03.29.09
Posted in Economy, Political at 23:35 by lnxwalt
Wow! Even a cheerleader like Robert Scoble is starting to doubt that California is the promised land. This is big news.
Scobleizer: Technology, innovation, and geek enthusiasm » Blog Archive Is California setup for a brain drain? «
But that’s just my stories. For California as a whole I’m sensing that the whole state is primed for a major brain drain.
Why? Our state is bankrupt. What was the response? Lay off a bunch of teachers. Our education system is already in the toilet, but this will make it worse. Other states, like Texas, that aren’t bankrupt and aren’t laying off teachers, are looking more and more attractive to parents. It’s that, or spend 10s of thousands on private schools.
There’s a general feeling that crime is getting worse. That’s part a PR problem due to four Oakland police officers getting killed last week, but how will we solve those problems if we don’t have any money to hire more cops, build more prisons, etc, etc? Callers to KGO radio yesterday made it sound like the crime problem is getting worse. Rubbed into the wound is the fact that as a state we’ve decided to stop spending money on education and I predict we’ll see the problem get even worse as uneducated kids hit the job market and find no one is willing to hire them. The crime rate is about to head up big time because of this.
The truth is pretty simple. The Bay Area does not equal California. Given that most of the state’s resident live in the southern part of the state, I would argue that for most Californians, the Bay Area’s particular characteristics are unlike the state they know. We’re not suddenly aware that crime is here. We’ve known this for many years and aren’t freaking out because of the killing of 4 Oakland police officers. Since our state has gone to great lengths to prevent people from protecting themselves, we cringe whenever we hear of violence against our protectors (the police), but this isn’t anything we haven’t seen before.
Our education is in the toilet, but it isn’t because of lack of money. With a recent high school graduate in the house, I can tell you that the school system was the obstacle that almost prevented MJ and most of his friends from learning and growing into thinking adults. Why? Because the schools are political and environmental indoctrination machines, with Fascist-like dictatorial powers used in administering prison-like campuses. A well-educated person questions the answers and doctrine given by those in authority, but this very thing brings a young person into conflict with power-tripping teachers, principals, and counselors.
Let us talk about the money for a minute. A local superintendent is about to retire from a pay of $240,600 per year. He may be a very good school administrator (or not so good), but his work is certainly not worth $200k+ a year. One of the big problems with our schools is that local campuses and the districts themselves are too large. I would assume that a superintendent who makes over $200k per year will have a couple of $150k deputies, who would each have two to four $100 – $120k people reporting to them. Below that would be several school principals, deputy principals, and finally the actual teachers who do the work of education. Seeing that teachers universally complain that there aren’t enough resources at the classroom level, the thing we must do is get rid of the highly-paid administrators (smaller districts helps immensely by making it obvious to all that these guys are superfluous).
Remember that $1 out of every $2 of the state budget is spent for the schools. The schools’ voracious appetite for money is unquenchable, so much that school spending is slowly strangling highways, mass transit, and other essentials of such a populous state’s budget. We keep hearing that this is inadequate, that California must dramatically increase its school funding, even if this results in sharp increases in taxation for our working families.
California’s school situation is dire simply because we’ve centralized funding and control in Sacramento. Just as with the nation’s financial system, our problem is the dominance and control by large, out-of-area institutions. There are thousands of locally-owned banks, savings & loans, and credit unions that are not in need of bailouts. But the big nationwide institutions were mismanaged and our whole nation is suffering as a result. It is the same with schools.
Funds from outside the local community, coupled with a profound lack of parental control of the whole educational process, mean that the schools do not have to adapt or be responsive to the concerns of the parents who know their children best. For example, MJ used to spend 4 hours or more each night on homework, and frequently wasn’t finished even after that. After spending 6 to 7 hours at school, pouring on the homework that way is–in my opinion–unconscionable.
One of my nephews used to do his full week’s homework schedule in half an hour on Monday. When his mother met with the teachers to request harder work, they informed her that they were not allowed to deviate from their predefined grade-specific content. This child’s brother is more like MJ, and used to spend his entire after-school time doing homework. Do you see the point? Each child is different, and has different capacities for school-based learning. State-issued standards about homework and classroom content fail to take into account that some students in a typical thirty-student classroom are probably a year or more advanced over some others.
What is the solution? We need to make sure that school districts are smaller, and that parents have more control over them than do professional educrats. In fact, we need to make legal changes to our educational system so that are unresponsive to parent and students’ needs are denied permission to operate. Secondly, we need to change the way we fund schools, so that the majority of their funds come from the local community. This will probably necessitate changes to Proposition 13′s controls on property taxes. And thirdly, we need to stop trying to recapture what schools did in 1940 and 1950. The nation, the economy, and the world around us are quite different now than they were back then. We must also stop indoctrinating children. If it is true, let them figure it out because they are intelligent thinkers. I’m talking to you, anthropogenic global warming (AGW), also known as “climate change”.
Back then, we knew that many graduates would go into factory jobs where a fixed set of basic skills served as the entry requirements for a life-long career. For this reason, schools tried to give each student the same training, the same content, as any other student. Today, there are few factory jobs awaiting graduates. Instead, they are faced with retail (many graduates will work for the large discount chain we know as “Big Blue”), foodservice (the “Golden Arches” is the first employer for a huge number of people), and other low-wage service jobs. The best futures are available to those who go out and start their own enterprises and do something differently from the way everyone else does. However, this requires that schools stop being “education factories” and reform themselves around “boutique training programs” tailored to the needs and plans of each individual student.
To be sure, This is going to be time-consuming, expensive, and contentious. We can do some things to reduce the costs, however. Knowing what we know, why do students have to sit in classrooms every day, when much of their learning could be just as effective in an online format? I got my Master’s Degree online, so I know that it takes personal investment in one’s own success. But that is exactly what is needed for those who go on to start and run their own enterprises. Best of all, this kind of training is very amenable to personal research.
And, yes, I am among those looking into Texas and other states. California’s decision to raise taxes during a recession is going to hurt state residents more. This includes those who are already struggling, those who have no healthcare insurance, and college students.
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03.12.09
Posted in Economy, Political at 02:21 by lnxwalt
Unemployment ‘is now a national emergency’ – USATODAY.com
The unemployment rate in Michigan was 11.6%, up 4.3 percentage points from a year earlier and the highest for any state, the Labor Department said. The unemployment rates in California, Rhode Island and South Carolina rose in January to top 10%. That was the first time those states had jobless rates in the double digits during this recession, which began in December 2007.
A number of people who still employed are working suchminiscule schedules that they are also, for all practical purposes, unemployed. Twelve hours per week is just enough to buy a couple of video games or rent a few DVDs each month.
I have a suggestion that may help California. Take all public officials statewide who collect $100,000 or more and cut their pay by 80%, using the savings to fund continued employment for lower-paid state and local government employees and grants for small business startups. The Pete Wilson horrendous tax increase during a recession trick is just going to make it worse and longer for Californians–again–the way that namesake governor Pete Wilson’s tax and fee and tuition increase prolonged and deepened that recession. (There was a campaign commercial for Ron Unz that made many Californians aware of just how badly this tactic backfired on us.)
What else? Abandon, at least until after the recession ends, the state carbon reporting and regulation plan. Consolidate state tax collections and funds custodian operations into a single “division of revenue”. Make it a felony for any state official to spend transportation funds (e.g., DMV taxes) for any non-transportation purpose. Kick off a comprehensive evaluation of the effect of state regulations and taxation on smaller businesses, the kind that produce jobs.
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03.11.09
Posted in Political at 02:44 by lnxwalt
Obama backs teacher merit pay, charter schools
WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama called for tying teachers’ pay to students’ performance and expanding innovative charter schools Tuesday, embracing ideas that have provoked hostility from members of teachers unions.
He also suggested longer school days — and years — to help America’s children compete in the world.
Charter schools can help. Merit pay might also be helpful, but do we really want teachers that are only motivated by their wallets? Longer days? I think not
I believe Mr. Obama missed a lot of what is going on because he spent some of his school years in foreign schools. Let me lay it out briefly.
Schools still rely on industrial age concepts, in a technology age world. They expect to produce a uniform product when it is neither socially nor economically desirable to have a cohort of clones each year. Schools rely on state and federal handouts that come with strings. Schools have rigid, theory X management structures, much like those in the failing automobile manufacturers. Schools have obscenely overcompensated administrators whose pay depends on building empires of subordinates (including teachers and their assigned students). Schools relegate parents to subservient and advisory roles, when the schools should be subservient and advisory to the parents’ leading roles in training their children.
Any reform plan that does not deal with these issues will be a dismal failure, just like the “No Child Left Behind Act”. Schools need to be locally-funded, locally-controlled, and to target locally-created standards. In that sense, the charter school movement has shown that much of the educracy that clogs our school districts can be successfully jettisoned without ill effect on the students.
As for merit pay, the teachers believe that merit pay is an attempt to damage their unions. They also believe that determining who merits what pay will not be objective. I agree that the merit computation will be subjective and will be manipulated by cynical administrators.
As for the daily length of school, I believe that learning to play outside without the teachers’ looking on is probably the most important part of education. This is when people learn to get along with others who may be older or younger than they (something they cannot get in the schools), and learn to work together to set objectives and to achieve them. You can hear them discussing it: one wants to play kickball, another wants to play dodgeball, and a third wants to play football. They learn how to get along and enjoy themselves, even when they don’t always get their own way.
This depressurizing time is also critical to absorbing the myriad facts and figures that were spouted at students that day. Yes, I realize that many foreign nations have longer school days and longer school years, and that those nations often have higher scores on learning tests. But reality is not learning tests–reality is a changing world, in which unexpected situations and choices come up. That kind of mind-numbing process beats down the inventive and innovative parts of students’ minds, so that they become mindless drones in the workplace. Think about it. Teacher says “homework tonight is …” so the student never has to plan or allocate time and resources toward a goal that is several months off. Often, the work requirement is so detailed that there is no room for personalization.
WRONG, WRONG, WRONG. Destined to fail. Student performance comes from home, and is stifled by the school. Until the imbalance between the two is righted, plans like these are destined to fail.
Personally, I believe that school districts need to be small, locally-funded, and controlled by local parents. If there is one thing that the past forty years have shown, it is that funding and control by large, out-of-the-area entities like state and federal educational bureaucracies merely makes schools even less responsive to the students and their parents.
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03.02.09
Posted in Economy at 06:58 by lnxwalt
Obviously, the word comes from economy or economic, and apocalypse.
- econolyspe
- Economic apocalypse
And it seems apt, especially when you know what it means. We often think of apocalypse as in the end of the world. We look at the economy and we see the same thing. But that is the wrong idea. The word apocalypse comes from a Greek word and means to reveal something that was previously hidden.
I have recently written a lot about the econolypse. I am hoping that in the process I am helping you to see that these problems are not new–the only new thing is that now they are visible. What was hidden about the mismanagement of the banks and the entire economy has now been revealed for all to see. This is an economic apocalypse.
There is another point that is also important to see. Apocalypse entered our language because it is the Catholic name for a book of the New Testament, Revelation. The book of Revelation is full of descriptions of devastating events and death, culminating in the return of Jesus to stamp out humanity’s rebellion against God and his establishment of a thousand-year peaceful kingdom. In the present unveiling of our economic distress, we really need to stop depending solely upon our own wisdom and learn to lean on the God who made us.
Look at it this way:
| Human Wisdom |
New Wisdom |
| Rising real estate prices will never stop, buy now before you get priced out. |
If the price is too high, maybe we should just wait, since it looks unsustainable. |
| Consumer spending drives the economy. Encourage borrowing, people spend more, economy grows. |
Consumers’ ability to spend is limited by their earnings and savings. Reward increased savings and spending will also rise. |
| Let the big banks take risks if they choose. They are too big to fail. |
A bank that is too big to fail is too big to exist. Break up those banks. |
Econolypse is a good word for what is going on. But we need to know what the word means, because there have been a lot of unsavory things going on under the table. Now that all is being revealed, we are being asked to protect those whose conduct caused it all from the consequences of their actions. It makes me wonder what will be revealed in another five to twenty years, when the fruit of our fouled up response comes back to bite us.
- econolyspe
- Economic apocalypse–the unveiling or revealing of what has been happening in our economy, hopefully accompanied by solutions characterized by departure from failed human wisdom and openly acknowledged dependence on the Sovereign Lord God for wisdom and guidance.
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