Posted: Apr 26, 2013 5:58 am
UtilityMonster wrote:
The funding/resource environment is definitely an important consideration, and I'm happy you pointed it out. I'm not sure how big of a difference it makes, though I suspect it does make some (although in the US I was under the impression that public schools were financed the same amount per student?).
They are more or less here too. But because in a general sense they are so underfunded, most schools rely heavily on P&C activities and donations. In good neighbourhoods, schools get much more funding from the community than they do in poorer neighbourhoods.
The other discrepancy is that some schools, infrastructure-wise, are well in the last century. They pretty much have to wait around till the infrastructure breaks enough for the government to be bothered upgrading it.
The socio-economic environment is already accounted for in evaluating teachers. Children are tested before they enter your class for a school year, so while one could say you are disadvantaged in having to teach 4th graders who are at a third grade level, you would be considered a solid teacher for having them just progress to a 4th grade level over the course of the year. No one is demanding teachers raise students two or three levels in one year.
But a student from a poor socio-economic environment on average will achieve less in a year than one in a more supportive environment.
Also, if teachers are typically unable to teach children as well in poor environments, administrators would take that into consideration when evaluating teachers.
You'd hope so, but this issue is such a political football. We are dealing with these debates here too in Australia. The media really loves to beat up a story about a "bad" school or a "bad" teacher. And the political debate here is so centred around simplistic populist outcry.
The way I see education going in my country, is a system of just functioning state schools that the government really is happy to have lag the rest of the education sector (including certain high-funded high-acheiving State Schools). That's why government funds private and religious schools as well here. Their goal is to output some percentage of top notch students, whatever school system they come from, and just scrape through the rest of the plebs. Education here is no longer about trying to give the most number of people as good an education as they can. It's about taking resources from the bulk of students, and funnelling them into a small percentage of gifted and high achieving students. I suspect this good teacher / bad teacher thing is just another part of that program.
epete wrote:
This issue is way more complicated than pundits would like to present it as. It's not simply a case of good teachers get good student results and vice-versa. There's a lot more factors involved. And pinging bad teachers (which is really what the ideology underpinning this "bonus" thing always is) is only going to make the discrepancy worse.
Ping? I don't think the fact that some schools have better facilities than other schools makes a huge difference in student educational outcomes. Even if it does, if you are a 4th grade teacher, that would mean your students have already suffered academically due to the bad facilities in grades K-3, and as a result would be behind other students. This would be taken into consideration upon them entering your class, and you would not be held accountable for this. Perhaps they really would perform worse because the desks are less comfortable or something, but I doubt it amounts to much.
It's not just about physical infrastructure, although that counts. It's also about teaching resources (books, papers, computers, other presentation technology) and teaching support (like support for misbehaving students and disabled/disadvantaged students). In the case of 'support', it's not just about the student who is misbehaving/disadvantaged. It's also seriously about the effect they have on other students. My wife used to have to deal with kids throwing chairs at her and the other students and trying to stab them with pens etc, as there was no facility a lot of the time to send them to someone else outside the classroom to deal with.
Also, just FYI, the U.S. spends more per pupil on education than any other nation in the world. This is all the evidence you need that the problem is not one of funding.
True. But it's also, like most sectors of our society/economy, about how the funding is used and where it is directed.
epete wrote:
I don't disagree that firing someone who is a bad worker in a unionised workplace can be a difficult drawn out process. That's a bit of a different issue though. That's not really related to teachers alone. I think the real debate is around rewarding "good" teachers and essentially punishing those seen to be not as good. I think it's an impossible metric to determine while ever there are so many other critical factors determining how well kids do (like level of school funding and resources and support; and the socio-economic background of the students).
It is obviously not impossible to determine. You have not provided any evidence that standardized testing is not effective at evaluating student progression on important metrics. You have used socio-economic background to suggest some teachers are at a disadvantage, while failing to acknowledge that this is accounted for by administrators when evaluating teachers.
Hang on. YOU haven't provided any evidence that this is accounted for by administrators, so why would you chastise me for not providing evidence to counter it? I've seen and read reports on this, as it's been quite a big issue here in Australia for the last decade at least. When I get time, I'll see if I can google some reports.
You have merely pointed out a possibility that facilities can affect the capacity of teachers to teach well, not shown that it actually makes a significant difference.
Not just facilities. As I said, the issues involved are more complicated than you or other pundits would lead us to believe.
You have not addressed the point that teachers can be watched in class by experts to determine their competency. By your logic, we should just hire people who are qualified and then, unless they commit some crime or violate some important rule, just say "fuck it" and not try anything to determine who is doing their job well and who is doing it poorly. It is patently ridiculous to draw such a strong conclusion from the few points you made.
You need to ban yourself for continually raising idiotic strawmen.
You could have two 3rd grade teachers in your school, both have entering classes with students at a 2nd grade reading and math level. If in one class the students hit 4th grade levels by the end of the class in both subjects, while in the other class, no progression is made whatsoever, is it "impossible" to determine that one teacher did a significantly better job teaching critical material to the youths?
It's not impossible, within the one school or socio-economic area, but you've got to have statistically significant results. You should ban yourself for not understanding statistics.
epete wrote:
Fair trade is basically adopting the good principles of free trade but being better for the working poor then the case under "free" trade. The other issue, is, like a lot of these cases with economic rationalists arguing for stuff, that it's not quite as simple as you would have us (or yourself) believe. Free trade often isn't free, as there are usually conditions imposed from the more powerful western nations upon the developing nations. One that comes to mind right away is the issue of "tax free areas" where the factories are positioned, and also the mandated use of western materials as opposed to local materials. I've even heard arguments that suggest that free-trade is particularly bad for global warming as it involves massively more amounts of freight (both from the developed country to the west, but also via the mandated freight from west to developed world).
So, in respect to your point about climate change, I do concede that free trade exacerbates climate change. The reality, though, is that improving the lives of the world's poor necessarily increases greenhouse gas emissions. In light of this, do you think we should promote development assistance or not?
We definitely should. It should be done a bit more sustainably though. That would mean using local materials in a lot more cases.
I fall on the side of thinking growth in the long term will create new technologies that will help us prevent worse climate change, that trade speeds up the development of these technologies, and that while trade may ultimately increase climate change even in the long term, the benefits to humans, like in development aid, outweigh the costs. After all, the whole reason climate change is bad is because it hurts sentient beings like ourselves.
I don't worship at the "technological alter", but I basically agree with your overall sentiment that in this instance climate change comes a second place behind lifting the welfare of the developing world. Climate change has occurred because of the first world, and it is the first world (and China) that need to deal with it now. If anyone should suffer hits to growth (if that is even the outcome of changing to sustainable technologies - something many argue is not) it should be the rich developed world, not the poor developing world.
In regards to circumstances where nations place restrictions on trade and these are detrimental to one or both parties, I feel you are actually just making the case for free trade.
In that sense, I am. But the reality is, it's not "free". So we don't actually have "free trade". But as you can probably guess, even if it was properly "free", I wouldn't support it for the same reasons I don't support a fully free market.
Yes, they are a problem and contradict the idea that is "free trade" - get rid of them. The WTO does a pretty admirable job at that, anyway. Free trade inevitably does create a race to the bottom to some extent, where businesses will go to the nation that places upon them the fewest labor restrictions, but those nations are also usually the poorest nations. Notice how China has developed more pro-labor policies as its economy has grown, and now corporations are moving to Vietnam, Cambodia, etc. Their economies will now speed up accordingly, which is good, because they need it the most.
I definitely agree that they have benefited. The problem is as I highlighted with the slavery analogy. Just because they are better off, does that mean what we are doing is moral? Particularly in light of the fact that it doesn't have to be a 'race to the bottom'. It could be a race to cheaper production in the west, while providing a solid living wage and employment conditions in the much cheaper third world.
epete wrote:
Perhaps. I guess the other point is: Is efficiency worth more than other concerns? Walmart type stores is a good example. Basically we have cheap disposable crap (which leads to way more pollution), and a domination of the market by the giant stores over local stores and more diversity. It's a double-edge sword, as you pay more for the same goods in a smaller more local store than a branch of a giant franchise. These sort of issues go to the wider question of what kinds of societies we want to live in, and as such are about more than just economics and market efficiency. Not sure of the answer there, other than allowing democratic processes of governance of society to play out. The problem is democracy is so skewed these days by marketing and a shallow media.
Okay, not everything, and in fact very little of what Walmart sells, is "crap." I know everyone loves saying that because, well, its Walmart. The reality is, Walmart sells goods at the lowest prices, to the lowest income consumers, and those goods are in fact high quality. The food Walmart sells is nutritious and inexpensive (assuming you buy the healthy foods), the televisions are as good as any other store, the clothes are durable and oftentimes quite appealing, and so on. This benefits the poor immensely, yet the left is loath to admit this.
Ok, I don't actually know what Walmart sells. I just thought it would be equivalent to the giant big box stores we have here. And as a general rule, they sell cheap chinese crap. It's a conundrum, and I'm not really sure on what the best answer to it is. The problem I think we have as western societies, is that we are driven by marketing and advertising to always strive for more bling and more "stuff". Somehow we need to train ourselves to be more content with less. This would also help alleviate the massive personal debt problem most of our western countries face.
There may be more local stores before a Walmart comes into town and puts them all out of business, but what exactly is the problem with that? Those stores have worse selections of goods, higher prices, and shorter hours of operation. They get put out of business for a reason: consumers prefer the convenience of Walmart.
Yeah. But is the tail wagging the dog?
epete wrote:
Nope. A lot of farmland is owned by giant corporations who hire workers to work the land.
Nope. Typically you only own the top 6 feet or so of land. The government owns what's below.
Well, the government or any corporation would have to pay you to mine for coal on your land, which would be required to reach coal underground.
Not necessarily. Underground resource mining does go under peoples properties without their permission. And the big one currently here and in the US is coal seam gas. Here (and it looks like the same in the US, judging by the scale of the industry), you can't deny someone the right to prospect and drill for gas on your property. The government has set compensation levels that the mining company has to pay to put tracks and gas wells on your property. But you can't really stop them.