In an earlier piece on charter schools, I suggested that we need to start asking school districts: How much is enough?
That is, if we want to get 100% of our educable students to proficiency in reading and math, how much would it cost?
If $15,000 per student isn’t enough, how about $20,000? Or $40,000? Or $100,000?
Last year I learned that the district wasn’t interested in spending less money to ensure an adequate education for Croydon’s kids. So I thought maybe it would be interested in spending more money to do that.
So last night, at a budget hearing held by the Croydon school board, I took my own advice. I asked the superintendent of the Croydon Village School (CVS) how much it would take to get all of the kids there reading at proficiency.
Here’s how I asked it:
If you were offered a budget of $1 million per student, you’d be able to teach all of the kids at CVS to read, right? So somewhere between the $30,000 we’re spending now, and $1 million, there’s some smallest number that would let you get the job done. What is that number? What would it cost to get the job done?
I wasn’t really prepared for his answer, which was that $1 million wouldn’t be enough.
Now, this is a guy who makes about $80,000 per year for one to two days of work per week. This translates to a full-time salary of at least $200,000, making him one of the highest-paid superintendents in the state — who, nonetheless, is running a school where half of the kids are below proficiency in reading and math.
And he’s not just a superintendent but a special education coordinator as well. So presumably, he knows a little about things like individualized instruction.
In trying to get him to come up with a number, I was very clear that the $1 million didn’t have to be spent during the course of regular school days. It could be used for programs outside of school. It could be used to teach each a kid’s parents to read if that was necessary. It would be enough to hire a reading specialist to live at a kid’s home if that’s what it would take.
But he admitted, in a public forum, that he wouldn’t be able, for $1 million per student, to teach the 21 students in CVS to read.
This all happened, by the way, just a few minutes after he had described himself as a ‘big idea guy.’ But apparently, the idea of teaching every kid to read is too big an idea, even for him. (By ‘big idea,’ he seems to mean things like getting a federal grant to buy violins and snowshoes for use by kids at the school or spending a few thousand dollars on a new reading assessment program that is already in wide use throughout the state.)
Sadly, the principal of the school agreed that it couldn’t be done for $1 million per student. As did a former member of the school board, whom I’ve written about before.
Now, what makes all this especially interesting is that RSA 193-H:2 says that,
Schools shall ensure that all pupils are performing at the proficient level or above on the statewide assessment.
So in a sense, I was just asking him: What would we have to spend to get you to stop breaking the law?
Now, maybe I’m being unfair, but I have trouble seeing any significant difference between $1 million isn’t enough money to teach a kid to read, and I don’t know how to teach a kid to read.
If you’re wondering why school costs keep going up and why that will never stop, here’s a big part of your answer right there. There is no amount of money so large that the people who are supposed to be teaching kids to be literate, numerate, and rational will not hide behind excuses for why they can’t really be expected to do that job.
District Meeting season is almost upon us. I hope some of you will try asking the same question at your budget hearings and annual meetings and report back with the answers you receive.
