By Tamara
With levy renewal votes on the horizon for many of
Washington’s districts I’ve been thinking a lot about what an education worth
paying for should look like. I think we
can all agree a solid grasp of fundamental skills in reading and math should be
a non-negotiable outcome. Followed by the ability to form, support, and articulate
an argument whether spoken or written. Art, music, physical education, and
technological literacy each play critical roles in the development of those
skills. As a bookend, adequate time
within the working day for teachers to plan and collaborate on lessons should
also be non-negotiable. That is the core of an education I want for my own
children and one I would support monetarily beyond taxes.
Yet I find myself in an uncomfortable position as a teacher
with a “backstage view” of how resources are allocated. When I witness my district
making new curriculum adoption with all its attending professional development
year after year (especially this year with the full knowledge Common Core is
coming) as a taxpayer, I feel short-changed. When I know first- hand that
developing proficiency with new curriculum and assessments takes time, as a
parent I worry my children are not getting the quality instruction their teachers
are capable of if not having to adjust to yet another adoption. Those are the biggies. But I also find myself
thinking , “Really, we are paying for children to spend twenty minutes reading
with a “Reading Rover” dog because a dog
is so much better at imparting literacy skills?” and “Really, we need five certificated
staff to proctor MAP to twenty-six
students for two hours out of the instructional day?” We have an entire room
full of class sets of books that we actually hired a “volunteer” to organize
but that no one has used in classroom instruction for at least three years. Sure
some of these expenditures are site-based decisions. But whether site-based or
district-wide, this is not how I expect my tax dollars for education to be spent.
So I am on the fence about my local levy. To vote no feels
like cutting off my nose to spite my face. But voting yes feels like a stamp of
approval for resource allocation I cannot as a parent, taxpayer, or educator
support.
Great, but it would be better if in future you can share more about this subject. making good content.
That’s a tough one, Tamara. My district doesn’t always make perfect decisions about allocating resources either. My approach is to vote yes – and encourage others to follow suit – and do what I can to influence good choices at the district level.
Easier said than done, but I’ve found that most district-level administrators are actually very open to teacher input.
You are right Mark, we cannot expect better service or outcomes with less support. But I do expect those making allocation decisions to use resources as wisely as possible with the information they have at the time-like if you know Common Core will be implemented in the next two years, don’t put money into new curriculum now.Your
grocery analogy is spot on. It’s not that I want to see resources taken away or diminished. On a limited budget you can’t buy all organic. But you can choose to just buy organic dairy products as that is the food chain toxins have the most exponential growth in.
Is voting no on our levy the most effective tool for change? Probably not. Asyou pointed out perhaps there are other options for me from the inside to point out inconsistancies.
And while my girls got enough English instruction to decode, they are yet to be able to carry on the most basic of converstaion. Regardless of what is done with resources at hand I know without question the education they are receiving now is by far better than anything the camp could offer. Because these girls arechoosing to be educated and make the most of everyting we can offer.
I agree… to an extent. I do think that there is and always will be a degree of waste whenever there are bureaucratic mandates which must be met. However, I would hate to see funding be cut under the presumption that this will compel schools to trim waste. Like NCLB, which ostensibly punishes failing schools through sanctions and reorganization, cutting funding is not the way to improve how budgets are written. Taking away support is not the way to improve the service provided.
I still fully believe that the answer is, in fact, to throw more money at the problem (to co-opt a phrase). How’s this for an example: I am head of household for a family of five. Our food budget is tight. My kids eat moderately healthy, but we cannot always afford fresh fruits and veggies, so we tend to eat more rice, pasta, canned and frozen fruits and veggies, etc. Would fresh and whole foods be better? Even organics? Yep, but it is simply too expensive for us right now, so we make different choices. Hypothetically, if some power existed to monitor parenting (I wish!), it might be determined that we are failing to provide adequate fresh fruits and vegetables for the children in my household. The consequence? Our food budget gets reduced. That’ll teach us! The logic here is obvious: if we couldn’t afford fresh whole foods before, we certainly won’t be able to if our budget is trimmed even further. If we are budgeting for meals, it is significantly cheaper for us to buy processed, unhealthy, pre-packaged meals than it is to buy whole foods and organics.
To me the same is true in education: we are doing a mediocre to adequate job (some would say) on a budget that is ultimately not adequate. To expect that our services and outcomes could improve on fewer resources has never made sense to me.
As for your new students from the refugee camp–that is a fantastic story and I wish them all the luck. It sounds like they have the dispositions to learn, as well as the skills, but I’d hesitate to give all the credit to a refugee camp classroom. Although, if my students all saw a good education as the true key to survival, perhaps all my lessons would be absorbed far more deeply. While I’m pleased that the education provided in the refugee camp served these children well, to say “if they can do it, we can too” is a huge leap.
The sheer volume of physical resources like books in contrast to the number of kids not meeting “standard” (however that is defined in the current moment) is what chaps me most. I have two new students that just arrived from a Thai Refugee camp. Both of these children can decode better than many U.S. born dual language students. Which tells me they received consistant if not quality English instruction in the camp where they do not have even a fraction of the resources we do-especially at a title school. When are we going to quit throwing monetary and physical resouces at our education challenges and focus our energies on the instructional practices we know are most effective? If it can be done in a refugee camp, we should expect and demand a better return on the investment (adequate or not) we as a wealthy nation put into education.
I think there is probably a lot you can do to advocate for better choices from within. There will be what we perceive as waste–but what we also need to trust is that someone, somewhere along the chain of command, doesn’t see it as waste and considers it a true need for some reason. And, if it truly is waste, the responsible but difficult thing to do is to point it out.
Consider the many changes to the math assessments at the HS level for several years. The program in which I work went through four new math curricula/approaches in six…maybe it was even five…years. It wasn’t the teachers’ fault, or likely even the administration/D.O. They were responding to what appeared to be the mandate and ever moving target from WASL to HSPE to EOC.
As for the paid “volunteer” to man the book room, I share your frustration. We don’t have someone to man the book room, but I’ve inventoried our English department books the last two years and there are boxes of novels whose spines have never been cracked, no one knows who ordered them or for which courses, and some of the titles (of which we have multiple class sets) have not even been approved by our instructional council. I don’t know who spent that money or even when–and we’re talking between 60 and 150 books at as much as twelve bucks a pop per title. My assumption is that the purchase was made in response to some mandate-of-the-moment which dissolved into thin air the following year. There are restrictions about how we can sell surplus materials purchased with public funds, but I’m hoping to be able to have a book sale or post some titles on amazon or whatever we can legally do.
I will say this, though. This kind of thing is not new. When I cleaned out the bookroom my first year as dept head, I found a sealed box filled with brand new paperback consumable workbooks about mythology. Let me clarify: the box had never been opened, the couple-dozen or so books had never been touched…pristine…and the copyright date was before I was born. I joked with the secretary that we had found mythology books with first-person accounts from Zeus himself.