Yes, school funding matters

I disagree ... well, I remain unconvinced. This is, to me, an argument for simply more of the same.

 

That's exactly what the Revere, Mass., example addressed in the NPR story:

How Massachusetts Schools Went From The Middle Of The Pack To First Place

That magic wand did many things, but chief among them, it gave more state money to districts that educate lots of low-income kids.

In places like Revere, north of Boston, where nearly 80 percent of students come from low-income families, many of those dollars were spent on people: to hire and keep good teachers and give them better training.

Karen English has taught in the Revere, Mass., schools for 36 years.

Kirk Carapezza/WGBH
This is key, says Bruce Baker, who studies school funding at Rutgers. "If you have enough money to hire enough people to have reasonable class sizes and to be able to pay them sufficient wages so that you're getting good people coming into the profession, that's most of the battle of providing quality schooling."

Revere didn't stop there. It used the money to give its teachers better materials, too.

"We noticed the difference right away," says Revere's current superintendent, Dianne Kelly. In 1993, she was teaching algebra. "We adopted a whole new textbook series in the math department. The first year I was here, the textbooks I was using with my students dated — no exaggeration — back to the '50s and '60s."

Revere's schools also used the money to hire reading coaches, a technology team — some even lengthened the school day.

"I really think that the funding was like winning the World Series," says Karen English, who grew up in Revere and has taught there for 36 years.

Today, the district says nearly 90 percent of its high school graduates go on to some form of postsecondary education. That's up from 70 percent in the early '90s.

And it wasn't just Revere.

"When you look at Massachusetts' overall performance nationally, we have gone from the middle of the pack to the top of the pack," says Paul Reville, a former state education secretary who now teaches at Harvard's Graduate School of Education.

 

Might as well build dorms. Probably a better atmosphere for some kids.

 

You're probably right. Unfortunately, so many of these kids' lives are so royally fucked up that the more time they spend away from home or, more likely hanging around their neighborhoods, the better off they will be.

 

Cran, that's not remotely the kind of situation I'm talking about. This may be a district that serves a lot of low-income families (and "low income" is not "abject poverty"), but it's not a hole of dysfunction. It was well above average with regard to post-secondary attendance even before the "magic wand" (per the BLS the attendance rate was somewhere in the 60% to 62% range over the 1990-1995 window).

This is the kind of situation I'm talking about.

 

Schools are already in the social services business. Kids can get outside counseling, two meals per day, dental work, and physical exams inside school walls.

Improving educational outcomes is based on whatever is the current flavor-of the-month. Lived in an area where the junior high school originally did not have inside walls. Teams of teachers would oversee students. Guess that plan didn't work out.

 

There is no question that constant shifts in plans and priorities is a real problem in education. But where are those changes in priorities coming from? Are they coming from educators or politicians? Often, it is politicians setting that agenda and educators are simply forced to adapt. That is what happened in New York over the last few years,

 

OK, Revere, Mass., despite being 80 percent low-income, doesn't fit your definition of "abject poverty." But when the percentage of kids from a decidedly poor town who go on to post-secondary education goes up about 25 percent during a period when funding was going up at a rate of $5 million a year and being targeted directly at the classroom (teachers, books, class size), it's a pretty strong indication that increased funding, targeted directly at the classroom, can make a significant difference.

 

Fascinating.

 

Hey my old school district is only a half grade behind!

 

It's not.