A teacher writes in response to an earlier post about the vendors making lots of money these days, but not schools or classrooms:
hahaha… I can laugh now, but, until I retired, I taught in a portable classroom, where termites would fly from the walls and I had to get rid of the smell of cat urine when I moved in.Yet, I had a smartboard, responders, laptop along with desk computer (T1 line plus wifi), and other electronic devices. However, once a device had problems (or needed batteries), well, things might not get fixed (I never did get a replacement hub for the one device I actually found extremely useful).
I was better off than my colleagues, one whose portable had mold, another whose portable had rotten flooring ready to cave in at the doorway, and then the ones who had no heat or cooling for much of the year (teachers complained, but it was only when a parent group complained, that the heat/cooler system was finally fixed). But, hey, we all had these electronics that were going to give us more points on tests!
At the last workshop I attended, the presenter certainly gave us some useful information, but when we asked her to help us with some specific problems, she drew a blank, not knowing how to respond. We told her, that we had 15 feeder schools, only three of which were in our district. She lowered her voice and informed us, “Oh, then I’m sorry, I cannot help you.” Then she quickly gathered up her materials and left. (I wondered why she couldn’t help us, until I discovered she was from an area with no out-of-district feeder schools.)
Yep. Lots of money out there to “fix” those poverty area schools.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Can anyone imagine one of the billionaires fueling edreformery putting valued employees and customers in a moldy, cockroach infested portable? I’ve “taught” in one of those. But I had a corner office on the top floor of a bank building when working for a small private business. Owners knew customers would not respect anything less! What we do to “other people’s children”!
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Sounds familiar. Did this teacher teach where I taught?
When the district decided to paint the school, they spray painted while class was in section. I had students throwing up as the fumes filled the room. We had to evacuate the room and move to the library for a few days.
My first complaint fell on deaf ears—the usual response from the district was that it was all in our heads. My second complaint mentioned we were starting standardized tests and the reaction from the fumes might mess up the results.
The painting stopped until testing was over and then resumed. We had to abandon the room again and flee to the library for a few more days.
They also always cut the grass while class was in session and all the kids with allergies and asthma had problems focusing on what we were doing in class. The crew that cut the grass would walk down the open air walkways outside our classrooms with gas powered blowers raising a dust/pollen storm.
Before the district replaced the roofs, when it rained, the custodians must have had a map that showed all the leaks. When teachers arrived at school on a rainy day, the custodians had already placed trash cans under almost every leak in the school. Sometimes, they had to move desks to make room. There was a row of computers on tables against the back wall and we had to cover them with a plastic sheet because there were leaks all along the back. Even with the trash cans the old, threadbare carpet that looked more like mud was squishy like a sponge. The custodians would prop the doors open after school and place big fans aimed at the carpet to speed up the drying process.
Every morning at 6 AM, the first two custodians arrived and drove around in an electric flat bed cart with paint, to cover all the graffiti that blossomed the night before. They also filled bullet holes—if they found any—with putty before they painted. By the time the kids arrived, there was never a sign of the graffito from the night before. One Monday morning, they discovered that over the weekend some kids had squirted super glue into every classroom door lock in the school. When I drove in, every lock smith in the San Gabriel Valley was there fixing the problem and we managed to open on time.
One year, the district spent $25 thousand to refurbish a closed boys student restroom and make it vandal proof with stainless steel toilets that had no lids or seats. The mirrors were also polished stainless steel.
It took some kid less than 24 hours to destroy that bathroom and get it closed for the rest of the year. All he did was drag a trash can full of paper into the room and set it on fire.
Without those custodians, the school would’ve fallen apart for sure. It was amazing what they did to keep the place working. We should have fired all the district administrators and put the custodians in charge.
And this is only a small preview of what went on.
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Gotta pay those consultants to “unpack” the bullet list!
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http://10thperiod.blogspot.com/2014/03/ohio-school-districts-get-by-with-same.html
Really good piece on how Ohio’s public schools have fared under ed reform leaders:
“In the 1998-1999 school year, when the only real school choice option was open enrollment because Charter Schools and Vouchers were in their infancy, districts received 98.4% of the funding the state said they needed.
In this school year (2013-2014), that number has dipped to 82.7% — an amount essentially unchanged from last school year. In fact, the percentage has been dropping every year except one — 2010 when the percentage increased by .4%, and this year’s .1% bump.
Today, school districts receive at the end of the day about the same amount of money they received in the 2002-2003 school year. Last year was the lowest amount since the 2001-2002 school year.
And the difference is even more striking when accounting for inflation. The three lowest net foundation payments on record occurred during the last three school years under Gov. John Kasich’s two recent state budgets.”
The funding shortfall exactly coincides with when when ed reform really took off in this state, a decade ago.
At the end of the day, they’re lousy advocates for public schools. Public school kids could do a lot better, as far as adult representatives. They’ve been bleeding funding for a decade under this “bold leadership”.
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Despite some of our TN legislators beginning to pay attention, our state department is forging ahead with plans for Common Core. Since legislation passed the House last week that would delay further implementation for two years, Tennessee teachers have received no fewer than 4 emails from “TNCore”, outlining plans for summer Common Core training. Today’s email asked for applicants to fill slots for FIVE HUNDRED common core coaches TN plans to employ.
All the while, the State Department of Ed is telling our legislators that the cost in delaying the Common Core and PARCC for two years would be 10 million dollars. I wonder if they’ve outlined for them the cost we’d incur if we do go ahead as planned. Certainly, there is MUCH technology that will have to be updated for the PARCC and countless “Common Core Aligned” materials still to be purchased.
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This is identical to the old portable building I was assigned at Oak Springs Elementary School in Austin Independent School District two years ago. I taught a preKinder class in this Title I School, and the first thing I noticed on the wall when I moved in was a Warning Notice of Asbestos. I called the central office administration and asked how they could put children in a building that contained asbestos. They said it was not a problem, and advised me not to let the kids “eat” any of the floor tile since that is what contained the asbestos. They actually made it sound like a joke.
There were broken pieces of tile throughout the room, which I tried to cover with area rugs. I called Travis County Health Dept and asked if it was legal for children to be confined in school buildings with asbestos. They said as long as it had been inspected and had a notice posted on the wall. In addition to the asbestos, it had black mold along the wall behind the sink and underneath where there had been water leaks. The air quality was horrible, and in Texas heat there was no chance of opening windows.
I had chronic headaches (probably from the formaldehyde and wall board chemicals), as did the children. These little darlings all lived in subsidized housing and poverty conditions at home, so they nor their parents never seemed too upset about the environment. Many of them had single moms and fathers who were incarcerated. Every day during my lunch break I drove about a mile to the Bank of America to sit in the quiet pleasant lobby and regain my energy to make it through the rest of the day.
It is said that “environment” is what shapes a child’s behavior. I wonder how long
Bill Gates would have allowed his children to remain in that gloomy toxic environment.
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Where is all that money going??? It is not going to students or to teachers to help them in teaching students or for fixing school infrastructure. But it certainly is going into the corporate publishing world via testing and testing related publications. It certainly is going toward corporate tax breaks which “give” money to support schools only when the money cycles back into corporate coffers… students study weather and the water cycle… how about letting them study the corporate profit cycle in education in social studies!
It is time for US citizens to look at the larger picture and so we can change “where the money is going” and put it back into the good of the nation rather than the “good” of particular individuals.
Here is a video I recently viewed on the subject:
http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/neoliberalism_youth_and_social_justice_20140314
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As the tech guy I was involves with teaching the kids and teachers, writing grant requests, research, purchasing, and discarding/recycling of tech related hardware and software.
In many ways we’re putting the cart way before the horse in the area of technology integration:
> The current internet requires lots of bandwidth that many schools don’t have available. And the conversions are expensive.
> Not everyone is tech savvy, which makes for inequality from class to class. And not all teachers/students have the up to date technology available at home, so it’s difficult to practice with the software and prepare (homework/lesson plans) or plan for the next school day.
> Many schools don’t have the money in their budgets for a tech teacher. Those that do still haven’t allocated time for the incredibly important areas of troubleshooting, maintenance, staff development, etc.
> Tech equipment is expensive. Tech maintenance and replacement is just as bad. Printer is cheap. Toner and ink are expensive and forever. A replacement lamp for a Smartboard is $250. Maintenance contracts are costly. Equipment goes out of date quickly and needs to be replaced with units capable of faster processing speeds. Companies that used to sell software in bulk with good discounts see greater profits in doing away with or lowering the discount rates. You can’t buy CD-ROMs or DVDs, anymore that can be used year to year. The optical drive will soon be a thing of the past on all computers. You have to subscribe on line. Which means you need high speed internet systems, requiring lots of bandwidth. The list goes on and on.
> As was mentioned in the original post: schools in dire need of repair and renovation are putting their funds towards technology, instead. It’s like giving diamonds to someone who’s dying of thirst in the desert.
Technology’s great but it’s not the be all and end all that it’s made out to be. Somehow we survive when the equipment goes down. And it does go down. That’s not to say that we should blow it off. There’s tremendous value in the medium. But it’s not “better” than the basics, as much as Arne and Bill would have us think otherwise.
Fact is that there should be much greater cooperation between vendors and the schools so that these technologies can become affordable. It’s not about profits. It’s about the kids. And administration needs to have the means to hire and maintain teachers who have the time and means to do the work that’s necessary to research, procure, maintain, and discard/recycle tech related materials.
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