I wondered about that too. That 4400 would be the fastest box in my house. Of course I mostly just use openoffice, firefox, cedega and a few games (and cinelerra & kino for video, and audacity) on Ubuntu dapper desktops. Once in a while I compile something. Everything I do at home runs just fine on much lesser systems than those described. I'm happy to keep it that way, and happy not to get sucked into paying $$ to have the "most powerful" desktop available for....what..the next 10 minutes? ('Til some other "must have" upgrade comes out).
Something not mentioned: Wasn't INTEL doing some fairly nefarious DRM stuff recently? Planning to? Have they stopped, or do we just care about DRM from OEMs like Apple, or software vendors like MS?
You could use Cedega if you wanted to do some gaming. It isn't a perfect solution, but I find it is enough of one to keep me off windows entirely (excpet at work).
Education is dangerous. Every dictatorships tend to kill off the middle class, seeing them as a threat. Typical of the US that'd we'd just let education for everyone but the rich wither away and spend an unneeded billion on entertainment. We've got rid of the unions, and pushed the working class into a very unstable dependency. All that's left is to get rid of those damned teacher's and federal employees' unions, then...then we can be completive with China, and the richest 1% will live better than any Roman Emperor imagined. The rest of us don't count, you see. Now instead of replying, shuddup and go watch your TV.
I would guess, based on US rather than UK experience, though, that more lefties have humanities degrees and would rather view their computers as simple appliances than learn much about them. The tendency toward apple use helps confirm this, I think
"While the "all-MS shop" allows you to change the (hardware-)horse whenever you want, once you're using the "mixed environment OS X", you're bound to one supplier (Apple) once and forever. There's no way you can change that - if you find out that Apple's support isn't as good as you were expecting, you'll face the high cost of changing back your IT to the Windows world."
Linux also is hardware agnostic compared to Apple. In fact, Linux is hardware agnostic compared to windows. By this argument, Linux is the best choice for IT. Given the availably of thin-client (win terminal servers aside) and low power-consumption workstations for Linux, as well as the lower cost of software doesn't that make Linux seem to be the best option, in general terms?
Re your conclusion: I more or less agree that improved wages will help meet demand. I don't agree that we are doing so much better in English than in math or science.. Read todays paper; or go to the grocery store and pick up a magazine if your think we don't have a problem. Furthermore; I will restate that such unbalanced pay will cause good English teachers to quit (I"d probably be among the first) or move abroad to teach ESL(there is a demand), and that in the hands of administrators the proposal would become cuts in the humanities; followed by gradual pay decreases in math and science. We'd be worse off than before; though the flat earth type privates would flourish through a voucher system. It seems pretty convincing, from an insider's view that the pay dfferential plan would be courting disaterous unintended consequences as a result of the political management of the schools
Do you have a comparison of administrative costs? My guess is that between bogus testing (there is good testing too, don't mistake me) bloated admin offices, with large clerical staff and very very high admin salaries the funds that actually go to teaching are surprisingly truncated. I know a school district where there is a CEO, rather than a certified superintendent. The board liked him and gave him the top job (at well into 6 figures total compensation) despite his degree being in ( I'm pretty sure) parks and recreation and lack of any related credential. I think we spend an awful lot on redundant besuited drones and their perks.
Maybe some of them are married with children, in which case both parents must work, because unlike other professionals, a teacher isn't paid enough to support a family in most cities. Has it occurred to you that many people who might teach see not being able to afford a family as a drawback?
I agree we should consolidate resources, use standard opensource school management and workstation software, and dramatically reduce the cost of information. I think a big eduwiki might be going too far, though.
It looks to me like we spend billions on textebooks, the information contained in which is frequently publicly available. We could "wikify" all that and compensate authors of copyrighted material for use in education. We also seem to spend a fortune on hundreds, maybe thousands of different school management packages, for schedules, budgets, grades and attendance, and more for tests. This could all be consolidated into a single set of open-source tools for use nationally. For a tiny fraction of the cost of all the commercial school-management software we could put an army of talented tecchies to work on the USSchool.org school management project, and adapt k12ltsp nationally. Adopt the olpc nationally too, instead of buying mountains of textbooks anually. All told, this should present a huge savings.
But I wouldn't try to make us a nation of home schoolers. I think we benefit more from the public schools than we care to admit. Besides, without some one to teach, how could the wiki be read?
We benefit from public educations in ways that are not immediately obvious, and the system has done well for us. I think with the savings in texts and technology we could attract better teachers and still pay less for education. I also think that maybe we should stop subsidizing multi-bilion dollar multinationals with our taxes, and use our resources to benefit ourselves.
(When we say business, do we mean Enron? Arbusto? Tyco? MCI? BP? EXXON? Haliburton? are these our models of legitimate profit and uprightness?? efficiency???)
That really isn't true. Chemists do not, generally, make much more than teachers, neither do biologists. http://jobstar.org/tools/salary/sal-prof.php#Scien ce.
Probably IT people don't make more either, after outsourcing is factored in. SOME engineering and science fields do pay more, and some talented people in these fields do very well for themselves.
But then again, SOME people with a talent for language work in Park Ave. for millions, or have successful law firms, or make big bucks writing novels or movie scripts. Others do very weell in journalism, law, training, and communications. I think your proposed pay differential is based largely on slashdotters being more familiar with engineering and science fields. There are, admittedly poor English majors working for small news papers, just as there are poor biologists counting dandelions in a field someplace as we speak. Bisaing your pay to a favor a select set of slashdotter's favorite fields will exact;y become "Limiting your candidate pool to people who would do the job at any price" as anyone with any real skill with language leaves for careers where they are appreciated.
Oliver, Have you ever met a public school administrator? Taken a class in education? I appreciate your view, but that sort of narrative evaluation would succumb to a "good ole boy" syndrome in about a month. It'd probably work out well enough for me, but I can't advocate it. Peer review is out of the question. Teachers don't have that kind of extra time during a school day, and anything done would be attributed to union politics anyway. How would you quantify inspiration(to use your example)? I can't see a way in which it could be a meaningful measure, despite being a valuable quality. Also your model for cognitive development might be a bit optimistic. There is less room for improvement in students who have suffered traumatic brain injury (say through chemical abuse) than you might think. What happens, at a certain age, is that the smarter kids start to pull farther and farther away in ability. Though I will admit that in our current system normal and smarter than average kids are often shortchanged by a lack of opportunity.
But lets get to the real issues.
1). the teacher's union is about the last labor organization left in an America rapidly sliding into the 3rd world. The idea of "getting rid of bad teachers" is a red herring for the dismantling of public education and the elimination of the middle class. Look for a middle class where the schools are bad. The two go hand in hand.
2).Why don't you believe us when we tell you things about education? I can tell you that staff allocation makes a huge difference. That skills based assessment is total BS. that I can grade 20 papers faster than I can grade 120 papers and get more meaningful feedback to a student in time for it to be of value if I have fewer students. This is a big problem. Not the class size thing, which is, but the belief that we, the teachers are lying. How well would you be able to do your job if someone who did not understand what you do was consistently changing your goals, providing you with support you did not need and taking away stuff you did need? If your pay actually decreased over time, and you were called incompetent every time someone took your tools?
3). Connecticut turned over a public school to a large corp in the 80's ( I think it was new london and general dynamics, but I wouldn't swear to it). The student's performance dropped and the school came in consistently over budget. If we in public education were as inefficient as industry, neither you nor I would be able to read this, I suspect.
The cure is not really in modifying the evaluation and pay system, I think. I think the cure (and I do not dispute that we could improve, though I'd say we need to improve less that..say BP does, given their record on pipeline maintenance) Is in largely eliminating departments of education, and doing a better job of regulating who gets to be a teacher in the first place. I've worked with more than a few teachers that I'd swear got their degrees with 4 box tops and a proof of purchase. I've also worked with more than a few who are diligent, intelligent, educated and insightful. How did the former get certified? (answer: usually because a state didn't want to pay for quality people and did some half-assed "emergency certification" or other, or because these people were certified by a wholly inadequate teacher certification mill--there is good money in making teachers)
Another reason I say the cure isn't in modding the current system is that by doing so, we'll just create a vacuum. A few teachers take more pay- bad ones leave= fewer teachers to the point of burying the good teachers past the ability to be effective. There has to be incentive for the system to be entirely staffed by good teachers. That requires 2 things: filtering that bad ones as much as possible at the outset and creating a sufficient supply of good ones so that our schools are adequately staffed. As far as I can tell, this will cost money. America no longer wants to pay for education (and as you know, more often than not, you get what you pay for). I don't see any plan that involves "getting more for less" doing anything in the long run but getting less. Most Merit plans are, at bottom, a "let's get more for less" scheme. A concept so dumb you wouldn't even employ it to buy used car.
It may no longer be possible to elect people who give a damn in large numbers, or keep them giving a damn once elected. The last elections was hopeful, Imho. I guess we'll see what "issues" drive the next one. Right now the red herring seems to be illegal immigration. Maybe in a year we can all get ornery, riled, and fired-up about gay Mexicans traipsing across the border with illegal tropical flowers carrying infected killer bees. The we can elect someone who'll pass a bunch of anti-science, pro-corporate legislation that will bankrupt us. In the meantime we can work on getting rid of unions then maybe healthcare, then minimum wage. right?
Of course I know what a paragraph is. Don't be absurd.
Your experience is deceiving if you believe the unions are responsible for putting those harebrained schemes into practice. The vast majority of really bad ideas I've seen come from administration and school boards.
I am an English teacher. Now that we have eliminated any confusion regarding my position in education, we can proceed. The union isn't merely protecting bad teachers. This is an unfortunate side effect. The union is protecting good teachers from bad school boards and administrators. The union is protecting students from bad politics. The union is the only means we teachers have of insuring we have sufficient pay and benefits to attract anyone with decent qualifications who hopes to live on the proceeds of his work.
Compare the salaries in union and non-union schools. You can actually make this comparison state by state, as unionization is state regulated for the most part. States with unions have higher salaries, and higher standardized test scores.
Why do you think non-union states have low teacher salaries and poorer scores? Do you suppose them to be uniformly inhabited by bad people? Could it be that there is some other mechanism at work? Can you say "duh?" (sorry, couldn't help myself)
If there were no teacher's unions what percent of our children would learn about evolution in Biology class, do you think? While you think remember that the the administration serves at the discretion of the school board and plenty of boards have politicized their opposition to "godless darwinism."
What about politics? How many history teachers said that invading Iraq was probably a bad idea? How many board members do you think viewed these teachers as unpatriotic?
For 20 years, teacher compensation has dwindled. Too many two-bit state representatives see school funds has a gift from above to be used in balancing a budget or throwing a construction project in the "right" direction. Too many parents don't feed there children or make them keep regular hours and blame the "useless" schools for "inadequacy." Schools are an easy target. They are expensive. They are deemed responsible for all social ills, and too much child-rearing. Of course they fail. (If you're dating your sister because she likes to do meth while you play banjo I probably won't be able to do a damned thing for your kids.) This makes the schools an easy political target: "blame the teacher, not the parents." So year after year teacher compensation is whittled away, the union fights a rearguard action, and pay gradually sinks below what one could make managing a Macdonald's. If the union weren't there, fighting where it has power and providing competition to schools where it is not, we would be getting paid in baskets of corn by now, and I wouldn't be teaching.
Not to equate my choice of job with the existence of public education, but if it weren't for the union, America wouldn't have public education in any meaningful sense. I guess that will be ok for most of you given the anti-union sentiment I see here. Or is it that you had "bad teachers" and never leaned to work a problem though?
We do have problems issuing grades, in fact. Some of us would prefer narrative evaluations, some prefer objective tests and a rating system (a, b, c, 100, 80, etc), some prefer subjective activities and a rating system.
The help desk is famed for being useless, IT staff do not, for example, have to run a large database on a cellphone, and the accounts have a fair estimate of what is coming, I suspect. but that isn't the problem with what you said.
The problem is that an IT guy isn't told that he has to run the corporate web server on his nokia while being compared to a guy who runs a similar department server on a 10 foot stack of blades. The comparison being made on load testing the servers. the same for the others-- there isn't a comparison.
the problem with teacher merit pay is that 1 teacher can be assigned a roomful of bright healthy kids, and the the next can be assigned a bunch of 70 IQ's with assorted disorders and problems at home. Whose students will perform better? Which teacher deserves more pay?
I Am Not A Math Teacher---but I bet I can teach more kids to do calculus than you can teach goldfish to subtract. That makes you worthless, right? I mean subtraction is easy, has no market value...
There are a couple problems here.
1st-- you are assuming an English teacher would attempt to make a living in literature, rather than law or marketing. As an English teacher I can assure you that I can have a law degree or a marketing career as quickly as I could get a reasonable set of credentials in physics. Now what am I worth?
The answer I will likely get is that I am worth what I am paid, and if I don't like making less than a math teacher from Brother Bob's academy of advanced arithmetic, then too bad for me.
this brings us to the
2nd pronlem;
the value of a degree. I went to a decent private college. My gre language scores are fairly high. I recently won some ets award for excellence based on a teacher test of theirs. I have about 50 grad credits plus a second undergraduate major. I am consistently ranked behind colleagues with degrees from poor schools, who have poor to middling test scores and a masters from a weak program. Does this seem like something we might build a meritocracy on?
What I'm getting at is that inflating the cost of a math teacher without adding some testing requirements will just make more clueless math teachers, and run any competent people in the humanities out of education. How about we raise the price of all teachers (or exempt them from income tax,or something) and then make it much more difficult to become a teacher. The place to start is the elimination or regulation of teacher programs, insisting that ALL teachers have a valid academic major (and education really isn't one, especially elementary education). But common ground is what is needed for the basis of a merit program. I'll happily go head to head on an objective test, or on the performance of similar groups of students under similar conditions given that the grouping was valid and the sample size adequate. I don't think a master's from the wal-mart school of education is worth a BA from Duke (which I did not attend), and I'm not too happy about merit systems based on "gameable" variables. All that will bring is more politics, more administration, and less education.
I can tell you that I was pretty interested when wl-mart advertised linux boxes--even if they were bottom-of-the-barrel hardware. I went to my local wal-mart regularly to look for them, but they never showed. Not 2 inches of floorspace, not 1 inch, not a placard. Until I saw this post I had thought it was something that never actually got done--a sort of vapor-product. I didn't buy one because it wasn't available as far as I could tell. period. You may be right--wal mart almost certainly cares about moving objects for profit, not at all about software distributions. But if my case was typical, then there was no supply, either.
Ok, you work in games feel like an innocent bystander and would rather not be shot. That's nice, I really doubt anyone actually wants to shoot you. I certainly don't
But, why is it not personal when MS steals other's work, ruins lives and destroys companies illegally, causes a huge drain in the economy and simultaneously slows technological innovation, making life worse for everyone. How is it "not personal, that is "not an emotional issue" when an organization for its own profit makes someones life worse, yet it is madness for the people affected to be angry? But when there are actual people at MS doing actual bad things and we should actually be angry at them. I think we should not shoot them, but maybe they should be compelled to do useful work for no more than reasonable gain?
How can anyone think it rational to claim that a legal fiction can own an idea?
Slashdot Mirror
I wondered about that too. That 4400 would be the fastest box in my house. Of course I mostly just use openoffice, firefox, cedega and a few games (and cinelerra & kino for video, and audacity) on Ubuntu dapper desktops. Once in a while I compile something. Everything I do at home runs just fine on much lesser systems than those described. I'm happy to keep it that way, and happy not to get sucked into paying $$ to have the "most powerful" desktop available for ....what..the next 10 minutes? ('Til some other "must have" upgrade comes out).
Something not mentioned: Wasn't INTEL doing some fairly nefarious DRM stuff recently? Planning to? Have they stopped, or do we just care about DRM from OEMs like Apple, or software vendors like MS?
You could use Cedega if you wanted to do some gaming. It isn't a perfect solution, but I find it is enough of one to keep me off windows entirely (excpet at work).
Education is dangerous. Every dictatorships tend to kill off the middle class, seeing them as a threat. Typical of the US that'd we'd just let education for everyone but the rich wither away and spend an unneeded billion on entertainment. We've got rid of the unions, and pushed the working class into a very unstable dependency. All that's left is to get rid of those damned teacher's and federal employees' unions, then ...then we can be completive with China, and the richest 1% will live better than any Roman Emperor imagined. The rest of us don't count, you see. Now instead of replying, shuddup and go watch your TV.
I would guess, based on US rather than UK experience, though, that more lefties have humanities degrees and would rather view their computers as simple appliances than learn much about them. The tendency toward apple use helps confirm this, I think
"While the "all-MS shop" allows you to change the (hardware-)horse whenever you want, once you're using the "mixed environment OS X", you're bound to one supplier (Apple) once and forever. There's no way you can change that - if you find out that Apple's support isn't as good as you were expecting, you'll face the high cost of changing back your IT to the Windows world." Linux also is hardware agnostic compared to Apple. In fact, Linux is hardware agnostic compared to windows. By this argument, Linux is the best choice for IT. Given the availably of thin-client (win terminal servers aside) and low power-consumption workstations for Linux, as well as the lower cost of software doesn't that make Linux seem to be the best option, in general terms?
Re your conclusion: I more or less agree that improved wages will help meet demand. I don't agree that we are doing so much better in English than in math or science.. Read todays paper; or go to the grocery store and pick up a magazine if your think we don't have a problem. Furthermore; I will restate that such unbalanced pay will cause good English teachers to quit (I"d probably be among the first) or move abroad to teach ESL(there is a demand), and that in the hands of administrators the proposal would become cuts in the humanities; followed by gradual pay decreases in math and science. We'd be worse off than before; though the flat earth type privates would flourish through a voucher system. It seems pretty convincing, from an insider's view that the pay dfferential plan would be courting disaterous unintended consequences as a result of the political management of the schools
Do you have a comparison of administrative costs? My guess is that between bogus testing (there is good testing too, don't mistake me) bloated admin offices, with large clerical staff and very very high admin salaries the funds that actually go to teaching are surprisingly truncated. I know a school district where there is a CEO, rather than a certified superintendent. The board liked him and gave him the top job (at well into 6 figures total compensation) despite his degree being in ( I'm pretty sure) parks and recreation and lack of any related credential. I think we spend an awful lot on redundant besuited drones and their perks.
Maybe some of them are married with children, in which case both parents must work, because unlike other professionals, a teacher isn't paid enough to support a family in most cities. Has it occurred to you that many people who might teach see not being able to afford a family as a drawback?
Well done.
I agree we should consolidate resources, use standard opensource school management and workstation software, and dramatically reduce the cost of information. I think a big eduwiki might be going too far, though. It looks to me like we spend billions on textebooks, the information contained in which is frequently publicly available. We could "wikify" all that and compensate authors of copyrighted material for use in education. We also seem to spend a fortune on hundreds, maybe thousands of different school management packages, for schedules, budgets, grades and attendance, and more for tests. This could all be consolidated into a single set of open-source tools for use nationally. For a tiny fraction of the cost of all the commercial school-management software we could put an army of talented tecchies to work on the USSchool.org school management project, and adapt k12ltsp nationally. Adopt the olpc nationally too, instead of buying mountains of textbooks anually. All told, this should present a huge savings. But I wouldn't try to make us a nation of home schoolers. I think we benefit more from the public schools than we care to admit. Besides, without some one to teach, how could the wiki be read? We benefit from public educations in ways that are not immediately obvious, and the system has done well for us. I think with the savings in texts and technology we could attract better teachers and still pay less for education. I also think that maybe we should stop subsidizing multi-bilion dollar multinationals with our taxes, and use our resources to benefit ourselves. (When we say business, do we mean Enron? Arbusto? Tyco? MCI? BP? EXXON? Haliburton? are these our models of legitimate profit and uprightness?? efficiency???)
That really isn't true. Chemists do not, generally, make much more than teachers, neither do biologists. http://jobstar.org/tools/salary/sal-prof.php#Scien ce.
Probably IT people don't make more either, after outsourcing is factored in. SOME engineering and science fields do pay more, and some talented people in these fields do very well for themselves.
But then again, SOME people with a talent for language work in Park Ave. for millions, or have successful law firms, or make big bucks writing novels or movie scripts. Others do very weell in journalism, law, training, and communications. I think your proposed pay differential is based largely on slashdotters being more familiar with engineering and science fields. There are, admittedly poor English majors working for small news papers, just as there are poor biologists counting dandelions in a field someplace as we speak. Bisaing your pay to a favor a select set of slashdotter's favorite fields will exact;y become "Limiting your candidate pool to people who would do the job at any price" as anyone with any real skill with language leaves for careers where they are appreciated.
Oliver, Have you ever met a public school administrator? Taken a class in education? I appreciate your view, but that sort of narrative evaluation would succumb to a "good ole boy" syndrome in about a month. It'd probably work out well enough for me, but I can't advocate it. Peer review is out of the question. Teachers don't have that kind of extra time during a school day, and anything done would be attributed to union politics anyway. How would you quantify inspiration(to use your example)? I can't see a way in which it could be a meaningful measure, despite being a valuable quality. Also your model for cognitive development might be a bit optimistic. There is less room for improvement in students who have suffered traumatic brain injury (say through chemical abuse) than you might think. What happens, at a certain age, is that the smarter kids start to pull farther and farther away in ability. Though I will admit that in our current system normal and smarter than average kids are often shortchanged by a lack of opportunity. But lets get to the real issues. 1). the teacher's union is about the last labor organization left in an America rapidly sliding into the 3rd world. The idea of "getting rid of bad teachers" is a red herring for the dismantling of public education and the elimination of the middle class. Look for a middle class where the schools are bad. The two go hand in hand. 2).Why don't you believe us when we tell you things about education? I can tell you that staff allocation makes a huge difference. That skills based assessment is total BS. that I can grade 20 papers faster than I can grade 120 papers and get more meaningful feedback to a student in time for it to be of value if I have fewer students. This is a big problem. Not the class size thing, which is, but the belief that we, the teachers are lying. How well would you be able to do your job if someone who did not understand what you do was consistently changing your goals, providing you with support you did not need and taking away stuff you did need? If your pay actually decreased over time, and you were called incompetent every time someone took your tools? 3). Connecticut turned over a public school to a large corp in the 80's ( I think it was new london and general dynamics, but I wouldn't swear to it). The student's performance dropped and the school came in consistently over budget. If we in public education were as inefficient as industry, neither you nor I would be able to read this, I suspect. The cure is not really in modifying the evaluation and pay system, I think. I think the cure (and I do not dispute that we could improve, though I'd say we need to improve less that..say BP does, given their record on pipeline maintenance) Is in largely eliminating departments of education, and doing a better job of regulating who gets to be a teacher in the first place. I've worked with more than a few teachers that I'd swear got their degrees with 4 box tops and a proof of purchase. I've also worked with more than a few who are diligent, intelligent, educated and insightful. How did the former get certified? (answer: usually because a state didn't want to pay for quality people and did some half-assed "emergency certification" or other, or because these people were certified by a wholly inadequate teacher certification mill--there is good money in making teachers) Another reason I say the cure isn't in modding the current system is that by doing so, we'll just create a vacuum. A few teachers take more pay- bad ones leave= fewer teachers to the point of burying the good teachers past the ability to be effective. There has to be incentive for the system to be entirely staffed by good teachers. That requires 2 things: filtering that bad ones as much as possible at the outset and creating a sufficient supply of good ones so that our schools are adequately staffed. As far as I can tell, this will cost money. America no longer wants to pay for education (and as you know, more often than not, you get what you pay for). I don't see any plan that involves "getting more for less" doing anything in the long run but getting less. Most Merit plans are, at bottom, a "let's get more for less" scheme. A concept so dumb you wouldn't even employ it to buy used car.
It may no longer be possible to elect people who give a damn in large numbers, or keep them giving a damn once elected. The last elections was hopeful, Imho. I guess we'll see what "issues" drive the next one. Right now the red herring seems to be illegal immigration. Maybe in a year we can all get ornery, riled, and fired-up about gay Mexicans traipsing across the border with illegal tropical flowers carrying infected killer bees. The we can elect someone who'll pass a bunch of anti-science, pro-corporate legislation that will bankrupt us. In the meantime we can work on getting rid of unions then maybe healthcare, then minimum wage. right?
Of course I know what a paragraph is. Don't be absurd. Your experience is deceiving if you believe the unions are responsible for putting those harebrained schemes into practice. The vast majority of really bad ideas I've seen come from administration and school boards.
I am an English teacher. Now that we have eliminated any confusion regarding my position in education, we can proceed. The union isn't merely protecting bad teachers. This is an unfortunate side effect. The union is protecting good teachers from bad school boards and administrators. The union is protecting students from bad politics. The union is the only means we teachers have of insuring we have sufficient pay and benefits to attract anyone with decent qualifications who hopes to live on the proceeds of his work. Compare the salaries in union and non-union schools. You can actually make this comparison state by state, as unionization is state regulated for the most part. States with unions have higher salaries, and higher standardized test scores. Why do you think non-union states have low teacher salaries and poorer scores? Do you suppose them to be uniformly inhabited by bad people? Could it be that there is some other mechanism at work? Can you say "duh?" (sorry, couldn't help myself) If there were no teacher's unions what percent of our children would learn about evolution in Biology class, do you think? While you think remember that the the administration serves at the discretion of the school board and plenty of boards have politicized their opposition to "godless darwinism." What about politics? How many history teachers said that invading Iraq was probably a bad idea? How many board members do you think viewed these teachers as unpatriotic? For 20 years, teacher compensation has dwindled. Too many two-bit state representatives see school funds has a gift from above to be used in balancing a budget or throwing a construction project in the "right" direction. Too many parents don't feed there children or make them keep regular hours and blame the "useless" schools for "inadequacy." Schools are an easy target. They are expensive. They are deemed responsible for all social ills, and too much child-rearing. Of course they fail. (If you're dating your sister because she likes to do meth while you play banjo I probably won't be able to do a damned thing for your kids.) This makes the schools an easy political target: "blame the teacher, not the parents." So year after year teacher compensation is whittled away, the union fights a rearguard action, and pay gradually sinks below what one could make managing a Macdonald's. If the union weren't there, fighting where it has power and providing competition to schools where it is not, we would be getting paid in baskets of corn by now, and I wouldn't be teaching. Not to equate my choice of job with the existence of public education, but if it weren't for the union, America wouldn't have public education in any meaningful sense. I guess that will be ok for most of you given the anti-union sentiment I see here. Or is it that you had "bad teachers" and never leaned to work a problem though?
We do have problems issuing grades, in fact. Some of us would prefer narrative evaluations, some prefer objective tests and a rating system (a, b, c, 100, 80, etc), some prefer subjective activities and a rating system. The help desk is famed for being useless, IT staff do not, for example, have to run a large database on a cellphone, and the accounts have a fair estimate of what is coming, I suspect. but that isn't the problem with what you said. The problem is that an IT guy isn't told that he has to run the corporate web server on his nokia while being compared to a guy who runs a similar department server on a 10 foot stack of blades. The comparison being made on load testing the servers. the same for the others-- there isn't a comparison. the problem with teacher merit pay is that 1 teacher can be assigned a roomful of bright healthy kids, and the the next can be assigned a bunch of 70 IQ's with assorted disorders and problems at home. Whose students will perform better? Which teacher deserves more pay? I Am Not A Math Teacher---but I bet I can teach more kids to do calculus than you can teach goldfish to subtract. That makes you worthless, right? I mean subtraction is easy, has no market value...
There are a couple problems here. 1st-- you are assuming an English teacher would attempt to make a living in literature, rather than law or marketing. As an English teacher I can assure you that I can have a law degree or a marketing career as quickly as I could get a reasonable set of credentials in physics. Now what am I worth? The answer I will likely get is that I am worth what I am paid, and if I don't like making less than a math teacher from Brother Bob's academy of advanced arithmetic, then too bad for me. this brings us to the 2nd pronlem; the value of a degree. I went to a decent private college. My gre language scores are fairly high. I recently won some ets award for excellence based on a teacher test of theirs. I have about 50 grad credits plus a second undergraduate major. I am consistently ranked behind colleagues with degrees from poor schools, who have poor to middling test scores and a masters from a weak program. Does this seem like something we might build a meritocracy on? What I'm getting at is that inflating the cost of a math teacher without adding some testing requirements will just make more clueless math teachers, and run any competent people in the humanities out of education. How about we raise the price of all teachers (or exempt them from income tax,or something) and then make it much more difficult to become a teacher. The place to start is the elimination or regulation of teacher programs, insisting that ALL teachers have a valid academic major (and education really isn't one, especially elementary education). But common ground is what is needed for the basis of a merit program. I'll happily go head to head on an objective test, or on the performance of similar groups of students under similar conditions given that the grouping was valid and the sample size adequate. I don't think a master's from the wal-mart school of education is worth a BA from Duke (which I did not attend), and I'm not too happy about merit systems based on "gameable" variables. All that will bring is more politics, more administration, and less education.
I can tell you that I was pretty interested when wl-mart advertised linux boxes--even if they were bottom-of-the-barrel hardware. I went to my local wal-mart regularly to look for them, but they never showed. Not 2 inches of floorspace, not 1 inch, not a placard. Until I saw this post I had thought it was something that never actually got done--a sort of vapor-product. I didn't buy one because it wasn't available as far as I could tell. period. You may be right--wal mart almost certainly cares about moving objects for profit, not at all about software distributions. But if my case was typical, then there was no supply, either.
Ok, you work in games feel like an innocent bystander and would rather not be shot. That's nice, I really doubt anyone actually wants to shoot you. I certainly don't But, why is it not personal when MS steals other's work, ruins lives and destroys companies illegally, causes a huge drain in the economy and simultaneously slows technological innovation, making life worse for everyone. How is it "not personal, that is "not an emotional issue" when an organization for its own profit makes someones life worse, yet it is madness for the people affected to be angry? But when there are actual people at MS doing actual bad things and we should actually be angry at them. I think we should not shoot them, but maybe they should be compelled to do useful work for no more than reasonable gain? How can anyone think it rational to claim that a legal fiction can own an idea?
Openmoko can be build on Openembedded, afaik, which can be run on your desktop-- be your own build server. Isn't that the whole idea?