Money In Education

Coming soon to the Norwalk BOE, is the aftermath of the 09/10 budget. With a two percent increase, cuts to something is inevitable. Corda apparently has said everything is on the table this year. A stance unlike previous years where moats and walls were verbally strung around the administrative staff, third floor, city hall. A position, btw, which runs counter to even the prevailing wind from UC Berkeley, where a professor argues, “how much we spend is less important than how we spend it.”

For years, decades even, the mantra out of our local political flunkies, has been the the idea that we must spend more on education. Never mind that prior to the 80′s, generations of kids managed just fine without all the comforts of modern educational thinking. It was not uncommon for those golden year generations to use the same textbooks on any subject that the previous 20 years of students used. These days it seems curriculum specialists justify their existence with calls for new textbooks and “teaching methods” every year. So more from Norman Grubb:

For decades, Grubb says, school spending has inexorably risen, while student achievement has stayed relatively stagnant. Maybe it’s time to look at which expenditures actually improve education, he argues, and which are a waste.

In fact, one could argue that student achievement has actually fallen.

And part of the point is an attempt to move the debates away from money to resources, because a lot of the debates in school finance have just been about money.

Yep, we see that here don’t we.

The resources that everybody talks about most of the time are what I call simple resources. So, most people argue most of the time about class size, teacher salaries, the average experience and credential levels of teachers, about the amounts of spending on books and computers and science labs and so forth. And that is certainly one category of resources and, under some conditions, they matter — I’m not saying they don’t matter. But many of the resources in schools turn out to be compound resources. We spent a lot of money in California on class-size reduction, and the evaluation that was undertaken showed no increases in test scores on average, because what happened is that the districts had to lower the quality of teachers to get more of them, particularly in urban schools. Teachers were leading their classes in broom closets and auditoriums and stuff like that — inappropriate spaces. And I think, most of all, nobody had given the teachers any training in how to teach in smaller classes. If you’re just going to lecture, it doesn’t matter if you’ve got 25 or 15 students in a class — you’re not going to do anything different. You need to learn how to change teaching approaches. So the effective resource is class-size reduction and professional development to teach the teachers how to teach differently and adequate physical facilities and keeping the quality of teachers up. Which is what I call a compound resource.

There’s a point here that is often overlooked. Some subjects do need nothing more than lecture style. Yet there’s no distinction by subject matter, because teachers unions have demanded that classroom size be written into contracts. This is just wrong. The hours and number of students taught over the course of a week is something that labor unions should be looking at, because it is a reasonable assumption that for every hour of instruction time number of student results in x hours of out of classroom work. So keeping teachers from being scheduled into 100 hour work weeks has merit. The way it has been accomplished is what is wrong.

Which leads into Grubb’s thoughts on unions:

Well, I have to say that there are several different kinds of teacher unions. And the dominant one, unfortunately, is one that’s usually called an industrial union. And it follows the pattern of unions that have developed in industry where the main concerns are wages, working conditions and employment rights. And unions that follow that pattern are the ones, for example, who will defend teachers at almost any cost — will be very reluctant to concede that there are teachers who are not doing their jobs. And these are the kinds of unions that I think people usually think of when they talk about unions impeding reform. There have been some movements in this country toward professional unions, which are more concerned with the professional status of teaching, with making sure that teachers are the ones making instructional decisions, with making sure that teachers have the competencies necessary to make decisions about instruction, and which are willing to work much more collaboratively with administrators in a model that’s usually called distributed leadership. Unions don’t have to be barriers, but I think they sometimes are, given that we have lots of old-style industrial unions. I think reforming unions needs to go on in parallel with everything else.

source: LA Times, Q&A–UC Berkeley professor takes on school spending, by Mitchell Landsberg, April 6, 2009

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  • Anne Sullivan

    A couple of thoughts:
    (1) Budget – let’s begin by cutting as far away from students as possible – do we SERIOUSLY need that many central office staff? Can’t we combine secretaries, admin, etc?

    (2) I will take a larger class size if it’s filled with students who parents get up in the morning and feed them breakfast, check their homework at night, and actively expect and advocate that their child will go to college. I will take a smaller class size of children whose parents are overwhelmed by the amount of energy needed to survive life and do not have the time, energy, or resources to spend on their children – and need me to supply basic parenting to their child as well fulfill their child’s academic needs. These are the children I wash, dress, and supply with clothing, food, books and toys on a regular basis. The second group is so starved for adult attention they need more direct teacher involvement or they become discipline problems (attention is attention after all). For me (a teacher of many years) class size isn’t about academic gains – it’s about having the time to teach basic appropriate social skills – which in my generation were taught at home.

    • turfgrrl

      Anne Sullivan: I suspect that you teach elementary school which I think has different requirements than secondary schools. But if things are as you describe where’s the social services administrative people, identifying this and working with all the social service agencies on addressing what appears to be a systemic problem?

  • Anne Sullivan

    My understanding is that they are doing as much as they can, but with social service people divided between two schools, they are streched way to thin….and yes, I am at an elementary school. Class size is still an issue with lower grades, no?

  • CTYankee

    Anne,

    I think it’s criminal that you are burdened with providing basic social support to your students.

    As cruel as it seems, you should be able to exclude those kids from your classroom that are sent to school unprepared for the day by their parent [sic]. This is really a failing of society, and it gets dumped on the schools as a problem with no solution.

    Interesting analogy with the industrial unions — workers are required to discard substandard raw materials –

    See the problem is that the parents see school as simply another entitlement with no cost. It’s innate that things with no cost are perceived as having little value. The only way to remedy the situation is to make school a commodity that must be earned — by the parents for the child.

    I await the barrage of criticism that says I’m heartless and unfeeling… But I know a lot of posters think I’m right.

  • anonymous

    The American government has created this situation with their gravitation toward social entitlements. Visit schools in Japan or China. Behavior and preparation for class is the complete opposite of what you are here simply because anything else is not tolerated. Being a screw up gets you thrown out. Here we are making in impossible to remove dangerous students from the building. Our wanting to provide for every want and need of our welfare recipients has created this environment. While we need to provide for those less fortunate, we must place some restrictions on their behavior.

  • Anne Sullivan

    History has shown us that part of America’s greatness is the availability of public education. I think about all the immigrants who came, got a great education and became valuable citizens. That said, as I’ve posted, there is a group of people who fully expect me to be the primary parent to their child. Alas, this is a typical experience for educators. In stressful situations, we sometimes end up making poor decisions (like the teacher who fished out the banana from the garbage in her Bridgeport classroom, peeled it, and had her student eat it), or we’re distracted from our main objective – educating children. I too have been to Beijing, England and other countries that don’t automatically provide education for everyone – you have to want it, earn it, and study hard for it. I vividly remember speaking to Chinese teachers about the difference between our countries. They were baffled by our philosophy of wanting to educate everyone to at least a minimum standard when clearly we were “dragging” children through our education system. If all these other countries who have been educators for centuries longer have a two or more tier system, then given the current state of financial distress we might want to take a look at another way. And a reminder – charter and other alternative programs are successful, but they have very serious behavior and expectation contracts for both children and parents. And when you can’t make it at the alternative school, you return to your home school. Thank you for reading my blog entry, and please know that I love my job and can’t wait to get back to it next week.