Social Justice and Teacher Pay

[crm114]

Chauncy wrote: <<To dismiss the OP with the statement that one can choose to go somewhere else and earn more is disingenuous. Many of those teachers (including the one mentioned above) are devoted to teaching in a Catholic setting and struggle to make it financially.>>

Chauncy, I hate to throw around casual accusations of intellectual dishononesty, so let’s just say there is a misunderstanding. The people who are “devoted to teaching in a Catholic setting and struggle to make it financially” have choices in a free market. They could take high paying jobs elsewhere and volunteer in the Catholic school. They could take high paying jobs elsewhere and donate money to help the Catholic school pay its teachers. Or they could continue to work in the Catholic school – but it would be “disingenuous” for them to do so if they were unsatisfied with the salary. Perhaps they should ask their spouses to work at high paying jobs in order to cross subsidize their mission work. Many do.

Here is the point about the the"devotion" these people have. Why should the Church (and indirectly the families who pay tuition to the school) have to subsidize an individual’s private devotion, when a market rate salary is already being paid?

I am one of the many people who are happily “devoted to teaching in a Catholic setting and struggle to make it financially.” And you know what I teach my students? Inter alia, that a free market economy is more consistent with human dignity than a system where some are coerced so that others can be rewarded beyond their value.

We are very confused in this country. We need to seperate charity from rights. You have a right to work, at market wage. If you need charity, that is another matter. If you choose to pursue a missionary apostlate that has low pay associated with it, that is very admirable, but you should still be responsible for your own support.

 

[CPA2]

I totally agree. Although I abhor federal taxes other than the minimum necessary to maintain the defense of liberty, our local taxes can certainly be used to fund vouchers so that all children can afford an education. Local communities should set minimum standards and allow parents the choice of where and how their children are educated.

The Department of Education should be terminated post-haste with extreme prejudice.

Amend!

The Louisian Department of Education has a new building in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. I do not see any teaching going on in that building! Sell the building. Fire the administrators and give the money to the parents in the form of school vouchers.

Louisiana has more than enough money to pay the teachers very well. However, the money never reaches the teachers. Get rid of the Louisiana Department of Education and let the free market decide how much a teacher is worth. The free market will pay government teachers a lot more than the starting salary of $38,000.

The only people who are opposed to school vouchers is the Louisians Department of Education and the teachers union. It is way pass time that these two special interest groups lose their power. Government education is a failure in Louisiana.

I did not condemn my children to a poor government school education. I sent them to Catholic schools. Catholic schools cost from 1/3 to 1/2 of the cost of government schools.

 

[crm114]

CPA, you are so right!

Try taking a poll: Call up your local school district and ask how many central administrators there are. In my local district, it is more than 2,000 (yes, you read that correctly). I have been on the district’s administrative campus (yes, you read that correctly) and it is astounding.

Then call up several diocesan chancery offices and ask how many employees they have in their schools offices. The ideal number is one to three in a small diocese, and perhaps as many as five or six in a larger diocese (say 50 or more schools).

The Catholic number will always be an order of magnitude smaller than the public number, even when adjusted for enrollment. But you will also find huge variation among dioceses. The bishops disagree, it seems on the application of subsidiarity in the supervision of schools.

 

[Trader]

I can’t speak for all Catholic schools, but the one I worked for gave teachers a tution break for their kids. I don’t remember exactly how much it was, but I think it was 50%. I am no longer a teacher, but my current parrish gives parrish members a tuition discount, also.

I have a bunch of family and friends who teach from first grade to graduate school. Policies vary. My goddaughter’s elementary school was the only blue ribbon award winning school in the area. Their teachers got free tuition for their own children. The music teacher is not even Catholic, but was glad to teach there because her two children could get into the best school in town because of that, with free tuition a big plus.

Parochial school teachers also get what an economist might call psychic rewards. They are physically safer than in public schools. My 5’1" niece never considered teaching at a public school where the unruly kids would be bigger than her. They feel more appreciated by parents and have fewer administative layers to deal with. Most importantly they should know that they are assisting parents with their duty to pass on the faith they were given. How much is that worth?

In our city the parochial schools cost about half what the public schools spend per student, and it may surprise you to know that they are better maintained and sometimes even better equipped. That blue ribbon award school uses a 70 year old building that has been better maintained than the 20 year old public schools. Our high school got air conditioning in classrooms by adding units one at a time as funding permitted. The public schools wanted a billion dollars to aircondition every building at once, on the theory that no one should have it unless everyone did.

 

[CPA2]

Academic scores have been declining in public schools (K-12) since 1963. Public education is an expensive disaster! Only school choice can turn the situation around. Seven studies by the Friedman Foundation shows that school choice helps students do better in school.

 

[CPA2]

Research is showing that home-schooled children get higher ACT scores and are better socialized than public school children.

America’s public universities have competition. A student can choose to go to any college in the United States. Our public universities are pretty good because of competition. Many foreign students come here to get a college education and they do very well. American kids do not fare nearly as well in college. 40% of the college students get an F, or drop with an F, in economics and college algebra at McNeese State University in Louisiana. The graduation rate is only 25% at McNeese State University and 50% at LSU. Graduation rates are as high as 95% in some prestigious private universities.

There is no competition in the public secondary schools. The government forces parents to send their kids to a school in their neighborhood. This inflexible policy really hurts kids in the inner city. The answer is to make public schools private. A step towards competition is for the state of Louisiana is to issue school vouchers.

 

[CPA2]

I am not advocating shutting the doors of government (public) education, just opening more doors of private education.

The parents will vote with their school vouchers. They will decide which public schools will stay open and which public schools will close. Additionally, many new private schools will open. New schools will give parents even more choices. Why should the state have a monopoly on education?

 

[IAGladfelter]

The salary people make has been described as being commensurate with the value placed on a person’s occupation / profession by the society / culture within which a person lives. The problem with teaching in general but especially at the elementary and secondary school level, is that for much of America’s history, instead of being valued as the profession which builds our future, it has been considered to be “women’s work,” and since women were presumed to be married and cared for financially by their husband, (as well as being sometimes treated as an extension of day care, in which all that was expected was to teach the children reading, writing, and basic math.) So, their contributions not being particularly valued in the grand scheme of things, teachers salaries have always been low to minimal, as was the respect given them in our communities (so-and-so is “just a teacher.”.

An long-standing corollary was that if a person wanted more than that for their children, they should not expect the taxpayers to pay for it; they should pay for it by themselves by sending their children to a private school.

I don’t see the abysmally low salaries paid our teachers from elementary school through universities as much a Social Justice issue as a sign of how little education is valued as a commodity and profession in our culture. Physicians, bankers, and financial executives are highly paid because our society at large places a very high value on what they do. Entertainers get paid megabucks and nobody complains because people enjoy and highly value what they do, and are ready and willing to pay them handsomely for their enjoyment.

Something is seriously wrong about that. Teachers build the future and should be among our highest paid professionals. My Father, a full Professor in the Education Department of a small midwestern state college often complained that most people seemed to feel that: “Those who can, do. Those who cannot, teach, and those who cannot teach, teach Teachers.” He considered this to be a systemic problem in our society; a very poor ordering of priorities which was as old as our Republic.

I agree. I see this as a matter of priorities, not Social Justice. As a society, our priorities or disordered. Where our children (and ourselves, for that matter) are concerned, high quality Education should be at or near the top of the list, and we must value it enough to pay handsomely for an education of the highest possible quality; but just try pass a local school bond to raise taxes enough to pay our teachers as much as we do our physicians, and see how that flies with the voters.

This is not a matter of social justice. It is matter of disordered (“messed up”) priorties, Appropriately re-ordering our priorities is a matter of education.

Blessings,
Irl

 

[Trader]

The salary people make has been described as being commensurate with the value placed on a person’s occupation / profession by the society / culture within which a person lives. The problem with teaching in general but especially at the elementary and secondary school level, is that for much of America’s history, instead of being valued as the profession which builds our future, it has been considered to be “women’s work,” and since women were presumed to be married and cared for financially by their husband, (as well as being sometimes treated as an extension of day care, in which all that was expected was to teach the children reading, writing, and basic math.) So, their contributions not being particularly valued in the grand scheme of things, teachers salaries have always been low to minimal, as was the respect given them in our communities (so-and-so is “just a teacher.”.

An long-standing corollary was that if a person wanted more than that for their children, they should not expect the taxpayers to pay for it; they should pay for it by themselves by sending their children to a private school.

I don’t see the abysmally low salaries paid our teachers from elementary school through universities as much a Social Justice issue as a sign of how little education is valued as a commodity and profession in our culture. Physicians, bankers, and financial executives are highly paid because our society at large places a very high value on what they do. Entertainers get paid megabucks and nobody complains because people enjoy and highly value what they do, and are ready and willing to pay them handsomely for their enjoyment.

Something is seriously wrong about that. Teachers build the future and should be among our highest paid professionals. My Father, a full Professor in the Education Department of a small midwestern state college often complained that most people seemed to feel that: “Those who can, do. Those who cannot, teach, and those who cannot teach, teach Teachers.” He considered this to be a systemic problem in our society; a very poor ordering of priorities which was as old as our Republic.

I agree. I see this as a matter of priorities, not Social Justice. As a society, our priorities or disordered. Where our children (and ourselves, for that matter) are concerned, high quality Education should be at or near the top of the list, and we must value it enough to pay handsomely for an education of the highest possible quality; but just try pass a local school bond to raise taxes enough to pay our teachers as much as we do our physicians, and see how that flies with the voters.

This is not a matter of social justice. It is matter of disordered (“messed up”) priorties, Appropriately re-ordering our priorities is a matter of education.

Blessings,
Irl

The problem goes even deeper than the value we place on education. The deeper problem is the value we place on children. Too bad you can’t ask the 45,000,000 of them who were aborted since Roe v Wade to chime in with their opinions.

I realize I may be old, but I have my first grade picture to remind me that we had 51 children in my first grade classroom. One inexperienced young School Sister of Saint Francis taught us to read, write and do math well enough that our reading test scores were higher than the scores kids get today with one third the class size. She lived with 18 other sisters and got constant on the job training in a school with a tuition of $2 per month.

In my eight years of elementary school I only remember one child who did not have a father at home. His dad was an Air Force pilot who was killed during the Korean War. Greg was on my little league team and the other fathers in the parish made sure he was included in any activity that required an adult male. His mother was one of the few lay teachers in our school. My parents saw our teachers every day at Mass. I did not have a chance to get away with anything because the teachers would forget by the time of a semi-annual parent-teacher conference. I was lucky enough to have two younger brothers who got in enough trouble to take the heat off me.

We learned all the commandments before I had any idea what adultery was. There was no danger that parents would protest how judgemental that was. The concept that parents would do anything for the sake of their children was not considered a crazy anachronism.

In my senior year of college I was a volunteer teacher’s aid in a public school first grade with 18 children. Only three of them lived with both parents. Most of my job was just to sit with one child at a time and help them read and do simple arithmetic. It was the kind of things parents should do, but don’t do when they are not present in the home. At 21 I was about the same age as many of the absent fathers.

By some measures teacher productivity has declined so much that we should not expect their salaries to keep up with other occupations. Teacher unions have made class size a prime target in negotiations. They want to teach fewer children for more money. It would be hard to get those concessions in a vacuum, but if one teacher also has to do the job of two parents, it makes sense.

 

[Dan_Grelinger]

Pay becomes a social issue if it is not enough to provide for basic needs. I have seen no official church teaching that says people must be paid what they are ‘worth’. What are each of us ‘worth’? How in the world do you figure that out? Are we not all truly invaluable? How can we put a price on what we are ‘worth’? Who really thinks they are paid what they are ‘worth’? We must all be treated with respect due children of God. In the ‘world’ sometimes people confuse money with respect, but in reality, that is falacy.

The whole debate on whether people are paid what they are ‘worth’ is not very productive, anyway. Are not policeman, firefighters, airliner pilots, taxi-cab drivers, doctors, lawyers, cooks, refuse collectors, managers, as invaluable as teachers? They all hold our lives in their hands to some extent. There is not normally a correlation between the importance of someone’s job to their pay. Some may want that to be so, but if you study models of truly holy people, they did not concern themselves with such talk.

In an efficient economic system (efficient necessarily meaning as providing for the maximum common good) pay is set at the level necessary to incent individuals to do what is required to become prepared for, and enter, the field. For occupations where financial incentive is not necessary to meet the demand for the people that are necessary to fill the openings, pay will be correspondingly low.

When I graduated from college, the student in my graduating class with the highest paying job offer declined it. Why was his offer the highest? Because it involved working for months at a time, 7 days a week, in the oil fields in Saudi Arabia. Not many qualified people wanted to do that, and the oil companies had to put high pay in front of people to entice them to do what most would not.

With the situation that exists today, I don’t feel concerned that my children are being taught by people who are in the teaching profession only because it is a way to get rich. I know that my children’s teachers care most about what is really important, and that is not money. I worry about a few doctors, though.

Dan Grelinger

 

[peter_banks]

According to government statistics (see below, last data I could find is from 2004), Catholic schools are competitive among all private schools and I wouldn’t describe any of these salaries as “abysmally low.”

nces.ed.gov/surveys/sass/tables/affil_2004_23.asp

I’ve been teaching at a Catholic High School for 19 years. When I started, my pay was $10,400.00 per year. In my 19th year it is $23,400.00 That’s pretty low pay especially when we had 7 children to rear—4 still at home. I call that abysmal. However, I knew what I was getting myself into and have never complained about my salary!!
However, speaking of justice issues, there are others, for instance, not being treated fairly that could be addressed at some so-called Catholic Schools

 

[pabakmil]

I agree with 1ke and crm114. My wife has taught in Catholic schools all of our married life and my children went through Catholic schools and college. Growing up, I went through public school and McNeese (‘77) for a degree in Marketing. No Catholic school challenged the parish schools or the county schools in pay. The cost for the kids’ education and my wife’s low pay were acceptable for our faith and quality of life. Some of the schools offered tuition breaks, some did not. It always would have been much cheaper to send the kids to public schools and more lucrative for my wife to teach in public school. My wife has always loved her job and the kids loved school. The result was my daughter and I graduated together from Christian Bros. My daughter began teaching at a Catholic elementary school, I received a MAT in Education and went to my second year of teaching high school religion. After putting time in as a LaSallian Volunteer in Kansas City, my son received his Masters in Education and is working in the Sacred Heart School System.

There are three different types of Catholic schools here. Parochial (parish) schools and Diocesan schools are on the same pay grade. Order schools are able to pay more. In my situation, six years experience and a masters translated to $30k. Starting salary for a bachelors in the city or county is $33k. I do look upon my teaching as an opportunity, a mission, and a gift from God. I did not go into teaching until we could afford the cut in pay and almost all of our bills paid. Does the Diocese value teachers and students? It most definitely does, but it also has to look at the families who will pay for the education and send their children to the schools. Nationwide, Catholic schools are declining in number. More and more, families want new cars, bigscreen tvs and fancy vacations rather than the reduced cost of a Catholic education. It is a sacrifice to send your children to Catholic school. It is a sacrifice to teach in a Catholic school. My daughter once tried to complain to me about the size of her paycheck. I asked if she knew what she was going to make when she signed her contract. She said, “Yes.” I told her she had two choices then, either she could find a second job because she must need more money or next year she could find a job that paid better. She was over 21 and college educated when she signed the contract, this is America, she can always look for a better job when her contract is finished. That was three years ago and the subject has not come up again.

Peter 3:15

 

[CPA2]

I’ve always liked what Steve Jobs (co-founder of Apple Computers)had to say about vouchers. This is from an interview in 1996, so adjust dollar figures accordingly. Link to complete interview is at the bottom.

Q: Could technology help by improving education?

A: I used to think that technology could help education. I’ve probably spearheaded giving away more computer equipment to schools than anybody else on the planet. But I’ve had to come to the inevitable conclusion that the problem is not one that technology can hope to solve. What’s wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology. No amount of technology will make a dent.

It’s a political problem. The problems are sociopolitical. The problems are unions. You plot the growth of the NEA [National Education Association] and the dropping of SAT scores, and they’re inversely proportional. The problems are unions in the schools. The problem is bureaucracy. I’m one of these people who believes the best thing we could ever do is go to the full voucher system.

I have a 17-year-old daughter who went to a private school for a few years before high school. This private school is the best school I’ve seen in my life. It was judged one of the 100 best schools in America. It was phenomenal. The tuition was $5,500 a year, which is a lot of money for most parents. But the teachers were paid less than public school teachers - so it’s not about money at the teacher level. I asked the state treasurer that year what California pays on average to send kids to school, and I believe it was $4,400. While there are not many parents who could come up with $5,500 a year, there are many who could come up with $1,000 a year.

If we gave vouchers to parents for $4,400 a year, schools would be starting right and left. People would get out of college and say, “Let’s start a school.” You could have a track at Stanford within the MBA program on how to be the businessperson of a school. And that MBA would get together with somebody else, and they’d start schools. And you’d have these young, idealistic people starting schools, working for pennies.

They’d do it because they’d be able to set the curriculum. When you have kids you think, What exactly do I want them to learn? Most of the stuff they study in school is completely useless. But some incredibly valuable things you don’t learn until you’re older - yet you could learn them when you’re younger. And you start to think, What would I do if I set a curriculum for a school?

God, how exciting that could be! But you can’t do it today. You’d be crazy to work in a school today. You don’t get to do what you want. You don’t get to pick your books, your curriculum. You get to teach one narrow specialization. Who would ever want to do that?

These are the solutions to our problems in education. Unfortunately, technology isn’t it. You’re not going to solve the problems by putting all knowledge onto CD-ROMs. We can put a Web site in every school - none of this is bad. It’s bad only if it lulls us into thinking we’re doing something to solve the problem with education.

Lincoln did not have a Web site at the log cabin where his parents home-schooled him, and he turned out pretty interesting. Historical precedent shows that we can turn out amazing human beings without technology. Precedent also shows that we can turn out very uninteresting human beings with technology.

It’s not as simple as you think when you’re in your 20s - that technology’s going to change the world. In some ways it will, in some ways it won’t.

wired.com/wired/archive/4.02/jobs_pr.html

---

 

[Trader]

This proves that Steve Jobs is even smarter than I thought. He agrees with me.

For the last two years I have been donating technology products to Catholic schools. Do you know what smart boards are? They are computerized interactive white boards. Teachers and students write on the boards with electonic pens in different colors. The display is erased by drawing a circle around the part to be erased and tapping once outside the circle. If attached to a printer, you can make copies of the notes instantly. They come with projectors that allow teachers to use DVD’s, Powerpoint presentations, and other standard or specialized software to improve teaching in the classroom. Test answers can be displayed on the board so that tests are actually useful. Scores and feedback can be given immediately rather than days later. They also allow a shorter child to write on the board near the bottom and scroll the display higher so everyone else can see it.

I donated the first one because a good friend and mother of my goddaughter was allergic to chalk dust and was considering leaving teaching in an excellent catholic school because of it. The principal thought it was important enough that their 30 second television commercial was redone to show my friend with the smart board. I got some amazing thank you letters from the sixth graders explaining how much easier it was to see what was on the smart board compared to a chalk board and how it helped them learn math better. One of the letters sounded so much like our bishop that I asked him about it. The bishop was impressed that a boy not yet confirmed would be doing evangelization. The letter expressed the hope that I could donate more of these boards to his school and to other schools.

When my friend, my goddaughter, and the school principal all agreed that the next one should go to the same teacher, I donated a second board. I made it very clear that I was not spending $3000 for something to replace a $50 movie screeen. As great as these boards are, they require the teacher to change the way they teach. Additional preparation is required by the teacher to improve efficiency in the classroom, and I knew for sure that not all teachers were willing to do that. Once they got the second board, other teachers and the school board got interested enough to buy 8 more for the teachers who committed to put in the time required.

I got similar results at two other schools, one where my niece teaches and another where my brother was on the board. My brother has now been appointed to the diocesan school board. I don’t think Bishop D’Arcy minded that the other schools were in different dioceses.

The attitude in the public schools seems to be that if everyone can’t have the smart boards, then no one should have them. Lazy teachers should have the same equipment as the hard working innovators, and the union backs them on that. Steve Jobs is right, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church is right when it says that parents are the principal educators of their children.

 

[CPA2]

This proves that Steve Jobs is even smarter than I thought. He agrees with me.

For the last two years I have been donating technology products to Catholic schools. Do you know what smart boards are? They are computerized interactive white boards. Teachers and students write on the boards with electonic pens in different colors. The display is erased by drawing a circle around the part to be erased and tapping once outside the circle. If attached to a printer, you can make copies of the notes instantly. They come with projectors that allow teachers to use DVD’s, Powerpoint presentations, and other standard or specialized software to improve teaching in the classroom. Test answers can be displayed on the board so that tests are actually useful. Scores and feedback can be given immediately rather than days later. They also allow a shorter child to write on the board near the bottom and scroll the display higher so everyone else can see it.

I donated the first one because a good friend and mother of my goddaughter was allergic to chalk dust and was considering leaving teaching in an excellent catholic school because of it. The principal thought it was important enought that their 30 second television commercial was redone to show my friend with the smart board. I got some amazing thank you letters from the sixth graders explaining how much easier it was to see what was on the smart board compared to a chalk board and how it helped them learn math better. One of the letters sounded so much like our bishop that I asked him about it. The bishop was impressed that a boy not yet confirmed would be doing evangelization. The letter expressed the hope that I could donate more of these boards to his school and to other schools.

When my friend, my goddaughter, and the school principal all agreed that the next one should go to the same teacher, I donated a second board. I made it very clear that I was not spending $3000 for something to replace a $50 movie screeen. As great as these boards are, they require the teacher to change the way they teach. Additional preparation is required by the teacher to improve efficiency in the classroom, and I knew for sure that not all teachers were willing to do that. Once they got the second board, other teachers and the school board got interested enough to buy 8 more for the teachers who committed to put in the time required.

I got similar results at two other schools, one where my niece teaches and another where my brother was on the board. My brother has now been appointed to the diocesan school board. I don’t think Bishop D’Arcy minded that the other schools were in different dioceses.

The attitude in the public schools seems to be that if everyone can’t have the smart boards, then no one should have them. Lazy teachers should have the same equipment as the hard working innovators, and the union backs them on that. Steve Jobs is right, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church is right when it says that parents are the principal educators of their children.

Thank you for your post.

 

[CPA2]

I see a problem with state universities, such as XYZ State University. The college of business at XYZ does not understand that the student is a customer. Customer service requires that you make it as easy as possible for the customer to buy. A student is entitled to the same expectation of service. However, the college of business at XYZ provides no service to the student.

XYZ college of business does not practice what it teaches. The university, like most state universities, is set in its ways, and there is nothing that you, I or anyone else can do about it. The student is a second-class citizen. The only way to improve public education is to make it private.

This is what Milton Friedman had to say about the “invisible hand.” It applies to all government agencies, including state universities. “An individual who intends only to serve the public interest by fostering government intervention is led by an invisible hand to promote private interest, which was no part of his intention.”

 

[CPA2]

XYZ State University spent a small fortune on a software registration package a few years ago. After a few years, they bought another software package for registration.
I started registering at McNeese on March 29, 2004. It was a disaster! The use of prerequisites and passwords was a bomb that blew up in everyone’s faces. It took me 8 days to register over the Internet!

The use of prerequisites was a bottleneck. Every time that I would try to register, the computer would lock me out. My son also had problems registering for Calculus 2, Physics and Engineering. All three courses required Calculus 1 as a prerequisite. My son is taking Calculus 1 this semester. However, the computer locked my son out of all three courses for the fall semester because he had not ”taken” Calculus 1! Using this logic, my son will not be able to register until December, after the semester is over. XYZ State University uses the Internet as a policeman to slow down the business process.

My wife has been telling me about the problems with IT she faces at XYZ where she is teaching. During the first week of class this spring, her entire lab shut down several times. She did not know why. It seems that the IT department did not tell anyone about a small detail. If students fail to put in the correct password, the entire lab shuts down for 30 minutes!

Each computer lab has a different password. IT intentionally programmed all the university labs to shut down if incorrect passwords were used a total of six times. Their reasoning was that the University did not want unauthorized people using the labs. Additionally, IT did not want students accessing inappropriate Internet sites. Valuable teaching time is lost (30 minutes out of a 50 minute class) every time six students enter incorrect passwords. In my mind, this is an example of the law of unintended consequences. IT did not consult with the end users, the professors, before they implemented the password protection. .

I made the mistake of entering the incorrect password three times during registration in March. XYZ burned my password! I had to wait an hour in line at the registrar’s office to get my password reinstated! The XYZ IT department will continue to use passwords, and those passwords will continue to shut down computers. Their cure is worse than the disease

 

[Trader]

XYZ State University spent a small fortune on a software registration package a few years ago. After a few years, they bought another software package for registration.
I started registering at McNeese on March 29, 2004. It was a disaster! The use of prerequisites and passwords was a bomb that blew up in everyone’s faces. It took me 8 days to register over the Internet!

The use of prerequisites was a bottleneck. Every time that I would try to register, the computer would lock me out. My son also had problems registering for Calculus 2, Physics and Engineering. All three courses required Calculus 1 as a prerequisite. My son is taking Calculus 1 this semester. However, the computer locked my son out of all three courses for the fall semester because he had not ”taken” Calculus 1! Using this logic, my son will not be able to register until December, after the semester is over. XYZ State University uses the Internet as a policeman to slow down the business process.

My wife has been telling me about the problems with IT she faces at XYZ where she is teaching. During the first week of class this spring, her entire lab shut down several times. She did not know why. It seems that the IT department did not tell anyone about a small detail. If students fail to put in the correct password, the entire lab shuts down for 30 minutes!

Each computer lab has a different password. IT intentionally programmed all the university labs to shut down if incorrect passwords were used a total of six times. Their reasoning was that the University did not want unauthorized people using the labs. Additionally, IT did not want students accessing inappropriate Internet sites. Valuable teaching time is lost (30 minutes out of a 50 minute class) every time six students enter incorrect passwords. In my mind, this is an example of the law of unintended consequences. IT did not consult with the end users, the professors, before they implemented the password protection. .

I made the mistake of entering the incorrect password three times during registration in March. XYZ burned my password! I had to wait an hour in line at the registrar’s office to get my password reinstated! The XYZ IT department will continue to use passwords, and those passwords will continue to shut down computers. Their cure is worse than the disease

I can appreciate your frustration. No one would consider the Department of Motor Vehicles to be a good business model, except for public school administrators.

Believe it or not, public universities are the best part of public education. They have the most in common with private schools.

1. Students(or their parents) have to pay tuition. Few parents and no students choose to throw away their own tuition money on unmotivated students.
2. Participation is 100% voluntary. If your behavior or perfomance demonstrate that you don’t want to be there, you are required to leave.
3. Standards have to be met. You are not automatically admitted if your temperature is sometimes 98.6 degrees.
4. Our public universites are considered so good that they attract students from all over the world. Even parents in the world’s poorest countries do not dream of sending their children to public elementary schools in New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles.

 

[CPA2]

I can appreciate your frustration. No one would consider the Department of Motor Vehicles to be a good business model, except for public school administrators.

Believe it or not, public universities are the best part of public education. They have the most in common with private schools.

1. Students(or their parents) have to pay tuition. Few parents and no students choose to throw away their own tuition money on unmotivated students.
2. Participation is 100% voluntary. If your behavior or perfomance demonstrate that you don’t want to be there, you are required to leave.
3. Standards have to be met. You are not automatically admitted if your temperature is sometimes 98.6 degrees.
4. Our public universites are considered so good that they attract students from all over the world. Even parents in the world’s poorest countries do not dream of sending their children to public elementary schools in New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles.

Becuase of more competition, state universities are far better than government schools (k-12). Government shools (k-120 are a failure (F-).

 

[lutherlic]

I agree with the other posts about funding issues. The money has to come from somewhere and that somewhere is us parents. Our Catholic school teachers should be paid top dollar but it simply is not possible. We are blessed by their generosity of their service.

Since the topic is in the social justice area, let me also agree with those who have already commented on vouchers. I feel that it is simply immoral to force parents to fund the public school system during the period their own children are not spending those resources.

I will go a step further - to be truly fair, we should be able to designate where our school tax funds go all the time. Catholic and other private schools would boom, children would be better educated, their teachers would be paid a lot more, facilities could be expanded and improved, and really good teachers stuck in public schools would have the option of moving over (without pay loss).