The majority of travelers are ID-compliant — around 94 percent, according to the TSA.
It seems crazy to me that 6% of travelers are going to the airport without ID. (I presume that accompanied minors who aren't required to show ID are included in the 94%)
Real ID is a series of annoying steps that you need to go through to get a star on your license. People that haven't "upgraded" to Real ID are the noncompliant ones.
I've had problems getting one. Taken a couple attempts at it when the drivers license renews. Last attempt, it seems those adopted need both the biological as well as the legal birth certificate. I've sorted my passport, so do have a passport card now - but I don't always travel with it. (One of the gotchas with GA flying, some days you end up taking a commercial flight home) Guess that changes. Previously, they would just wave you through and 'randomly' select you for fabric/skin swabs.
As a US citizen I "just" needed to present my birth certificate and Social Security card to the DMV along with my "normal" license, and a print-out of a paystub from my employer online (that they didn't even look at).
Of course, the second factor is "going to the DMV", which depending on area can either be an all-day hellscape, or if you're rural, five minutes in and out.
As a US citizen, I don't have a social security card (though I have a passport) and I think I probably have a birth certificate somewhere though I don't really know. Going to AAA where I am is sorta exurban and pretty easy.
Do yourself a favor and contact the social security administration for a replacement card. It's a lot easier to get it now and keep it somewhere safe then be screwed when you suddenly need it for a second form of ID.
I probably should although I also have Passport, RealID, and a Global Entry card--the latter of which I use for flying now given that it doesn't really matter if I lose it.
As a legal immigrant, you get used to dealing with government bureaucracy, and the demands are usually higher than for citizens. Places where you get the same treatment as citizens then don't feel so bad in comparison.
I had trouble getting one. I thought I was prepared. I brought in my passport, my social security card, my paystubs, and stacks of utility bills to prove my residence.
They told me bills needed to be physically postmarked, not printed, so what I brought didn't count. The problem was I had gone digital/paperless, so I hardly ever received physical bills in the mail.
I eventually had to switch two of them to paper billing, wait a month or two, get the bill, and then use that before switching back, then go back to the DMV. It was really annoying.
I haven't had a social security card in decades since a wallet was stolen. I do have a passport (and global entry card) but I basically get almost no paystubs/utility bills/etc. in the mail.
When I got my RealID license I forget what I needed to dig out but it was annoying. (Was able to handle through AAA rather than DMV though.)
Renewing non-REAL ID driver's license is online.
Getting a REAL ID requires a trip to DMV, and this is why I am avoiding it. Essentially for this reason, i am just choosing to renew my regular ID instead of getting a REALID one.
The good thing is I have many ids that can be used in lieu of REAL ID:
- Passport card
- Passport
- Global entry card
So I will probably never get a REAL ID until California does away with non-REAL ID ids.
Getting a real id requires you to bring in paperwork that doesn't exist for me anymore. They want a utility bill? I do everything paperless. I am unable to get a real id because of their ridiculous "proof" requirements.
It's not about identifying people. I have a passport and can show that to them. I have a global entry card. Both qualify as a substitute for a real id. But I cannot use the global entry card as a form of proof of identity. No, please bring a landline telephone bill to us.
They accept PDF printouts. The documentation burden is not a lot, but the timing can be inconvenient especially when you already have alternatives you can rely on.
I do expect that a lot of the proofs of state residency are things that people increasingly don't have any more--especially given strict proof requirements. And this is of course even truer of people who don't even really have a permanent address even though that's perfectly legal in the US.
The annoying extra steps involve stuff like authenticating your residence address with additionjal documents. Enough hassle that I didn't bother with mine, as it would have taken extra time and I waited til the last minute before renewing. It's also a privacy invasion. And to do it now I'd have to pay a bunch extra to get a replacement license when I otherwise don't need to. I hope someone can get this new TSA fee blocked by a court.
Added: I think Real ID may also require your license to show your residence address (mine only has my mailing address). California's DMV collects residence addresses but treats them as confidential, ever since actress Rebecca Schaefer got murdered by a stalker who got her address from the DMV. There is a separate space on the application form where you can write the address you want them to print on your license.
Not to mention that the list of acceptable documents has changed multiple times, compliant IDs usually cost extra, issuing clerks often didn't accept digital bills or state documents like voter registration, and some states (e.g. Arizona) only started issuing compliant IDs within the last few years.
It's a rollout practically designed for noncompliance.
I did have to get some additional docs and come back to the AAA office, Not really a big deal but you did need one or two additional docs even though I have a passport.
Just FYI: nowadays they only use each security question once, so apparently if they run out of questions after many times of doing this, you might not get cleared to fly.
In California, a teacher without a chemistry degree can teach high school chemistry after passing the CSET Chemistry subtest. This requires less depth of knowledge than AP Chemistry.
Expensive yes. Underfunded depends on where you are.
San Francisco's school district has an annual operating budget that equates to $28k per student.
I've heard people in San Francisco say that schools here are underfunded. When I ask them how much we spend per student per year, their guess is usually less than half of the actual amount.
Nearly every time we try to fix this problem with money it fails. The problem is not money. All else being equal there is little to no correlation between spend and outcome. Money get's touted by schools and politicatians as a way of pretending to care but not actually do any of the work to improve outcomes.
What does tend to correlate with money and also correlates with outcomes is parental involvement. Solving that problem requires societal and economic change in a district though not giving the school more money.
I would argue spending less money would actually improve things.
Ultimately it’s a culture problem. America’s attitude toward problems is nothing if not “throw more money at the problem and hope it gets better.” See also, healthcare, military spending, college sports, etc.
cost per student is higher for high school students. So if you take an average across all grades for public schools and then compare that to specific cost per grade at private schools, of course private schools are going to look relatively cheaper for younger students.
I think your reasoning is flawed, but fine...if the goal is to try and have the cheapest possible one room school house. That $200k gets eaten up pretty quick by things like security, janitorial, building maintenance, support staff like principals, librarians, guidance counselors etc etc. If you’re meaning to include total cost for the full time employees (the teachers) in the list, then the salaries are a lot less attractive once you’re done covering benefits, etc.
I've got multiple kids, so I'll admit I think about schools here a lot. The absolute cheapest private schools I've seen in San Francisco are subsidized by religious institutions. The tuition for those schools per child is roughly $28k. Non religious private schools usually start in the $40k range and can easily get into the $50s and well beyond.
My point is that it's hard to point at some issue of inefficient public bureaucracy, because clearly private institutions aren't able to do it any cheaper. I would also argue they wouldn't try, because their goal is a good education, or at least better than the public alternative (that only spends $28k per kid).
"I think your reasoning is flawed, but fine...if the goal is to try and have the cheapest possible one room school house."
I was generous in my estimate for each of the line items. I chose a one room school house as an example because it's easy to grok, and anything larger would be cheaper due to economies of scale.
"I've got multiple kids, so I'll admit I think about schools here a lot."
Although I have only one child (in 4th grade), I think about schools a lot, too.
"The absolute cheapest private schools I've seen in San Francisco are subsidized by religious institutions. The tuition for those schools per child is roughly $28k."
This $28k number is false. Most parochial schools charge about $12k. Here is a breakdown by grade level of the number of parochial schools in SF that serve that grade level, and the median tuition among those schools for that grade:
# Median sticker price
Pre-K 7 $16,610
K 29 $11,530
1 29 $11,530
2 29 $11,175
3 29 $11,175
4 29 $11,175
5 29 $11,175
6 30 $11,519
7 30 $11,519
8 30 $11,519
9 4 $31,725
10 4 $31,725
11 4 $31,725
12 4 $31,725
"Non religious private schools usually start in the $40k range and can easily get into the $50s and well beyond."
This 'usually start in the $40k range' is also false. For each of the grades K-5, 33-39% of non-parochial schools in SF charge less than $40k. For each of the grades 6-8, 30% of non-parochial schools in SF charge less than $40k.
"because clearly private institutions aren't able to do it any cheaper"
Non-parochial private schools don't typically price based on cost. The schools that have high demand (due to parents and student population) can charge more. So they don't need to manage their costs tightly. And they can spend lots of money on marketing.
Moreover, not all students pay sticker price. So looking at the sticker prices (which I've listed above) may give an inflated view of total income.
"because their goal is a good education"
Their goal is happy customers (parents). Different schools achieve this in different ways. Some parents choose a school not based on the expected quality of education but based on the expected networking opportunities for themselves and for their child.
I was generous in my estimate for each of the line items. I chose a one room school house as an example because it's easy to grok, and anything larger would be cheaper due to economies of scale.
I would argue that economies of scale don't apply to education in the same way they apply to other businesses at large. Sure, you theoretically get the benefits of scale with central organization, buildings, centralized services, etc, but once you get to the classrooms themselves most of the cost simply scales linearly with the number of students.
This $28k number is false. Most parochial schools charge about $12k.
I'm not sure what we're talking about here anymore. You're using K-8 as the dominating factor for this gotcha a few times in this thread. There are more K-8 parochial schools, yes. "Most parochial schools charge about $12k" is true, unless you're talking about high school. Exactly 1 parochial school is less than $30k (SF Christian, at $16k). From there (limited to religious schools):
- Sacred Heart ($31k)
- Archbishop Riordan ($32k)
- Saint Ignatius ($34.6)
- Sacred Heart ($60k)
- Jewish Community School ($65k)
I might have missed some in here since I'm going by names, but given that SF Christian is the cheapest private high school on SF Chronicle's list[1] I don't think that matters for my point.
You started this thread with average cost per student across all SF public school students, which includes special needs, high school, etc, but move to median prices for debate, and structure most of your argument around the cheapest schools (K-8). Mea culpa on my end, though: you are correct that when I was saying "cheapest I've seen," there was an unfair modifier of "cheapest schools on my personal spreadsheet" which is limited to schools within a reasonable commute and that we'd be willing to send our kids to. You're absolutely correct that there are cheaper parochial schools available as long as you only need K-8.
Using averages for private schools, which feels more applicable to your starting premise, private schools in SF average $27k, $28k, and $52k, for elementary, middle, and high school (again, referencing SF Chronicle's data). I still feel comfortable with my original premise that averaging $28k per student across all of SFUSD students is not an absurd number.
So looking at the sticker prices (which I've listed above) may give an inflated view of total income.
Sure, that's fair! But we're not talking about income, we're talking about average cost per kid. We can't actually know the details under the hood, but again, those schools specifically in your list are usually subsidized by a larger religious organization, so the sticker price doesn't truly reflect that cost anyway.
You started this thread with average cost per student across all SF public school students, which includes special needs, high school, etc, but move to median prices for debate
The reason for this is simple and not nefarious:
- I don't have access to data that would allow me to apportion total SFUSD costs to individual school types
- When considering schools with vastly different prices (and different scales), the median is a much more informative measure than the mean (which could be skewed by an unusually expensive or inexpensive school with a tiny student population).
Another reason for using median is that I was responding to your comments which talked about general price levels ('tuition for those schools is roughly', 'usually start in the $40k range'). You were not talking about averages, but typical prices or minimum (starting) prices. The mean prices have no bearing on the truth or falsity of those claims.
Using averages for private schools, which feels more applicable to your starting premise, private high schools in SF average $27k, $28k, and $52k, for elementary, middle, and high school
If we look only at non-parochial schools, the means are even higher (e.g. $39k for 5th grade, $41k for 8th grade, $59k for 12th grade).
those schools specifically in your list are subsidized by a larger religious organization, so the sticker price doesn't truly reflect that cost anyway
Sorry, I should have been clearer. I meant when we look at the sticker price for non-parochial schools, we should assume their average revenue per student is less than the sticker price, and the average cost per student is less than or equal to the average revenue per student.
I still feel comfortable with my original premise that averaging $28k per student across all of SFUSD students is not an absurd number.
My original point in this subthread was that SFUSD is NOT underfunded. Do you believe it IS underfunded?
which is limited to schools within a reasonable commute and that we'd be willing to send our kids to
If we limit the discussion to only those schools we'd be willing to send our kids to, then that would rule out almost all SFUSD schools, which kind of defeats the point of the discussion!
BTW In case you want to see the SF Chronicle data in a form that's more personalized (showing the schools nearest to you first, filterable by grade levels and price and type), I made a tool to do that: https://tools.encona.com/schoolfinder
My original point in this subthread was that SFUSD is NOT underfunded. Do you believe it IS underfunded?
Your original point was not that it's "not underfunded," it was that it's overfunded (and substantially so, based on other comments). Your top(ish) comment on this thread to the $28k per student average:
I'm saying it's a lot.
My only argument here is that I don't think $28k is unreasonable, particularly when viewed against the cost of private alternatives.
then that would rule out almost all SFUSD schools, which kind of defeats the point of the discussion!
We go to our attendance area SFUSD school and love it. There are plenty of SFUSD and private schools that would not be on our list, be it for academic reasons or logistical.
I made a tool to do that
Cool, I dig it! Annoying, unsolicited feature request would be to allow addresses or zip codes rather than requiring geolocation :)
My only argument here is that I don't think $28k is unreasonable, particularly when viewed against the cost of private alternatives.
OK, so we agree SFUSD is not underfunded?
We go to our attendance area SFUSD school and love it.
That's great! At my attendance area school, two thirds of students are behind grade level in math, and there's no opportunity to be grouped with kids in other grades.
Annoying, unsolicited feature request would be to allow addresses or zip codes rather than requiring geolocation :)
If this is for privacy, don't worry, it's all front end code and your location isn't sent to the server. (You can check the network tab or just look at the code.)
Yes, it was extremely clear that your position is that it’s overfunded.
OK, so we agree SFUSD is not underfunded?
No, we don’t, I just wasn’t trying to make that point. There’s absolutely debates to be had about SFUSD, including how they spend their budget (personally I would make big cuts at the central office and redistribute to the schools), but the thought that $28k/kid is too much in SF just isn’t grounded in reality.
two thirds of students are behind grade level in math, and there's no opportunity to be grouped with kids in other grades.
This type of broad statement is true, but also obscures the realities of the student population SFUSD is mandated to serve. That high level number includes special education, non-English speakers, etc. Generally speaking, the data for kids with a similar socioeconomic background to the one I suspect your kids have are doing fine in SFUSD, particularly in K-8.
For example, a low key popular school with “bad scores,” Flynn[1]. ~30% of the student population met or exceeded the standard for math. That number jumps to 65.4% for kids with college-educated parents, and 81.3% for grad school. Race is an unfortunate proxy here, but it’s 70.8% for white students.
Not trying to convince you to send your kid to public school, of course, just calling out that there’s nuance required when comparing outcomes and what can work for families.
personally I would make big cuts at the central office and redistribute to the schools
Amen.
That number jumps to 65.4% for kids with college-educated parents, and 81.3% for grad school.
Do you think those kids are learning primarily due to their experience at school, or because their parents teach them? Anecdotally, whenever I've walked past Kumon centers during the weekend they seem busy, and when I was driving the other day I noticed Russian School of Math has added a new location.
Rahim, you should have a blog or other website where you write about your experience with schooling in the Bay Area. Considering that schools here have insisted that exothermic reactions produce oxygen and wood, I am not particularly inspired by them. There's no substitute for the actual experiences of parents here.
I have only one child so my direct experience is very limited. Much of what I know (or think I know!) is from looking at data, conversations with parents, conversations with SFUSD employees, and with educators.
San Francisco schooling district spends upwards of $1B a year to educate 55k students. About 85% of the budget goes to salary and benefits (excluding pensions). Of that, 75% goes to educators and the rest for other staff.
Cost of living is the primary driver for cost of education everywhere.
It affects the minimum viable salary for a teacher to even be able to live in the city where you want to hire them to work, same for all the other support staff that make a school function.
With a budget of $28k per student, and 21 students per classroom, that’s $588k per classroom.
Now, granted, some of that goes on building upkeep, cleaning, supplies, heating, pensions, managers etc - but if $588k per classroom doesn’t let you pay enough to attract teachers there’s something very suspicious going on.
I don’t buy that argument, there’s no reason a teacher in San Francisco can’t live in Oakland or Berkeley, or a teacher in NYC couldn’t live in NJ. You don’t have a human right to live in the most expensive real estate on Earth.
GP didn't say anything about it being a human right. You seem to be strawmanning their argument.
I think it's a reasonable expectation that even in HCOL places like SF or NYC, people in careers important to society should be able to live in the communities they serve.
Yeah, screw the teachers, they should just have a longer commute, who cares about them? /s
I always want to laugh when I hear people complain about finding near-minimum-wage workers in a HCOL area. They can't seem to grasp that commuting is not free, it may feel free to them at their income level but transportation costs money (gas, car maintenance, insurance or bus, etc) and time. I'm not saying teaching is a minimum wage job but it's not a high earning one either, paying them as low as we do _and_ also asking them to have a longer commute is just absurd.
Jackson Hole residents complaining about "poor service" in stores and restaurants in town, because shocker, servers can't afford to live in Jackson Hole. And unlike even SF or NY (which may not be perfect but have at least functional transport), there's no easy way to travel from the next town, an hour away or more.
Residents have started banding together to rent coaches to bus people in, which seems the most reasonable solution, after all, no poors in town, still, and it doesn't hurt the residents that service industry employees in their town have a three hour commute. /s
It got so bad in Atherton, CA, that the school had to build accommodation for teachers in the school itself. Next step, they can do janitorial work for extra money!
If an average class has 20 students it's $560k per year. If an average student gets 1000 hours of schooling per year you can pay 200$/hour and you have spent only just above 1/3 of your budget.
It feels like there is more to the story that "$28k doesn't go as far in San Francisco".
It’s because this is a very simplified view of a classroom. What is presented above is the best case scenario, not a realistic one. For example, there’s no consideration of costs associated with any sort of handicapped student, or student with special education needs.
Real world costs completely spiral out of control when you look at the actual system—for example, the buildings are all built during the rapid expansion of the country so are now old enough to need expensive maintenance, and there isn’t money or interest from the community to tear them down and build new ones.
Also something else that isn’t being covered is that involved parents are pulling their kids out for home schooling, and well behaved kids are increasingly being pulled out and put in charter sschools. This is leading to a rapid collapse of the school system. Public school is being left as a place for students who’s parents don’t care enough to do anything with them, or with enough behavioral or special needs that charter schools won’t handle them.
$28k per student is more than enough to run a school in San Francisco. Let's assume we cannot take advantage of the economies of scale available to SFUSD, and we're running a school with just one classroom: 22 7th graders. That would cost SFUSD $616k ($28k x 22). What would it cost us?
Teacher (all-in cost): $150k
Teaching assistant: $100k
Rent for commercial space in SF (~1,200 sq ft): $60k
Curriculum, books, supplies: $23k
Technology (22 Chromebooks, projector, software): $18k
Field trips and enrichment: $10k
Utilities, internet, insurance: $27k
Furniture and equipment: $20k
Admin/legal/accounting: $8k
Total: $416k
That leaves $200k unspent.
AND ... these numbers are deliberately conservative. Teachers work ~40 weeks per year, not 52, so the $150k all-in is really $3,750/week - very competitive for SF. The $18k technology budget assumes replacing every Chromebook annually, but they last 3-5 years, so amortized cost is more like $5k/year. The rent estimate of $5k/month assumes market-rate commercial space, but you could find cheaper options in underutilized buildings or negotiate with a church/community center. Furniture lasts decades, not one year. The $1k per student for curriculum and supplies is also high - you're not buying new textbooks every year, and open-source curricula exist.
If you were trying to minimize costs rather than be conservative, you could probably run this one room school house for $350k/year ($16k/student/year).
The big thing you’re missing is special education, and to a lesser extent English Language Learners. School districts are obligated to teach every student, some of whom cost the district dramatically more than they receive from the state.
Your admin costs are also low - you need to account for each teacher being coached and managed, running school operations and front desk, facilities management, finance, IT, etc.
Also this is an area where first principles analysis is likely to lead you astray - I’d recommend starting with SFUSD’s public budget to understand what their cost structure is.
You're recommending I look at SFUSD's public budget when:
- that budget is how I was able to calculate per-pupil spend
- in another comment you admitted to having 'no idea' where the $28k/year number came from, suggesting to me that you haven't looked at the budget yourself
The granularity in SFUSD's published budget is not sufficient to analyze what is useful and what is waste.
I did some research into this - the public budget is actually reasonably detailed. The biggest gap between your analysis and the actual expenditures are the SFUSD faces much higher facilities costs, higher admin cost due to Teacher coaching, and specialized programs for English language learners and special education
Any specialized teaching: art, languages, in high school I understand they have a different teacher for each subject, a librarian, a substitute teacher on sick days, an individual aide for one of the kids to represent the special education budget…
But I remember you previously and you appear to want a school system that spends money on exactly what your child needs and nothing else.
you appear to want a school system that spends money on exactly what your child needs and nothing else.
Providing for my child's educational needs is my job as a parent, not the job of the government 'school system'.
But if the government is going to operate schools and demand that we all pay for those schools, I'd prefer it if those schools were run for the benefit of students (and specifically to maximize academic achievement) and not for the benefit of government employees.
We simplify space binding by focusing on two core components, a single encoder per modality and high-quality data; enabling training state-of-the-art models on a single GPU in a few hours as opposed to multiple days. We present EBind, an Easy, data-centric, and parameter-efficient method to Bind the embedding spaces of multiple contrastive models. We demonstrate that a simple 1.8B-parameter image-text-video-audio-3D model can outperform models 4 to 17× the size. The key to achieving this is a carefully curated dataset of three complementary data sources: i) 6.7M fully-automated multimodal quintuples sourced via SOTA retrieval models, ii) 1M diverse, semi-automated triples annotated by humans as negative, partial, or positive matches, and iii) 3.4M pre-existing captioned data items. We use 13 different evaluations to demonstrate the value of each data source. Due to limitations with existing benchmarks, we further introduce the first high-quality, consensus-annotated zero-shot classification benchmark between audio and PCs. In contrast to related work, we will open-source our code, model weights, and datasets.
