It’s not enough funding or misused funding that’s the problem, it’s how the funds are being used that’s the problem.
In my former life I worked in education finance and its eye opening.
First… Fuck Pearson, Fuck Mcgraw-Hill, Fuck Houghton Miflin Harcourt. Also fuck the companies that sell testing templates as a consumable goods.
The three biggest issues are big education companies, grant limitations and SPED mandates.
First, big education: They lobby state governments to change curriculum, even when test scores had been great. “We can always do better!” This creates an endless cycle of states updating curriculum that’s not broken and schools shelling out huge sums of money for new textbooks or even worse the yearly consumables that seem to have infected every school system. These companies just always need to be selling and will strip every dollar they can from the budget every year.
Second, grant limitations: A large part of a schools budget are federal pass through grants. These can have many limitations about what percent is spent on supplies or resources and highly encourages paid hours for extra learning time. Extra learning time means kids are in school longer… Kids like adults are tapped out after a full day of school. Additional instruction time has extreme diminishing returns.
Third, SPED is Frankenstein’s Monster: While SPED is well intentioned and obviously needed, legality and loopholes has caused SPED programs to spiral out of control. Now basically anyone get an IEP if their parents try hard enough and being placed in SPED can grant real educational advantages. Not only can students get breaks on testing times and other performance breaks, being placed in SPED almost always legally creates a burden for that student to be assigned more and or more expensive resources. If a child isn’t placed in SPED parents can sue, and parents are winning more and more of these expensive lawsuits, causing districts to place more and more students into SPED. This causes a lopsided budget where a majority of the funds are being diverted to SPED students. Meaning non SPED have less resources, fall behind and then their parents often try to get them an IEP to be placed in SPED. It’s a real problem, with no great immediate solution.
Everything you described seems like funding misuse to me. Using public funding to funnel money to private interests is corrupt af. The teachers aren’t to blame here, this is just what capitalism does, it corrupts everything it touches.
Really only the first point is corruption and corruption can exist in any system.
A lot of it is misaligned priorities and people and institutions who are unwilling to talk about and fix the hard issues.
I am not a programmatic expert, but I would suggest allowing more educator autonomy and they need to rewrite contracts to allow bonuses or raises for high performing teachers beyond what most current union negotiations entail.
It’s not enough funding or misused funding that’s the problem, it’s how the funds are being used that’s the problem.
In my former life I worked in education finance and its eye opening.
First… Fuck Pearson, Fuck Mcgraw-Hill, Fuck Houghton Miflin Harcourt. Also fuck the companies that sell testing templates as a consumable goods.
The three biggest issues are big education companies, grant limitations and SPED mandates.
First, big education: They lobby state governments to change curriculum, even when test scores had been great. “We can always do better!” This creates an endless cycle of states updating curriculum that’s not broken and schools shelling out huge sums of money for new textbooks or even worse the yearly consumables that seem to have infected every school system. These companies just always need to be selling and will strip every dollar they can from the budget every year.
Second, grant limitations: A large part of a schools budget are federal pass through grants. These can have many limitations about what percent is spent on supplies or resources and highly encourages paid hours for extra learning time. Extra learning time means kids are in school longer… Kids like adults are tapped out after a full day of school. Additional instruction time has extreme diminishing returns.
Third, SPED is Frankenstein’s Monster: While SPED is well intentioned and obviously needed, legality and loopholes has caused SPED programs to spiral out of control. Now basically anyone get an IEP if their parents try hard enough and being placed in SPED can grant real educational advantages. Not only can students get breaks on testing times and other performance breaks, being placed in SPED almost always legally creates a burden for that student to be assigned more and or more expensive resources. If a child isn’t placed in SPED parents can sue, and parents are winning more and more of these expensive lawsuits, causing districts to place more and more students into SPED. This causes a lopsided budget where a majority of the funds are being diverted to SPED students. Meaning non SPED have less resources, fall behind and then their parents often try to get them an IEP to be placed in SPED. It’s a real problem, with no great immediate solution.
Everything you described seems like funding misuse to me. Using public funding to funnel money to private interests is corrupt af. The teachers aren’t to blame here, this is just what capitalism does, it corrupts everything it touches.
Really only the first point is corruption and corruption can exist in any system.
A lot of it is misaligned priorities and people and institutions who are unwilling to talk about and fix the hard issues.
I am not a programmatic expert, but I would suggest allowing more educator autonomy and they need to rewrite contracts to allow bonuses or raises for high performing teachers beyond what most current union negotiations entail.