From: elg@elgamy.sccsi.com (Eric Lee Green)
Date: 25 Jul 92 20:39:48 CDT
Newsgroups: misc.kids,misc.education
Subject: Educational funding (was Hillary Clinton)
Distribution: world
Organization: Eric's Amiga 2000 @ Home

From article <BrwE6K.35D@news.cso.uiuc.edu>, by slkg9733@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu (Steven L. Kellmeyer):
>>The brighest day in America will be when education has enough funding and
>>the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a new bomber....My history
>>teacher (from the Wireless catalog) bets@matt.ksu.ksu.edu, bets@ksuvm.ksu.edu
>
> By the by, check child achievement scores on a state by state basis.
> Education funding levels have no correspondance to child achievement.

They do if you check achievement scores on a region-by-region basis. For
example, Kansas spends the most money in the five-state area surrounding
it, and has the highest achievement. Similarly, Minnesota, which is known
for innovations such as parental choice and teacher-founded academies of
choice independent from school district control, also spends over $4k per
pupil and has test scores to match.

It is misleading to compare the $4500/student spent in Kansas to the
$8K/student spent in New Jersey. Everybody knows that most of the money
spent in New Jersey goes straight into the coffers of corrupt government
officials etc., anyhow :-(. It is better to compare the $4500/student spent
in Kansas to, say, the $2800/student spent in Louisiana or the
$2500/student spent in Mississippi (both of which have similar living
expenses to Kansas). There is no comparison. The latter two states spend
the least money per-pupil in the U.S. -- and rank 49th and 50th in student
performance.

> They *DO* however, have a real correspondance to bureaucratic salaries.
> Unfortunately, those salaries ALSO have no correspondance to child
> achievement.  In short, education has enough money (a teacher with 10
> years in and an M.A. can earn 40K for nine months work in most cities;
> starting salaries for B.A., no experience is 18-20K, or about the same
> as a newbie state's prosecutor).

I would agree that teacher salaries were high enough, if we could only get
enough science and math and special education teachers. Unfortunately,
we're drowning in history and English teachers, yet we pay all of them the
same wage no matter what subject they teach. It's insane. Logic says that
getting a good math type to teach math instead of go into computer science
means paying this guy (typically) the amount of money he'd make in computer
science (30K to start, 50-60K/year with ten years experience). Logic says
that getting a good English type to teach English would only require the
same salary as a fast food restaurant manager would get (which is the only
other thing you can do with an English degree :-). My starting salary is
$21K/year. This is the same starting salary as everybody entering the
teaching profession.

Meanwhile, I'll disagree with you totally if you say that we are spending
enough money in the classroom. I get $50 to spend on materials and
supplies. Fifty measly little dollars per year. I've already spent that
much out-of-pocket before school even starts (the typical teacher spends
over $300 out-of-pocket on basic materials of instruction for his or her
children). Meanwhile, the only reading kit I can get from the warehouse is
something called the "Swaine Programmed Reading Kit", which I have seen
and which I do not like because it is poorly designed but some supervisor
from Hell loves the damned thing and won't let the warehouse stock
anything else. Some of my kids could really benefit from DISTAR or
Alphabetic Phonics or any number of other possible structured methods of
teaching reading (many of my kids have reading problems because they need a
structured way of learning how to read, rather than the inane basal primers
that they were given). I can't get them. What I can get is a single basal
primer for each child from the warehouse and -- get this -- THE CHILDREN
ARE NOT ALLOWED TO TAKE THE BOOKS HOME!!!! We can't afford to replace them
if they get lost, the warehouse keeper says.

The children are only allowed to check one book at a time out of the school
library, as another example. There simply are not enough books there for
the children to check more than one out. School library budgets
nationwide have been cut for each year of the last twenty years, when you
account for inflation. Books have gotten more expensive over that time, due
to the IRS and its silly book-burning rule (basically, you can only
depreciate a book if you destroy it -- so nowdays most books that are made
are destroyed within two years time, driving up the price of all books to
pay for those that are destroyed in order to be "expensed"). The net effect
is that school libraries are shrinking and continue to shrink.

Meanwhile, the federal government keeps mandating bureaucracies and new
expenses all the time. Take, for example, the Education for All Children
Act. This single-handedly created a special education assessment
bureaucracy (it's written in the law), fifty different forms which must be
filled out in quintuplet, and dozens of obscure bureaucratic requirements
needed to get funds from the Feds to even PARTIALLY cover the cost (it
doesn't fully cover the costs, of course). It costs the school system over
$30,000/year to care for each severe and profoundly handicapped child,
though thankfully there is only a handful of them in the United States
(around 50,000, meaning that school systems are only spending 1.5 BILLION
dollars on these kids -- all of which is mandated by federal law, little of
which is reimbursed by the feds).

I'd suggest that if you wonder about the bloating of bureaucracies, you
look straight at Federal and state "reform" regulations -- all of which, if
you look closely, implicitly require a bureaucracy in order to implement,
monitor, and regulate them. The Education for All Children Act, of
course, is one. On a local (Texas) level, the research says that the TTAS,
Texas Teacher Assessment System, has little validity as an indicator of
teacher competence at imparting academic content area, yet it requires a
school system to hire people to conduct many inservices and train assessors
and supervisors to take time off from their busy days and spend more time
administering some silly checklist of dubious value.

To summarize: To say that money makes no difference may be correct to a
certain extent. But as a classroom teacher, I certainly appreciate being
able to buy adequate supplies for my classroom, and having up-to-date
textbooks (in Louisiana, I had a textbook that said "Someday, men will walk
on the moon"!), and, in general, not having lack of money stand in my way.
I'd love having math manipulatives that I didn't have to make myself...
right now, I have to take some dowels and a two-by-four and a drill-press
and make my own counting sticks, for example. I'd love to have the district
pay for the globe on my desk (bought out of my own pocket) and the neat
NASA poster (the Earth as seen from the Moon) and ... well hell. It'd be
great to be in the sort of professional environment that I had when I was
in the computer industry, where the general atmosphere was "if you justify
it carefully, we'll buy you what you need to do your job." Here in the
classroom, the atmosphere is "You'll be satisfied with what we give you,
and we don't care if it's not what you need." Unfortunately, the latter
message is what I hear from the exact same business leaders who gave me the
former message in my previous life...

--
 Eric Lee Green  elg@elgamy.sccsi.com         Dodson Elementary
 (713) 437-6908  uunet!nuchat!elgamy!elg      Houston, TX
                "Kids are kids, no matter what"