestiong about real life starting after college, and your point about
Things like teacher certification, whatever else they do that people find valuable, also reduce the supply of teachers. In my local area, there's still an oversupply, but the union's been pretty effective at keeping rates high, in part because the non-union administrators still make more than them which always gets pointed out when there is a salary issue.
Difficulty is not the only valid metric. Some jobs are easy, but unpleasant, and command more pay because of that.
Except, of course, many teachers work additional time running events in the evenings or teaching summer school, all of which add to their pay and can easily take them above the cap. The pay schedule is only part of the story.
That's a serious misreading, as blacks in texas outperformed blacks in wisconsin. Every racial subgroup in Texas outperformed the same cohort in Wisconsin, eve though the overall average went the other way. Welcome to Simpson's paradox.
Ah, you are conflating "greater scientific literacy" with "shown facts supporting global warning". Greater literacy means greater awareness of the flaws that are present in the science as is (beyond the scope of this discussion, but flaws are certainly known.) as well as greater awareness of the science. The communitarians changed views at a much slower rate, and the change was in favor of CAGW, which they overwhelmingly supported anyways, and consensus, which fit right into their basic world view . The individualists, perhaps because they don't inherently trust consensus by definition, picked up on the flaws and realized the CAGW supporters tend to use stronger arguments than are actually justified and overlook some things.
Why, exactly, did they go for egalitarian communitarians and hierarchical individualists? Most individualists would consider themselves egalitarians. I think there was some internal bias in there.
I was judging by the tax receipts as a portion of GDP for a basic overall tax rate. I don't know of any other single number that's closer, although it's certainly not perfect. The effect of tax changes are not felt instantly, which leads into the next point
At no point has any prominent anti-keynsian predicted that austerity would fix their issues quickly. Changes in policy are rarely felt quickly Unfortunately, we don't have an alternate reality to know what would have happened if they had stayed full keynsian. You can't actually say that the deepening recession is the fault of the austerity. That's like saying getting sicker after taking an anti-biotic is the fault of the anti-biotic. It's worth noting that the strong keynsians have been often wrong as well. I lean towards assuming the system is so inherently chaotic that making confident claims of will or won't happen is based on a pretense of knowledge.
NCLB causes no such thing. Failure to fail is the fault of the administration of various schools, districts, and individual teachers. NCLB does nothing to require that students never get held back a grade. Although it would be better if they could be held back in just one subject. There's a lot to be said for a-la-cart subject level instead of one size fits all grades which expect every 5th grader to be at the same level in every subject.
worth noting, there is nothing in NCLB which demands that you compare 5th graders to 5th graders from year to year to guage AYP. It would be legal to compare students who entered the school system in 2004 from year to year instead. That's not how anyone does it, because that would make NCLB actually sane, and the education establishment wouldn't actually want that. Please note Pournelle's iron law of bureaucracy
No, but being literate is practically a prerequisite for having a basic grasp of science. One should expect lower levels of mastery in more advanced topics.
Anarcho-fascist is an oxymoron. The 2 terms are incompatible. A lot of people have tied themselves in knots to pretend that libertarianism leads to fascism so they can avoid dealing with the fact that the fascists were overwhelmingly closer to the progressives and communists of the era than they were to any sort of anarchism or capitalism.
You seem to be implying that "Let the chips fall where they may" style comments can be somehow linked to fascism. Unfortunately, the fascists were all about government taking care of and controlling it's populace.
We didn't exactly have a free market system before.
I embrace the idea of removing all government subsidies and tax breaks. How does it follow that austerity is immoral? Please provide some argument that doesn't amount to "I personally find the results distasteful".
Government is the #2 cause in the increase in medical costs (#1 is the development of new tests and treatments that arent' just replacing an available option with something cheaper.) What ever else it does (so, regardles of whether you think it's a good idea), strict medical licensing (as supported by the AMA) decreases the supply of medical professionals which increases the cost. Government paid healthcare, and incentives to provide insurance by employers, increases the demand for medical services by reducing apparent price, which increases actual price.