Money, Power, Education (2/22)
For Monday’s class, the readings focused on how public schools receive their funding. The New Teacher Book provides some foundational stats as well as more nuanced insight about education’s depraved financial situation. In his piece School Funding Basics, Stan Karp states that state and local sources provide for 90% of school funding while federal funding only covers about 10%. This obviously largely impacts the students of poorer distracts. Sometimes the funding is so lacking that it’s not only unethical but actually illegal. Because funding is based on politician’s whims and biases and not actually student or school staff need, there is a lot of room to rob from education. On top of that, the “over-reliance on local property taxes also contributes to funding inequalities [...] with different tax bases” aka as long as so much of school funding is tied to private property taxes there will always be a gap in the quality of education in low-income, medium-income and high-income areas. This 90-10 (statelocal - federal) funding model is so problematic it makes me wonder what would happen if we flipped it so it was 90% federal funding and 10% state, local. Would we see the poorer states rise to meet the richer states? Not only does this mostly affect poorer, browner and blacker schools but it also majorly affects students with special needs. When reading through the history of policies that affect those with special needs such as FAPE, IDEA and others, the government has been slow and conservative when pushed to give more than the bare minimum. This reading also reminds me of Endrew F vs Douglas County Schools where Endrew’s parents were advocating that IDEA should grant their autistic school an education “appropriate” to his ability not just an “adequate” one that takes the least amount of resources/money. Unfortunately The School won the case and Endrew’s parents put their son in a private school that better supported his growth. But not all parents can afford to do that. The slashes to public budget make way for gross privatization which further stunts resources and puts communities in a type of capitalistic chokehold. Opportunistic politicians profit off of this systemic failing. Cuomo has cut billions off the budgets of the schools with the highest needs for a decade now. During the pandemic when schools were getting much-needed additional funding from the CARES Act, he slashed their regular education budget so to cancel out the additional help in the time of a crisis. Bill Deblasio has mandated a school hiring freeze for the last few years to pull tenured teachers out of purgatory at the expense of students learning needs. There is hope though, like the teachers in Chicago, we must continue to fight in solidarity. The other essay in The New Teacher Book, “Aren’t You on the Listserv?” goes into the reasons and remedies of the disparity in who’s parents are represented in school involvement. The majority of white people involved in this diverse school reminds me of the “Nice White Parents” podcast and how a small group of white parents took over the PTA of a mostly black school in Brooklyn. The teacher and author implements a bunch of strategies to make involvement more equitable and finds a lot of success! One thing she did was to make every home notice in both spanish and english and to put spanish on top. I thought this was cool and also made me realize my own small bias- whenever I fill out online forms I expect USA to be on the top of an otherwise alphabetized country list... and this is just one small way it is engrained in me the false narrative of US superiority.