Eacaraxe said:
Satinavian said:
You actually cut funding to schools where children struggle and have below average test results ?
Yup. That's just the tip of the iceberg, too.
School funding otherwise comes from local property taxes which are inherently regressive, thus wealthy and suburban districts have an overabundance of funding and are not reliant on state or federal grants, whereas poor, rural
and urban, districts may be solely reliant on state and federal grants. So, any time state or federal funding is cut, wealthy districts are barely impacted if at all while poor schools are completely fucked. Under a regime of testing-based funding allocation, schools that are overachieving because they're already well-funded are receiving additional grants they don't actually need, while poorly-funded schools are forced to accept cuts they can't afford.
Springboarding off of this point, not only is it as damaging as Eacaraxe says when Federal funding is cut, we need to talk about how it's unfairly allotted in the first place [https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-06-01/title-i-rich-school-districts-get-millions-in-federal-money-meant-for-poor-kids]
Like many of the laws passed during the height of the civil rights movement, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act sought to right decades of injustices largely rooted in unequal access to resources.
"As a son of a tenant farmer, I know that education is the only valid passport from poverty," said President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965, when he signed the law on the lawn in front of the one-room schoolhouse where he grew up in rural Texas.
"By passing this bill," he continued, "we bridge the gap between helplessness and hope for more than 5 million educationally deprived children."
Title I, the largest federal K-12 program, was how Johnson planned to do that. And since children from poor families often enter schools with a host of more-costly educational needs - from less exposure to reading and math to social, emotional and nutritional problems - it's important the limited federal dollars are funneled to those who need them most, he reasoned.
How is it then that a school district like Nottoway, with a child poverty rate of 30 percent, receives so much less in federal support than Fairfax, one of the wealthiest districts in the country?
The answer lies in a complicated and outdated formula that's used to distribute the Title I money - a formula that's resulted in a series of significant funding discrepancies that can shortchange school districts with high concentrations of poverty, and benefit larger districts and big urban areas instead of poorer, rural districts and small cities.
"The places that are less poor are getting more money per poor kid," says Nora Gordon, an associate professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University who recently conducted an analysis of the Title I program for The Hamilton Project. "This is what happens when you have four different formulas that are very opaque and interact in different ways. You can have a lot of things in the law that seem like a good idea, but the net result is not a progressive one."
In fact, the net result often means that in addition to the formula overlooking poor rural school districts, like Nottoway, it also shortchanges smaller high-poverty urban districts, like Flint, Michigan, which similarly faces challenges that affluent districts often don't, such as dated facilities and teacher shortages.
Discrepancies are also visible in the amount of Title I money districts receive per poor child.
Virginia's Mecklenburg County, for example, with a child poverty rate of 30 percent, receives $1,000 per poor student through Title I - the same amount as poor students in York County, where the child poverty rate is less than 6 percent.
To be sure, when policymakers crafted the current formula in 2001 as part of the No Child Left Behind Act, they did so intending to correct a formula that was directing even fewer dollars to concentrations of poor students than it does today - one that allowed Claiborne Parish in Louisiana, with a child poverty rate of 36 percent, to infamously use its Title I funds to build not one, but two Olympic-sized swimming pools for students.
But the formula has proven a sort of intractable beast - one that politicians and policymakers have had little success altering, despite its glaring shortcomings.
"In the context of deeply inadequate funding overall, formula changes are always seen as a zero sum game," says Michael Dannenberg, director of strategic initiatives for policy at Education Reform Now. "More money for one district or state is coming at the expense of needy children in someone else's district or state."
"Politically it's very hard," he says. "It's not impossible, but it's very hard."
Dannenberg would know. He first tried - and failed - to change the formula while working for former Sen. Clairborne Pell of Rhode Island. Years later, as a senior policy adviser for Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, Dannenberg was part of the push to update the formula as part of No Child Left Behind. That version is still used today.
"To be clear, the wealthiest school districts are getting more per Title I child than high poverty school districts," he says. "But the effort to improve targeting of Title I funding [to concentrations of poor students] was realized in part as a result of the No Child Left Behind Act. We had a degree of success, but not nearly as much as one would hope."
Because Politicians have children. And what school districts are they going to? The poor, undeveloped, under-staffed, and decaying school districts? Nope. They are going to the Wealthy School Districts. With the children of donors. That Federal Money will go to their children. And not only will that benefit that Politician's family, but their only career as they get more money for campaigning.
You want a quick solution? Force every Politician's child to have to go to school in the poorest district accessible to the Governor's Residence. You'll start seeing equal funding happen real quick.
But, hey, let's bring it full circle. Chicago Teachers are on their 17th day of Strike [https://www.npr.org/2019/10/16/770809022/chicago-teachers-will-go-on-strike-capping-years-of-social-justice-activism]. As I said previously, through a direct link of school closing after receivership, Thousands upon Thousands of Teachers are overworked and underpaid trying to take on the load of some of these displaced students.
In 2012, the union published a manifesto called the Schools Students Deserve that detailed the need for lower class sizes and more staff, such as librarians, social workers and counselors.
In the last two contract fights, the union brought up these issues, but they also had to concentrate on protecting their members whose jobs were being threatened by school closings and the opening of charter schools. The school district also had a budget deficit that made it difficult to argue for more resources.
This year, they saw an opening to try to win big on these social justice issues. The school district has more money after a change in the state's funding formula and Lightfoot has said she believes schools need additional resources. The union also feels compelled to push these demands after years of budget cuts that led to staff losses in schools.
This isn't a rogue statement. The United States have long felt the pain of a lack of funding and paying the least they can get away with to the
most important people in this world: The Teachers. Because you do not get Doctors, Lawyers, Presidents, Engineers, and the rest without a Teacher.
With the amount of work and pressure Teachers have to do just with an underfunded class with unreal class sizes... these people have to get more jobs just to pay the rent [https://time.com/longform/teaching-in-america/].
Hope Brown can make $60 donating plasma from her blood cells twice in one week, and a little more if she sells some of her clothes at a consignment store. It's usually just enough to cover an electric bill or a car payment. This financial juggling is now a part of her everyday life - something she never expected almost two decades ago when she earned a master's degree in secondary education and became a high school history teacher. Brown often works from 5 a.m. to 4 p.m. at her school in Versailles, Ky., then goes to a second job manning the metal detectors and wrangling rowdy guests at Lexington's Rupp Arena to supplement her $55,000 annual salary. With her husband, she also runs a historical tour company for extra money.
"I truly love teaching," says the 52-year-old. "But we are not paid for the work that we do."
That has become the rallying cry of many of America's public-school teachers, who have staged walkouts and marches on six state capitols this year. From Arizona to Oklahoma, in states blue, red and purple, teachers have risen up to demand increases in salaries, benefits and funding for public education. Their outrage has struck a chord, reviving a national debate over the role and value of teachers and the future of public education.
For many teachers, this year's uprising is decades in the making. The country's roughly 3.2 million full-time public-school teachers (kindergarten through high school) are experiencing some of the worst wage stagnation of any profession, earning less on average, in inflation-?adjusted dollars, than they did in 1990, according to Department of Education (DOE) data.
Meanwhile, the pay gap between teachers and other comparably educated professionals is now the largest on record. In 1994, public-school teachers in the U.S. earned 1.8% less per week than comparable workers, according to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a left-leaning think tank. By last year, they made 18.7% less. The situation is particularly grim in states such as Oklahoma, where teachers' inflation-adjusted salaries actually decreased by about $8,000 in the last decade, to an average of $45,245 in 2016, according to DOE data. In Arizona, teachers' average inflation-adjusted annual wages are down $5,000.
The decline in education funding is not limited to salaries. Twenty-nine states were still spending less per student in 2015, adjusted for inflation, than they did before the Great Recession, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, leaving many public schools dilapidated, overcrowded and reliant on outdated textbooks and threadbare supplies.
To many teachers, these trends are a result of a decades-long and bipartisan war on public education, born of frustration with teachers' unions, a desire to standardize curricula and a professed commitment to fiscal austerity. This has led to a widespread expansion of charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately operated, and actions such as a move in the Wisconsin legislature in 2011 to strip teachers' pensions and roll back collective bargaining rights. This year, Colorado lawmakers voted to raise teachers? retirement age and cut benefits.
Essentially, all of these things are tied to two things. The Politicians and the Voter.
The Voter wants to hear good things. And they remember that Children are our future, and that education is the best way forward. Now, while you can't sit down and hear everything about little Devon's life and how his educational journey has led him to find out what's the best thing for him... you can make him a Percentage. Let's say he was a 78 last year. But this year, he's a 83.
My word. The Politicians draconian plans are working! There was an increase of 5 points! That's HUGE! All these points are going up! Stay the course! No more money put into the equation, we have ourselves a winner!
Devon was moved from higher level math to a lower level this year. That C minus he was rocking in Pre-Calculus because he couldn't get the help he needed became a B+ because he's in a remedial math.
But that literally doesn't matter, because all we see is the upwards momentum. Numbers went up. Happy days.
We are not raising educated students. We are raising Test Takers. We are not investing in their future, we're telling those foolhardy enough to be educators to go out into the parking lot, gather some rocks, and somehow figure out a way to use that to make our next batch of Adults who will have to shoulder the responsibility of running this country.
Then we give them an arbitrary guideline via standardized testing. And though a lack of funding to supply these students with necessary resources, enough teachers, and help if they need it... hell, if you don't get us the scores we want, we have to punish you with an even bigger lack of funding and expect you to do better. If not, hey, you must have not wanted it enough so there goes your school.
People in the future will study this and call America Barbaric for how they treated their students. And my only problem with that is that it will take the future for people to finally see that sentiment to be absolutely correct.
