Category: Education

Decline in Education in California

On By Norbert HauptIn Education1 Comment

In the mid 1960ies, California was ranked fifth in the United States in per pupil spending on education. During those years, California built one of the finest university systems and community college systems in the country. People from other countries and states came to California to learn how to implement colleges. The people of California had a purpose, a vision and a will to create an unsurpassed educational system.

With the cuts of recent years, we have started the process of dismantling our educational system. Expected cuts in future years are Draconian and will do serious damage which it will take decades to overcome.

In 2012, California is in rank 42 in per pupil spending. Below California are Arizona, Idaho, Mississippi, Nevada, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Utah. Per pupil spending for 2010/11 for California is $8,689. Rank #1 is New York with $17,750, twice the amount of California.

In 2012, it costs $44,563 to incarcerate a prisoner for a year in California, the highest cost in the nation. That cost is almost the price of a year at Harvard University with room and board. The average cost per prisoner for the U.S. is $28,817. We are currently building the best prisons in the country. We’re doing to prisons now what we did to education in the 1960ies.

So let me get this right:

We went from #5 to #42 in education.

We are at #1 in prison expenses.

A society’s values are reflected by the things it spends its money on. If I drive a Hummer, a minivan, a Prius or a 1965 VW Beetle, you are going to draw conclusions about my lifestyle and my values.

Right now – in California – we’re building prisons and we’re dismantling education, systematically, ruthlessly.

Big question: Are we #1 in prison expenses because we’re #42 in education?

School Days Around the World

On By Norbert HauptIn Education37 Comments

I believe the value a society or a nation places on education is related to the success of that nation. On the left is a chart of countries and the number of school days.

I have collected this information from several disconnected sources and established the table. It does not show all nations, and the numbers are also not 100% accurate. For instance, some countries, like Belgium and Germany, have different states that actually have numbers that vary slightly up or down.

I have tried to be as accurate as possible and include all of the more influential nations today.

Look at the chart and correlate where children spend a lot of  time in school and  where the nation has a lot of influence.

Japan was the Wunderkind of the 1980 and 1990ies and it transformed the world in technology, computer and automobile output. Toyota, Sony, Honda, Mitsubishi.

Germany is the financing arm of Europe today. Airbus, Mercedes, BMW, Audi, Zeiss, SAP.

China – just about everything manufactured in the world, and 80% of what is sold at Wal-Mart, is made in China. Need I say more?

The United States are toward the bottom of the list. If the United States wants to hold on to its edge in the world it needs to fund education more seriously. It needs to send its kids to school more days. This starts with early education and preschool. It goes through K-12 and on with universities. Right now, many other countries are gaining an edge over the United States simply by expending more effort on education of all categories. The United States still has the world’s most desired universities. In the past decades, students came to the United States to study, and often they stayed. More and more, they go home after they are done, to India, to China, to Russia and all other countries.

This edge in university education will not last forever. There are, right now, 360 colleges under construction in China. I believe that in another 20 years, students from all over the world will go to China for an education, because that’s where the opportunities will be. That’s where unfettered access to information will sponsor science without shackles. Scientists that want to learn about cloning, genetics and other research dependent on simple things like stem cells will have to go to China.

Education, not oil pipelines, not birth control restrictions, not the stock market, not capitalism, holds our future. The education of our children will either save this nation’s glory, or it will destroy it.

Unfortunately, education is like a 30-year-mortgage. It takes an entire generation of investing and paying before the debt is paid off and the investment comes to fruition. I am old enough that I will not see the result. Will America pull out of it? Or will we be an intellectual and financial debtor nation to China?

Many readers have commented that mere attendance in school does not necessarily make a good education, but it’s rather just extended babysitting. Quality of education is much more important than quantity, I am sure. Furthermore, the length of the school day also matters, so a chart of HOURS in school, rather than days, would be helpful. I agree with all those comments. It is not my intent here to argue what a good education is in general. There are many more qualified people to do that than I. I simply collected a chart – how many days are kids going to school. Then I argue that education is important, no matter what defines “good,” as a critical factor of success of a country.

Time to Start Learning Chinese

On By Norbert HauptIn China, Education1 Comment

Xinhua Net reported that there were almost 300 million people learning English in China in 2007. The entire population of England in 2007 was 51 million.

Six times as many Chinese are learning English as there are people in England.

I think it’s time that I started learning Chinese.

Cuts to Education in California

On By Norbert HauptIn Commentaries, EducationLeave a comment

The governor announced additional cuts to education in California.

“The state cannot give what it does not have,” Brown said after expressing the  same sentiment in Latin. “And there’s been a lot of obfuscation and gimmickry,  and I’ve reduced that to a minimum, if I do say so. I don’t want to rely on  pushing the problem further down the road.”

I appreciate fiscal responsibility. I question what rationale has us cutting education of our children, while maintaining bloated pensions and a terribly expensive corrections system.

You can judge a society’s values based on the priorities it sets:

Prisoners, prison guards, children.

U.S. Spends $11.6 Billion Training Afghans

On By Norbert HauptIn Commentaries, EducationLeave a comment

According to USA Today:

U.S. taxpayers foot the bill for training and equipping Afghan security forces. That cost was $9.2 billion in fiscal year 2010, $11.6 billion in 2011 and $11.2 billion for 2012. Construction and equipment account for about half the bills but will ebb as most forces will be housed and outfitted over the next year, Fuller said.

Do you know how much money 11.6 billion dollars is? Let’s put it in perspective with elementary schools. In 2009, there were 67,148 elementary schools in the United States. Dividing up 11.6 billion dollars equally over all elementary schools, each school would have received $172,752.

The average elementary school teacher in public schools in the U.S. in 2008 made $49,220. This means that each elementary school could have hired three additional teachers and paid their full salaries and overhead with the money.

We’re being told that sending the money to Afghanistan is a “good investment.” The same article says:

Fuller estimates maintaining Afghan forces will cost about $4.5 billion a year by the end of 2014, most of which the impoverished country cannot pay for on its own.  Fuller said aiding the forces is a “good investment” given that it costs about $1 million a year for one U.S. soldier to live and fight in Afghanistan.

Let me state this clearly:

The United States of America would have been better off putting three additional teachers into each elementary school. It would have helped our children, and it would have created 201,444 jobs.

35 States Apply for Race to the Top Funding

On By Norbert HauptIn Education, Political1 Comment

This country does not have a terror problem, a war problem, a budget problem per se. It has an education problem, which is decades old and is not being addressed properly. We’re dumbing down and falling behind, and it’s starting with your infants and toddlers in early education, it continues in elementary education and goes on from there.

Lack of American graduates in science and math puts us further and further behind China, India, Korea, Japan, Germany and many other countries every year. We’re outsourcing our future, by cutting the education of our youngest citizens – those who will carry us when we are old.

The U.S. Departments of Education and Health and Human Services announced today that 35 states, D.C. and Puerto Rico submitted applications for the Race to the Top-Early Learning Challenge, a $500 million state-level competitive grant program to improve early learning and development. Applicants include: Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, West Virginia and Wisconsin.

I wonder what the states that did not apply are doing? Texas is missing from this list. What’s up, Governor Perry?

Book Review: Outliers: The Story of Success – by Malcolm Gladwell

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, Education, Four Stars2 Comments

Outliers talks about brilliance of talent or performance in our society that we regard as the ultimate success. What do the top NFL football players, the most brilliant scientific minds like Einstein, the tycoons of business like Bill Gates and top music groups like the Beatles have in common? They reached the ultimate pinnacle of success in their chosen fields.

Gladwell studies this extreme level of success and sheds an entirely new light on the phenomenon. All of a sudden, after reading Outliers, I see Bill Gates and Steve Jobs from a different angle and I understand their success better.

I purposely do not want to divulge Gladwell’s concepts here. You need to read this book to understand the points. However, one of the concepts he exposes is the “rule of 10,000 hours.” He argues that in order to achieve ultimate success in any field, the person must spend 10,000 hours practicing his or her quest. If that is becoming an Olympic skater, it means starting skating at age 3 and putting in 10,000 hours of practice before Olympic stature is within reach. Gladwell makes a compelling argument and cites numerous powerful examples.

I now find myself searching for where I have put in my 10,000 hours and what I need to leverage myself to have a fair chance of success. My point of view of success, that of others and my own, has shifted as a result of reading Outliers.

One of sections in the book talks about education, both in elementary and secondary schools, as well as in college. This is a subject dear to me that I am passionate about. Having grown up in an educational system outside that of the United States, I have a unique insight of one looking in from the outside, and I have criticized our system vehemently in the past. This book gave me new arguments – and, well, there is room for other blog entries….

Here is an excerpt:

What Alexander’s work suggests is that the way in which education has been discussed in the United States is backwards. An enormous amount of time is spent talking about reducing class size, rewriting curricula, buying every student a shiny new laptop, and increasing school funding—all of which assumes that there is something fundamentally wrong with the job schools are doing. But look back at the second table, which shows what happens between September and June. Schools work. The only problem with school, for the kids who aren’t achieving, is that there isn’t enough of it.

The conclusions Gladwell guides us towards are revealing and actually inspiring.

Outliers has contributed to a refreshing new outlook on success within me. That is amazing, as I consider myself an autodidact and an education junkie who has devoured volumes of seminars and books on all manner of subjects of personal improvement and life-long self-education.

Thanks, Malcolm Gladwell, for enriching and inspiring me to be more for myself and a better example for all around me.

Rating: ****