Why? Notice one ratio in particular. He assumes 18 teachers and 5 administrators. I have no figures, but I bet if you examined NY, you would find 18 teachers to 18 non-teachers. (emphasis changed from original)

So, first you make something up. Then you blame this made-up reality on the Teacher’s Union. You don’t bother to make up a story behind why the Teacher’s Union would want to divert some budget from it’s members to its non-members. Then you damn the Democratic Party for being behind this made-up reality...

What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculties! And how infinitely capable the Democratic Party must be, to invade your fantasies and ruin public education...

Amen! If you read the Guliani book, "Prince Of The City," you will run across a segment, where during an audit the administration found over 1,000 administrators more than the board of ed admitted having.

What is it all about, educating children, or providing lifetime employment to Democrat party hacks? In nyc and many other cities the question was answered long ago.

Andrew, my "noble reasoning" friend, I really hate to break this to you, but the non-teaching staff belong to the "teachers" unions too. The unions are happy to add new layers of bureaucracy.

And while I don't have figures for NY, I have read statistics for other jurisdictions where the ratio of non-teachers to teachers is 1:1. This is no joke, it's a tragedy. (Private schools are often 1:8 or 1:10.)

The amount NY is spending per-pupil would send children to almost any private school. Instead they are trapped in failing inner-city public schools from which many emerge without even the most basic skills of reading and writing. Lives are being DESTROYED.

"Making things up?" Pox on you. I was reading articles or voting on these things when you were IN elementary school. I've been following this subject for years, and every significant educational reform is fought by the unions, and their allies in the Democrat Party. For instance, if you follow stories about Charter Schools, you invariably find the teachers unions trying to stop or limit them, often successfully. Vouchers are fought of course, but also any effort to get rid of incompetent teachers, or to raise standards, or to bring in people from other fields who would like to make a second career in teaching, or to let parents chose public schools within a district.

Try reading this little item before you go all "infinite in faculties" on us... Savor it; it's extraordinarily diabolical.

In California public school teachers get tenure in 3 years! That's crazy! But Schwarzenegger's initiative to raise that number by just a few years was defeated by massive spending by the unions. Imagine YOURSELF running a school some day, and anyone who's worked for 3 years is in for life, no matter how bad they are.

Republicans aren't perfect here, but are generally on the side of good. Democrats are on the side of evil, and have made a corrupt bargain of monstrous proportions. And they pontificate about "protecting" our schools while almost always sending their own children to private schools. (As do big-city teachers by the way. In SF public school teachers are much more likely to send their kids to private schools than the general population.)

You are part of a corrupt party that destroys children to preserve its power. YOU. YOU are destroying the hopes of the poor by supporting your party.

The problem is, John, they don't think they are doing anything evil. They think they are doing good, and furthermore that they are the only people doing good, and that therefore anyone who opposes them is therefore not merely misguided but in service to evil themselves. That's why you can't argue with them. You can't argue with a do-gooder; they're always right and you're always wrong.

My father was a teacher in South Florida for about twenty years. He took early retirement at a lower pension because he just couldn't take it anymore. And that was back in the early Eighties. He couldn't stand the teacher's union. Pat Tornillo was the head of the teacher's union forever; my father couldn't stand him.

Andrew,

I don't follow the issue of public schools and teachers' unions very closely-- I don't have any children, so I have no reason to pay attention to the quality of the local schools, public or private.

I will say this much though-- private schools do seem to do a much better job of educating children than public schools, based on my own experience of them. I was in a public school in first grade and for half of second grade, and in a private school for the other half of second grade through the end of fifth grade. At the beginning of sixth grade, my family moved and I was put in a public school again through the end of twelfth grade.

We were pushed harder in private school than we were in the public schools I attended-- the teachers expected more of us, and gave us the tools we needed to achieve. For instance, I recall how in the fifth grade we were using math textbooks intended for seventh graders. In English class, we were expected every week to copy words from a list at the end of our textbooks, and look those words up in a dictionary, and to copy those dictionary definitions verbatim into a notebook for turn-in at the end of the week.

I think I owe my ability in math and reading to those two facts-- for what's worth, when I took the SAT in June 1979, I scored a 1460 (750 math, 710 verbal), which put me in something like the top 1% of everyone who took that particular test.

And once I went back to public schooling at the beginning of sixth grade, I basically coasted for most of three years. I didn't really have to start studying again until sometime in the eighth grade-- I'd already seen it all. Needless to say, I was bored out of my mind-- if I could have, I would have gladly spent my entire school day in the school's library, just to get out of all those boring classes.

It's when I look back at those days that I get pissed off at the Democrats and the teachers/administrators unions and their insistence that as many children as possible be educated in the public school system. Basically, for them, it's a job-protection racket-- if they really did care about getting children educated, they'd put power-- and more importantly, money-- into the hands of the people most directly concerned about the education of children: the parents. But no, education is too important to be left to uninformed lay-people like parents. It is a holy calling, something that can only be performed by a trained elite-- educators-- and is so arcane and expensive that only governments and their agents can do it.....

.....which is utter BS if you will stop to think about it, Andrew. If schooling is something that only a trained elite (whatever you care to call them) can do, and can be done only under the aegis of government, then how the hell did our grandparents and their ancestors get educated? My great-grandparents (born about the time of the Civil War) and my grandparents (born in the 1890s) were all educated in rural Pennsylvania, by teachers hired by the local parents in one-room schoolhouses built by-- again-- the local parents. Government was involved to the extent of setting standards for the granting of a diploma, but the means of meeting those standards was up to the people paying the bills-- the parents.

And no, my grandparents weren't drooling idiots. Three out of four of them went on to higher education, one of them becoming a schoolteacher, and another becoming a physician.

It's an old story, Andrew. The public school system we have today was built on Taylorist principles. (Google "Frederick Taylor", the father of industrial engineering.) Taylor sought to streamline the production of goods and to wring the waste out of industrial processes, with the idea of producing vast quantities of high-quality goods at rock-bottom prices. He and his disciples succeeded beyond their wildest dreams-- compare the goods and services available in 1875 with what was availble in 1925. The difference is eye-popping.

Unfortunately, Taylor's ideas of "the one best way" and mass-production were copied by the social scientists, who sought to treat live people as if they were dead matter, mere grist for their dreams of a mass-produced utopia-- everybody getting along just fine because they've all been (among other things) educated in the same mass-production fashion in the public schools.

Only people aren't dead matter, the public schools are increasingly dysfunctional, and all the educators can do is propose more of the same? You'd think that they'd be educated better than that-- they're the experts, right?

Yeah, I know-- you've read this rant before. It's just that "rule by experts" is so offensive to me, not least because I'm one of the experts (at least by training) and I'm acutely aware of just how limited the competence of the experts is to rule. The world is a complex place, and the experts really don't know very much about it, much less to rule it. And being experts, they feel they have to "save face" by pretending to knowledge they don't have, no matter how much misery they cause. (And I know damned well they don't have it.) They have to justify their fat paychecks somehow, and their pretensions to expertise fit the bill.

So, you’re not saying that you’re making stuff up? ‘cause your post said that you were making stuff up. But if you’re not saying that you’re making stuff up, we’ll go from there...

Have you by any chance seen This study? here’s the important bit:

Using a statistical analysis known as hierarchical linear modeling, the Lubienskis found that regular public schools scored "statistically significantly higher" than private and charter schools at the fourth-grade level. With 10 points roughly considered a grade-level difference in achievement, the regular public schools were trailed by 11.9 points by conservative Christian schools, 7.2 points by Catholic schools, 4.2 points by Lutheran schools, 5.6 points by all other private schools, and 4.4 points by charter schools.

It seems that the effects we note of private schools being “better” are actually a product of rich kids going to private schools. And it seems that rich kids have such an advantage over poor kids that even when their scores are _depressed_ by private schools, they’re still doing way better than the poor kids...

So, if public schools do better than private schools, why do you want to put poor kids into private schools?

I don't know whether I've seen "This study" or not: your link is blank.

Well, that would make it tough, wouldn’t it?
http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/public_schools_beat_private_in_math_teaching_9849

Stupid formatting issues...

Andrew,

You're missing the point. The point is not to force kids into private schools. The point is to let the parents, who after all are footing the bill, to make the choice of a private or public education for their children.

If public schools work better in a specific time and place for a specific child, then that child should go to the public school. If private schools work better in a specific time and place for a specific child, than the child should go to a private school. But the bureaucrats and the teachers' unions should not be the ones making that decision. That decision should be made the the child's parents.

I fail to understand why that concept is so hard for big-government advocates to grasp. Grrrrrr......

Well, you want to take money from a system that works well, and give it to a system that works poorly. Or, if you want to keep the same level of funding, you’re asking for a tax hike to subsidize a system that works poorly. So... which is it? Stupidity? Or expensive stupidity?

Stupidity is thinking that a single study proves anything about a complex and difficult-to-measure subject. Is the one you linked the only study ever done on the subject? If so, we'd better do some more to make sure this one isn't a fluke. If not, what do the other ones say? Have you checked the methodology of this one for shortcomings? Do you know what 'hierarchical linear modeling' is? The link you gave certainly doesn't explain it.

I'm not just being difficult here. As I recall (it's been a while), there have been 30 or so studies on the effects of second-hand smoke, of which 10 or 15 showed that it was dangerous, 10 or 15 that it had no measurable effect, and 5 that it's actually good for you. I don't believe the "good for you" studies, though they do suggest that "no effect" may be closer to the truth than "bad for you".

When a single study -- or 5 studies out of 30 -- shows something so counterintuitive as the one you link to, I don't sit on my ass and assume that it's true, much less sneer at those who disagree with it. I ask (a) what do other studies show?, and (b) how could so many people with personal experience of public and non-public schooling (whether as students, teachers, or parents) think something different? After all, if this study is correct, no one should ever pay for worse schooling when they could get better schooling for free. But hundreds of thousands do just that. Are they all fools? Or is there something wrong with the one study that purports to show that they are?

One more thing: Vouchers would not only "take money" from the public schools, they would take students as well, so less money would be needed.

For example, suppose the public schools in a particular state are spending $7,000 per student, and vouchers are set at $5,000. Every student whose parents take a voucher and spends it elsewhere saves the state $2,000. The state would actually increase the available money per student as vouchers were taken. Looks like a win-win situation to me.

Yes, there would be transitional costs if half the students took the vouchers and left the schools half-full. But the only way vouchers would cost the state massive amounts of money is if they kept all their current schools, teachers, and administrators, even with half as many students. And they couldn't do that if they tried: they would lose quite a few teachers and administrators, who would voluntarily quit to teach in the new or newly-expanded private schools.

In short, the money argument is a red herring. Please don't go around calling other people stupid if you haven't figured out even that much.

Isn't it odd that people like Mr. Cory who claim that public schools do so much better would none the less face a mass exodus of students should the permitted to depart?