To my great dismay, I’m entirely convinced that calculator instruction has replaced large chunks of my students’ “understanding of arithmetic and algebra”; I’ve observed a crippling lack of proficiency in basic operations involving fractions and integers, and a general unfamiliarity with the process of graphing functions. When all is said and done, mathematical instruction for many of these children seems to have been little more than “applied calculator” – wherein a new concept is just a few new buttons to become familiar with. In my Algebra II class, this sets up a wonderful irony wherein a bunch of students are conceptually fixed within the linear confines of the algorithm, which is both a brother to and the opposite of the algebra – both words are etymologically tied to Al-Khwarizmi and his works, though the former refers to a rote process while the latter refers to an analytic approach.

At the end of the day, I see content knowledge as arbitrary to student development. So, [course objective] sensitive perspectives of student strengths and weaknesses [...] seem meaningless to me outside of a narrow, self-referential context. As an Algebra II teacher, I do find plenty of constructed merit in [another Algebra II teacher’s] means-focused look at the Algebra I objectives – evaluating student mastery in the context of what is needed to perform well on future content objectives. I too spend considerable time re-teaching and re-imagining basic skills that the SATP has strangely promised students were “proficient” in. However, the basic skill I [...] worry about in the classroom are those that are necessary for digestion of the content strain that defines whatever class we’re teaching – i.e. Algebra I, Trigonometry, or Calculus. While I spend the first month or so of Algebra revisiting operations with fractions and graphing lines, I spend the first month of Calculus reviewing function shapes, translation, and domain/range. The latter is not a cumulatively more advanced basic skills set than the latter – I’m sure my Calc kids are just as horrible at adding fractions – it’s merely the appropriate language from which the respective course will build. Ultimately, I would rather tie student achievement to what I’m sure are less data-compatible concepts: such as creative analytical approaches, content-independent mathematical reasoning, and context-free fluency of application. In my mind, the ability to be successfully mathematical shares little more than coincidence with “equations and inequalities.”

In January, some students from Brown who were on a road trip stayed at my house overnight while passing through Jackson. One of them – Pete – was a math major who was highly interested in education and social justice (later, he mailed me a copy of Robert Moses’s radical equations as a thank you for my hospitality). While at dinner, he and his friends grilled me about the Teacher Corps, about being a first-year teacher, about educational equality, and all the usual things. At one point, Pete shared an anecdote (which I’m afraid I’ll maim in my re-telling) about a conversation he had with a (Brown?) professor, who was of the opinion that its was outright presumptuous, even to the point of being offensive, that programs like Teach for America essentially throw pre-selected smart people into these crumbling classrooms, with the idea that its better than nothing. I told Pete that I pretty much agreed, but what’s even more offensive, to the point of being criminal, is that programs like Teach for America can design a selection process and a bare-bones teacher-training regimen that will provide an annual crop of twenty-somethings that will be – at the very least – indistinguishable as teachers from their colleagues who’ve spent four years learning how to teach, and – in many cases – the TFAs and the MTCs will outperform these colleagues (despite the irony that – as Berry notes – these are sometimes moot differences when we’re describing shades of essentially abysmal performances). At the very least – and I’ve always valued MTC, TFA, and its brethren for this – alternate route programs are excellent litmus tests for the grotesque, grotesque impotence of schools of education. Whether their glaring counterexamples to the buffoonery of a education degree will ever bring academia into (a) a non-bickering realization that something needs to be done, and/or (b) a healthy competitive environment, wherein (and this is the crux of the offense) schools of education should be able to adjust, and hopefully – with all their, you know: resources, time, and personnel – out stride these “presumptuous” programs in the quality, longevity, and supply of their product, I don’t know. However, I’ll let the voice of my principal (in a letter she wrote for me to distribute on a recruiting trip) provide testament to what it looks like on the side of demand:

 

“As a principal, I can say unequivocally that one would rather have highly committed, community-minded teachers making a difference for two years than having either vacancies or filling our schools with substandard, under-certified teachers for five years. Quality teacher make a difference one student at a time, one day at a time.”

 

 

So true. Unfortunately, poverty hasn’t gotten the same rich judicial treatment that race did in the Brown hearings, where the Court ruled that even if schools could be separate and equal, there was still something inherently damaging to a child about growing up under the legal restrictions/impositions of a delineated racial identity. In this sense, the implications of race were realized as something more complex than the literal characteristics of an environment, something more indelible than culture. And, in this sense, Russell’s statement “the fundamental problem is poverty” lacks – at this point in legality and society – the same power and difficulty as a structurally similar statement, “the fundamental problem is race.” For, despite Russell’s good-reporter shtick of an anecdote here and a quote there, this article – as does, as far as I know, most articles with similar focus – fails to venture out of what is both the most superficial and the primary definitional facet of poverty: money. (Kozol, for what its worth, probes a little deeper, but is more of an observer than a concluder.)

 

When one says that “the fundamental problem is poverty,” one definitely does not say “the fundamental problem is money.” Which is why, as Rusell notes: “… despite the decade-long infusion of money, the quality of education in Edgewood has not kept pace,” and – quoting Jimmy Vazquez – “you can’t erase generations of poverty, oppression, and racism in a single decade.” This isn’t to say that funding equality is not necessary for educational equality – it most definitely is – but to hint that it is far from sufficient.  Just as equal facilities and opportunities for minorities were nevertheless lacking something critical in their separateness, so does a decade-long infusion of “equal” funding into an impoverished district leave much to be desired. Clearly, there is much less de jure about poverty segregation; even the sometimes xenophobic reliance of school districts on locally raised property taxes is constitutionally protected, by Texas v. Rodriguez. Nor is there really any corollary of cultural inertia between poorness and blackness. Nor is there really any framework for a political identity of the poor, unless you count (eye roll) Karl Marx.

 

In the end, I don’t really know how to reconcile with the Texas court decisions, and – as a consequence – this article. Part of my reluctance is a confrontation with the utter complexity of poverty. I mean, it’s quite disturbing – nevertheless true – that we can’t just fix poverty with money. What, then, is poverty? (I’m reminded now of the often referred-to study that cites the discrepancy in the quantity and quality of words that a child hears growing up in different class levels) Where does it begin, and where does it end? What does it mean to educate economically homogenous schools? A ten-year infusion of funds can’t correct the effects of poverty on educational achievement, what can? Do we keep on infusing money, or do we search somewhere else? If we search somewhere else, do we make sure the money is still there? To confront this confustion, part of me wants to see Poverty Studies departments start popping up in academic institutions, claiming their rightful place next to Gender Studies, Black Studies, Asian Studies, American Studies, etc. And yet, part of me wants to go back to worrying about education and race, education and gender, education and culture – if only because this latter desire, I sadly admit, seems much simpler.

I honestly can’t read stuff like this: “Studies show that leaders have a strong desire to lead”; “power is an ‘expandable pie,’ not a fixed sum.” Bad psych studies that focus on tautologies are a major reason why most educational academia is worthless.

 

I’m reluctant to fall into the non-answer of “some people are born principals,” which is just as impotent as the assertion, “some people are born teachers.” When you’ve bargained the democratic ideals of your society on an insistence that everyone has the right to an adequate education under law, you’ve created an artificial demand that eclipses any organically occurring instances of those people who are “natural” at a given task – whatever that means. This political conundrum is all the more glaring when Sanders notices that “the majority of educational leadership programs… lack meaningful admissions standards,” that “[educational leadership programs have] one of the highest acceptance rates in all academe,” that “too many leadership programs have become little more than diploma mills,” that – after a 1987 observation that “out of 500 or so graduate programs across the country, roughly 300 should be shut down altogether” – things got worse. This leads one to meta-wonder: who’s leading these leadership travesties? And to further wonder: why doesn’t anyone (besides people in the education field) seem to notice/care?

 

Perhaps – ignoring Levine completely – becoming a school administrator is not an inherently – or at least primarily – academic task (Sanders notes the hope for a “retired admiral, basketball coach, or CEO” to fill in our vacancies).  But this is more of a question of what is and is not academic, or – more precisely – the best way to respond academically to a certain civic desire. Because, from certain vantage points of “academia,” a MBA isn’t the most academic or pursuits, but its certainly found a way to be rigorous within an academic setting, and be highly competitive and highly valued. However (and my partial knowledge of economics will hamper me here), the competition and need for a MBA exists in a much less regulated/mandated employment sphere than that of public education; no one decided that every citizen in a given state needs to attend – for 13 years of his or her life – an institution run by someone running a MBA. If so, would there be enough MBA’s to go around? Would there be enough good ones? Wouldn’t this unnaturally fixed demand – consummated via government contracts – allow for unnatural prices?  If every community had to purchase an employee with a certain certification for a position that had to fill by law, would they value that certification? That person?

 

It’s the sort of irony that you get used to – that academic courses for people that run schools (i.e. teacher and administrators) are almost universally useless.  I wonder whether Mr. Curlee’s certification classes were in any way helpful for him becoming good principal. I wonder whether you could create an environment of academic rigor that would allow my principal to become as professionally competent as Mr. Curlee (as I know she wants with all her heart to be). I wonder whether you could create an environment wherein Mr. Curlee could have achieved his competence faster. I believe all of this is possible; I’m afraid of its probability given an environment where artificial need and little competition hinders any naturally occurring quality control from a market perspective. Calling all retired admirals and basketball coaches…

Simply put, if we are to confront the achievement gap, it may be more appropriate, in light of The Coleman Report, to renegotiate our concept of “equal educational opportunities for individuals by reason of race, color, religion, or national origin” – and, by that token, the very nature of “academic success” – given that black children, as noted in this article, start out school trailing behind their white counterparts. It may just be the case, then, that institutionalized education beginning at age 5 is not the great equalizer we all want it to be – at least within the current framework. Instead of calling for a reinvention of the concept of “school,” or “opportunity,” or “ability” – which seems to be at the crux of the effective conflict at hand – Viadero’s article prefers to summarize a short history of the Coleman Report’s controversy, scrutiny and eventual acceptance at a sociological touchstone in the educational/scientific community. Her article – true to the field – stays within the terrible unease that results when one must face the facts that schools don’t do very much, if we are to understand the productive role of a school is somehow related to the concept of social/intellectual/economic mobility. What bothers me is the insistence that an institution that does level the playing field of opportunity and achievement must look like a school, with perhaps a little more salt – or a pinch of some other ingredient that will give it that kick it needs (I imagine here a Secretary of the State Willy Wonka, played by Gene Wilder, dropping a boot into a steamy cauldron). To me, things like the Coleman Report (coupled with a year and a half of teaching in public school) make it all the more apparent that – if we are serious about engaging the disease within us that is an achievement gap – the “oversimplified” utterance that “schools don’t matter” hits the nail on the head: schools as we currently imagine them do little more than have a “uniform change” on students, when what we want is a different change for different people, specifically the type of differentiated change that allows black kids who start out school trailing behind their counterparts either (a) catch up, or (b) not have the misfortune of starting out behind. In either case – and the inertia of the overstuffed, convoluted educational words against this infuriates me – the institution that can provide changes (a) or (b) above must – by mere fact of the “uniform change” we now observe – look, feel, and work nothing like whatever it is we now call “school.”

 

Furthermore, a question begs to be answered: at what point do students have the freedom to fail? If it is increasingly the responsibility of an institution to ensure that each student has documented progress of this and that, higher ed communities will – as the high schools have before them – risk the intellectual autonomy of successful/proficient people for the benefit of nailing down the problem areas. At some point, if a student shows up to Harvard, or UMass, or Amherst, or BC, or Tufts – and decides to waste his/her time there, then we need to be able to say that he or she failed to engage in his/her educational opportunity, at least as much (but perhaps more) as the institution failed to engage in him/her.

 

The educational paranoia of environmental determinism – which seems to imply more and more that a student’s success is wholly predicated on the constructs of the environment surrounding – seems to wipe away any intellectual agency – and thus responsibility – from that student. While it is reasonable to give significant weight to controllable environmental factors that influence student proficiency at the high school level (though the Coleman Report article seems to imply that the controlled environments within a school building seem to do little to alter student proficiency in any form-fitting way), it becomes considerably less reasonable at the undergraduate level.  The problem is that while we – as human agents – can’t deny the fact that sometimes students will make a choice to not participate/not engage/not behave/not learn, we – as educators – live in a world where that choice is viewed as predominantly the result of our own lack of urgency to “search for the best possible methods to educate… students.” So, to revisit the concept of de-liberaling the “liberal arts,” any standardized infusion of “the National Survey of Student Engagement,” “efforts [of the college to] assess student progress toward generally accepted goals,” or “training in classroom teaching” must be treated with caution – as I’m sure it would at many of our strong liberal arts institutions – lest it mangle the fabric of intellectual freedom, which – in my mind – should not in general be institutionally wrested from students or faculty.

 

Now, this is all not to say that the assessment of an higher-ed institution’s effectiveness should go unscrutinized, for our means of evaluating a college or university certainly needs to mature past the laundry list of “tuition, financial aid, facilities, and the like” – which reminds me of the pre-MAEP means of evaluating the quality a Mississippi public school (Does it have books? Does it have desks? Does it have teachers? Then it’s doing fine). Furthermore, Bok is certainly sensitive to the concern that a higher ed institution’s worth should not be weighed upon “how smart the students were when they were enrolled,” and rather the magnitude of the college or university’s assistance in their own intellectual development. Yet,  the necessity of reform at the undergraduate level is clouded with the failures of reform at the high school level – and the it’s unclear whether it’s prudent to embark on a engagement with the former without a sobering analysis of the latter.

An anecdote: this past Wednesday’s Civil Rights/Civil Liberties Club went extremely well. The students inquiry and response moved in and out of surprisingly uncharted topics: sexuality rights (i.e.: the case of student being suspended/expelled for affirming a non-traditional sexuality; the sociolinguistic effect of “that’s gay”), disability rights (i.e. why do the deaf and blind get their own school, but other disabilities are in general education buildings), gender rights (i.e. various analogies between the social place of disability and social place of femininity).  However, the conversation turned – as it always does – to race and educational equality. We have been working together for the past months to produce a cross-community activity with students from St. Andrews. Jake and I have recently befriended two local lawyers who happened to be the parents of the senior class president and St. Andrews, which has allowed a lot of positive momentum to be built on their side too. But at Jim Hill, we seem to be going in circles. Sadly – and naturally – we don’t seem to want to progress on the cross-community action before we have a better sense of what these two communities are, and how they’ve become this way. During this last meeting, we again discussed the issue of St. Andrew’s resources, class size, grounds, economics, etc. A girl named Jessica Jordan spoke up, effectively asking, “Well, if they’re such a good school and they care about diversity, why don’t they come to our middle schools to tell us to come there.” This is where the anecdote comes back into the Reading Wars: the Admissions Director of St. Andrews had written a letter to the JPS school board to the effect of “lets us come in and promote St. Andrews to your high-achieving students” (who otherwise would end up at Jim Hill’s in-name-only IB Program, or Murrah’s tenuously hallowed halls). The school board told her to take her business elsewhere, adding overtones of accusation at treason; the Admissions Director had been at one time associated with Parents for Public Schools, and had sent her children through JPS up until the high school years.

 

 

 

Clearly, there are gross structural inequalities in the educational landscape of Mississippi – and these conditions function very well with patterns of racial difference. Speaking from statistical analysis, the Mississippi Board of Education “acknowledges that there is a statewide crisis of insufficient numbers of teachers in the schools… and that Mississippi schools rank among the lowest in the United States in teacher salaries, per pupil expenditures, and student performance in standardized testing.” (Lambright, 2001, 6) While these numbers themselves are devoid of racial indicators, there’s much to be read into the fact that, while the total black population in Mississippi is 36.3% (2000 Census, in Lambright, 2001), black students comprise 55% of statewide enrollment in public schools and 80.3% of these students attend de facto segregated public schools (Hacker, in Lambright, 2001). For their part, those white students of Mississippi residing in areas where the black population exceeds 25 to 35 percent of the total population (Lambright, 2001) largely attend private “segregation academies,” remnants of “the largest white abandonment of the public schools in any American state.” (Callaway, 1993, 43)

Nsombi Lambright claims that “the white establishment continues to control access to knowledge, capital, and the franchise in order to maintain a dual school system.” (2001, 5) While I tend to agree with this on a visceral level, I’m critically interested in the terms of and motivations for this control. As the Civil Rights Movement made a legal presence of desegregation, the response by would-be segregationists (plenty of whom in powerful civic positions) to preserve a dual system in Mississippi had to become more indirect, more elusive (Brown, 2005). Furthermore, I’m under the impression that, in controlling or attempting to control the educational future of the African-American population, there is some sort of benefit to the “white establishment” beyond the preservation of Old South traditional values – namely, the preservation of an economic structure that benefits from a large number of poor, uneducated African-Americans.

These are the facts and premises guiding my research. What will follow is a brief overview of three cases where financial interests intersect – both directly and indirectly – with public education. Furthermore, as the education I’m primarily concerned with is public, so will the money be. The interests of tax base and budget control arise time and time again when researching post-Brown educational disenfranchisement. The first overview is of a national/cultural structure tied to urban sprawl; the second two are presented as rather Mississippian phenomenon.

 

Lizabeth Cohen uses New Jersey – “the quintessential postwar suburban state” (2003, 197) – to analyze the civic cost – financial and social – of so-called “white flight” from urban areas. While ostensibly promising an egalitarian promised-land for the honorably upward-mobile, the very ontological terms of postwar suburban communities are riddled with a priori inequality – e.g. not everyone can be upwardly mobile. As a result, “new kinds of hierarchies” (Cohen, 2003, 200) surface, segmenting the masses – first on economic, then on racial terms.

As large lot zoning locks out lower income groups, and locks in low population density, the suburbs benefit and the city suffers. Cohen shows how intense localism in New Jersey kept property tax (paid at the municipality, not state, level) in place as the leading source of municipal funding – a situation that favored the high-value, low density lots of the suburbs. So, the cities end up “paying higher taxes on… less valuable property and getting poorer services in return,” (Cohen, 2003, 232) and the name of the game in New Jersey – a state void of income tax until 1976 – becomes property value, which is in turn linked – via fear tactics – to the racial composition of a population (Cohen, 2003).

In his autobiography, Amiri Baraka notes “Newark is a colony… where white people make their money to take away with them” (Baraka, in Cohen, 2003, 226). With an overwhelmingly white population commuting from the suburbs to make their income-tax free fortunes, leaving Newark’s minority-heavy, low income core to fend for itself – this certainly seems true. At the time, minorities couldn’t reside in the suburbs even if they had the necessary financial means. For, in the name of property value, many African-American and Latino would-be homeowners were prevented time and time again from purchasing property in all-white suburbs. The reason is drawn out quite clearly in the National Association of Real Estate Boards’ Code of Ethics, pre-1950:

[A] realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood a character of property or occupancy, members of any race or nationality, or any individual whose presence will clearly be detrimental to the property values in the neighborhood. (in Cohen, 2003, 219)

As Robert Wood notes, this creates a situation where “[for the homeowners] to be liberal in their attitude toward lower-income newcomers, to strive for heterogeneous neighborhoods, to welcome citizens regardless of race, creed, or color… is to invite financial disaster.” (in Cohen, 2003, 253) All this – large lot zoning, dominance of property tax, and all-white suburbs – had clear effect upon educational opportunity: by 1990 (re: by the time most of the legal substructure for these inequalities had been cleaned up in the New Jersey Supreme Court), “the average disparity between rich and poor districts had grown to $1400 a student… from $248 in 1975.” (Cohen, 2003, 246)

 

In 1969, the Supreme Court ruled in Alexander v. Hamilton that the State of Mississippi had hardly followed the Court’s mandate in Brown II (Mississippi Teacher Corps (MTC), 2001) to integrate the public school system with “all deliberate speed.” Mississippi high schools had, in fact, barely budged from their segregated roles. So, when faced with a court order for immediate integration – and, to a lesser extent, when faced with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 – widespread “white flight” occurred in the state, though not particularly in suburban residential patterns (there were few urban areas, save Jackson, to flee from). Rather, white communities spontaneously developed a rash of “segregation academies” – private, non-denominational schools with white-only admission policies (MTC, 2001). As a result, the dual system resurfaced in Mississippi, under more legally elusive terms.

In her 1993 thesis, Mississippi’s Segregation Academy Movement, 1954-1970, Michelle Callaway gives a clear run-through of the immediate legislative maneuvers taken by the State of Mississippi to preserve segregation, and the judicial counters by the Supreme Court to chip away at their defenses. In an effort to save needless prose-welding, I’ll provide a chronological list of important legislative acts and court cases, post-Civil Rights Act (1964) and post-Alexander v. Holmes (1970) – with a focus on those of fiscal consequence. As Callaway notes, “politicians devised two types of legislation to counter integration – laws designed to abolish the public schools and laws created to financially assist or encourage private school growth” (1993, 7); I am concerned primarily with the latter.

 

1964 – Senate Bill 1501: authorizes State Educational Finance Commission to provide $150.00 in tuition to all MS children who wish to attend non-sectarian private school (non-sectarian/non-parochial to avoid church-and-state conflict)

1969 – 29 January – Coffey v. State Educational Finance Commission: rules that Senate Bill 1501 fosters the creation of private segregated schools.

1969 – 20 September – Senate Bill 1548 and House Bill 67: $150.00 loan dispensed to students attending non-public or non-sectarian schools. Loan forgiven if students remain in MS after graduation. The Bill also recommends a tax credit program for those individuals who contributed money to educational programs (e.g. private schools). Note: in most cases, these tuition grants relieved 50% of tuition charges and in many cases over 80%.

1970 – 19 September – Senate Bill 1548 and House Bill 67 found unconstitutional.

1970 – Green v. Kennedy: establishes that US Secretary of Treasury and IRS can not grant tax exempt status to racially discriminatory private schools. This is a response to MS legislative maneuver to grant up to $500.00 in tax deduction to parents sending their children to private schools. By 5 October 1970, only 9 of the original 41 schools questioned by the IRS maintain tax exempt status. (Callaway, 1993, 7, 11, 13-15, 18, 20, 90)

 

Callaway notes, “despite the federal court’s intervention, Mississippi experienced a phenomenal growth in segregation academies form 1964 to 1971.” (1993, 22) These start-up private schools struggled to find a physical space to operate, to stay financially solvent, and to provide sliding-scale tuition for “less fortunate” white families. In a pattern similar to that outlined by Cohen in A Consumer’s Republic, per capita student cost increased in the public schools (same budget, less children), but the amount of money local school districts received decreased (white flight, property-tax, budget contol) (Callaway, 1993, 33). However, in a pattern contrary to the commerce/commodity friendly foundations of Cohen’s Republic, the extra financial strain put on middle- and lower-class white families by segregation academies drained the state’s sales tax receipts (Callaway, 1993, 41).

 

In the introduction to “Community Organizing for School Reform in the Mississippi Delta,” Nsombi Lambright highlights the structural components of Delta educational inequality. Of particular note is the following: “The private prison industry is the fastest growing industry in the state and prisons are competing with other companies for government contracts… The state is relying on the continuation of the cheap labor force and prison occupancy to continue this system.” (Lambright, 2001, 3, my emphasis) This is a particularly distressing comment when coupled with the information regarding the drastically poor quality of Mississippi schools. Furthermore, the foreseeable incentives of cheap prison labor in the Delta allow an even more glaring perspective on the following: (1) over 96% of White children in the Delta attend private academies, and (2) representation on school boards is overwhelmingly white (also, board members are often appointed rather than elected) (Lambright, 2001). Given the direct linkage of schools to the criminal justice system, the implementation of corporal punishment in the State of Mississippi, and other trends supporting the criminalization of students (Lambright, 2001), it is perhaps not surprising that budgetary and disciplinary policy decisions are controlled by a dominant population that has little to no familial/cultural relationship to those being affected by policy decisions, and a dominant population that in some part benefits (perhaps disproportionately) from industrial growth tied to criminal labor force.

 

Brown, Kevin (2005) Race, Law and Education in the Post-Desegregation Era: Four Perspectives on Desegregation and Resegregation. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press.

 

Callaway, Michelle (1993) Mississippi’s Segregation Academy Movement, 1954-1970 (Master’s Thesis). Oxford: University of Mississippi.

 

Cohen, Lizabeth (2003) A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America. New York: Knopf.

 

 

Mississippi Teacher Corps (2001) Delta Autumn: A Guide for First-Year Teachers in the Mississippi Delta. Oxford, MS: Mississippi Teacher Corps.

 

 

 

 

(1)    create a minimal physical core of usable, flexible, and negotiable information

(2)    align libraries with the contemporary benefits of simultaneity and the considerations of obsolescence; this will of course allow an amount of research agency previously unavailable to students in a static physical collection, but this is an energy which can be responsibly cultivated.

(3)    provide room for modest, relevant growth in those areas of interest voiced by the faculty and student populations. The library should also be interested in altering itself with the trends of this growth, expanding and contracting its collection with some healthy scrutiny.

 

 

Some unavoidable, critical problems with lockstep pay:

-    it encourages older, ineffective teachers to stay in the classroom (this problem in compounded with the relative difficulty involved in firing a teacher)

-    there is no realistic difference in pay between a highly successful teacher and a highly unsuccessful teacher (unless the unsuccessful teacher is performing at such a low level as to prompt a nonrenewal of contract. This, as I’ve observed, is unlikely to happen, since (a) there is currently no functional definition of teacher success, and administrators are cursory at best when evaluating staff, (b) bad teachers are not necessarily unintelligent ones; they know how to both underperform and stay hired)

-    it discourages young teachers from staying in the business in the short term; the frustrations of the classroom often quickly eclipse miniscule increases on a moderate salary, especially compared with the different pay structures and stress levels of other professional opportunities

-    it encourages the academic community to lower standards for degree conferring, as the only realistic jumps in pay come when a teacher acquires a higher degree qualification. Since degree-jumping is the sole venue for augmenting the financial destiny of a teacher, it becomes reasonable that a teacher would seek out the least rigorous means for acquiring degrees, and it becomes reasonable that the academic sector – acknowledging the ubiquitous high demand for degrees – would capitalize on this by conferring degrees in the most profitable of ways, especially in the face of two maneuvers by the education sector to adjust to teacher need by making it more profitable in the short term within the lockstep structure: (a) low accreditation standards, and (b) little to no investigation at the hiring level of the contrastive value of degrees between institutions.

 

I discussed payroll financing with my father, who is an administrative-level commercial real estate banker, and who serves on the board at the Urban Community School, a K-8 charter school in Cleveland, OH. While the pay structure at Urban School is in the traditional lockstep mode, my dad had some interesting things to say about the evolution of payroll financing in the banking world, and how it may be transferred to the educational sector. Throughout the whole conversation, two things kept coming to mind: (a) the extreme reluctance of some progressive school reformers to collaborate with business leaders (to do so seems a move relegated to the conservative elements of school reform), and (b) the amount of sense my dad seemed to be making (though perhaps there’s a son’s bias at work). Here’s what I’ve gotten out of it:

 

a. Base Salaries:

From a worker’s perspective, base salary at the entry level of teaching doesn’t seem to be a massive problem (though they could be higher). Beginning teacher salaries are moderately – though not impressively – competitive in and of themselves; what they lack are attractive avenues for growth – both in terms of venues for increased yearly return and one-off yearly incentives. As utilized in Jackson Public Schools, the lockstep pay scale seems to only increase teacher pay each year at a 2% rate, which more or less adjusts for the cost of living to match inflation. While this is a necessary yearly adjustment, it does little to (a) encourage teachers to stay employed in their schools if given other options (because teaching is in general more stressful than other jobs with similar pay) (b) encourage teachers to perform well in their schools if given other options (since they are not rewarded for performing well). The issue is not about whether or not we need to increase teacher pay, its about how to do it in the most rewarding and productive way. Upon hearing of this project, a friend of mine – also in teaching – quickly insisted that I put every dollar and cent of my $25 million into teacher salary. His intentions carry much weight. He – in essence – asked me to imagine a school system where real competition for teaching positions (now desirable for a sufficiently competitive economic status) provided administrators the safety to let go the teachers who were underperforming, and the benefit of quality control (which would most likely spring up with increased demand for teaching positions).

 

The fact that inflexible, moderate teacher salaries are not “sufficiently competitive” with other professions – especially at the entry-level – may provide for the fact that private school systems seem to often provide higher quality educations with lower teacher salaries. That is, public school positions may be better paid, but their salaries are not sufficiently high enough to naturally draw a higher ratio of quality education-minded workers than private schools, whose workers often have ulterior motives for a pay cut that is obviously overshadowed by the relative undesirability of the public sector (again, this undesirability is in part due to the fact that a teacher’s salary is pittance anyway, so it seems of nominal financial difference to teach in an environment where one wants to teach for the aforementioned ulterior motives). In fact, the travesty of teacher salaries often seem to draw an unsavory amount of workers for whom an education position is their highest market value – who view teaching as a lesser evil of sorts (reminding us of the adage: “those who cannot do, teach.”) Given the low standards of education degree programs, and the tragic standardized test scores of applicants for these degrees, (the people for whom education is a “best option” comprise a dismal talent pool for school systems. Needs to reform pedagogy instruction aside, the only way that this talent pool will improve is if teaching becomes more competitive with other professions on a reward level. Our societies reliance on “sacrifice, moral duty, and motherhood” will not cut it.

 

b. Performance Pay: