At 01:32 AM 1/30/2006, Robert G. Brown wrote:
On Fri, 27 Jan 2006, Jim Lux wrote:
Entire state of CA: 35,135 lowest, 56,444 avg, 53,804 BA+60
Even districts with very low average family incomes don't have salaries
that are a lot lower. (The low income has other effects.. more is spent
on supplemental programs for remediation).
Ummm, it isn't really fair to use CA as an example of what is "typical".
<snip>
Super-inflated property values add a certain baseline minimum to the
cost of living there, even with rent control and the like (as in my
brother cannot charge anything like the $7K/month or so that would be
"fair market" rent for a ramshackle trailer). The CA economy in the
highly desirable living/affluent zones (like e.g. the New York City
economy) "works", but it is somewhat distorted compared to 90% of the
rest of the country.
I suspect, though, that the ratio between software weenie wages and teacher
wages is fairly consistent.
Apparently NC's average salary is $43K, compared to $47K national
average (available various places online). However, entrance level is
much lower and while it isn't by any means an absolute rule, "computer
instructors" are a lot more likely to be young than old, and I'll wager
that only a very small percentage of them have actual Bachelor's degrees
in computer science. Compare this to:
http://www.computerworld.com/departments/surveys/skills
and you can see that a "help desk operator" makes more, on average, than
a high school teacher in NC. All the "real" computer jobs in NC make
maybe $15-20K (on average) more a year than teaching high school, and
let people start making this kind of money far younger than they would
in teaching school.
Indeed, this is true, and teachers ARE undervalued.
So OK, you got me, 4-5x was a bit hyperbolic. The main point, though,
is not -- there is and will likely continue to be a large and immediate
marginal benefit to anyone who leaves a job teaching computer skills in
high school and enters almost ANY sort of real IT position in industry
or (even) higher academe (which pays less than industry but employs a
lot of IT people, making the average a bit deceptive). For young people
just starting out in teaching the marginal difference of $10-20K can be
a significant fraction of their original salary, and its MARGINAL
benefit (factoring in insurance and retirement, taxes, social security,
and the fixed costs to the family of mortgage and food) can be the
difference between not so genteel poverty and some degree of comfort or
the money required to start a family. I know several people who used to
be teachers but who literally couldn't afford to stay in the profession,
at least if they wanted to remain married.
You're right.. you'll climb the scales faster in IT than in
teaching. However, folks who teach do it for the love of it, not for the
money, so probably, it's not so much that you can earn a better living
being an SA than a teacher, but that the career path for the average IT
person doesn't encourage teaching as a profession. I'll bet the average CS
curriculum doesn't have much content in the "how to teach others to do
computer" area, especially when the teaching target is rookies or 4th
graders (CS grad students do discussion sections for undergrads, but
that's, I'm sure, viewed as penance, dues paying, or something
similar). Likewise engineering, etc.
Hah.. maybe this is the solution to the world's problems, here on the
Beowulf list: it's not that we need writing classes, or teamwork classes,
or more calculus, etc., it's that we need to encourage more engineering
majors to take up teaching as a job, as opposed to being money grubbers
chasing VCs.
The interesting thing is that I think that everybody -- governments,
school boards, parents, students, teachers -- understands that computing
is one of the most important single things for an individual to master
in school these days. Computers are also expensive little suckers, they
become obsolete in 3 years and decrepitly obsolete in 5 years, and the
BEST INTENTIONED TEACHERS IN THE WORLD lag the mastery of the technology
by more like 10. The kids being taught, who have grown UP with
computers, often understand them better than most of the teachers in
their school, sometimes including the ones nominally responsible for
teaching them about computing. This creates a huge resource problem.
You can't solve a school's computer problem by a single huge bolus of
money.
The endowment idea... As I mentioned earlier (and you go through again
below), you need a continuing source of money. Doesn't have to be huge,
but it does have to endure.
To do this properly, one needs to FUND computing with ROLLOVER
REPLACEMENT of every computer the school owns, including those provided
for all the teachers, every five years at the latest.
This actually is starting to be standard practice. If only because
supporting all the other things becomes difficult with highly heterogenous
configurations. It's actually the case that some (enlightened) schools
won't accept donations of 3 year old computers (costs more to keep them
running than the "free computers" are worth).
One has to FUND
systems management for an entire LAN. One has to FUND software. One
has to FUND teachers to teach computing, in the teeth of a 30% salary
differential available for the asking to anyone competent and willing to
work for IBM, or SAS, or Pfizer, or GE, or countless smaller companies.
The 30%, realistically, is going to be paid by love. Sort of like folks
working for NASA being paid in "space dollars". However, there does need to
be some sort of payment.
So, get that endowment fund going.
Interesting solution! Of course this produces a sort of awkward
plutocracy as far as setting curricula is concerned, where someone or
some corporation (ahem, ahem) with lots of money (ahem) and an agenda
(ahem) can endow a fund with strings attached and arrange to shape those
young minds along the paths they select.
But this happens anyway, just in other areas (athletics springs to mind).
Or they can achieve the same
goal by donating equipment or software instead of money and avoid having
to pay the taxes that might have ultimately funded the schools directly
(but without the influence). Beyond the corporate, often as not
individual initiatives along these lines tend to push still more
resources into schools in affluent communities while neglecting poor
ones just because the poor ones don't have the wealthy donors, because
parents have a hard enough getting involved where their own kids' future
and opportunities are at stake, let alone kids in poor rural communities
Down East (in NC, that would be the eastern part of the state, where
there are whole counties that are very poor indeed).
This is a fundamental problem (and one which has resulted in interesting
lawsuits, where some districts have a "share the donation wealth" policy)
Is it more inequitable than any other aspect of something as highly
politicized as public school funding? Probably not. In California,
decades ago, schools were funded almost entirely by property taxes within
the district, leading to huge inequities. They created what was called the
"Collier factor" method (I think) which did some wealth transfer to
equalize it. Prop 13 resulted in a huge defacto change to state funding,
but then, it's the legislature sticking their fingers into the money
distribution: influenced by the feds, etc. No matter how you slice it,
public schools are viewed as a convenient mechanism for achieving social
goals (it's pervasive, everyone's kids go, it's compulsory, etc.)
optimization problem. One might THINK that communities have the right
to determine what school size is best for their own community's needs.
Not according to the Gates foundation.
Communities have decided to do things in the past that are demonstrably
inappropriate: segregated schools spring to mind. Local school boards are
typically not educationally sophisticated, and tend to respond to loud
voices, reasonable or not. One hopes for a reasonably sophisticated
professional infrastructure at the county and state that provides a decent
framework within which a local school board can work. State textbook
adoptions are a good example. If you use the state textbooks, you get
money to buy them. (Mind you, textbook adoption is itself an interesting
can of worms. Read Feynman's comments on the process in one of his
books). California, for instance, publishes "framework" documents that
describe an integrated K-12 plan for each subject (i.e. in Grade 4, we all
talk about California history, and cover the following areas)
<snip>
Anyway, an excellent discussion.
jim
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