Another .5% GET increase!

[leilanidude]

http://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2018...acher-pay/

Senate Bill 2105, was introduced by Sen. Josh Green, D-Kona, Ka‘u

Buried inside what seems to (at first) be a reasonable bill to increase the starting pay of teachers from a current high of about $50k, to $55k, is this little gem:

"Increase the general excise and use tax by 0.5 percent for six years to serve as a dedicated funding source for the DOE, along with state programs addressing homelessness. "

Also, limiting class size to 20 seems like a good idea, but will mean possibly hundreds of extra teachers needing to be hired statewide, when we can't seem to hire enough to begin with.

[randomq]

Instead of trying to tax and legislate better education, I feel the legislature should focus on making Hawaii a better place for new business. Students would be a little more encouraged to study if they saw financial success and opportunity around them. (And internships)

[kalakoa]

Increase the general excise and use tax by 0.5 percent for six years

"Welcome, new teachers! We've just raised your starting pay, but to cover that cost, the price of everything else went up too!"

[geochem]

All about expanding the union labor (voter) pool at the expense of everyone else.

I recently read a very interesting book called "David and Goliath" - that challenged current wisdom on a number of issues: one being that (reduced) class size always improves student success. The author cited research findings that have shown that, as expected, going from very large class sizes to smaller ones, there is an improvement, but that further reductions reach a plateau with no change, and then a decline in student success with further reductions. The research findings found that higher teacher salaries, with no change in class size, brought about a greater improvement in student performance than did a decrease in class size with no change in salaries.

I believe that there was also mention made of increasing the ability of administrators to weed out the small percentage of unqualified and non-performing teachers as having a much larger impact on student performance as well.

I am sure that it would be far too much trouble for our legislators to actually investigate such findings before they submit their proposed legislation...

[glinda]

quote:

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Originally posted by randomq

Instead of trying to tax and legislate better education, I feel the legislature should focus on making Hawaii a better place for new business. Students would be a little more encouraged to study if they saw financial success and opportunity around them. (And internships)

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That sounds a little too much like trickle down theory, which we all know doesn't work. From my perspective it all starts in the home. The first and foremost step needed to increase student performance is to address the issues of the homes the students live in. And yes a good portion of that is the economic stability of the family. But let's not fool ourselves into thinking just because we make it easier for some businessman to make a profit it'll mean something to their employees and in turn the community at large.

[HereOnThePrimalEdge]

If the ratio of classroom teachers to administration is almost one to one, why not first look at redundancies in management? Do we really need one full time administrator for every teacher? In business it's approximately one supervisor for every seven workers (or more). If administrative oversight on that scale isn't necessary, why not "retire" an administrator and replace them with a classroom teacher. No extra money needed for that.

ADDED: If a teacher can control a classroom full of 20-30 junior high school students, perhaps they have better supervisory skills that the current administrators who only oversee the equivalent of one teacher.

QUESTIONS:
1) Are the classroom teachers so capable and competent they have the ability to control 20-30 raging teenagers shut into a room with them for an hour?
2) Or are the classroom teachers so profoundly incompetent they require one administrative handler each to keep them under close scrutiny?

[kalakoa]

Do we really need one full time administrator for every teacher?

Yes; it's called "compliance cost overhead", and it gets worse every time "reforms" create new "regulations" which are inevitably far more important than actual "education".