The New York Times published a shocking expose of the dreadful conditions in America’s public schools, due to underinvestment in buildings, supplies, and personnel.
The stories told in this long article demonstrate the lack of concern for students and education, and the dedication of teachers willing to put up with these conditions. The schools have not recovered from the deep budget cuts that followed the recession of 2008-2009.
After you read the responses from teachers and see how poorly they are paid, and how much they must take out of their own pockets for supplies for their classrooms, you have to wonder why teachers across the nation are not walking out en masse and protesting to their state legislatures.
The Times invited teachers “to show us the conditions that a decade of budget cuts has wrought in their classrooms.” They received comments from 4,200 teachers. The Times published a selections of the submissions, and they are powerful.
By the way, the median salary at Facebook is $240,000.
These comments help to explain why teachers are walking out, striking, protesting, and demanding new funding for their schools.
Broken laptops, books held together with duct tape, an art teacher who makes watercolors by soaking old markers.
Rio Rico, Ariz.
Michelle Gibbar, teacher at Rio Rico High School
Salary: $43,000 for 20 years of experience
Annual out-of-pocket expenses: $500+
I have 148 students this year. The district skipped textbook adoption for the high school English department, leaving us with 10-year-old class sets, and we do not have enough for students to take them home. Our students deserve better. Our nation deserves better.
As I near retirement age, I realize I will retire at the poverty level. The antiquated myth of the noble, yet poor, teacher must go. I am passionate about my subject and my students. I am not passionate about living paycheck to paycheck.
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Tempe, Ariz.
Jose Coca, teacher at Kyrene Middle School
Salary: $46,000 with 12 years of experience
Annual out-of-pocket expenses: $1,000
The building smells old and dank. There are holes in the ceiling, skylights don’t work, the walls need to be painted, I still use a chalk board, but — more important — my students need new desks and computers.
I can’t speak for other school districts, but mine — in Tempe — can’t get new social studies books for students. Young teachers spend more out of their own pockets because they don’t have supplies stockpiled.
My pay is not keeping up with inflation. I have co-workers leaving midyear, or not renewing their contracts, and I work with a lot of older teachers that have maybe five more years in them. I also work with some who retire and return as workers for a private staffing company.
North Las Vegas, Nev.
Kelsey Pavelka, teacher at Wilhelm Elementary
Salary: $33,000 with three years of experience
Annual out-of-pocket expenses: $1,000
I have six laptops for 42 fifth-grade students (in one classroom) with many broken keys and chargers. My students are supposed to use these to prepare for their state test, which requires typing multiple paragraph responses. I crowdfunded to get 10 Chromebooks with all the keys on the keyboard, so they could learn to type on a machine that works.
Tennessee
Kathryn Vaughn, art teacher
Salary: $50,000 with 11 years of experience
Annual out-of-pocket expenses: $1,500
I am a public-school teacher in the rural South. I’ve had to become incredibly resourceful with the supplies. Teaching art to about 800 students on a $100-a-year budget is difficult. I do receive some donations from the families at my school, but my school is Title I and the families don’t have a lot to give.
I personally have to work several additional jobs to survive and support my veteran husband. We live in a modest house, I drive a 15-year-old car, and despite all of that, even with my master’s degree, some months we are not food secure.
Warren, Mich.
Elliot Glaser, media specialist at Warren Mott High School
Salary: $94,000 for 20 years of experience
Annual out-of-pocket expenses: $1,000
I work in a high school in a suburb north of Detroit. We have about 1,650 students, roughly 25 percent of whom are English Language Learners (students new to our country who don’t speak English well or at all).
After two years with no budget at all, this year I was given a little more than $500 for our library. I was able to purchase about 30 books. I am lucky, since our elementary and middle school libraries received no budget at all for the fourth straight year.
Story after story: the same reports of old textbooks, empty library shelves, obsolete technology, underpaid teachers.
What kind of a nation are we? What kind of future do we want for our children and our society? Why are we still spending millions of dollars every year on testing, when our schools need basic supplies for students and decent salaries for teachers?
By the way, the median salary at Facebook is $240,000. It shows what our society values. Not children. Not education.
All the focus on “school choice” is simply a hoax to distract attention from the billions of dollars that have not been restored to schools to reduce class sizes, update buildings, and pay teachers a professional salary.
“you have to wonder why teachers across the nation are not walking out en masse and protesting to their state legislatures.”
Actually, I suspect that a lot of them actually have already walked out..
It’s just that they left for good and no one keeps track of that.
That is undoubtedly one of the reasons so many schools have teacher shortages.
I’m sure Arne Duncan, Bill Gates and Raj Chetty would probably say “Mission Accomplished! We got rid of those bad teachers who couldn’t handle the testing!”
Here is my posted online comment in the NYT to this article:
Carol Ring
ChicagoApril 16
I read these stories and they make me really glad that I am a retired elementary music teacher. I used to spend around a thousand each year for materials since the districts in which I worked (5 total) in Illinois did not provide materials. I was a single parent who could barely survive.
I would occasionally take my young daughter to McDonalds and never order anything for myself. I couldn’t afford a meal.
One time I bought some individually wrapped chocolates for Halloween. I had two packages that were unopened. I returned them to the grocery store because I couldn’t afford to eat them. I remember the cashier made a nasty comment about me. I was angry that I was so poor. [I had a Master’s degree plus graduate hours.]
I remember one time it was payday. I had to put gas into my car to make it to work. I only had $.75 cents in my wallet so I put in $.75 cents. I made it to school.
I tried to save money and joined the credit union. One year I was able to save $50.00. This was in a total of 20 years of work.
I finally got disgusted and left the US and worked as an elementary music teacher in Bolivia for two years and in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia for 9 years. I, for the first time in my life, made a good salary working at the International School of Kuala Lumpur. I managed to save a considerable amount of money (for a teacher) and received a measly pension for my 20 years of work in Illinois.
And yet The Times has been cheerleading for nearly all the policies that have led to this situation….
Watch for the pivot.
They will claim “Reform did not fail. It’s just those damned budget cuts!” — ie, “It’s the implementation, stupid”
Diane, thanks for this good information.
The question is what will come from this? Do law makers now see how badly our public school systems are and how confused the reformies have made the situation. The reforms such as charter people and voucher systems, union scab teachers with little or no classroom experience preying on the weak.
Yes, public schools and their teachers have become weakened and the reformies are there to take advantage by trashing the people in the public school system while they are down. However, the tide is about to sway and watch out for the storm as public schools will rebound better than ever squashing the fake news charter school people and their bogus test scores with hand picked students.
What is happening in education is the result of right wing policies becoming mainstream in many states. The libertarians want a ‘small government.” Why not have a government that best serves the people rather than focusing on size? Small government abandons the whole notion of the common good. This is how they can justify sending children into dilapidated buildings with few resources and very little support staff. Nobody wants a bloated, wasteful government, but I believe most Americans are willing to invest in their public schools and their children’s futures. Voters need to stop voting for those that refuse to invest in the common good. Taxes are not “the devil’s work.” You get what you pay for, and the under investment in education has resulted in a dystopia for our young people and teachers.
Reminder of the 2017 Inaugural Address: “But for too many of our citizens, a different reality exists: Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; AN EDUCATION SYSTEM, FLUSH WITH CASH, BUT WHICH LEAVES OUR YOUNG AND BEAUTIFUL STUDENTS DEPRIVED OF KNOWLEDGE; and the crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential.”
I think you would be hard pressed to find a single teacher out of the millions who has NOT used their own money for classroom supplies.
Teachers paying for their own classroom supplies has been going on for so long that the public and even some school administrators just expect teachers to do it as part of the job.
On the other hand, I think you would be hard pressed to find a single politician in the long history of our country who has used even one dollar of their own money to pay for supplies for their public office. Many of them are actually stealing money from the public till.
POET: How about the huge waste of money that goes to the military? I believe in a just system when the military has to have bake sales and candy sales to support purchase of their military hardware.
The question is what will come from this?
Nothing
More requirements for teachers
More cuts.
Vouchers
More charter schools
Larger classroom sizes.
Fewer teacher benefits.
Another words, probably nothing positive.
Man, drext727, you sounding as pessimistic, or should I say realistic, as me with that post!
I concur!
I’m going with realistic.
I don’t see a link here to this New York Times article. Anyone know where it is and/or what the title of the article is called??
“What kind of a nation are we?”
One that values death and destruction over life and living.
“What kind of future do we want for our children and our society?”
It doesn’t matter what “we want”. What we will have is a society that is a caste system with the very few avaricious hoarding the majority of wealth and resources leaving little for the rest of us peeons.
“Why are we still spending millions of dollars every year on testing, when our schools need basic supplies for students and decent salaries for teachers?
Because the powers that be haven’t listened to, haven’t even attempted to get input from the teachers. Money talks. . . .and now the teachers HAVE TO WALK OUT en masse to get those powers that be to listen.
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
Do not forget to thank Charles and David Koch,ALEC and the Wal-mart Walton family and their wealthy old, white allies for the state of our community based, democratic, transparent, non-profit, unionized public schools.
I think the NY Times reporters see this as a Pulitzer winning story, even though it is very old news — as old as the text books in the picture.
It’s good they are finally recognizing the obvious, but it’s actually pathetic that took them so long.
When the plight of public s hoops gets a two-page spread in The NY Times, which usually gives star treatment to charter schools, I express gratitude, not criticism.
I guess you’re right.
Like expressing gratitude toward a doctor for finally giving you antibiotics to treat an infected wound rather than the leaches and maggots that he has given you in the past.
Quite apart from the ” late to the party” aspect, to attribute the condition of schools to “a decade of budget cuts” is “interesting”
given the title of the article: “25 year old textbooks and holes in the ceiling”.
I would hope that this journalist would follow this up with some in depth investigative reporting because, as every teacher and everyone who frequents this blog knows this is just the tip of the iceberg and there is much more going on than simply “a decade of budget cuts”.
All the testing and charters and contracts for tech gadgets and the rest of the stuff associated with “reform” has effectively taken money from schools and teachers that could have been spent on books, supplies, school nurses and psychologists, reduced class sizes, building repairs etc
And all the hundreds of billions of dollars that American companies (in name only) refused to pay in taxes on trillions of dollars held in offshore accounts COULD have been used to build thousands of NEW schools.
Of course, Microsoft and Apple and other companies recently brokered a deal with the Trump admin that reduced the tax rate from 35% down to 15%.
Just two companies (Microsoft and Apple) “saved” roughly $60 billion combined in taxes, which could have paid for 3000 new schools at $20 million apiece. How many books would that have bought? How many art supplies? How many science lab supplies?
But of course, that’s old news and the time has passed when those companies could have been forced to pay ALL the taxes they owed.
Where were the journalists at the NY Times and elsewhere who were willing to write these stories before they became old news? MIA, that’s where.
Forgive me for not being overly impressed by a “day late and dollar short” NY Times article that barely scratches the surface and includes a “conditions that a decade of budget cuts has wrought” claim that is laughably out of sync even with it’s own title.
SDP,
Of course I agree with you. But you credit The NY Times with having a brain, just one, that thinks through and interrelates all these issues. These are stories that appear in different sections by different writers, approved or suggested by different editors. The editorial board is all in for charters (one writer). The business section writes about tax cuts and who benefits. Education writers tell stories about different parts of the elephant. You see the whole elephant. I wish you worked at the Times.
I don’t expect the Times as an organization to have a brain.
I just wish someone (anyone) who works as a journalist at the NY Times had a brain.
I see no evidence of that and have seen no evidence in a long time.
It doesn’t take a genius to know that the last decade of budget cuts can not account for the fact that schools are having to use 25 year old textbooks.
All it takes is simple math. Let’s see, 25 – 10 = 15.
So even before the last decade of budget cuts, the schools were having to use 15 year old textbooks.
But hey, we can’t expect NY Times reporters to be able to do simple subtraction, can we? It seems to be asking for a lot to even expect them to be able to write a truthful statement not dictated by ideology and/or corporate dollars.
What a joke the NY Times has become. Judith Miller’s reporting on Iraqi WMD (sic) was just a symptom of a giant systemic problem which the NY Times has yet to address — and probably never will address.
Public education has become the way politicians avoid this problem.
https://nonprofitquarterly.org/2018/04/17/childhood-poverty-costs-us-1-trillion-year-researchers-find/?utm_source=cerkl&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter-04172018&cerkl_id=1693675&cerkl_ue=w1lgssYRVwl8i%2FeQbiv%2FZmiPaHKDzoxEmIN9XO1ojxA%3D
We have been in a fight with the Democratic mayor of Boston, Marty Walsh, to fully fund our public schools for the past four years. This year, 44 of our 125 schools will lose funds, but the mayor and The Boston Globe tout the nonsense that it’s the largest budget ever. So what? Unless costs never rise, each subsequent budget is larger than the last. What is the most galling is that the city is FLUSH with cash, undergoing a huge building boom, with receipts of some $77 million so the argument can’t even be made that there isn’t enough money. Walsh, who enjoys a strong mayoral system and appoints the School Committee, simply won’t spend the money on schools. (And he was just re-elected.)
I was enraged to see a Boston teacher included among the horror stories in the NYT. There’s no reason at all. Teachers, parents and kids beg on Donors Choose and Go Fund Me to get what they need for their education.
&, ironically, this, in the Tuesday, April 10th Chicago Tribune:
“Shelton’s Textbook Still in Use”
A 7-year-old is excited she has a textbook that was used by country singer Blake Shelton, but her mom is embarrassed the book is nearly 40 years old. Marley Parker saw that ‘The Voice’ star had written his name in ‘Look Away (Keys to Reading)’ in 1982. However, her mother did not share her daughter’s enthusiasm. Shelly Bryan Parker wrote on Facebook that she was embarrassed. The former teacher was critical that the textbook was still in use, & she voiced support for teachers who are demanding more funding for Oklahoma schools.
Thank you for posting this here. I wanted to comment on the NYT site but was too disheartened. The thing that kills me is that people criticize the school systems by saying things like, “just throwing money at the problem won’t solve it. After all we pay $xx per pupil!” As if all that money goes to each individual child and not to heating dilapidated buildings, fuel for the buses, the superintendent’s new stationery and furniture, and a million other costs. I wish we WOULD actually try “just throwing money” at our schools! Let’s try it and see what teachers could do with those funds. It wouldn’t be wasted, that’s for sure!
This sounds encouraging. It’s worth looking into for the future. I like Warren and Bernie but think Bernie might be getting too old. Who knows if Warren is running? Notice that Merkley and his children attended public schools!!
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Dem senator sees opening on left for possible 2020 bid
PORTLAND, Ore. — Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) is quietly making clear to liberal advocacy groups that he’s available for a 2020 bid, even as the Democratic field of potential White House hopefuls fills with better-known progressives.
Merkley, the soft-spoken liberal who sent his kids to the same public school he attended in a blue-collar neighborhood here, commands neither the star power nor the crowd-thrilling electricity of his close Senate allies, Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). But what he lacks in wattage, he has begun making up for with powerful new friends.
Every two weeks, Merkley’s Senate office plays host to a meeting between progressive senators — Warren is a frequent attendee — and the outside groups channeling Democratic excitement ahead of this fall’s midterm elections. The “inside-outside” meetings, as Merkley calls them, give liberal groups like Indivisible, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee and the Daily Kos a chance to compare notes…
Amid those politicians with larger footprints, how does Merkley stand out? He pointed to his story, a grandmother who lived in a boxcar during the Depression and a father who worked a blue-collar job at a mill, supporting Merkley’s family in the Portland neighborhood where he still lives.
“Because I live in a blue-collar community today, the same community, I can really bring, I think, a pretty authentic voice to the challenges of blue-collar America,” he said. “We’re failing working America.”
http://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/383664-dem-senator-sees-opening-on-left-for-possible-2020-bid
Has anyone considered that fact that holes don’t mysteriously appear in ceilings, and textbooks don’t get magically torn to shreds?
I’m not quite sure of your point rager. Please expound.