Remember the Jetsons? Poor George, a computer engineer, was the foil of his stereotypical tough boss, the bombastic Mr. Spacely, owner of Spacely's Space Sprockets. To be fair, Mr. Spacely, even with his Adolph Hitler mustache wasn't intentionally evil, just meddlesome. He was a business owner trying to compete with his rival, Cogswell. Together Cogswell and Spacely got in a heap of trouble and George always took the heat.
So, it wouldn't surprise me that if Spacely received a delivery of bad parts, he'd send them back and insist on a credit to boot. He knows he has to build a superior product - a Sprocket.
What if Spacely had been a Principal Spacely in a school when he got that same delivery of bad parts - children, who from the moment they were conceived were at-risk. Principal Spacely still has to deliver a solid product - a high achieving school. But, he can't send these bad parts back, can he?
And that's where the business model being inflicted upon the PreK-12 education system becomes a guaranteed failure. Yelling "Jetson" isn't going to fix it. And yet - pro-business reformers, RTTT champions, continue to claim the failures of the education system sit squarely on the shoulders of bad teachers (they would have you believe all teachers are bad teachers) and unions are at fault. It's divide and conquer.
What we as citizens and tax payers need to remember is that public schools were not designed to be profitable, not as entities in and of themselves and not through the various routes that tax dollars drip into our classrooms. This doesn't mean there are not efficiencies that can and should and often times have been made.
In the greater context, education spending pulls in a profit in the number of qualified and competent employees we put forth into society - either as career-ready grads or students who choose to matriculate into higher education. There are millions of graduates of public education gainfully employed, far more than those who are not. In fact, there is a shortage of livable wage-earning positions to accommodate our competent graduates.
No one can ignore those fields that seem to have a shortage of solid candidates, and that truly is a societal failure to acknowledge and deftly adapt education to the changing markets of the world. But, just what kept education leaders from responding in a timely manner? Clearly the prescriptions and manipulations of the funding formulas that control just how public education monies can be spent have historically damned the adoption of supporting technology and new career path development.
Take Bayard Middle School in Wilmington for example. Accidentally named a PZ school by the Department of Education in 2011, several weeks of planning by district personnel furthered to develop an already identified "bold exploration" (see the CSD Strategic Plan) - the develop of a 6-12 STEM academy in Wilmington. The funding injected by the PZ designation would have jump started the conversion of this school. However, the promise of those funds were withdrawn when DOE realized that they failed to calculate Bayard's historical achievement data correctly. The DOE then skipped over two other failing schools serving urban students and sent the money downstate to Laurel, a district that many assert is on the verge of financial collapse due to successive cuts in state funding. This move by DOE has been seen by critics as a conciliatory slide of hand to Laurel.
The Bayard debacle failed to incite the ire of Wilmington's elected paid politicians and quietly slipped away, leaving the school district holding the tab incurred while planning and seriously delayed the implementation of a "turn around" at a school that is destined to find a home on the DOE's under-achieving list. The interventions needed at Bayard will have to come from local funds - at a price tag that would devastate the district's ability to fairly, properly fund it's many other schools in accordance with the funding prescriptions that come from the state and feds. The future turnaround at this school will be slow and right now, is tentative at best. Yes, the PZ funding never belonged to Bayard, but it should have flowed to the next school on the list - and it didn't. I can't think of a finer example of manipulation of funding.
Putting the Pieces Together
What Race to the Top has taught us is that even the federal policymakers recognize that public education needs an infusion of funds, not the systematic reduction that state governments are inflicting. The ARRA stimulus funds of 2009 required states to maintain their funding of public education at the previous year's level. The writing is on the wall. Public education will cost Americans more as we try to move forward into a technology-based market after the fall-out of the Great Recession. Public schools must turn out graduates who are prepared for today's current career opportunities while competing with millions of un-employed and under-employed yet experienced workers during an a job shortage crisis.
We've learned that it doesn't matter how prepared our students are if the jobs are not there. And while federal and state policymakers are focused on college and career ready grads, we need our leaders to ensure those jobs and careers will exist- something that has simply not happened in part due to the constant fighting between political parties. It's rather demoralizing for our rising seniors - the understanding that the pay-off for their commitment to education may not be there when they are ready for it.
The conversion to great schools is costly. We've spent ten years under the confines of No Child Left Behind, a law that punished schools for failure rather than provide these schools with the funds to convert to pertinent and responsive centers of education. As the ESEA is again up for renewal and will be so perennially until our political parties can agree, we must urge them to not loose sight of the children in the classrooms. RTTT funds data coaches. My students need teachers, capable teachers, and more of them - trained in the new market that these students will eventually arrive to - much more than they could ever need a data coach. My students need fidelity to best practices to implement vetted research-affirmed, peer-reviewed programmatic and cultural changes that will support their needs while training them for the future needs of the economy. They need extended learning time that begins at 300 hours a year - the minimum amount determined by research and practice to actually affect achievement. My students need smaller class sizes, especially in their early years to help mitigate the effects of an achievement gap that exists for some children from the moment of conception. And today, we need to turn our attention to our middle and high schools, to cut with precision focus through the funding red tape to ensure that all students rising into this time of economic uncertainty will have the opportunities for career success.
Troubled school left unto themselves with no change in the way funds are delivered will be forever slow and timid in delivering a dynamic education. And while we need to employ best practices in all of our schools, we need to do so in a way that preserves those schools that are already achieving success for their students - that means protecting the funding that already flows into those schools. Because each neighborhood, each town, each city is different, each school is a reflection of a socio-economic class. We cannot divert funding from successful schools to pay for reform in under-achieving schools. We have already stated that efficiencies need to be achieved and frequently have been - yet we need to acknowledge that decreasing the dedication of services in a successful school will negatively impact achievement.
We must begin to look at a public school system specifically as being non-profit-bearing, and for that matter as being a giant financial hole, a tax write-off, an entitlement program. We must move away from the concept of educational institutions as a business. Businesses by design break even or generate profit. Schools do not, can not, will not if their only funding is federal, state, and local taxes. Schools are not permitted to accumulate funding except for local taxes. If you don't use your state and federal funding, it's taken back. This puts districts in a tremendously difficult position of wanting to deploy targeted funds when it would be illegal to do so. Current funding formulas have indeed tied our hands.
What I know for sure is this - Businessman do not belong in the classroom, which is squarely where they have inserted themselves. When a Media Mogul creates an Enterprise to contract with state departments of education to supply the likes of data coaches, I am certain of two things - 1) some of those data coaches received a public education and 2) the media mogul has just received an influx of funds from education that the tax payers intended to send to the classroom. Business is diverting education funding. The resulting failures are being places squarely on the institution providing the education and everything about this scenario is morally and ethically wrong.
Business has a role to play in education - as employers of our qualified graduates. And that is exactly where businessmen belong. At the very end of the chain. And if they so choose to invest philanthropically in our non-profit education centers - schools - great, but those funds should come with only relevant strings attached - in non-profits this is called "restricted giving."
Education is not a land grab and treating it as such is utter chaos.
Jane, Stop this Crazy Thing!
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