Bruce Baker has a fabulous new post in which he roasts the vapid comments by pundits and others who are utterly ignorant about school funding.
It starts like this and gets better and better:
“On a daily basis, I continue to be befuddled by the ignorant bluster, intellectual laziness and mathematical and financial ineptitude of those who most loudly opine on how to fix America’s supposed dreadful public education system. Common examples that irk me include taking numbers out context to make them seem shocking, like this Newark example (some additional context), or the repeated misrepresentation of per pupil spending in New York State.”
The immediate issue is Philadelphia but the analysis applies across the nation.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It is not ignorance, it is an intentional campaign to mislead the public and divert their attention away from money sucked upward and truly wasted (if the overall vitality of our society is the goal).
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Your comment seems to assume that the overall vitality of the society depends on spending more for education of poor kids than on middle class or wealthy kids. It may be so, but if you could explain why, I’d appreciate it.
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Dear New Student of Mine (I have to assume you are educable):
Were the vast majority of your students – over your career at the private school you taught at – poverty-ridden and low income?
Has the core of your career teaching involved such students?
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Nope. The elite of the elite. What’s your point?
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What’s my point?
You just made it for me – and all of us reading this post.
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I heard Doctor Baker speak about 2 years ago at Bank Street College and was drawn to his meticulousness and ability to back statements up with real mathematician’s data and graphs.
I am a fan of cluster graphs myself.
But I would like to add to this discussion another kind of financial illiteracy, and it is a grave siutation: teachers are also ignorant of how their own districts get financed and about the exact mechanisms of how funds from government are determined, enter into the system, are deposited into the literal coffers/ accounts of the LEA (local education agency, as in “school district”), and how they are appropriated each bugetary year.
This is something administrators learn and must master in order to have their building or district level license, but teachers, in their “teacher education” are completely left out of this realm of knowledge, and this is a REAL reform that schools of education must provide. Teacher ignorance of school financing should be a zero tolerance policy. The more we know, the better we can partner with administrators who are faced with crippling budgets. When there is empathy, there is empowerment.
Conversely, if funds are being misappropriated or used disporportionately or even illegally at the expense of some target student populations, then teachers – and unions – would have some tools to effectively confront boards, voters, and other personnel to advocate for what’s right and not what’s just politically popular.
We need this knowledge now more than ever to push back against the government’s copulation with corporate america as these numerous insatiable newlyweds starve public schools in order to collapse them and privatize them . . .
Can anyone recommend any texts that academically and technically impart this specialized knowledge? Any administrators or prinicipals out there who can send us some titles on the mechanisms of school financing?
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What is amazing is the fact that people are “shocked” by “how much it costs” to educate a child. Why should $10,000, $11,500 or $13,000 a year, in today’s world, stun anyone? New cars generally cost more than $20,000, a new home (national average) nearly $200,000, and a gallon of milk costs $4? Who decided that a child’s education should only cost under $10,000 a year? It seems a bit arbitrary.
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It is arbitrary, in one sense, but the foundation grant is set by the state legislature according to a complex local/state formula. The legislatures answer to the frugal voters. In private schools it is not unusual to have to pay $20,000 and upwards for a year’s tuition (day schools). Public schools want to offer that kind of education but can’t fund it, and they also have to by law provide special education, which is a known budget buster. A “no frills” education, just reading and math, can be done for low cost, but most of the reason kids like schools is the other stuff, athletics, drama, music, clubs, and the like, and those are the areas in which kids discover their capacity to commit to something. Since attitude is (almost) everything, their lack diminishes the life experience of kids. We like to think that in this society everyone can have the best, but in essence it still is the case “You can have whatever your daddy can pay for.” The state is not your daddy.
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Our forefathers could not have what the king had, so they fought him for the inequity. They did not seek to have his riches, but sought to have enough to sustain a dignified life, something that present low income and middle class Americans are fighting for right now. Our federal tax dollars should trickle right back down to us. I do not want to pay for Penny Pritzker’s (make that “Penny Trickster’s”) tax breaks nor do I care to democratize Iraq or Syria.
We should not be big daddy to the rest of the world when there is dire poverty and dwindling middle class right here in our own backyard.
You are a lone wolf, Harlan. The moon is coming, but few here have found it sensible to listen in on your howls.
I refuse to part with my good faith that you, at 77, are educable.
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You deeply misunderstand the meaning of the American Revolution. It was a revolution for freedom, not for equity. Sensible people know that equity can never be achieved except by tyranny. Freedom can be achieved, but at the expense of equity. I AM, thank God, still educable, but only by rationality.
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As for being a lone wolf to whom no one listens, so be it. It doesn’t mean I’m wrong. We know now that the Bolsheviks were wrong, no matter how many of them there were. We know the Communists in China were (and are) wrong, and there’s a LOT of them. We know the Khamer Rouge were wrong, though they succeeded in dominating Cambodia for a while. Another form of this wisdom is: “50,000 Frenchmen can’t be wrong.” Another form of the fallacy is: “If you win the election, you must be right.” Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt? Obama in the US? Sometimes, victory at the polls signifies being on the side of virtue. Sometimes it reflects political chicanery. The after count in Florida showed that Bush did win the state, but only by about 500 votes, yet I suspect you still think his victory was stolen from Gore by the Supreme Court. In spite of initial evidence that the IRS delayed approval of tea party groups and that that may have suppressed conservative voting (while screaming bloody murder about conservative desire to see every voter present a photo ID being vote suppression.), my suspicion is that Obama won fair and square by getting out the vote of his party, whereas the Republicans did a very poor job of animating their potential base. Subsequent events seem to show that the President is not actually leading very well. He won. That doesn’t make him right. Because 52% of the electorate is ignorant and/or deceived doesn’t make them right about the candidate they elected. Saying no one listens to me is true. But the conclusion you draw from that premise, that my ideas are worthless, is not true, even by the rules of logic. No reason to get personal. But what can a half baked cartoonist know anyway? See how illegitimate it is? Ad hominem is just bad, bad, bad. Pray you avoid it.
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I have never decontexturalized your thinking, Harlan. But I have stated many times that your thinking on this blog is, well, relatively not congruent with the tone and awareness herein. In that sense, you are a wolf with very few in your pack. You may be the wolf, but your pack has a handful, whereas we herds of moose number in the tens of thousands.
For the record, the Republicans have rightfully earned their place in the “Old White Boy’s” network, and this is a primary reason why they lost so many positions recently.
But I have also stated that BOTH parties are awful, and the democrats are almost as much into corporate welfare and have been plutocratized just as much as the GOP.
As far as “winning the election and being right” goes, there are few politicians in DC who have won their elections and are doing right by their constituents. That goes for both parties.
Communists in China and Cambodia were NOT true communists, but became a ruling elite that supported a military, police state that did little for the average person. We have yet to really see if Chavez did as he said he would do for poor Venezuelans.
Yet the communist parties in France, Italy, and Spain do balance so many things out, and we should be as fortunate and as evolved as those countries to have as much fiscal justice and equality, all on a relative scale.
I’m so glad your bonding with the “elite of the elite” has really broadened your views about the masses, the middle class, social contracts, and poverty.
As far as being a “half baked” cartoonist, I will admit that my full time day job has left me not enough time to pursue art directors. But my work has been in the New York Times (op/ed), the Chicago Tribune (op/ed), and the Sacramento Bee (same). It has also won and been exhibited in the Society of Illustrators in Manhattan, the United States’ oldest illustration guild. Out of over 1700 entries in my category, less than 2% were chosen as winners, and mine, a piece on cocaine and land use (from a story about a federal agency) won. I’ve been cited by Jerelle Krause of the NY Times (art director for 29 years there) as an adept communicator in this genre.
I’m not a household name, but not bad for a “half baked” illustrator.
And as far as you go, I’d rather be a half baked illustrator any day than you, a hardly baked thinker.
I do, however, enjoy hearing from you, sparring aside. The more you write, the more we read and act accordingly.
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You deeply misunderstand the dynamics of teaching disdvantaged populations and public education’s role in leveling thay playing field.
And you’re an outright hypocrite about big government spending too much money on social contracts because it was a big government program under FDR that gave you what is probably the social security, at your age, you are using to live a dignified life, notwithstanding anything you’ve worked for, invested in, saved for, or inherited.
Since you are such an invididualist and tax-aversive pinoeer, why not donate your remaining social security payouts to some low income children as a scholarship to the school you taught at.
Would that not make you feel fulfilled and purposeful as well as all the other things you’ve done with your lif?. Just think for a moment that there are so many children who are not the “elite of the elite”. What a difference you could be making in the life of even one child.
You’re a privatist, an indepdendent, a “little to no government in my life” kind of fellow. Why not execute your very philosophies by redistributing your SS payments to fund a private elitist education for a poverty ridden child who is bright and willing to work hard?
This is your moment to be noble Harlan, is it not?
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You are right about the Social Security. If I had been more prudent financially in my life, and others were not dependent on me for their comfort, I could afford to give it all away, and should. I just never thought about the value of money or making money until after I was retired. I can’t justify my ignorance of what life is about. The difference between us is that you think that kind of ignorance is the way life should be. I’m guilty of imprudence, but not hypocrisy.
Yet, UNTIL I can sustain myself without government support, perhaps I should just shut up and not criticize the ignorance and immorality of people who think it is ok to steal from the productive people and redistribute it to the less fortunate using the force of government.
You seem to have no trouble amplifying your sense of morality by a craven exploitation of the power of the state. I suppose you can live with it because it makes you feel morally superior. I’m not fooled by you, though. I admit the truth of your argument, but will be inconsistent in not acting on it. Lord knows, I don’t deserve social security, even though I worked 61 years worth of quarters, some of it in factories (to help pay my way through college) before I began collecting it. I just did what was directed by the law in blithe blindness. Now I know better.
You do not. You still justify it.
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Harlan — I don’t find you remotely persuasive, but you are a master of the “blog comment” genre.
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I agree with FLERP here.
Harlan you have talent. Costumes, sets, bright lights, colorful glow-in-the-dark props, glitter, sequins, all very mesmurizing. You’ve got magic to do. No sarcasm here. You are an interesting read.
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Thank you, Robert. But I work no magic. Magic is ALWAYS deception, misdirection, and therefore unethical. MY stage “effects” are based only on truth, as I see it.
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Fascinating!
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Harlan may be a hypocrite and hard-hearted. But he is certainly correct that special education is a “budget buster,” i.e. extremely expensive, which private schools don’t have to deal with. This is one of several things that people tend not to include in their speeches about how public schools should emulate private schools. And those who wax nostalgic about the great public school educations they received 40 or 50 years ago seem to forget, or omit, that they got that education at bargain-basement prices.
Until we add up exactly what it would cost to provide the education that we claim every child deserves, we’re all willfully ignorant about school funding. And until we actually propose practical ways that we can raise the money that’s required, we’re cowards, or at best we’re useless.
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Raise the money, FLERP?
Really?
Here’s a start as to how we can raise money:
1. No more off shore tax havens for Apple and IBM, and others.
2. No more wars, that kill men and women and that kill domestic programs.
3. No more 35% tax rates for people like Warren Buffet when they pay, after loopholes, and effective rate of 14% while their receptionists, who make 1/250th of their salarty, pay 28% to 33%.
4. No more $400 million dollar tax refunds to Mark Zuckenbuerg and Facebook.
5. No more tax breaks to big oil unless companies like Exxon convert 90% of their business model to solar and wind only.
The list has about 100 ore more other suggestions, but I have parents to call . . . . .
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Remember, the first step is to figure out what kind of education we want, and how much it costs. That actually takes some serious consideration and research. What kind of class sizes do we want? What should teachers be paid? What kind of retirement benefits should they have? What kind of facilities should every school have? And what would it all cost? I don’t expect you to do all this, but that’s only because I’ve come to expect that nobody will do it.
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Another cost saving meaure:
We need to diagnose better and more accurately who is LD and who is not, all on a relative spectrum. Then for the kids who are not and placed into a general ed setting, beef up the services, improve class size, hire the best teachers, and offer a TA who is also adept. . . . . . supply adequate materials and remove high stakes attached to testing. Take money away from buying stat collection services and high stakes standardized expensive and unreliable, invalid (although efficient) tests and use the monet instead to reduce class size and fortify instruction.
Ditch RTTT and NCLB and replace our system with a system similart to France or Finland or even Scotland.
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Now, that I agree with completely.
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Robert Rendo: I emphatically agree with your inclusion of “accurately” in your first sentence. Sometimes even on this blog people still casually throw around numbers as if they are trustworthy simply because they are presented as such; discussion then bubbles and boils around frothy gruel rather than substance.
Cases in point: NCTQ’s recent advocacy piece on teacher prep evals and CREDO 2013.
Let me illustrate. While working as a SpecEd TA, I had occasion to work with high school students who were living in a group home, halfway between living back at home and in jail [juvenile detention is a very slick euphemism for “prison for young people”]. Some [by no means all] of these young men were actually quite bright. However, because they had missed a good portion of their formal education while serving time, they scored “low” on standardized tests administered by the school psychologist. Hence, they indubitably had learning disabilities.
Gloryosky! Stop the Presses! There, in black and white, was hard data—Holy Metrics no less!—that they were pretty far behind the curve re their “appropriate” age and grade level and qualified for Special Services. So into the SpecEd classes they were funneled. Patently inappropriate placements. **I can already hear the bleating and panting: but how could I, a lowly SpecEd TA, know this? Leaving aside the arguments from contempt and ignorance, I was on very good terms with the teachers I worked with and the school psychologist. A scam is a scam is a scam, and only severe pressure from an emotionally unstable and abusive administrator who had the ear of the LAUSD board can explain such not-best-practices. But that’s a story for another time…**
I knew the truth. Other SpecEd aides knew it. The teachers we worked with knew it. The school psychologist knew it. But when the administrator in charge of SpecEd and effectively the leader of the school [when the principal was in school he was still MIA] ordered someone tested because they wanted that student to be placed in a situation where they would be in small classes with two adults keeping an eye on them, well, for all you charterites/privatizers out there who love the jackboots of educrats on the necks of school staff, “if you believe it, you can achieve it” [the first “it” being “that I will run you out of a job in this school district if you don’t bend to my will” and the second “it” being “gaming the system so I can do less work”].
So this jacked up the numbers of the SpecEd students. And I am recounting only one way that SpecEd was abused by educrats [another common one being as a form of remedial education].
I once asked a number of the teachers I worked with how many of their students were really and truly learning disabled. Interestingly, with the diversity of male and female, different ages and backgrounds, strengths and weaknesses as teachers, etc., they all had the same answer: a little more than half of the students formally assigned to them. Which was the same number I had come up with just by working with these teachers and the students for years.
So again, Robert Rendo, I thank you for that strategically placed “accurately” in your first sentence.
As is my wont, I offer up what I hope are two apt quotes. Please accept my humble offerings:
“Fast is fine, but accuracy is everything.” [Wyatt Earp]
“Accuracy is the twin brother of honesty; inaccuracy, of dishonesty.” [Nathaniel Hawthorne]
Krazy props.
🙂
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Dear Not at all Krazy TA,
There is indeed a difference between true cognitive impairment and the rest of the spectrum that shows no real processing issues in the brain. The line between the two has been blurred by faulty diagnostics, and politicized interpretation of those diagnostics. That and the fact that we teachers need far more education in the brain sciences.
From what you describe, the administrators who placed those kids (who missed a lot of school days because of their situation) into SE are a disgrace and should have been sued for malpractice and fired.
They were no different than a doctor who gives a child a chemo drug when they have diabetes.
I am sorry you had to be part of that scene.
A real behavioral problem, such as a violent child, is NOT the same thing as a child who is autisitc, has down’s syndrome, or has real language processing issues. Violent, emotionally anamolous children can be bright and accomplished. They usually are, even if the IQ is low or uneventful, but this is not always the case at all.
For such “delinquents”, as the system likes to call them, they should not be placed into SE, nor have IEP’s, but should be in GE with a great deal of support, such as remediation and smaller class size.
I hope that id you are retired, you write up a description of these heinous practices and inform the district, families, and communities of this egregious practice, even if was years ago.
Awareness is never too late.
Props to you (I just found out the meaning of that term this morning! I am very internet illiterate . . . ). Does it come from “proper”?
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But Harlan, Those countries, especially the first two, are more on the socialist democractic spectrum.
Is this our HU agreeing with this?
I still will defend you as being highly educable.
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I should have qualified by saying I am agreeing with ditching the NCLB, RTTT, and CCSC. France is moribund socialism, its education system strictly meritocratic, draconian. Finland has a good reputation for its education system. The USSA is too huge to achieve Finland’s education focus. Scotland I know little about, but I suspect it doesn’t even come near to educating everyone in the way you would like to. I am educable, but so far you haven’t even tried.
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