Semi-Daily Journal

That would be workER's comp, as my uppity-feminist-yet-staunch-Republican mother would say.

"Feminist and Republican" makes for a comical contradiction.

Brad should travel to Russia or India, or at least talk to some Indian or Russian mathematicians or programmers, before he argues that turning around California's sh---y schools requires significant additional investments of money. Anyone working with programmers in Silicon Valley can see that many of the best were educated in nations that spend (even on an adjusted or PPP basis) a small fraction per pupil as America does, which calls into question the idea of any meaningful correlation between American per-pupil spending and achievement.

What does California spend per pupil--eight grand? seven grand? Russian per pupil spending is almost certainly less than $100 per pupil, perhaps far less, and yet the average Russian student is typically several YEARS more advanced in math and science than even the best American students, and I would suspect the same is true in many parts of India as well.

Even when you adjust spending for higher costs of PPE depreciation, teachers' salaries, maintenance etc., you still are left with a glaring absence of any meaningful correlation between per-pupil spending and academic performance/achievement. I suspect that the sinkhole in this country consists mainly of 1) bureaucrats and other non-teachers who suck up massive funds, and 2) hugely expensive athletic facilities and programs. Neither of these allocations does anything to improve students' ability to master calculus or physics--which, BTW, are studied by _all_ _junior high school_-age students in Russia....

The hard truth, I suspect, for Calif as for the rest of the US is that mastering such subjects has next to nothing to do with how much is spent on your school and almost everything to do with the determination shown and effort expended by the student and his parents.

Education has far more to do with cultural values--mainly attitudes toward learning and teachers and belief in the social importance of what the Russians call the intelligent, or man of culture and education.

Tombo: I somewhat agree.

I think the US primary education system routinely does poorly when compared with other industrialized nations, or even emerging countries like India.

However, its Universities are still by far the best in the world. While there are some very strong universities in other countries, their overall quality and quantity is unequaled. I think there is a lesson here...

US Universities put a much larger emphasis on the students working out their own education - selecting classes, professors, etc. based on interest, ability, needs, and goals. And they tend to learn these skills from others who are practicing them - such as taking a class from Dr. DeLong who is also doing real economic analysis.

The US university model is much more in harmony with how humans learn best - by learning and working alongside those who practice and teach the things of interest to the individual students. The US primary and secondary school education has a real "mass produced" quality to it - where children are forced into a series of courses, their own skills matter little, and their own interests matter not at all.

sz

SZ,

I agree that our universities generally do a good job, but the issue is the relation between spending and primary/secondary school performance. You're off the mark in supposing that self-direction will enable a twelve year-old to master calculus. In point of fact, the Russian secondary school system offers no choice whatsoever to students and piles on tons of homework, which is one reason that their students routinely master math and physics concepts that the best American students struggle with. Related to this is the refusal to give students the time to earn money by flipping burgers: you're in school to master core principles of recognized academic subjects, not to earn cash for earrings or sneakers (or piercings???).

If tech drives the economy and our standard of living, then we could profit greatly from moving in the Russians' direction toward MORE discipline, HIGHER math/physics standards, and significantly more homework. As it is, many of the tech jobs are moving inexorably to Bangalore and other points east. BTW, those aren't just the low-end jobs: Intel and the other major tech firms are finally discovering Russia's programmers and scientists, who tend to be more gifted and more creative than India's. The analogy is with Japan's auto industry ca forty years ago: just a matter of time before much of the higher-end tech work goes to places like Budapest, Riga, Moscow, Novosibirsk....

A lot of this depends on culture.

"Anyone working with programmers in Silicon Valley can see that many of the best were educated in nations that spend (even on an adjusted or PPP basis) a small fraction per pupil as America does, which calls into question the idea of any meaningful correlation between American per-pupil spending and achievement."

That would be because they heavily "track" students, spending virtually all their resources on a tiny minority while virtually ignoring the rest of the population, educationally. The tiny minority they actually educated then immediately comes over here, giving us highly educated workers for free.

I don't see a lot of lessons for the US there.

"Russian per pupil spending is almost certainly less than $100 per pupil" ???
PLEASE think before you type. Given the cost of living and what teacher salaries are in India and Russia, such cost comparisons are worse than useless. If you want to argue about administrative costs or testing or the schools mission is too broad or teachers have it too easy or whatever, make a case for it. I see overworked teachers and run down, overcrowded schools you wouldn't want to work in. So there's a problem, yes, but it is probably got more to do with a lack of money than anything else. (BTW my child is home schooled.)

"Russian per pupil spending is almost certainly less than $100 per pupil" ???
PLEASE think before you type. Given the cost of living and what teacher salaries are in India and Russia, such cost comparisons are worse than useless. If you want to argue about administrative costs or testing or the schools mission is too broad or teachers have it too easy or whatever, make a case for it. I see overworked teachers and run down, overcrowded schools you wouldn't want to work in. So there's a problem, yes, but it is probably got more to do with a lack of money than anything else. (BTW my child is home schooled.)

"Russian per pupil spending is almost certainly less than $100 per pupil" ???
PLEASE think before you type. Given the cost of living and what teacher salaries are in India and Russia, such cost comparisons are worse than useless. If you want to argue about administrative costs or testing or the schools mission is too broad or teachers have it too easy or whatever, make a case for it. I see overworked teachers and run down, overcrowded schools you wouldn't want to work in. So there's a problem, yes, but it is probably got more to do with a lack of money than anything else. (BTW my child is home schooled.)

"Russian per pupil spending is almost certainly less than $100 per pupil" ???
PLEASE think before you type. Given the cost of living and what teacher salaries are in India and Russia, such cost comparisons are worse than useless. If you want to argue about administrative costs or testing or the schools mission is too broad or teachers have it too easy or whatever, make a case for it. I see overworked teachers and run down, overcrowded schools you wouldn't want to work in. So there's a problem, yes, but it is probably got more to do with a lack of money than anything else. (BTW my child is home schooled.)

"Russian per pupil spending is almost certainly less than $100 per pupil" ???
PLEASE think before you type. Given the cost of living and what teacher salaries are in India and Russia, such cost comparisons are worse than useless. If you want to argue about administrative costs or testing or the schools mission is too broad or teachers have it too easy or whatever, make a case for it. I see overworked teachers and run down, overcrowded schools you wouldn't want to work in. So there's a problem, yes, but it is probably got more to do with a lack of money than anything else. (BTW my child is home schooled.)

"Russian per pupil spending is almost certainly less than $100 per pupil" ???
PLEASE think before you type. Given the cost of living and what teacher salaries are in India and Russia, such cost comparisons are worse than useless. If you want to argue about administrative costs or testing or the schools mission is too broad or teachers have it too easy or whatever, make a case for it. I see overworked teachers and run down, overcrowded schools you wouldn't want to work in. So there's a problem, yes, but it is probably got more to do with a lack of money than anything else. (BTW my child is home schooled.)

"Russian per pupil spending is almost certainly less than $100 per pupil" ???
PLEASE think before you type. Given the cost of living and what teacher salaries are in India and Russia, such cost comparisons are worse than useless. If you want to argue about administrative costs or testing or the schools mission is too broad or teachers have it too easy or whatever, make a case for it. I see overworked teachers and run down, overcrowded schools you wouldn't want to work in. So there's a problem, yes, but it is probably got more to do with a lack of money than anything else. (BTW my child is home schooled.)

"Russian per pupil spending is almost certainly less than $100 per pupil" ???
PLEASE think before you type. Given the cost of living and what teacher salaries are in India and Russia, such cost comparisons are worse than useless. If you want to argue about administrative costs or testing or the schools mission is too broad or teachers have it too easy or whatever, make a case for it. I see overworked teachers and run down, overcrowded schools you wouldn't want to work in. So there's a problem, yes, but it is probably got more to do with a lack of money than anything else. (BTW my child is home schooled.)

"Russian per pupil spending is almost certainly less than $100 per pupil" ???
PLEASE think before you type. Given the cost of living and what teacher salaries are in India and Russia, such cost comparisons are worse than useless. If you want to argue about administrative costs or testing or the schools mission is too broad or teachers have it too easy or whatever, make a case for it. I see overworked teachers and run down, overcrowded schools you wouldn't want to work in. So there's a problem, yes, but it is probably got more to do with a lack of money than anything else. (BTW my child is home schooled.)

"Russian per pupil spending is almost certainly less than $100 per pupil" ???
PLEASE think before you type. Given the cost of living and what teacher salaries are in India and Russia, such cost comparisons are worse than useless. If you want to argue about administrative costs or testing or the schools mission is too broad or teachers have it too easy or whatever, make a case for it. I see overworked teachers and run down, overcrowded schools you wouldn't want to work in. So there's a problem, yes, but it is probably got more to do with a lack of money than anything else. (BTW my child is home schooled.)

apav,

What the hell with all the posts???

Tombo, the technical jobs moving overseas has nothing to do with our educational prowess or lack thereof and everything to do with the fact that they can hire two (or three or four) overseas programmers for what they would pay here. There are other economic factors, as well, but that's really all it comes down to -- economics.

Your comparisons of per pupil spending are off, too, since you're comparing apples to oranges. What does land cost here? Facilities and maintenance? What are teacher salaries? Custodial salaries? Once you've got a model that corrects for all of those other things, then you can make a comparison. Now, though, it's just foolish.

Tombo, the technical jobs moving overseas has nothing to do with our educational prowess or lack thereof and everything to do with the fact that they can hire two (or three or four) overseas programmers for what they would pay here. There are other economic factors, as well, but that's really all it comes down to -- economics.

Your comparisons of per pupil spending are off, too, since you're comparing apples to oranges. What does land cost here? Facilities and maintenance? What are teacher salaries? Custodial salaries? Once you've got a model that corrects for all of those other things, then you can make a comparison. Now, though, it's just foolish.

"the technical jobs moving overseas has nothing to do with our educational prowess or lack thereof and everything to do with the fact that they can hire two (or three or four) overseas programmers for what they would pay here."

PaulB, certainly the fac that labor overseas is a key factor in why jobs move. But if the U.S. wishes to compete with the cheapness of foreign labor, U.S. workers need to be of higher quality. Unfortunately, it appears that as far as technical jobs are concerned, foreign workers may be equally or better skilled. Vastly improving the U.S.'s human capital through better education would certainly reduced the drain of labor to some extent.

If we fail to improve our schools, we can always do what we've done throughout the 1990's--import quality workers. But why not just bring the jobs to them, while, of course, paying them less?

"the technical jobs moving overseas has nothing to do with our educational prowess or lack thereof and everything to do with the fact that they can hire two (or three or four) overseas programmers for what they would pay here."

PaulB, certainly that's a key factor in why jobs move overseas. But if the U.S. wishes to compete with the cheapness of foreign labor, U.S. workers need to be of higher quality. Unfortunately, it appears that as far as technical jobs are concerned, foreign workers may be equally or better skilled. Vastly improving the U.S.'s human capital through better education would certainly reduced the drain of labor to some extent.

If we fail to improve our schools, we can always do what we've done throughout the 1990's--import quality workers. But why not just bring the jobs to them, while, of course, paying them less?

"apav, What the hell with all the posts???"

Obviously, apav had the same frustrating and mystifying experience I did the first time I tried to put a comment on DeLong's site -- I waited, and waited, and waited for the list of comments in that thread to reappear on my screen to confirm that mine had been added to it, and then I sent it again. And again. It took me forever to discover that, for some strange reason, Brad's site adds your comment to the thread WITHOUT revealing that fact to you until you actually disengage from the thread and then sign back onto it.

Bruce:
Re:
Obviously, apav had the same frustrating and mystifying experience I did the first time I tried to put a comment on DeLong's site -- I waited, and waited, and waited for the list of comments in that thread to reappear on my screen to confirm that mine had been added to it, and then I sent it again. And again. It took me forever to discover that, for some strange reason, Brad's site adds your comment to the thread WITHOUT revealing that fact to you until you actually disengage from the thread and then sign back onto it.

Not necessarily. I had one post duplicated that I absolutely did not resend.

On education:
A suprising portion of the differential in spending (I admit to having forgotten the figure) is spend on various forms of handicapped accomodations, including learning disabilities. These can be quite expensive. Naturally, they add nothing to test scores.

My wife is a teacher in an affluent district that provides many of these services, as well as various goodies for smart students, and is quite efficiently run (partly due to being small). I'm quite impressed with what money can buy. One of the most important is smart teachers.

Moreover, If you skim the cream American secondary students are competitive with anyone.

Well, I really liked California, but I have to admit that our family of four left the state in the late 90s. The brutal truth of the matter is that we left because we could not afford to buy a house in any school district in San Diego that we thought had the resources to educate our children, and we could not afford to put our children in private schools and either buy or rent. So when the kids got to be school age, the incentive to leave was very great. I'm not sure to this day whether we made the right decision (the school district we moved to has its own quaint issues, and mid-Missouri is where the Ozarks meet Iowa...not my vision of heaven). What I do know is that an additional deep problem in California is the bizarre inequity of the property tax system. I'll admit there is a bit of irrationality in the belief, but it would incredibly piss me off to find that I was paying (in some cases) 10 times more property tax than a neighbor who owned an identical house, but had lived there since the 70s. Now, of course, you can even pass on the tax break to your children, if you can afford them. In San Diego, there was a tremendous incentive for older properties *not* to ever change hands since the tax advantage was so great. The inefficiency and reduced likelihood of (possibly denser) redevelopment should be pretty clear.

All that said, I still think that California will continue to thrive unless they do something really stupid like starve the UC system. The fact that there were limits to what they would do to UC even in bad times was what would set California apart from many other states I'm too familiar with right now...

The posting problem is not just due to what people are doing. If you post from a separate comments window, press 'post', wait a second, and kill the window. Open a new comments window, and you should see your post.

If you're viewing this blog one article at a time, so that the comments and comment text box appear with the article, then pushing 'post' once will produce at least two posts. I checked that out, pushing the button and then killing the (article and comments) window. It still posted twice.

This story from the WSJ this morning almost knocked me off my chair. I have known about California's wacky property taxes for some time, but I didn't realize it was like this:

"Mr. Buffett, the chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., took on California's famous Proposition 13, which has limited property taxes there since 1978. As an example, he pointed out the difference between his own property-tax bills for homes he owns in California and Nebraska.

His home in Omaha, he said, is valued at roughly $500,000. His current yearly property tax bill on that home: $14,401.

In California, he owns a Laguna Beach home valued at $4 million, or eight times as much. The annual property taxes on that home are just $2,264 -- a fraction of what he pays in Omaha.

More to the point, said Mr. Buffett, the taxes on his Omaha home rose $1,920 this year, compared with $23 on the Laguna Beach home. Mr. Buffett attributed the scant jump in California to the restrictions of Proposition 13, which generally limits property-tax increases to 2% a year, no matter how much the value of a property appreciates."

Is this typical?

I think pblsh is on the right track---the biggest problem with California is the severe economic distortion caused by Proposition 13.

Fixing California's economic problems is easy---just institute land value taxation to recapture land rents from private holders.

Re education, I think a of it is culture and the influence of parents and peers. Another problem is that education in the US needs to be more "evidence-based" (like the nascent evidence-based movement in medicine). While I'm not against giving teachers higher pay, I think education could be made more efficient...

Jason McCullough wrote, "That would be because they heavily 'track' students, spending virtually all their resources on a tiny minority while virtually ignoring the rest of the population, educationally." Right. Not to mention the fact that casually observing bright Indian/Russian/etc programmers hardly constitutes a scientific sampling procedure.

Apparently several posters failed to read my remarks about adjusting school spending via PPP or some other mechanism to arrive at a fair comparison.

Again, the Russian schools system spends a pittance on Russian students. Their per-pupil expenditures on maintenance, new plant and quipment, and teachers' salaries are next to zero. For example, teachers earn maybe $100 per month in Moscow, where the average income is at least five times higher, and few schools even have computers. None has a pool or any other athletic facilities.

As to the comment that the Russians' success is due to tracking students, there is actually LESS tracking in Russian secondary schools than in American ones. Whereas only college-bound US students take even one calculus course or a serious physics course, EVERY Russian student must take calculus and physics courses which are much more demanding than even a typical American high school's AP course in these subjects.

Again, culture-- standards, expectations of students and of teachers, amount of homework assigned, etc-- is far more important than money as a determinant of educational performance. There simply is no excuse for the appalling performance of US primary and secondary students--a performance level that has declined during an era of rising school spending in the US.

I wonder if those educated Indians and Russians would rather have their children educated in the U.S. or in the wonderful Indian and Russian school systems?

My Chinese girlfriend (educated in Changan) woke up at 6:30, read for an hour, prepared for school at 7:30, got a siesta at around noon for several hours, went back to school and stayed until 9 or 10. Upon arriving home, she studied until she fell asleep. She did this 6 days a week.

She would rather that her kids don't also have to do this.

Many other Chinese that I have met tell me that they are very impressed by the diversity of the American educational system. I, for one, very much approve of the idea of introducing math majors to Kant and requiring art students to do at least some quantitative courses.

My Chinese girlfriend (educated in Changan) woke up at 6:30, read for an hour, prepared for school at 7:30, got a siesta at around noon for several hours, went back to school and stayed until 9 or 10. Upon arriving home, she studied until she fell asleep. She did this 6 days a week.

She would rather that her kids don't also have to do this.

Many other Chinese that I have met tell me that they are very impressed by the diversity of the American educational system. I, for one, very much approve of the idea of introducing math majors to Kant and requiring art students to do at least some quantitative courses.

Nameless,

Every Russian immigrant I know has found that his children, upon arrival in the US, are several years ahead of their counterparts and therefore find their classes to be a complete waste of time. By the same token, my neighbor's brother went back to Russia recently and his brother's fifteen year-old son, who's enrolled in one of the top magnet schools in New York City (I think it's Brooklyn Tech), found that he could not even do any of the math or physics exercises assigned during the first week. They brought the kid back to Brooklyn, as the gap was simply too large for the child to close, regardless of any amount of tutoring.

I expect that my wife and I in future will go to Russia each summer and hire math and physics tutors at a teacher's salary, ie, $100 per month, to keep our boy at at least the level of a high-achieving Russian kid. As for the rest of the year, my wife and I are leaning toward the view that if even the best private schools in this country are years behind even mediocre Russian schools, we might as well save our money and free up more time to tutor our children ourselves.

And yes, in contrast to the Changan helot-child described above, our children will get a full night's sleep and enjoy life when they're awake.