Falling Off The Skyscraper

Even as you pass the 3rd floor on the way down, you can console yourself by saying, "Nothing's happened yet!"

In the coming years, California’s claim of being the economic exemplar of the country may be further undermined by legislative overreach. The statewide rise in the minimum wage will hit the lower-wage sector, particularly outside the coastal enclaves. Various plans to boost the welfare state, such as a single-payer health care system that includes the undocumented, and a host of union-driven initiatives, seem certain to drive up costs and impose an ever-heavier tax burden on the state’s struggling middle class.

Perhaps most threatening, over time, may be a host of new environmental laws which will impose enormous burdens on affordable housing, energy prices and industrial growth. The slowdown in tech growth, coupled with a looming decline in the markets as the Trump agenda unravels, could weaken the capital gains juggernaut that has sustained the state through the past decade. Gov. Jerry Brown, under whose watch spending has risen 45 percent, is already predicting a large deficit for next year.

So far this decade, California has defied economic logic, largely due to the explosive growth of Silicon Valley, as well as the effects of rapid real estate appreciation. Yet, these gains have failed to reverse, and in some ways have even exacerbated, the state’s highest-in-the-nation poverty rate, growing inequality and a mounting outmigration of middle-class families. These facts suggest that it’s time to end the celebration and start focusing on how create a more expansive, less feudal California.

Something that can't go on forever, won't. That's as much a law of economics as it is physics.

While We're Renaming Things...

Berkeley was named for a slave-owning Anglican priest, so let's rename the city, too:

San Francisco Chronicle op-ed: The Case For Renaming Boalt Hall, by Charles Reichmann (Adjunct Professor, UC-Berkeley)

You see, Boalt was a racist. He didn't like the Chinese.

Opposite Day

Yes, I know that schools are a microcosm of the community from which their students come, but really?  Not one?

A Project Baltimore investigation has found five Baltimore City high schools and one middle school do not have a single student proficient in the state tested subjects of math and English.

Let’s find out what those schools are doing, and do the exact opposite. We might not be 100% right, but we'd be far more right than wrong.

Marvel

Considering how much effort I put into my just-finished master's program, I marvel at people like this:

So, Mui is pretty sharp at math. Which makes sense. She has been working to master the subject since she was a little kid. According to Mui, she was learning addition and multiplication in preschool, and really, she just kept rolling. Mui proved to be so good at math that after fifth grade she started taking community college courses.

She didn’t stop there.

On Saturday, Mui will be the youngest among more than 8,700 graduates at George Mason University’s 50th commencement. She has earned a master’s degree in mathematics from Virginia’s largest public university, a milestone reached before she has even graduated from high school.

Wow!  And good for her!

I Can See

Friday morning I was trained to put in my new contact lens--a hard lens, one that will reshape my eye while I sleep and obviate the need for glasses or contacts the next day.  Thirty-plus years of looking up when putting in a contact lens must be discarded, I now have to look directly at it as I poke it into my eye.

So I put it in Friday evening.  Saturday morning, when I took it out, I could see.  At my appointment a couple hours later my doctor told me that we'd achieved 75% of the correction we'd planned on in just that one night.  This leads us to hope that perhaps, in time, my vision will be good for perhaps 2 days at a time before I'll need to put the lens back in again.

I was a little emotionally overwhelmed Saturday morning when I could see so clearly.  It was more than I expected, especially after only one night, when for others it can take a week.

It makes me so...happy.

Relatively Easy Day

Today was Senior Checkout day.  As I have only seniors 1st, 3rd, and 5th periods, and planning period 2nd, I didn't have students until 4th period today.

Which made it a good day to get an eye appt for training in how to wear my new contact lenses--which I wear at night, and which sort of reshape my eyes for good vision during the day.  Got to school in plenty of time for 4th period's quiz, the average of which was over 90% (no, it wasn't the hardest quiz in the world, but it included a proof by induction).  Then it was lunch time, followed by no students 5th period, so I wandered down to the local park, where our post-checkout seniors were having their senior picnic.  They ran out of Chipotle burritos before I could snag one, but eventually the pizzas showed up and I got a slice of pepperoni.  And I also got two cups of Pinkberry frozen yogurt covered with M&M's, so all in all not a bad deal.  Got back to school in time to give 6th period their quiz.

Got home and got the pickup and trailer ready for a short shakedown cruise to see if anything needs to be looked at before my Colorado trip this summer.  Tomorrow I have to go to the eye doctor again so he can take a look at my eye after a night of wearing the lenses, and then I'm off for a night or so.

Probably won't blog again till Monday--let's see if I can take a couple days off!

Cool Coin

This is a pay phone token that I picked up in Italy during the summer of 1976. It's a gettone, pronounced "jeh-tony".  If I remember correctly, there was quite the shortage of coinage in Italy at the time, and these circulated as coins--perhaps worth 50 lire, at a time when there was somewhere between 700 and 900 lire to the US dollar.

click images to enlarge

Mongo

Today was the big day.  As I've done each year for the past several years, I planned an outing to a local Mongolian Barbecue restaurant after school for the graduating seniors I've taught.  Someone counted close to 50 showing up today--good food, good times.

And I'm still stuffed!

If You Have No Standards, You Can't Be Attacked For Not Meeting Them

Joanne has a post today about what is arguably the worst decision a university system--not one school, but an entire system of 23 universities--could make:

California State University, which recruits from the top third of California graduates, plans to stop using placement tests to decide whether students need remediation in English and math, reports Emily DeRuy in the San Jose Mercury News. Instead, CSU schools will analyze high school grades and SAT or ACT scores.

Grades aren't a very useful tool for universities, and periodically there's talk of ditching the SAT/ACT because somehow they're racially biased.  Let's be blunt--you have to have some way of determining if a student is ready for college-level work.

This is a bad idea.  A wise man once spoke about "the soft bigotry of low expectations".  This idea is Exhibit A.

Juxtaposed with that article is this one:

Illinois high schools have cut remedial classes and placed most students in a “general” college-prep track that doesn’t prepare graduates for college, concludes a Chicago Tribune analysis of the class of 2015.

My district in California is well on its way to doing this.

Feels Good

Our seniors are taking final exams today and tomorrow, and today I gave finals to all my stats classes.  Not a single person in the entire course failed stats.  And no, I'm not known as an easy grader.

I taught them something!

Update, 5/24/17:  Dang it, I missed one yesterday, so in each of the 2 courses I teach, I had one senior not pass.  I have about 90 seniors total, so the percentage isn't horrible, I guess.  I had a lot more seniors earn A+'s than F's, so that's something.

Making The Numbers Match

While writing my last post I felt compelled to back up some of my numbers by looking at the state budget.  Looking at the budget document online prompted me to look at K-12 spending in particular.  I admit that I'm flummoxed, what am I missing here?

Here's the State budget for 2017-18:
http://www.ebudget.ca.gov/budget/2017-18MR/#/BudgetSummary

Click on (and thus open the pdf's for) both Summary Charts and K-12 Education.

For summary charts, scroll down to Figure SUM-03, which shows a $183 billion state budget.  Note that the general fund portion of K-12 education is a little under $54 billion.  It also shows another $770 million in special and bond fund expenditures for a grand total of $54.3 billion.

Now open the K-12 pdf.  The 2nd paragraph on the 1st page says:

The May Revision includes total funding of $92.3 billion ($54.2 billion General Fund and $38.1 billion other funds) for all K‑12 education programs.

How, exactly, do you make the numbers on those two documents match?  Where is that $38 billion coming from?  Could it possibly come from the feds?  Wherever it comes from, it amounts to about a thousand dollars per person for everyone in California. That's a lot of money.

Single-Payer Health Care in California

The major Sacramento newspaper, never known for having a conservative bent, publishes this story about a proposed single-payer health care system in California:

The price tag is in: It would cost $400 billion to remake California’s health insurance marketplace and create a publicly funded universal heath care system, according to a state financial analysis released Monday.

California would have to find an additional $200 billion per year, including in new tax revenues, to create a so-called “single-payer” system, the analysis by the Senate Appropriations Committee found. The estimate assumes the state would retain the existing $200 billion in local, state and federal funding it currently receives to offset the total $400 billion price tag...

The cost is higher than the $180 billion in proposed general fund and special fund spending (budget is here, click on Summary Charts, then scroll to Figure SUM-03 --Darren) for the budget year beginning July 1.

Employers currently spend between $100 billion to $150 billion per year, which could be available to help offset total costs, according to the analysis. Under that scenario, total new spending to implement the system would be between $50 billion and $100 billion per year.

This is California.  We don’t let little things like reality stop us from doing what we know is right.

Read that last paragraph again; "could be available", when translated from California liberal to normal person language, means "huge extra tax on businesses", which is just what we need to make California businesses more competitive with the rest of the world, and to stop businesses from leaving the state.

Socialism is expensive.  How much are you willing to pay for "free" health care?

Update, 5/26/17:  In case you think I'm being too hard on, or too biased towards, our California legislators:

A California Senate committee tasked with reviewing bills that spend state money passed a $400 billion universal health care proposal Thursday with no funding plan.

Sen. Ricardo Lara, D-Bell Gardens, introduced SB 562, a sweeping overhaul of the state’s health insurance market. He’s also the chair of Senate Appropriations. The committee passed the bill with a 5-2 vote during a fast-paced suspense file hearing, clearing the way for it to be taken up on the Senate floor next week.

The vote came days after the committee revealed the Legislature’s first cost assessment of the bill, which turns out to be more than the entire state budget for the year beginning July 1.

Lara has yet to reveal a detailed plan about how the state would come up with the money to provide health care to the nearly 40 million people living in California. Opponents argued that the funding issue should have been addressed before the committee voted on the measure.

As you can see, I'm not being too hard on them at all.  They're even worse than I tell you they are.

The 3 M's

I'd like to learn some more math, so I started looking at course offerings at a nearby community college, as well as at Sacramento State, to see if they offer Game Theory.  That search led me to the web site of Sac State's College of Continuing Education, where I find the Community College Faculty Preparation Certificate Program.  This could be interesting!

One of the links at the CCFP site was to a 2014 online handbook called Minimum Qualifications for Faculty and Administrators in California Community Colleges.  It makes sense to see if I meet the qualifications for teaching at a community college before enrolling in a community college faculty preparation program, no?

So I started thumbing through the handbook, and it turns out I'm now qualified to teach 3 different subjects; here they are, along with the requirements I meet:

Manufacturing Technology (quality control, process control): any bachelor's degree and two years of professional experience
Mathematics:  bachelor's in mathematics or applied mathematics and a master's in statistics, physics, or math education
Military Studies:  any bachelor's degree and two years of professional experience (in the pay grade of E-7 or above)

It's nice to know I have some options.


By the way, I did find a game theory class--in the economics program at Sac State.  Haven't yet found whether it's offered at night or online.

Update, 5/22/17:  Turns out those three subjects align quite nicely with the 3 career fields in which I've worked.  I've been an army officer, a manufacturing manager, and a math teacher.  Funny, that.

So Crazy It Just Might Work!

Instead of spending so much teachers' (and prospective teachers') time on diversity and equity and hate whitey and "unconscious bias" and God knows what else, what say we focus on curriculum?

Slowly, slowly, a small but persuasive body of work is emerging which raises curriculum to an object of pressing concern for educators, and expresses long overdue appreciation for the idea that the instructional materials we put in front of children actually matter to student outcomes. A welcome addition to this emerging corpus is a new Aspen Institute paper by Ross Wiener and Susan Pimentel, which makes a compelling case—equally overdue—that professional development and teacher training ought to be connected to curriculum. A primary role of school systems, states, districts, and charter-management organizations, the pair write, “is to create the conditions in schools through which teachers can become experts at teaching the curriculum they are using and adapting instruction to the needs of their particular students"...

Practice What You Teach begins with a discussion of research demonstrating the frustrating state of teacher “PD,” which, like the sitcom Seinfeld, is a show about nothing. Next, they discuss curriculum materials, which “have a profound effect on what happens in classrooms and on how much students learn.” When average teachers use excellent materials, Weiner and Pimental note, “student learning results improve significantly.” The general disregard for curriculum as a means to improve teacher effectiveness and student outcomes is reflected in the observation that “many teachers do not have access to strong, standards-aligned curriculum; in fact, most teachers spend hours every week searching for materials that haven’t been vetted and aren’t connected to ongoing, professional learning activities in their schools.”

Honest teachers will tell you this is true:

...Ashley Berner of Johns Hopkins described how schools of education “turned from academic subject mastery to developmental psychology as the foundational resource for teacher preparation” a century ago. This relegated curriculum to a thing not just beneath the notice of teachers, but beneath their dignity. We are encouraged to “teach the child, not the lesson” and other empty platitudes: Education is not the filling of a pail, it’s the lighting of a fire. Students won’t care what you know until they know that you care. Ad infinitum.

I get so tired of educational platitudes.  Don't forget, "I don't teach content, I teach students!"  Sheesh.

And I like this line of reasoning:

It does not diminish our appreciation of the actor’s talent that he performs Hamlet but didn’t write it. No one expects their doctor to repair to the lab every night to prepare pharmaceutical compounds on the theory that she alone knows what her patients need. The master carpenter begins his day in the lumber yard, not in the forest.

We flatter teachers’ professionalism by telling them they alone can best determine what will engage and enlighten the children before them, but the price of that flattery is that we make their jobs impossible to do effectively, forcing them to spend fruitless hours on Google and Pinterest hoping to find materials that a well-run and coherent system would provide to them—along with training on how to implement it effectively.

True enough.

So yes, let's insist that teachers focus on their subject matter and curriculum, not on social engineering--which might be more fun and less work, but it's not what we're paid to do.

Typical Teachers Union Position

In theory, I'm not against unions.  Synergy, and all.  I am, however, against unions when they advocate for insanity, as in this case:

The bill for city teachers no principal wants will hit $34 million next year and has become a sticking point in deadlocked contract talks as fiscal watchdogs warn that cash-strapped Hub taxpayers can’t keep carrying the dead weight.

As of yesterday, 47 tenured teachers earning an average of $91,000 a year are without formal classroom positions in the so-called “excess pool,” school officials told the Herald...

The teachers’ union is digging in its heels and insists that unwanted teachers get placed in classrooms...

The teachers lose their positions because of poor performance, or no principal wants to hire them, or because they have failed to obtain proper licenses. Other times, they lose their positions due to school closures or budget cuts.

I really honestly truly would love someone to comment on why the teachers union's position is the correct one.  Be civil, be intelligent, and be clear. 

I Wonder If A *Two*-Party System Might Help

Maybe not, but the one-party system isn't doing any good, either:

But income tax revenue from the wealthy tends to be volatile and unreliable—in Connecticut’s case, as the WSJ notes, the hedge fund industry’s decline has led to lower-than-expected tax receipts (states like California have run into similar problems when taxing their own economic elite). Moreover, financiers are mobile, and can move to other states if rates get too high.

It’s tempting for blue model partisans to see the state and local pension crisis as a temporary problem that can be papered over with high-end tax hikes. And while the rich may well need to pay more to address the problem, it won’t be enough. The forces that have brought about the blue model crisis are structural: Overly-powerful public sector unions, dishonest accounting practices, chronic political can-kicking, and a defined-benefit pension model that doesn’t work in the 21st century. These are deep-rooted problems that will require major reforms in the way government runs and the way the civil service is organized. As Connecticut Democrats are realizing, the Bernie Sanders approach to government deficits—tax the millionaires and billionaires, then tax them some more—is simply not adequate to the scope of the crisis.

Lucid Dreaming?

Last night I collapsed on top of my bed around 8--and woke up around midnight, with the audiobook still playing.  Shut that off and went right back to sleep.

Strange dreams.  The one I remember the best was going to some friends' house, and then noticing I was naked.  I knew I couldn't have gotten all the way to their house while naked but I couldn't explain what had happened, so I grabbed a towel and wrapped it around my waist.  Moments later I looked down and, on my legs sticking out from under the towel, were jeans.  Apparently I was now wearing jeans under the towel.   Puzzled I said, "Is this a dream?"

And I immediately woke up.

Cool Coin

As I type this (in December!), this bimetallic beauty from Mexico, denominated 10 pesos, is worth about 50 US cents.

click images to enlarge

College Accreditation

This article identifies many problems in the current accreditation system, but this one is pretty telling:

Note what’s missing from this list: improving quality in the classroom. No institution seeks accreditation to improve the education it provides. If any improvement results, it’s a byproduct, not a goal. (Talk about an elephant in the lecture hall!)

As someone who used to *volunteer* at the Commission on Teacher Credentialing and worked on ensuring state universities met CDE’s standards for teacher credentialing programs (it’s a type of accreditation), I can state categorically that form over function was the rule of the day.

Who's Surprised? Not Me....

Dallas County Whistleblower Tapes Democrat Campaign Worker Describing Voter Fraud Schemes