Money for Schools? First make certain that the funding is actually needed for the purposes for which it is used. From me, a thirty-three year veteran teacher, you will get no argument about whether schools need money. The problem is whether or not the money is used in ways that enhance student learning.
I work in a Title One school. A healthy majority of our students are on free and reduced lunch programs; they come form “official” poor families.
These children exhibit the difficulties documented so well in Ruby Payne’s book A Framework for Understanding Poverty. Their deficits become cumulative in the areas of background knowledge and cultural understanding. In many of our families, wiives, children, and even husbands are “property.” It is the right of other family members to rule over them. Schools do not have the right to insist on attendance, courteous behavior, or even to insist that assignments be completed; those things come under the purview of parents who may not hold the same values that we in education generally find important for student success.
Title One’s answers to these problems are of mixed success. We are required to hold many family activities that encourage involvement with the school. I understand the need to engage parents. However, some of the other activities required by Title One regulations are less helpful.
For example, any student in the school is entitled to free “tutoring” after school. A multitude of companies have come to the trough to feed on federal funds without significantly improving the students’ academic achievement. Why? Students are not really tutored in the traditional sense of the word. What does happen is that students are grouped in numbers of 15 or so and assigned pages in workbooks that they are told to complete. There is little, if any, individual attention.
The tutoring companies are receiving per head federal dollars as though students were really getting individual attention, but such is not the case. In fact, at my school, the tutoring seems no more than adding a ninth and tenth period to the students’ long days. Parents get to feel good because they believe their children are being “tutored,” the companies are making money, but the kids are not being given the small group or one-to-one attention that might actually address their needs. This tutoring program costs a great deal of money.
Those funds could be better used to lower class size in the regular day so that all students could have more interaction with their teachers, and there would be an opportunity for teachers to use proven techniques that depend on small groups for success. In my county, teachers and paraprofessionals have been and will continue to be laid off. If the tutoring funds, which are federal dollars, could be used to retain teachers, students might benefit much more directly and for full school days.
Another area of waste is the money used for textbooks and materials in Title One schools. There is money for some materials, but it is tightly monitered, which is fine. However, there is plenty of money for hot dogs and soda to lure parents to after-school activities. The structure governing the use of funds seems to be based on general principles rather than individual school needs.
Finally, once materials are ordered and used, they are cast aside with no regard to their cost. Two years ago, I worked in a Title One school where workbooks were available in abundance. At the end of the year, teachers were told to clear out their rooms. Any books that did not fit in the room were to be “recycled.” By recycling, I mean actually put in a dumpster for pick-up by a recycling firm, not sent to other schools that could use the materials.
Ironically, during the next year, at a non-Title One school, teachers were struggling to assemble a collection of the same books to meet the needs of their students. I could not help but feel the irony very strongly. A Title One school had tossed out the very materials that a regular school needed, and there was no outcry. Such waste is intolerable.
Do schools need money? Yes, indeed. However, throwing money at a problem without assessing needs and insuring that money is used where it is most helpful is not only wasteful, but it reduces the funds available for people and materials that might actually address students’ difficulties.
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