The Republican candidate in my CA-15 district, Scott Kirkland, recently weighed in on the film Waiting for 'Superman', with an assessment about public education that was spot on. Mr. Kirkland observed that the film effectively conveys the core issues in public education and that we must ferret out what is both good for our pocketbooks and, most importantly, good for our kids. I couldn't agree more.
When it comes to what is good for our pocketbooks, many may be surprised with how our education system is funded. One might naturally assume that individual communities and states are in the best position to make decisions about how to provide public education for their communities. Local control, consequently, has always dictated public education financing. In fact, state and local governments provide over 90 percent of education funding. So when we talk about our deteriorating public schools we are talking about the failure of an enterprise run and funded by local government, with the Federal government more or less relegated to the sidelines.
On another financing note, let me add that Mr. Kirkland also got it right when he observed that our state and local governments are spending an average of over $9,000 per pupil, more than is spent by any other nation. Given the poor return we are seeing on our investment, what we are doing is clearly not working. This is the "fix" that is at the heart of the issue.
When it comes to what is good for our kids, the frustrating part is that we know what works. Mr. Kirkland notes that Waiting for 'Superman' does a great job focusing on research-proven approaches that enable kids to succeed: great teachers, more instructional time, early childhood education and wrap-around supports. The challenge, then, is to figure out how to fix our system of school governance and finance so that we can get these game-changing components into every one of our children's schools.
This is why I formed the Educational Equity and Excellence Commission, which is now housed in the Department of Education under Secretary Arne Duncan. The Commission brings together our country's best experts to tackle and ultimately fix the broken system of education finance, so that communities have the freedom and the resources to implement the solutions that work and meet the individual needs of our communities -- and each child.
The title of the film, Waiting for 'Superman', implies that students, parents and communities cannot wait for someone to save them, they must save themselves. As a former teacher and principal, it pains me to hear this. We cannot wait for our broken system of education finance to fix itself, nor can we wait for state and local government to figure out how to effectively implement winning strategies. My Equity Commission is one part of this puzzle but all hands are needed on deck. We must come together now, as a nation, and fix this crisis fast before our children have to wait any longer.
Yeah, I'm guessing its a little more affordable in rural China and Indonesia. Of course so is everything else.
We spend a woefully small % of our GDP on primary and secondary education. Therein lies the problem.
Chris Bowen
Author of "Our Kids: Building Relationships in the Classroom"
We have to come to grips with the reality that education has been undermined by tens of thousands of small town elites across the country that have given corporations public land, public exemptions on taxes and pollution, and happily accepted commissions for themselves while knowing that the tax base underlying education has been deliberately reduced. I did not appreciate this until I read Deer Hunting with Jesus.
URL for my summary review of Deer Hunting with Jesus:
http://www.phibetaiota.net/2008/07/deer-hunting-with-jesus-dispatches-from-americas-class-war/
URL for my reviews of 104 books on education generally:
http://www.phibetaiota.net/category/reviews/edugen/
URL for my reviews of 47 books on university-level educational matters (some overlap):
http://www.phibetaiota.net/category/reviews/eduuniv/
I would love to see the Huffington Post sponsor an Open Space Technology (OST) summit on education, and then make the published outcome a litmus test for candidates for office local to national....
The idea of an Open Space summit is commendable. But I fear that teachers, students, parents would get drowned out by the pinheaded reformer types.
The problem with “our failing schools” is that the people that are evaluating them have no idea what to do with their data. They describe the symptoms (drop out rates, lack of involvement, discipline, low test scores “and call this these the problems (there is a difference) then do not even do the analysis the tests were designed for and the politicians are just interested in dividing up the cash hence, all the “results” are zip codes.
No wonder we have intractable problems and blame game discussion. The adults involved do not know how to analyze data and the politicians want the cash to buy votes, at least they are thinking! The people who paid for the testing do not even have access to the raw data; it is proprietary to the company they paid to collect it! And this was the New Mexico Department of Education! To be fair 3 yr ago.
As for the research-based solutions of Waiting for Superman?
That's amusing.
Then, that's what I'd expect from a Duncan flunky.
Exactly how many real teachers are part of your Commission?
Thought so.
What state are you talking about? What nation are you talking about?
You can't possibly be talking about California.
Return on our investment? 319 LAUSD schools fall into the PI category and 34 middle and high schools are ranked as low performing by CA. 95% of those schools have been PI for 5+ years. PI stands for Program Improvement (it means it is failing miserably academically).
When listing the Graduation Rates of the Nation’s 50 Largest School Districts, Los Angeles ranks as the 48th worst of 50.
The CA Legislative Analysis Office (LAO) wrote a report on the broken funding system in CA. It is frightening to me that you think schools are getting $ 9,000.00 per student. According to the non-partisan LAO office, K-12 schools receive $ 7,417 per student. This is an 11% drop from 2007.
Ask him how unfunded mandates and standardized testing are sucking the money from our schools.
1. Schools are financed by Average Daily Attendance money from the state based exclusively on attendance and not whether the students are actually learning something before being socially promoted into the next grade without even minimal Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (CALP) or minimal math skills to succeed. Being asked to work at a level far beyond the students subjective ability is humiliating and leads to their disruption of the academic process with no support for teachers from administrators concerned exclusively with ADA from the state.
2. $9,000 is no where near enough to educate students who start school already way behind more affluent children. Geoffrey Canada discovered these children had heard millions of less words than their more affluent counterparts. Good education is more expensive in this country than others with a lower standard of living. Connecticut spends over $20,000, which is still cheaper than the $73,000 per year in juvenile justice.
3. Since school is property tax supported, more affluent communities have more money.
4. 94% of Whites are out of public education in LA. They don't want to pay for a system they no longer use.
5. The feds contribute significant amounts of money to public education in all states.
At perdaily.com we talk about what is really going on in school, not fantasies that charters do better or teachers are responsible for failed public education where they have no say..