Comments on: School of the Future Part 1: Funding

By: ktenkely

ktenkely — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 04:22:36 +0000

I am totally dreaming here but what if a portion of school funding was paid for by a product that schools produce? This would provide community buy in as well as student buy in to their education. I am thinking about a school that grew plants in the school garden as part of classroom learning. The vegetables, flowers, and fruit were sold to the community to raise money for the school. In a year the school raised $4000. What if every school offered a product as a result of learning experiences? What if we gave students $10 each and asked them to be creative and turn it into as much money as they could? We need to think way outside the box on this one. Our current system just isn’t going to cut it!

By: Andrew

Andrew — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 16:37:36 +0000

Jason -
While I agree that there’s a large dollar amount of waste in public school budgets, and I’d be more than happy to see the back of Office and Windows, focusing on those elements is like focusing on foreign aid as component of the federal budget.
The big cost drivers for schools are schools – buildings, transportation, personnel. Reducing those costs will require fundamentally changing how schools operate. I’m not of the mind that a teacher aide is more essential to a successful school than office staff or maintenance, and significantly reducing operating costs will require a reduction in all three, plus teachers, administration, etc.
Clearly this is a question of priorities, but to recognize the systemic problems in school systems and then call for more money into the same systems (aka the California model) is dangerously short-sighted.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 16:12:39 +0000

There’s a few systemic issues that aren’t covered by a simple flat tax.
First, locality and local control are central to the current conception of American public schools. The choice to fund them through property taxes is meant to enforce that notion, creating stakeholders out of the population served by the schools. A flat tax or income tax moves away form that model – either to a centralized “money pot” where each district is doled out a fixed budget (per student? per school? by residential population?), or a a smaller version of the same system (by state? by county?) If you walk too far down that chain, you’re back at the fundamental inequity of wealthy residential areas working from budgets that are orders of magnitude larger than poorer, more rural or more industrial areas.
The other major issue comes from the battles sure to be waged by localities and school boards over their rights to control the structure and content of a local school system. Moving funding away from localities moves the locus of curricular control.
There are many benefits to parents personally funding schools (either via vouchers or raw tuition), although equity and democracy are not among them. But my best hopes for restructuring how schools are funded involves a moves to smaller academic bureaucracies and some method for increasing parent/student mobility. Unfortunately I haven’t come across a method for doing that which doesn’t marginalize the students most in need of a robust public education system.

By: Sue Densmore

Sue Densmore — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 14:27:36 +0000

While I agree that there are improvements in spending priorities to be made in terms of software licensing and such, I don’t think this is the biggest funding problem.
I believe that our general population feels entitled to things being free of charge. Look at the flack being given to newspapers who suggest they might have to charge people to read their stories. It costs money to run those internet sites. Why do we not expect to pay?
This carries over into everything, and suddenly “the government” is some separate entity with its own bank. WE are “the government.” And if WE want quality education, WE have to pay. That’s just the way it is.
The schools are not seen as essential institutions that have to be kept going or everything will fall apart. Banks are seen that way – hence the bailout. Schools are seen as failing. So on top of the funding issues, or maybe underlying them, we have a PR problem.
People say not to “throw money” at the problem. But more money is exactly what education needs – to double the teaching staff and halve the class sizes, to provide proper tech and materials, and all those other things educators know we should have.

By: Jason T Bedell

Jason T Bedell — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 00:56:59 +0000

It seems to be that the biggest problem with funding is misspend and poor priorities at both the government and school levels. How many unnecessary office positions are in schools that could be used for another teacher, aide, or supplies? How much do we waste on Windows and MS Office, when free Linux or Open Office would suffice fine? At the government level, billions were spent on a bank bailout; barely a fraction is spent on education. If we, as a society, make education a priority, I think that the money would mostly be there.
Jason