Schools treating parents as customers

[CharonY]

47 minutes ago, Erina said:

Look, I can't create a system where you get something for free.

No one said that it should be. The question is only who is paying and what is the consequence of it. I think I have explained why having students shouldering the cost will drive down education quality. At this point you seem to have a certain thing in mind and keep arguing against that. I.e. you do not seem to follow the arguments being made, I am afraid.

 

49 minutes ago, Erina said:

I'll check out the Baumol effect, but I fail to see how unproductively is rewarded against genuine productivity ? It's a bit like the Unions striking right now for better pay. It makes no sense. Better to just outshine your contemporaries and negotiate on personal basis, rather than blackmail.

You are missing the point. In economic models, salaries increase naturally with productivity. However, in teaching there is a cap. I.e. each teacher can only deal with so many students. Your "perfect" student/teacher ratio would be a hard cap, for example.

So let's say there is a linear correlation between productivity and salary.

And let's say in the past a teacher teaches 30 students and the worker can produce 100 items. Now moving forward let's say new instruments allow the worker to produce 200 items in the same time. So the worker basically replaces another worker and doubles the salary. Meanwhile the teacher continues to teach 30 students (stagnant productivity) and does not get a raise.

Now in yet another decade new technology doubles worker productivity again to 400. Now workers make 4x the salary, but the teachers keeps the same salary. 

Now, this might not appear to be a big problem, but if many sectors increase productivity (which is a general trend, due to e.g. automation), and therefore most folks make more money, then cost also tend to increase due to overall higher consumption (i.e. inflation). So either teacher wages will have to increase, too (though they tend to trail behind) or they will need to find another job to survive.

In Universities professors are usually quite competitive in other job markets (to some degree) due to the skill sets they have. So either universities pay decent salaries (though they have been overall stagnant when inflation-adjusted in many places) or they just take different jobs. The reliance on faculty to teach and the restriction on how many folks can be taught (especially hands-on in applied fields) drives costs up. The one way to deal with it are things like online courses. But as it turns out, the outcomes with this type of learning is usually of low quality. 

[TheVat]

19 hours ago, CharonY said:

...what students really hate are courses that are considered hard and which require applying knowledge as well as working on gaining new ones. What they love are classes that can be passed by memorizing power point slides. There is a clear correlation between grades and ease of course and the resulting evaluation (i.e. how popular a course is). In other words, given the choice, folks will take the easy way. The administration reacts to these desires and force faculty to make things easier to pass more students. And now folks are saying that the degree is not worth anything. Well that is what you get if you do not allow faculty to keep certain standards. Putting even more power to the customers will just accelerate this process.

Goodness me, could this be industrial disease?

 

[Erina]

You're right, I am fed up arguing the same point. But, I'm only replying to other members, including yourself. I feel that I have more than proven my point, but we'll just agree to disagree on that.

How about then the manner in which the accounts are managed i.e. every cost placed on an open blockchain for everybody to inspect the ledger.

The parents would be issued their budget in a crypto-currency, which then can only be spent in the school. I am aware that teachers being paid would need to convert that back (at the market rate) to buy food and pay a mortgage, but that is their own business. However, the bursary that the school received on top of each child's net value would be more challenging, as suppliers would need to be paid, but they would just have to accept the crypto-currency as that would be law (they can convert it themselves).

Of course, a school would be given just enough rope to hang itself with. I know how that sounds but old habits die hard and some people think everybody else is just stupid. Once black holes start appearing in the accounts it will be very interesting to see just how the money is spent.

Real time information on how and when money is spent would save on FOI requests, be fully transparent and with the right tools could highlight inefficiencies between schools. It could also show up areas where more than one school could pool their recourse and purchase in parallel to reduce their costs and highlight where suppliers or ingrained practices rip schools off, as somebody posted earlier.

 

[iNow]

17 minutes ago, Erina said:

I feel that I have more than proven my point

You’ve repeated yourself an awful lot, dug in your heels, acted superior even while badly missing basic terms like refute and rebut, dismissed reasonable concerns and criticisms from others with the wave of a hand, remained largely obstinate, and convinced practically nobody here of the merits of your position, but hey! So long as you feel good about it all I suppose that’s all that really matters!

21 minutes ago, Erina said:

I am fed up arguing the same point

You misspelled “addressing legitimate counterpoints.”

23 minutes ago, Erina said:

they would just have to accept the crypto-currency as that would be law (they can convert it themselves)

Out of curiosity, would you plan to peg your cryptocurrency as a stable coin? Would you do fiat-backed, commodity-backed, or maybe just a non-collateralized algorithmic approach?

Given your dogged and absolute reliance on fundamental free market determinism, these details matter quite a lot. 

[CharonY]

1 hour ago, Erina said:

How about then the manner in which the accounts are managed i.e. every cost placed on an open blockchain for everybody to inspect the ledger.

Public schools publish their budgets. I have not idea why blockchains would be relevant here.

 

1 hour ago, Erina said:

The parents would be issued their budget in a crypto-currency, which then can only be spent in the school.

You have noted issues of students getting loans for higher education, now you are proposing the same thing, just with the added volatility of crypto? Sorry this seems like a typically tech-bro approach. I.e. doing the same stuff but just at some trendy stuff and call it disruptive.

Similar as with any complex topic one cannot just start with a proposed solution and try to make the problem fit the solution. The first step is to fully diagnose the issue. And there is a lot if literature out there to dig through. But that takes time and effort. Again, something that many proponents of fast solutions do not want to invest.

[exchemist]

18 hours ago, Erina said:

 

The UK has as many Nobel Prizes as all of the EU countries combined (bar Germany). The Europeans love theory, but the Anglo-sphere does the practical, that is the system we need to maintain.

 

On a point of factual detail, this seems to be untrue.

According to this table:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_country

The US has 403, the UK 137, Germany 114, France 72 and the rest of the EU countries between them have 171, or, if one excludes the recent admission of former Warsaw Pact countries, 131.

The UK does well, it is true, but one needs to bear in mind the advantage of language. Language is important for information sharing and collaboration in science. When I was at Oxford in the 1970s, the old-school dons were still advising chemists and physicists to learn German, as so much of the good research had been written in German. But in fact English was already becoming pre-eminent and that has of course continued. France, a country comparable to the UK and Germany in population and intellectual tradition, has done well, all things considered.  So in Europe we have the big 3 industrial economies - the UK, Germany and France -  dominating, which is to be expected.   

In any event, Nobel prizes are not much use as a measure, if your aim is to contrast a supposed love of theory with supposed excellence at practice. Nobel prizes are awarded for theory just as much as for application, if not more so.  

[CharonY]

I will also add that Nobel Prices are not a good indicator of the quality of education, but rather of research and the ability to attract researchers.

[Erina]

@iNow: I dealt with your little joke and you can't get over it, well you shouldn't troll. Your problem.

I don’t know how you define “stable” in terms of crypto-currency, they are inherently volatile. But, as the system is to replace Sterling transitions, I thought it obvious that the coin would be pegged to the national currency.

@CharonY: The world is trending toward Blockchain technology and I think that it fits well with the my proposal, given that the participants will be cost conscious. Why wait until well after an anomaly has been discovered months later, when this could be seen in real time.

Of course, a lot of what will be built upon Blockchains is not yet understood, but continuous monitoring opens up so many possibilities to find intuitive ways to avoid waste and be more efficient. Imagine a paper company browsing the school's blockchain transaction for a competitors price and low-balling them, the business would flow to the school.

I didn't want to drag this conversation into tertiary level again, but did entertain some of the issues, for the sakes of harmony. However, I didn't agree with them. On top of which I found my solution didn't gain any traction.

Ah, sorry about the Nobel Prize claim, that was an Anglo-pshere effort, not just the UK. I got mixed up with that, it was from something else.

[CharonY]

32 minutes ago, Erina said:

@CharonY: The world is trending toward Blockchain technology and I think that it fits well with the my proposal, given that the participants will be cost conscious. Why wait until well after an anomaly has been discovered months later, when this could be seen in real time.

In that case why not have a genetic algorithm create an AI-driven curriculum and finance system that incorporates sustainable efficiency optimization using big data ecosystems that drill down toward a holistic education with resilient feedback logistics that minimizes pain points and provides an optimized customer journey that synergizes with hyperlocal strategies, aligns with global retargeting and moves the needle towards fully realized returns on investments?

[exchemist]

5 minutes ago, CharonY said:

In that case why not have a genetic algorithm create an AI-driven curriculum and finance system that incorporates sustainable efficiency optimization using big data ecosystems that drill down toward a holistic education with resilient feedback logistics that minimizes pain points and provides an optimized customer journey that synergizes with hyperlocal strategies, aligns with global retargeting and moves the needle towards fully realized returns on investments?

Love it! This is just the sort of stream of impenetrable management bullshit that made me so grateful for the chance to take early retirement. 😃

 

[Erina]

I really don't know if this is worth pursuing on these forums any longer.

What a shame.

[exchemist]

23 minutes ago, Erina said:

I really don't know if this is worth pursuing on these forums any longer.

What a shame.

You are right. You've tried to explain your idea - and nobody here thinks it is a good one, for reasons they have explained. So that's that, really.  

Edited April 15, 2023 by exchemist

[Erina]

That's what the miners of the seventies thought too.

[TheVat]

3 hours ago, CharonY said:

In that case why not have a genetic algorithm create an AI-driven curriculum and finance system that incorporates sustainable efficiency optimization using big data ecosystems that drill down toward a holistic education with resilient feedback logistics that minimizes pain points and provides an optimized customer journey that synergizes with hyperlocal strategies, aligns with global retargeting and moves the needle towards fully realized returns on investments?

Respectfully, I have to say that it will be efficacious to implement consensus mechanisms that build through multiple iterations of the feedback system as it cycles through each incremental through-line of various pedagogical tiers as they self-actualize and tesselate through a full plenum of profit algorithms and covariant fact valuations.  

And thanks for a good laugh!

[exchemist]

11 hours ago, Erina said:

 

Ah, sorry about the Nobel Prize claim, that was an Anglo-pshere effort, not just the UK. I got mixed up with that, it was from something else.

Daily Mail?