NY Merger Study in the News

In April, the Syracuse Post-Standard had an article with an HCS picture at the top, reporting that Report says change in New York law might encourage school mergers:

Syracuse, NY - The movement to merge New York's 700 school districts has virtually stopped since 1996 hamstrung by a process of multiple votes and tax disparities,...
A report by the New York State Association of School Business Officials shows that since 2010, some 30 school districts have studied merging but failed to complete the process for a variety of reasons. ...
The report says the obstacles to school mergers are: fear of change, fear of the loss of local identity, the perception that the merging communities are incompatible, higher costs and property taxes, more time needed to transport students and job security for school employees....
Most recently in Central New York voters in the Hamilton Central School District overwhelmingly rejected a proposal to merge with the Morrisville-Eaton Central School District in a December advisory vote.

The NPR summary of the NYSASBO report was slightly simpler: Study finds New Yorkers don't want school mergers, but of course citing the same "obstacles". The report itself is at 1398091412_NYSASBO School Merger Study April 2014 (1).pdf.

Nowhere, so far as I can see, is it mentioned that the proposed merger plan for the merger which Hamilton voted down was not actually going to save money; the economy of scale offered by getting all the kids into one place (reduced staff) was almost precisely balanced by the diseconomy of scale imposed by getting all the kids into one place (increased transportation). That could change, of course; plans which actually close buildings are more likely to save money anyway, and I've mentioned before that it would be possible, with a little more reduction in the school populations, to close and sell the elementary school building that's inside Morrisville, take those students to the MECS building north of town, and bring the 12th, 11th, ... ? grade MECS students to HCS -- which would let some of them sign up for Colgate classes, too. I'm pretty sure that would save money. (It might be possible even now, but the SES merger-study group didn't think so.)

I'm not sure how live an issue this really is; I suspect that most New York parents are thinking instead about the Common Core Standards. But I'm sure it will come back; the state can balance a budget with high enough taxes, but those taxes have been fueling a vote-with-their-feet anti-tax movement: to Florida, to Texas, or just to neighboring states with lower taxes. So the state will need to save money -- state promises of long-run aid should not be relied upon. It would be wonderful to think that they'll only push for mergers that actually save money, but I have no confidence that this will be the case.

Board of Education Meeting, Tuesday 2014-03-18

It's really nice to have the BoE meetings put up on YouTube; unfortunately there was no microphone in front of Diana Bowers (Superintendent until July) so that answers to some questions are not audible to me, except in bits and pieces. Also, some BoE members leaned back too far from the microphones, sometimes. Anyway, I'll set it here with notes below so that you can find segments for particular speakers or subjects. Umm, I skipped the FFA presentation somewhere early, I see...sorry, it's not what I was focused on. (But the state FFA convention will be here, with local schools including HCS as hosts; it seems to rotate among all the participating schools.)

Bottom Line, as I understand it: We can't save money by refinancing any of our debt; we can save some by not keeping our "resource officer" (policeman), we will probably save some with an "interim Superintendent" being paid less than Diana has been paid and we may save quite a bit if that interim Superintendent is part-time or shared with another district. We may save a trivial amount of money on the GEA if the House amendment to the NY budget goes through, or a small but non-trivial amount if the Senate goes through; the Senate version does end the GEA in 2016--2017, and they have different rules about going past the tax cap (which is 2.21% this year.) We have a long-term problem of sustainability in that our instructional budget has been rising more slowly than inflation for years, while the Special Education program has risen rapidly; it's not clear that anything can be done about that, but in a world of limited resources it is unfortunately fair to say that we (and other NY districts) have increasingly been doing special education instead of general education; resources have been redirected, and the tax cap says they can't be increased at the same pace. Perhaps it has to be that way. Meanwhile, we can certainly save money by cutting art, which doesn't seem to be covered in the testing which evaluates how well HCS is doing, so obviously it's not important. (end sarcasm)

6:50--13:55 Barbara Houze, retiring art teacher; she's unhappy at being replaced by a total of 0.7 part-time people who, by "magic math", will be able to cover the actual classes, but the art program will have no planner, advisor, or advocate; only the actual classes will be covered.
14:00-16:00 John Knecht spoke up as artist and educator, to say that art should be treated like chemistry or history or math or any other academic subject. (I doubt this; I think of art as a category of subjects, not as a subject; it's of very little importance if we're just training workers with specific skills, but immense importance if we want the creative class, the "black-collar" entrepreneurs/innovators/designers/scientists of the 21st century. Or if we want artists, I suppose.)
16:20--18:15 Denise Leone as a "visiting artist at HCS" said that we evaluate cultures based on their art, and she wanted to understand why art is among the first items to be cut ... to understand the process. Molly Johnson replied that it's not, (a) it's not decided if the art will be cut and anyway (b) we've been cutting a lot for a long time and (c) the process is open, working through open meetings and openly available documents like those at boarddocs for this meeting.
20:00--21 Audrey Miller spoke as a parent of a child who hates school except art/music; this is not about saving the art program, it's about saving the children.
21--22 An HCS art student whose name I can't hear (upd: Sydney Craven) said that a lot of kids need an arts background for what they hope to do with their lives, especially of course if that involves application to an art school. It was well-spoken.
22--24 Lynn Schwarzer talked about the amazing changes wrought by the art teacher who ought to be given a full-time position, after decades of relative inadequacy at HCS. She also talked about STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) education broadening into STEAM education (I just can't think what that "A" could stand for, but I'd be happy to buy an Evil Mad Scientist STEAM T-shirt for each BoE member; I did long ago link to STEAM Learning Network site: Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Mathematics, to STEAM: A Framework for Teaching Across the Disciplines, and just as an example to Maker Faire and Science Education: American kids should be building rockets and robots, not taking standardized tests. - Slate Magazine.)

Art/music/theatre good, tests bad. (All right, all right -- tests are good for some things, just not for all we now use them for. Art/music/theatre good.)
24-- Carolyn Hsu wanted to know about the specific rules and limits for donations...I could hear Diana's response when I was sitting there, but I can't hear enough of it on the video.
28:15--Stephanie McClintick, as a local artist, wanted further clarification....
31:10--Molly (BoE) Somewhat into the next phase, thanks for and acceptance of the Sports Boosters donation.
31:30--40:00 Embarking on search for the next Superintendent; nothing solid yet, but looks like it has to be an interim.
40:--46 Molly, Diana, Bud -- policy on testing and opt-outs chosen by students or parents.
46--Aaron on opt-out consequences; if fewer than 95% of students participate for two consecutive years, there might be financial consequences but it's not clear in the regulations; there will be a reclassification of the school as not being "in good standing" which might hurt college applications, but (Diana) there may be a lot of downstate schools in this situation and college admissions people will understand.
47 Kevin Ellis continues same topic, but I can't hear him.
52--1:00:30 Matt Crumb on 2.21% tax cap calculation, on failure to save money by refinancing debt, and on House and Senate bills to amend the Governor's proposed budget. Get Your Protests In Before April 1st!
1:00:30 Bill Dowsland on Senior class trip to Hershey Park.
1:01 Susan Marafino pointing out that the "resource officer" is costing us $20K/year, which may be money well spent but it might be money better spent e.g. on keeping the art program going, and that a part-time rather than full-time Superintendent might save even more. (Molly replies that there is some savings implicit in having an interim Superintendent anyway, who will get a lower salary than Diana has received.)
1:05:40 Ellen Larson on testing and teacher evaluation, which ought to be separate.
1:07:50 Ryan Solomon contrasts South African actual violence with American over-protectiveness and would rather spend the resource officer's cost on art; applause suggests that this is a popular view.
1:08:50 Ferdinand von Muench talks about the art and strings programs which seem to be at risk; we just need to follow the library's example with a 3.6% tax increase. He wants to encourage people to go to the next public Finance Planning meeting, but it hasn't been rescheduled yet. He makes two major points: our Administration costs are high, with 6 people to do the admin that other similar-size schools do with 4. (Note that the most expensive of these is of course the superintendent; as he knows but does not say, "School superintendents get paid more than governors in a dozen states: New Jersey, New York,...". So a part-time or shared superintendent might be a really good buy for a financially stretched district. And Special Education of which he is very much in favor, but there is a question of sustainability. (See "bottom line" above, or better yet listen to what he's saying. The recent growth in special education is substantially larger than our deficit; the GEA is larger than our deficit; life is difficult.)


Well, I guess I ran out of steam (not STEAM) as I approached the end, but I'll post this and hope it's somewhat useful to somebody. Error-correction would be appreciated.

Update: Radio Free Hamilton reports here. Sadly, the first comment is "Are these all the same people that voted against the merger. Do they truly not get it and see what they caused". This appears to reflect a failure to realize that some of us turned against the merger when we realized that according to the merger study, it wasn't actually a money-saver -- the economy of scale (reduced staff) and diseconomy of scale (more transport) were quite close to balance. It's certainly probable that most or all of those speaking voted accordingly--I dunno. Obviously, most of Hamilton did. (It was a money-shifter, and that gets complicated. Never mind.) So it goes.

Gap Elimination Adjustment

In yesterday's post I noted parts of Wanda Berry's note on NextDoor; I should also have mentioned a very important point she brings up in that note:

Whether or not the merger goes through, it is time for us to believe in democracy enough to mobilize a citizens’ effort to get the state legislature to get rid of the Gap Elimination Adjustment, which is the real threat, along with our declining school age population.

Indeed, while the proposed merger is all about promised state aid; one irony is that it is also all about previous promises of state aid being broken. More concretely:

• as often discussed, we wouldn't be discussing a merger that doesn't actually save money, if there weren't state incentives offering an average 5.3%-of-budget aid for fourteen years, plus permanent (?) reclassification of Hamilton as part of a "high needs district". But also,
• we wouldn't be discussing a merger at all if it weren't for a fiscal squeeze resulting from the "Gap Elimination Adjustment", a formula by which the state has refrained from paying millions that had been promised.

So what, and why, is this terrible "Gap Elimination Adjustment"? Basically, it's a formula by which the state says "we have a fiscal gap this year, with more outgo than income, and sure, we promised you a certain amount of aid, but here's your school district's share of the pain." And we respond with "OUCH". Here's a Vimeo video explanation:
Gap Elimination Adjustment: An Explanation from Cap Region BOCES on Vimeo.

Wanda and many others are hoping that if we all get together and say "No!" then the state legislators will say "Okay" and the schools won't be short of money any more. I sympathize very strongly, but I think we need to consider the context. What are we actually asking the state legislators to do? They want to please their voters; they already want to restore school funding. If they restore school funding, they must either reduce funding for something else, or else they can raise taxes. (Of course they can probably borrow money now, but that means that at some future time they'll be either reducing funding for something else, or raising taxes. Borrowing money now to fix it later is part of how we got in this mess.) This, of course, brings us to the Report of the State Budget Crisis Task Force (PDF,page 7)

The conclusion of the Task Force is unambiguous. The existing trajectory of state spending, taxation, and administrative practices cannot be sustained. The basic problem is not cyclical. It is structural. The time to act is now.

From their point of view, the elimination of the Gap Elimination Adjustment would be a big step -- in the wrong direction. If they remove the GEA, then the painful decisions to be made get worse -- do we cut our already-underfunded pension plans, do we cut our massive health care payments, do we just let the infrastructure rust? Or -- the most obvious answer -- do we raise taxes? Hmmm... raising taxes sounds very good, doesn't it? Or does it?

Exactly how high are our taxes, comparatively speaking? That's complicated, because it involves income taxes and sales taxes and property taxes; for Alaska it also involves some weird taxes which don't actually get collected from the individual, they're based on oil movement, but apart from that we can sort of say that NY has the highest tax burden outside Washington DC in the state tax-burden chart. That's a statement that needs lots of qualifiers about what you're including and excluding; some are noted at the bottom of the chart. Some charts will put NY as low as #5 in state tax burden, but we can definitely say that a lot of New York residents and New York businesses notice, now and then, that they could be paying a lot less by moving to another state. And what happens then? Sometimes nothing. Some of us pay, and stay to pay again. For others... Income Migration: What Does It Really Mean For States? - Forbes

New Yorkers are subject to some of the highest state tax rates in the country, so it is not surprising that commentators have suggested residents will leave the state in droves. And it appears to be true. As reported by the Tax Foundation, between 2000 and 2010, New York lost $45.6 billion in income to other states. That’s far more than any other state. The next closest is California, which lost $29.4 billion over the same period.
This is a significant amount of income migration. But where did it all go? The answer, not surprisingly, is that much of the income went down south. Florida reportedly had a net gain of $67.3 billion. ...

Or as the NYT put it two years back, At 102%, His Tax Rate Takes the Cake - Common Sense - NYTimes.com

Mr. Ross said he asked his accountant what he could do. “He said, ‘Fire everyone here and move to Florida,’ ” according to Mr. Ross. He employs 10 people in his New York office.

Of course some of the migration goes to neighboring states, which do have lower state taxes; Florida has no income tax at all. But as our taxes rise, it becomes increasingly attractive for high-income Manhattan residents to start thinking: how much of this could I do on the Web, or by teleconference? As the New York Times put it a year ago Midlevel Finance Jobs Leave Wall Street as Firms Cut Costs

New York’s biggest investment houses are shifting jobs out of the area and expanding in cheaper locales in the United States, threatening the vast middle tier of positions that form the backbone of employment on Wall Street.
The shift comes even as banks consider deeper staff cuts here, which could undermine the state and city tax base long term.
“Places like New York or London will remain financial centers, but most of the players are taking a much harder look and asking whether they can move large numbers of jobs...”

When you ask the legislator to raise taxes again, you're not just being generous with your own money. You're asking that legislator to bet the state's fiscal stability on your hope that these people, people whose lives revolve around the way they care about money, will decide that they don't really care about money all that much: they'll stay, and pay again.

They might, or they might not. State aid cuts may go away, but they might expand. They might expand a lot. Ask for state aid, hope for state aid, but don't count on it.

(My inclination is to agitate for mandate relief more than increases in aid. NYS education costs twice as much per pupil per year as the national average. We should work on that.)

Rathskeller PTO Meeting

Well, the PTO meeting in the Colgate Inn Rathskeller took place this evening; several people presented parts of the ABCs of HCS, and then "student presenters" Maddie Lamel-Brown and Zach Coddington presented their Student Merger Survey Results. Note that a clickable (slightly longer) version of the ABCs is available here. The room seemed pretty full; I don't know if any minds were changed.

Points from the April 17th "Informational Meeting"

Ten of us from the CAC, having attended many meetings and reviewed much data, met last night with the BoE scattered among forty-odd community members, Superintendent Diana Bowers presiding...and near the end, someone in the audience commented that there seemed to be two of us in favor of the merger proposal, two undecided, and six against. I think that's about right, at the moment; and at the moment, I'm among the reasonably-solidly-against. There was a camera going; the video ought to appear on the Hamilton CSD site somewhere sometime soon. My very-fragmentary thoughts:

What Next? The perennial question, Where Do We Go From Here? was answered by Dr. Bowers, as indeed I laid it out in my CAC Done; Do You Feel Lucky? post: next comes (1) a BoE vote, and they can choose to stop everything, or to proceed. If they choose to proceed, then there's (2) a community straw vote, which can stop everything, or proceed. If we choose to proceed, then things go to the DoE and (3) back to the BoE, which can stop everything, or proceed to (4) a final community vote for district merger. Meanwhile Morrisville has the same sequence. If all the votes are favorable, then there's a merger, and then we (the combined district) elect a new combined BoE, and they decide what happens next -- who to hire, what to do with the existing buildings, whether to build a giant swimming pool instead (as Dave Hollis put it), and and at that point we ...well, it goes on. And on. And on, until Somebody gets tired of our performance and rings down the final curtain. (I don't think Diana actually got that far.)

Please Read: As Susan Marafino said, anybody who is going to vote on this should dive into the data, probably starting at the end with the 15-year Financial outline if we merge, based on the Possible Program/Staffing (where we save by economies of scale) and the Transportation Plan (where we pay to get kids together to achieve those economies of scale, and incidentally give them an hour per day extra transportation time for all HCS middle schoolers and M-ECS high schoolers.) Also please read my own collection of District Comparisons on this blog and at the accompanying site, based on the earlier documents and on reports I saw in the past year or so. (Some of these were out of date; as Susan commented at the meeting, M-ECS has in the past few years drastically cut its programs, and some of the district comparison material I linked is out of date in that respect.)

Summary: As Diana indicated at one point, the communities fit together in that our true-value tax rates are very very close (I believe neighboring communities have higher rates). As I said, I think that this equality actually indicates an additional difference: Morrisville made a choice between cutting programs and raising taxes which I do not believe we would have made. There are all kinds of reasons behind this; I'm not saying that they made the wrong choice, for them. I am saying that if a merged district were somehow to run short on money in future, I expect that most Hamilton homeowners would be voting differently than most Morrisville homeowners, and somebody would lose and be very unhappy about having merged. Of course if the merged district were never to run short of money, that's not a problem. If fuel costs stop rising (why would they stop rising? Well, they might, I suppose)...if the state doesn't run out of money (won't it run out of money? Well, maybe not...but I haven't read any economists or investors who think the current situation is sustainable. Some promises will be broken.) My feeling is that this merger is a very big gamble, which is why I wrote the CAC Done; Do You Feel Lucky? post which goes over both of those issues, with links.

And If We Don't Do This Merger Now? Well, we may do a different merger later (such as the merger I proposed in that post), or no merger at all. A couple of people were commenting on the value of merger in terms of having enough students for advanced classes, (again, I wrote about that in the aforementioned post.) One item I wanted to repeat in the meeting, but didn't get to: the economic issues of advanced K-12 (or introductory college) courses are changing rapidly. A recently completed study is reported as Online Education Trumps the Cost Disease

In a large, randomized experiment Bowen et al. found that students enrolled in an online/hybrid statistics course learned just as much as those taking a traditional class.... Perhaps even more importantly, Bowen et al. found that the online model was significantly less costly than the traditional model, some 36% to 57% less costly to produce than a course using a traditional lecture format. In other words, since outcomes were the same, online education increased productivity by 56% to 133%! ... ... Online education even in its earliest stages appears to be generating large improvements in educational productivity.

Actually outcomes were not the same; students learned the same material faster in this "hybrid" (online + one class/week) model than in the classroom-only model.

Then again, there's the Khan Academy which I've discussed many times, as a not-yet-complete K-12 curriculum (with some college courses) of thousands of explanatory videos with software to go with them; they're not intended to make teachers obsolete, but they are intended to make "class size" obsolete as a concept. I've also discussed Khan's One World Schoolhouse book a few times, in which he explains how that can work. Will it work? Which model will win? I don't think anybody knows, but the background to the economics of education is changing faster than ever before, and the most clearly currently-effective change is happening at just the right level to make merger unnecessary. Predicting is hard, especially the future -- but there's no need for panic. There's a very good chance that we will end up replacing the traditional model of school with something that's somewhat cheaper and a whole lot better. (Or with something that's a whole lot cheaper and somewhat worse -- I admit that's possible too.)

Tell me what I'm missing...

Update: Radio Free Hamilton (i.e. Dave Hollis) reports: 'What If' Scenarios Paint Post-Merger Picture

Members of the committee of HCS district residents studying the possible merger with Morrisville-Eaton Central School discussed the study in a forum Tuesday night in the school cafeteria attended by about 70 people.

70? Well, I guess there were more people after I counted. And yes, the picture is me. (And Susan remarks that there was one CAC member who stayed in the audience; 11, not 10.)

Future Finance: NY

Back in December, I noticed but did not blog when the NY Times said
Experts Warn of Budget Ills in New York State, Lasting Years

New York State faces long-term budget problems that are compounded by the teetering finances of its local governments, an aging infrastructure and the possibility of severe cuts in federal funding......New York’s problems had been “papered over with gimmicks” for decades...
... outsize spending on health care and education, its vulnerability to the ups and downs of Wall Street, and the struggles of its local governments to pay retirement obligations. ... “Albany has increased dependence on a small number of very wealthy taxpayers to keep the state going,” ... New York... is particularly vulnerable to possible cuts in federal aid resulting from efforts to reduce the federal budget deficit....The report said New York’s local governments were “facing a rapidly deteriorating fiscal future.” ...Syracuse... annual pension costs had increased 50 percent since ... 2010, to $30 million from $20 million. “If you say to the municipality, ‘You’re just going to have to figure out how to pay for it,’ what you are saying is that now bad people aren’t going to be arrested, fires aren’t going to be put out,” she said. “Snow will not be plowed from the roads. Trash will not be collected.

The 69-page PDF Report of the State Budget Crisis Task Force reports on many sources of instability and unsustainability, including

A new top rate of 8.82 percent applies to individuals with taxable income above $1 million and married couples above $2 million and does so in a more concentrated way than has occurred previously. Further, this “millionaires” bracket brings increased dependence on a relatively small number of taxpayers (estimated to be 31,000), roughly half of whom live outside the state.

In other words, the money available to the state may suddenly decrease, whether from renewed recession or from financial companies moving their operations to lower-tax regions; their incentives for doing so have risen.

State general aid to local governments is moderate ($873 million in 2010), and is procyclical, increasing when state revenues are strong and remaining flat or decreasing during downturns. Aid to K-12 education is by far the biggest portion of state aid ($23 billion) and is the largest item in the state budget.

And the result for K-12 education?

95 percent of school district leaders said they were drawing on reserves to pay for recurring operating expenses, with two-thirds indicating they were “very concerned” at the extent to which they were doing so. Compensation costs represent 70 percent of school district budgets, but contractual cost relief is difficult. Few districts are negotiating contracts with zero across-the-board increases. Built-in annual step increases remain in place; increases in pension and health care costs are in the double digit range. Further, the savings from the generational turnover of teachers seems to have peaked. All other things remaining constant, status quo contractual terms and ordinary retirements will drive larger average annual salary increases than in the recent past. Add to that any increase in costs other than compensation.

Unsustainable trends will not be sustained indefinitely. They will end.
Or maybe not? No. They will end.

MOOCing money

In more contemporary news of online education, the NYT today reports Massive Open Online Courses Prove Popular, if Not Lucrative Yet

One tiny revenue stream has begun flowing into the nondescript Silicon Valley office building where Coursera’s 35 employees work to keep up with the demand for their courses: the company is an Amazon affiliate, getting a sliver of the money each time Coursera students click through the site to buy recommended textbooks or any other products on Amazon.
“It’s just a couple thousand, but it’s our first revenue,” Ms. Koller said. “When faculty recommend a textbook and people buy it on Amazon, we get some money. The funny thing is that we’re getting more than twice as much money from things like Texas Rangers jackets as from what the textbooks are bringing in.”
Other possibilities around the edges include charging a subscription fee, after a class is over, to continue the discussion forum as a Web community, or perhaps offering follow-up courses, again for a fee. And advertising sponsorships remain a possibility.

And possibilities like making the course content freely available but charging for tutor services...
Or then again, maybe not.

Chicago

Wins, losses and draws in Chicago school strike - CNN.com

"Across the board, on every issue, the teachers got a more favorable outcome than the school system," [Professor Bruno] said Wednesday.
The deal, which still must be ratified by the union's overall membership, calls for an average raise of 17.6% over four years... it also strips out a merit pay program that would have been tied to increased emphasis on student test scores... Teachers also managed to hold the line on health insurance increases, and protect seniority pay increases and raises for additional education that the school system wanted to limit or eliminate. Union officials also trumpeted victories in ... The union didn't get all it wanted. In addition to the salary compromise, the school day and year will be extended
"The mayor doesn't walk away empty-handed from this,"

Well, maybe not quite.

From the viewpoint of progressive Matthew Yglesias we get Chicago public schools' pension crunch.

I get annoyed when conservatives talking about the federal government running out of money, but listening to some progressive crowing about the outcome of the Chicago teachers strike it's also frustrating when people don't acknowledge that the city of Chicago most certainly can run out of money. Things like extra money for music and art teachers could be great ideas or could be bad ones depending on where it comes from. But it's not as if Chicago Public Schools is sitting on some giant pile of money that administrations have just been refusing to use. On the contrary, it's actually sitting on a large unfunded pension obligation:...

Everybody's going broke.
Or then again, maybe not?

update: The libertarian summary is found on Saturday Links | The Agitator

Step one: Capitulate to the teachers’ union in the largest city in your state. Step two: Ask the rest of America to guarantee your state’s $200 billion pension gap.

Yeah, everybody's going broke.

"If You Eat, You're In"

The "Edible Landscape" project is one item that might help local schools, businesses, farms, etc; here's a 13 minute TED talk by Pamela Warhurst.

Warhurst sees this as community activism, community art, sustainability, and I guess being a locavore; most of that leaves me feeling "well, okay," but I'm in favor of things that make school "real" in the sense that the grading ultimately comes from something outside, where agriculture certainly qualifies. (So does robotics. Art sometimes yes, sometimes no. Math definitely yes for people like me, but definitely no for many others and I may have been born this way--certainly I saw it that way before heading off to Epsom Chapel Nursery School. (Simple math, anyway -- I never really got a proper grip on category theory.))