Longweekend58,

You say I find it difficult to stick to the topic at hand. My initial post was to respond to specific claims made by other people on this thread. Then my posts were to respond to various other comments and to untruthful accusations made against me by you.

Now you concede that I “may well be in favour of private schools”. Well, that’s progress on claiming that I was oppposed to them and progress on saying that you don’t know what my position is. Was the clue when I said, “You have state aid to private schools because of the efforts of people like me who argued that you should get it”? You made an accusation that was false, and you had no reason to make it. You could have simply responded to the point I made about the relative educational success of private and public schools, but, at best, you decided to make assumptions. I don’t know why people do that, but they do. You’re not the first to behave like that, and you wont be the last, but that is no reason for me to just accept it.

It is “a long, long time” since the DLP won state aid for private schools – in the 1960s, to be precise – and since that aid became substantial – in the 1970s, to be precise. The DLP was a significant force in politics then. In the first case, it was DLP pressure on Henry Bolte that won per capita state aid in Victoria. In the second case, it was the very existence of the DLP, with its substantial block of voters (19 per cent in Victoria in the 1970 Senate election), that prompted Gough Whitlam to get the ALP to overturn its opposition to state aid and to bring in funding via the Schools Commission in order to win the 1972 election.

It is not so long since the DLP in a re-incarnated form, had representation in parliament - last year, to be precise, and a new DLP senator will take his seat this year.

Longweekend58,

I take it that you accept the percentage increases in the CPI that I give for each year since and including 1974 as correct, as you have not said otherwise.

If, as I said, “inflation since then has been approximately 551 per cent”, then you need to add 551 per cent of the original amount to get the value in today’s dollars, not multiply the original amount by 5.51. Thus, if you seek to correct me and say that the figure should be 741 per cent, not 551 per cent, then you need to add 741 per cent of the original amount to it to get the value in today’s dollars, not multiply the original amount by 7.41. It is the difference between the Consumer Price Index and the percentage increase on the original amount. If the amount is 100 and the CPI increases by 100 per cent, the new CPI is 200. The percentage increase, however, remains at 100.

741 per cent “of” $11,400 is, as you say, $84,474, but my 551 per cent was not “of” $11,400, but the increase on $11,4000 needed to give it the value it would have today. The Consumer Price Index today, with 1975 as the base year (i.e., 100), is 651. The increase to reach 651 is 551 per cent. My maths is correct.

Riddler raised the question of teacher salaries, so I posted a few facts.

You claimed I was opposed to state aid, so I posted the fact that I had been a candidate for the DLP, the party that advocated state aid in the first place.

Vanna claimed that the UK was below the OECD average in “everything”, so I posted an OECD figure showing that was not so.

Had the discussion remained about the desirability of funding or not funding private schools, I would not have needed to p0st any of the above at all.

If you had replied to me simply by disputing my account of OECD research, I would have basically stuck to that point in my response to you

vanna,

Productivity isn’t everything for the obvious reason that the value of money falls year by year, so, if there were someone whose productivity had remained the same, the real value of their income would fall, making them worse off even though they were doing the same job as before.

The critics say that standards have fallen over some time period, but they ignore the fact that teacher pay has fallen over that time too – relatively in some case, in absolute terms in others. Do you not get the point that falling pay has reduced the average ability of those going into teaching? Do you not see that, if this trend were to continue, fewer and fewer able people would remain to teach our children? Do you not understand that there are many factors other than what a teacher does in the classroom that affect student performance? Do you not know, for example, that there has been a 10 per cent worsening of the secondary staffing ratio in Victoria compared with 30 years ago? Do you not know that retention rates have increased dramatically so that teachers are now dealing with students who would not have even been in school 30 years ago? Do you not realise that the environment outside of school is less conducive to learning now that it was 30 years ago?

What’s unfortunate for teachers is unfortunate for students. A society that spends its time teacher-bashing is not one that values children.

Is this a "ridiculous analysis", then?

"A further rationale for the increased public funding for non-government schools arising from the SES scheme was that it would save public money overall, when funding from all Commonwealth and State sources was taken into account. This kind of justification for public funding of private schools has a long history in the politics of Australian education, based on the assumption that State governments, in particular, would reduce their funding commitments for public schools, including through school closures, when significant numbers of students moved from public schools to the private sector.

But the political and financial realities are quite different from this theoretical assumption. In 2006, for example, some 200,000 additional students were enrolled in non-government schools compared with the 1996 level. Had these 200,000 students been accommodated instead in public schools over this decade, this would have required additional public funding of around $2 billion. Over that same period, however, the real increase in public funding for these same students, in the non-government sector, was more than $3 billion, mostly provided by the Commonwealth. In other words, governments funded the additional non-government school students by $1 billion more than would have been required for the equivalent number of students in fully publicly funded government schools."

From http://www.aeufederal.org.au/Publications/2010/Schoolfundfutures.pdf

Watch the usual suspects weave their moonbat magic in refutation without the use of figures or links.

I note that longweekend is torching you with a vengence on the stats, so I'm going to limit my reply to you and Vanna to the following:
"The critics say that standards have fallen over some time period, but they ignore the fact that teacher pay has fallen over that time too – relatively in some case, in absolute terms in others. Do you not get the point that falling pay has reduced the average ability of those going into teaching?"
The responses to this are many.
1) You actually haven't proved a salary reduction, bad math aside you've just argued that teacher pay is lower relative to the average worker wage. Longweekend has explained why this is not how economics is done, but you continue to ignore his explanations. I'm more interested in,
2) How you don't understand causation or logic. Observation 1- salaries have "fallen" (let's just assume this is true for a minute). Observation 2- standards have fallen. But that does not lead to the logical conclusion that there is a connection between those two things, anymore than if I played that game with a different section of the economy (mining wages have increased, therefore mine workers must be working more productively today than they were in the 70's... needless to say, this isn't necessarily true at all). It's like arguing that a rock can keep tigers away. You have to explain why the things are connected. The AEU certainly doesn't claim they are, because they assert teachers are doing awesome.

But more than the AEU, who I can't believe Vanna still has the gall to link us to, it's not what the results say. Parents are leaving public education in droves, so it doesn't make sense for us to pay teachers the same level they were getting in the 70's (assuming for the sake of argument Chris understood math). When sewing machines were invented, loom makers made less money. That wasn't a bad thing. When less people want a service from the government, the government should spend less on it, especially when the government can't give the product away (public is free, yet people still have been leaving for years and years).
3) Chris has still been unable to show that teachers were paid correctly in the 70's under his math, rather than overpaid. An IT worker in India might be getting $4 an hour, working very hard, and giving 90% productivity. It doesn't follow that if we increase his wage to $100 an hour he will be 20 times more productive. That's absurd. If teacher's were paid over $100K a year in real terms as Chris (falsely) asserts, then they were overpaid. There is zero analysis from Chris on the reasons that the current wage is problematic. Which is annoying, because I already argued: