In response to this piece at the School Funding Shell Game site, one visitor asked for some specific examples.
That makes sense. It’s one thing for people to finally recognize that obsessing over school spending is preventing us from improving student achievement. But that realization leaves a vacuum: If we stop doing that, what should we do instead?
Aristotle said that ‘nature abhors a vacuum’. If you create one, something will try to rush in to fill it.
The same is true of politics. If you create a vacuum by giving up a bad idea, other ideas will try to rush in to fill that void — many of them worse than the original idea.
And since it’s easier to think up bad ideas than good ones, often the easiest way to get elected to office is to propose a bad idea that can be implemented quickly. And in the space of bad ideas, the easiest ones to think up involve taking money from one group of people to give it to another group. If the latter is substantially larger than the former, this is practically a recipe for electoral success.
Anyway, in answer to the reader’s request, here are some of the ways in which a school district could turn what is normally considered a ‘problem’ (e.g., shrinking enrollments) into an ‘opportunity’ by looking at it in a new way:
- Shrinking class sizes offer an opportunity to switch to multi-age or multi-grade classrooms, where older children enhance and reinforce their own learning by helping younger children; and where children can be grouped by what they already know (readiness), rather than by how old they happen to be (astrology).
- Eliminating grades with too few students can provide openings for town tuitioning agreements, which can provide a wider range of opportunities for individual children while reducing the cost of schooling each child.
- Renting out extra space in school compounds to businesses can turn a fixed-cost burden into a generator of revenue for a town or district.
- VLACS and other distance-learning technologies allow students to pursue the same curriculum regardless of where their parents have to move next in order to pursue employment; and can provide a wider range of educational opportunities than many students would find in smaller, more rural (or just poorer) school districts.
- Replacing paid classroom aides with parental or retired volunteers can increase community involvement in schools while simultaneously paring expenditures; and replacing mediocre teachers with video and online courses from world-class teachers can improve learning while simultaneously slashing expenditures.
- Focusing on readiness instead of age provides both impetus and opportunity to get students to take more responsibility for their own learning, e.g., reading their textbooks at home instead of sitting in a room waiting for the content to be explained to them. This can simultaneously improve learning and reduce the costs of both instruction and transportation.
- Focusing on achievement instead of time served provides an opportunity for advanced students to graduate early and get out into the world sooner, instead of waiting around (at taxpayer expense) until they happen to reach an arbitrary age limit. (Although a student can’t take the GED before a certain age, a school district is free to award a diploma to a student of any age.)
This is not, of course, a comprehensive list. It’s up to each district to look at its own changing circumstances, its own resources, and its own goals, to come up with a list of its own.
Now, it’s true that taking these kinds of actions would require school boards to be willing to (1) ignore some of the more onerous, intrusive, and senseless state mandates regarding what constitutes an ‘adequate education’, (2) stop conflating ‘education’ with ‘day care’, and (3) potentially cut some jobs.
But the alternative is to keep pretending that the world isn’t changing, thereby clinging to ‘solutions’ that are increasingly ill-adapted to our actual situation, and therefore both more expensive and less effective with each passing year.
Right now, most school districts (and legislators) are like the guy who walks into his kitchen just in time to see his wife cut the end off a roast and throw it away. When he asks why she does that, she says it’s because her mom used to do it. When they ask her mom, she says it’s because her mom used to do it. When they ask the grandmother, she says: ‘I used to cut the end of the roast off because my roaster was too small.’
That’s school spending (and school policy) in a nutshell, right there.
