This one’s for the official Radio Sweethearts After School Makin’ Kidz Grumpy Club.
It seems there’s a debate out there as to whether schools should be included in the economic stimulus package currently before the Senate.
I’m having some serious trouble, I have to admit, following the entire debate – as far as I can see, everyone’s in pretty standard agreement: Schools need money, schools need a performance increase.
The debate comes in whether the economic stimulus package is the appropriate legislation for education funding. But there’s another debate entirely.
How do schools need the money to arrive? With strings or without? With a mandate to end bloated bureaucracy with such stringent measures to ensure its success that it only creates more bloat?
I know that frequently, because of the arcane strictures placed on economic funding, there are school systems which end up with the money to build new, state-of-the-art facilities, and without money to staff the building with teachers and faculty enough to serve the children who will populate them.
Schools don’t necessarily need more money (in some cases); schools need freer money (in all cases).
And maybe, in order to ensure that the details are worked just right so that schools can do what they need to do – and are held accountable – it would be best to have education covered in a second bill.
3 Comments
If you look at school buildings as pieces of infrastructure separate from the education system they provide, additional money in a stimulus bill would be hiring building contractors, not teachers.
Not every school needs a new building or repairs, admittedly; but as school funding in many cases is largely a function of property values, the collapse of the housing bubble will have some lingering effects that could be alleviated somewhat through stimulus.
The education system is something that needs addressing separately from the infrastructure aspect of it. Based on what I’ve seen over the past couple of days, it appears that education reform is likely to be Michelle Obama’s priority. Which is excellent, I think. Schools and education problems are one of the main driving forces of suburban blight, and efforts to fix the problem could make great strides in bringing cities together, instead of having them spread ever outward.
Study after study show that more money does not make a better school
I’m not arguing for more funding, just appropriate funding. A good school is a function of a healthy community, and in many cases that healthy community is lacking. In those cases, absolutely, more funding a better school will not make.
But a healthy community cannot guarantee a good school. Money must be involved. Teachers must be paid, rooms must be heated, students must be fed.
The school system in which my mother works receives a theoretically appropriate amount of money to meet their budget from the state. Unfortunately, this money comes with such strictures that it cannot be spent in an effective manner.
Think of it as the state giving the schools money to buy new buses, but takes away the money to pay drivers. Plenty of pizza for lunch, no oven to cook it in. Money to build a new athletic complex while math teachers get laid off.
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