The doublethink required for the “Separate but equal” era in the US (not at all what the phrase would imply) was substantial, but I think that’s a big topic that would be a digression here. Suffice it to say that when the people in power wanted to do so, they were historically able to do so with fig leaf explanations for the real differences even though they would claim they were ‘Separate but equal’.
Actually, depending on how localized and non-distributed your property taxes going to pay for schools mechanism is, that right there can accomplish providing an unequal public education by giving more money-per-student to schools in wealthier areas.
My point was that they can no longer blatantly give more money to particular schools on such a grand and scale, so under-publically-funding all schools and then having the more well-off neighborhoods make up the difference accomplishes the establishment of a large discrepancy in school quality WITHOUT unequal public funding.
I have family in that business and this matches their experience. The principals of each school control the budget and each principal had different priorities. Some principals are stuff principals and some are people principals. People principals have small class sizes and hard to get supplies and stuff principals have large class sizes and an abundance of supplies.
I as a parent have paid for my own kids school supplies in every school that my children have gone to and in many cases pay for more than my own kids, so that less fortunate kids also have supplies. If any teacher of my children have paid for supplies it’s been small incidentals that they didn’t consider at the beginning of the year, when they send the list out.
To be clearer (for Ontario anyway) the Education portion of the property tax used to be set by the local school board and received by them. This was changed to a rate set by the province (still based on property values) and collected into a common fund that was then distributed to all schools on basically a per-pupil ratio. IIRC there are additional funds for special needs, such as ESL education for areas with large immigrant populations, etc.
I think the OP is about the more generic school supplies. In my experience everywhere, kids must supply their own notebooks, pens, crayons, etc. Many schools produce a list - your child must have 10 notebooks, a ruler, compass, 10 pens, a set of color crayons, etc. etc. etc. But if a grade school activity uses construction paper, large Bristol boards, art activity paint brushes and big jars of tempura paint, or in the above examples, gold stars and even chalk and dry erase markers - these are the sort of “office supplies” you’d expect from the administration, but they don’t provide them.
When your kid comes home with that big finger painting - who provided the paint?
This is the teachers’ complaint, that they are expected to provide a lively interesting learning environment but many places don’t provide the materials.
That works in some districts, and some schools. But there are some schools where, if you sent that list home with every student, not one family would send in anything (either due to lack of means, lack of interest, or both). And these also tend to be the same districts where the administration provides the least resources to teachers.
Just to ensure our American friends aren’t led astray here, the available money is NOT determined by school boards. It’s allocated to them by the provincial government, and the amount allocated in largely based on how many children there are in the school board.
How WELL it’s spent then depends on the board, but the pot of money available is handed to them by the province.
This is an important point, because it largely avoids the huge rich neighborhood / poor neighborhood disparity that appears in places in the USA where county taxes determine a large portion of funding levels.
Maybe I’m too old, but in the 1960’s, all I ever had to bring to school was notebooks and pens. Anything else in the category of supplies was provided by the school. Oh, and sometimes we had to buy the workbook that went with the textbook, and when I went to private school, we had to buy textbooks (which much of the time, we could sell next year). By high school, compass, ruler and protractor. For drafting, our own T-square and triangles.
I don’t remember ever buying paint, providing paint brushes, or any other art materials. Similarly for materials for science or other activities. In fact, since all we needed was notebooks and pens, I don’t even remember the “needed school supplies” list provided to parents.
but then, our education, even in early grades, was mostly bookwork. There was none of the creative papercutting or construction paper crap or painting. I don’t remember art as a subject. So the need for supplies was much less.
actually since modern school systems began in the 1880s and 90s …… one reason in the early 1900s non political school boards took hold was there was so much political graft associated with the school system
things like the politically appointed janitors making 4 times the amount of the teachers who were sharing 5 books for 15-20 kids on 4 desks no ink to write with ……
it got to the point that the teachers were feeding and (some cases bathing )the poorer kids from the slums out of their own money ……
Two radio talks show hosts here in the area encourage people to send in commendations about local teachers. One a month they select one and give him or her $1,000. I have not heard all of the recipients, but every one of the ones I have says they’re spending it in the classroom, theirs or the school in general.
I have always paid for chalk, then overhead markers now dry erase markers out of my pocket because it gives me a wide variety of colors to help students see the different parts of the problems more easily. Of the teachers I’ve worked with in my 20 years of teaching I would say over 90% of teachers do the same.
Does the school give you *no* chalk/dry erase markers or is it that they don't give you as large a variety of colors as you want ? There's a difference. And anyway , my full sentence was
"As far as I have been able to tell, teachers have been 1) paying out of pocket for a long time and 2) it’s not “essentials” they are paying for. They don’t seem to be paying for chalk or dry erase markers or textbooks or *at least I’ve never seen anyone stating that they are buying that type of supplies. *(emphasis added)If you’re saying your school did not even provide a single color of chalk, I certainly won’t say you’re lying, but I will absolutely say that’s the first time I’ve ever heard of that.
It’s not unheard-of. It’s also not unheard-of for a school to provide writing instruments, but in far too low a quantity, or inconsistently, so that you still need to bring your own to be assured of having even one color.
I have had to buy pencils for students to write with.
I have had to buy overhead markers because the ones the school gave us were unusable since they leaked so badly.
I have had to buy whiteboard markers because there was a limit as to how many we were issued in a year.
I’ve had to buy chalk because the brand we were issued was so hard and the blackboard so cheaply made that the chalk wouldn’t write properly and instead scratch the board (I swear they were cylinders of cement and not plaster of paris)
It is very common in my area for local parents’ groups to award “bonuses” to public school teachers to encourage them to stay within the school system and at a particular school. The amounts vary, but they are usually on the order of several thousand dollars. That’s right…if Mr. Smith is a good teacher and the parents want him to stay at Jim Wilson Middle School, he may get a check for an extra $4K or so every year from the JWMS Boosters.
I didn’t believe this when I first heard about it, mainly because it sounded like bribery of a public employee. But now it just seems the norm.
Can we get some clarification on what European schools do?
Half the Europeans in this topic immediately ran in and started to post about how amazing Europe is without making it clear if they actually knew what they were talking about, while the other half said it’s similar to how its done in the U.S.
Yeah, I think this is generally a problem of mismanaged funds, and not overall funding. Here in Alberta, schools are well funded and teachers make very good money. What they did here was offload the burden of supplies on the parents. So our kid would get supply lists like 50 pencils, 500 sheets of paper, ten erasers, etc. When we asked why he needed so much stuff, they said because quite a few parents wouldn’t bother buying any supplies at all, so the ones that did were essentially buying the supplies for the ones who couldn’t be bothered.
In high school we had to pay about $500 per semester as well for a public school to pay for gym uniforms, field trips, bus pass, annual yearbook, textbook rental, etc.
This was a school that had just gotten a multi-million dollar gift from an alumni, and blew it building a large theater for the performing arts students. Yet they were chronically short of basics like erasers and paper.