Note: I began working on this post yesterday afternoon, when kunilou’s multipoint post was the last in the thread. I was pulled away from the computer and just now got back and I’m trying to catch up now, so please bear with this if it’s just a little meandering.
I agreed with this right up until the last sentence.
In keeping with what Kunilou and Angel of the Lord posted, there are schools where basic resources are scarcities. This is an appalling state and there should be no distinction between communities which could lead to having three separate school districts in one county, for instance, where one set of students is incapable of bringing home their textbooks because there aren’t enough for every kid to be assigned one, one where the school board is fighting about whether the capital improvement monies should go to more athletic equipment or more computers and another where the student parking lot was filled with Audis, BMWs and expensive SUVs yet a special pilot program was providing free laptops and Palm Pilots to every kid.
Those are three actual examples from the Pittsburgh area from when I was there and teaching future teachers.
Were I Queen of the Universe, there would be no difference in funding across school districts, be they community districts or countywide districts. Kids have no say in the circumstances of their births or upbringings, nor about where their parents choose to live. They don’t make the money, they don’t buy the houses. Because Tommy’s dad is a corporate lawyer and can live in a froofroo suburb doesn’t mean that he deserves to get a better education in a nicer building with more resources available to him than Davy does because Davy’s dad died and his mom is the janitor who cleans Tommy’s dad’s office.
The most wretched phrase I know is “We’re moving to X because they have better schools.” These are mandatory, public accomodations. How do we all simply go along with the knowledge that we’re now perpetuating a different standard of “separate but equal” that’s no longer based upon race (though largely on economic strata) and is just as unequal as race segregated schools ever were?
There is no reason why teachers should be able to district shop for better pay and benefits, meaning that better teachers are bound to end up in more affluent (typically suburban) districts.
There is no reason why any child anywhere in this nation should be unable to go to school in a safe, well-maintained buildling with an actual gym and actual hot food cafeteria that serves nutritious meals.
There is no reason why, in the era of $600 Gateways and Dells advertised on television every minute of the day that there should be a single school in this country that doesn’t have sufficient computers for every single student.
There is absolutely no reason why any teacher should have to outlay hundreds of dollars from their own pocket in order to purchase actual instructional materials for their classrooms.
As a small-l libertarian and a capital-R Republican, my solution to this problem is quite hard to believe, hard to swallow, but I think it’s absolutely necessary. Keep the school districts. That’s fine. If every little suburb and community wants to have their own schools, fine. And let every community set their own tax levels. Also fine. But all the money? Goes to the state. And from the state, the money is distributed. The basic operating budget would provide the exact same dollar figure per student to every school throughout the state.
Every school in need of textbooks and basic supplies would have that money budgeted to them immediately, as every school would have to meet materials parity annually.
Capital improvements monies would be divided into technology, basic facilities, extra facilities and “other” categories and for first ten-fifteen years, they would be distributed based largely on the severity of need, with basic facilities and technology needs given greatest weight.
As an aside, chcoco, I’m curious, what did you teach?