We had a discussion last night, as we've sold the house and everything. When it turned to politics, I mentioned that the Democratic party needed a Tea Party rebellion of its own to clean up its act. Public Education couldn't improve until then, for example.
His reply was pretty typical: You can't get guys like me to teach, because the schools can't afford to pay that much. My reply - that made him stop and think - was this:
Howard County [Maryland] must pay $15,000 per pupil for K-12. With 20 kids in a classroom, that's $300,000 per teacher. Take away half of that for overhead - building, heating, depreciation, etc, and that's still $150,000.I think this hit home, pretty hard. All I can say is that if someone as liberal as my older brother is thinking twice about this, the Democratic Party is in a deep, deep pit of FAIL with their core supporters. Even the hard core is wondering if the party is irredeemably corrupt and incompetent. It'll be an interesting next ten years, folks.
And while I'm patting myself on the back for being such an intellectual rebel, let me point out that I was way, way off in estimating cost. It seems that San Diego spends $25,000 per K-12 pupil. For a class of 20, that's a cool half mill a year. At 50% overhead, you could get teachers for $250,000 a year. At that price, Junior's next semester should look like this:
8:00 - 8:50 Physics (A. Einstein, instructor)Instead, we get, well, the San Diego public school system.
9:00 - 9:50 American History (Tho. Jefferson, instructor)
10:00 - 10:50 Physical Education (V. Lombardi, instructor)
11:00 - 11:50 Music (G. Gershwin, instructor)
12:00 - 12:50 Lunch (catered by J. Child)
1:00 - 1:50 Math (L. Euler, instructor)
2:00 - 2:50 English (W. Falkner, instructor)
But my subversive efforts en famille will continue. You tell me it's the Institution/You better free your mind instead ...
10 comments:
It is really, really hard to argue your case against numbers like that...
My kids go to private school and it only costs 1/3 of your original estimate per child.
Don't forget you have to factor in that huge school district administration staff salary to the cost of per student.
My wife is a teacher, studying for her doctorate. One thing that I never realized until she started was the number of Federal mandates that the schools have to deal with. For example, the ADA requires that the schools provide handicapped students with the "least restrictive environment" for their learning. You might think this means ramps for kids in wheelchairs. And you are right, it does. But it also means full time aides for the mentally challenged. And an administrator to oversee the program, of course.
But I don't disagree with the basic analysis. And my daughter is in private school as well. :)
Without even analyzing the numbers, a curious mind wonders the same thing every time a district comes to a budget crisis.
The powers that be start to talk about cutting teachers, but never is there talk of cutting administrators.
Bureaucracy is expensive, and that cost per-pupil is an average. There may be children with multiple disabilities that have to go to special private schools--and those tuition costs often run into high five-digit or low six-digit figures. Depending on the state, money may also be diverted into "charter" or "magnet" schools. Those schools get to pick the motivated students, run up an even higher cost per-pupil, then send the tab to the public school systems.
The core problem is that there's no market forces at work; there's no price information between the "service" and their "clients". Your brother wouldn't actually be able to teach, because he wouldn't be allowed to create his own curriculum, or make any demands of the students without being shouted down administrators who were just given an earful by parents.
There's no fix for the system as it currently stands. When everyone is required to participate, and anyone can make any demand without immediate financial consequence, the whole thing looks exactly like what we have: the haphazard ruins of an ongoing war between three parties that cannot agree on anything yet are forced to cooperate.
I looked up my local school district here in NH. $13,625 per student. So yes, times 20 is a nice amount. I have no idea what a schoolteacher makes, but the feds have only made expenses go up.
When you calculate billing rates in an engineering firm, you usually take 2.5 - 2.75 x the engineer's hourly rate to get the billing rate. This assumes also that 1/3 of the total hours in the office are overhead (i.e. a combination of engineers' overhead hours and administration).
Now an engineering office has lower infrastructural requirements than a school. So let's up the factor to 4.
$500,000/4 = $125,000 to hire a teacher with. Still pretty good.
I'd like to see a school's transparent budget. I'll bet there's a lot of deadwood in it.
The Liberals have built an impressive humanoid-bureaucratic infrastructure, a giant parasite complete with its own language, and it has succeeded in feeding and fattening itself for decades. Kill it now but watch your shoes, it's going to be messy.
Weetabix said...
"Now an engineering office has lower infrastructural requirements than a school."
It didn't used to be that way, and it's ridiculous. There's no practical reason why schools need to be enormous concrete monuments to socialism.
My point about lower infrastructural requirements was that an engineering office of 40 has maybe 6 non-producers in it, or 34 engineers.
A school with 34 teachers, by Borepatch's proportions, would have 680 students and, say, 10 admin people for a total of 724 people.
You'd need a bigger building for that. Thus the higher factor for revenue/salary.
Just sayin'.
(WV: theax - what we need to give to teachers' unions)
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