Yes, school funding matters

If you want to deliver social services to disadvantaged kids, public schools are an amazingly efficient way to do so. You've already got a building designed to their scale. You've got a transportation network (buses) to bring them to the centralized location where services are going to be offered. You've already got a full staff of people (the vast majority with college degrees) interacting with your target group and able to provide intelligent insight as to what services they could benefit from. You've even got an institutional scale kitchen.

Now, you could take scarce dollars and duplicate this infrastructure off site, but why?

 

We just need robots to teach our kids in a standardized fashion, and thus eliminate the teachers and better yet, eliminate the administrators.

 

Maybe some of the money could go to Planned Parenthood and other organizations that would help keep ill-equipped people from having so many kids that they're neither economically nor intellectually nor emotionally prepared to care for?

 

Some school administrators don't like other agencies horning in on their turf.

 

Here's a public school example. My son decided he wanted to be in band in middle school but had only taken piano lessons. The band teacher said they needed bass instruments. So when he heard that no one played the bassoon, he chose that.

For three years he kept and used the bassoon the school supplied for free. It cost about $2,000. We are doing pretty well financially, but no way I would have spent $2,000 on a instrument he may get tired of when he was in sixth grade.

He leveraged that into getting into the best publich school in the state (a school that has a performing arts magnet) and a full scholarship to college.

We ended up buying him a bassoon when he got to high school, but one of the girls his age in the band used a school-supplied bassoon all through high school and got a music therapy scholarship.

The best thing you can do to improve public school is to make it a place where kids want to go -- for music, academics, sports, hot teachers, whatever.

 

Because public schools only have the kids for, what, 40 hours a week and 36 weeks a year?

 

And I will tell you I don't care. It does exist in practice and that is a very good thing.

 

That seems like another good reason public schools are a good place to deliver services, right? More summer school and after school and pre-school are exactly what kids from disadvantaged homes need.

 

DC public school spend nearly $30,000 per capita on education. Newark got $100,000,000.00 from Zuckerburg. Very little bang for the buck.

But let's be serious and fair. Everything matters. Money is important, so is family support, trained qualified teachers, administrators that put the focus on the schools not the administration.

But let's keep being honest. When we talk about underfunded, underperforming schools that get the headlines, we are talking about urban majority black schools or where there is a plurality where Blacks and or Hispanics are the predominant populations. And it can longer be said that these kids have no examples of success to show them that education is the key to a better life. Where African Americans are in the majority, African American adults are in positions of political leadership, not to mention a re-elected Black President of the United States. Mayors of Baltimore, DC and Newark have been black, mostly for 30 years. Only Baltimore has had a white mayor in the last 30 years of those cities. And he's was about as liberal as any in the country. Baltimore is as well funded as any white jurisdiction in the State. In fact, tax money from suburban jurisdictions are siphoned off and re-routed to Baltimore to make up local differences.

If you equalize the money or even equitably distribute it, urban black kids underperform. Deal with that at your peril.

 

One of the big problems with the Zuckerberg money was that so much of it was spent on all the usual school reform consultants and the community was left out of the decision making. It was a disaster. The so-called "school reform movement" is a cottage industry that serves itself and its hedge fund investors above all else.

 

Poor kids underperform.

 

I've read that, and I had a big issue with the failure to get the community 'on board' with the changes. Keeping parents informed about changes to the direction and circulum is important but damn it, they ended up bitching about a gift horse who turned out to be Secretariat who shat gold bricks.