Spending is Not Enough

California Governor Jerry Brown has proposed a statewide K-12 financing plan that would provide higher funding to school districts with greater incidences of poverty and lack of English proficiency.  If the proposal is adopted and fully implemented, the poorest districts could see their students receiving over $5,000/year more than students in wealthier districts by 2020.  This would be on top of current state and federal funding preferences for poorer California districts, which already receive 20% more than richer districts.

Leaving aside the important and complex questions about what equal opportunity means in this context, how much will this additional spending help?  What drives the savage educational inequalities between rich and poor, Asian, white, black and brown?  Although traditional education spending is a critical component of helping all American children succeed, real progress isn’t possible until community leaders and policymakers target this spending toward effective learning and address the broader inequalities that drive disparities in student achievement.

Finland, whose students regularly place at or near the top of International math, reading and science tests, offers interesting lessons on improving educational outcomes through the K-12 system.  Finnish teachers are required to attend a fifth year teaching Master’s program, which undergraduates can apply for only by placing in the top 10% of their college class.  In 2010, the acceptance rate at one of these Master’s programs was only 10%.  Basic funding is distributed on an equal basis to all schools in the country, while poor schools receive additional funds to pay for teachers’ aides and other learning supplements.  Finnish class sizes are also smaller.  Some or all of these factors have made Finland not only a world leader on test scores (even though Finnish kids aren’t required to take standardized tests), but also one of the most egalitarian nations on earth when it comes to the gap between high and low achievers.

Many of these policies would indeed improve U.S. education.  Most U.S. states have some amount of state-level foundation funding, but there are still vast disparities in total per student expenditures which are correlated with factors like student poverty and race. California’s progressive financing proposal is one attempt to address this gap.  Additionally, although teachers unions have made great strides in securing middle-class salaries for K-12 teachers, the relative compensation and prestige of the profession is not comparable to fields like law or medicine as it is in Finland.  A large national push to dramatically increase teacher salaries and strengthen credentialing requirements would likely improve the quality of educators in the classroom.  Finally, investing in teachers’ aides and hiring more teachers for poor schools would almost certainly improve student performance.

All of that said, U.S. students’ relative lack of academic success by international standards cannot be blamed on the formal U.S. public education system.  America’s gaping class, racial and parental education divides are an equal driver of differences in academic performance.  Researchers have found that, as early as their second birthday, poor children, children of color and children of mothers with low levels of education display lower levels of cognitive ability than their rich/white/educated peers.  The most pronounced gap is the rich-poor gap, but all of America’s inequalities are reflected in differences in academic ability and social and emotional intelligence even before children enter school.  These early differences persist or are even exacerbated over time.

The solution to these much more entrenched problems is a nationwide, community and workplace based push to improve early childhood education in low performing areas.  Labor unions should extend the reach of their internal programs to encompass the education of members on early childhood cognitive development techniques.  Community groups need to expand classes for young mothers on effective parenting, conduct literacy drives and expand access to books and learning material.  In the background, progressive forces also need to continue their fights to decrease economic inequality, reduce work hours (so parents can actually spend time with their kids), improve workplace flexibility and fight discrimination.

Centrists have been calling for a “Waiting for Superman” education policy that involves often ineffective remedies like charter schools, vouchers, attacking teacher unions, and occasionally effective remedies like raising teaching standards (and sometimes even pay).  What the best and brightest education reformers should be doing instead is fighting against the unequal economic system that produces educational gaps in the first place, building up community and workplace organizations to educate parents in low-performing communities, and pushing for policies like progressive school funding, more teachers in the classroom and an improvement in the status of the teaching profession.

Let them Teach

Teachers at Seattle’s Garfield High School are expanding their boycott of the district’s Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) tests.  The boycotters claim that MAP fails to identify specific areas of student weakness and doesn’t accurately assess student progress.  Additionally, the tests tie up computer labs for months and have a standard error larger than students’ expected performance gains.  Educators like English teacher Rachel Eells says they’d rather lose their jobs than waste any more of their students’ time.

This small, collective act of principle is important for a number of reasons.  First, the dissent of the teachers itself is commendable.  American authorities demand more and more obedience from citizens every year.  Police mercilessly crush Occupy Protests in the streets, TSA officers harangue travelers at the nation’s airports, service sector managers maintain near dictatorial control over their employees and school districts force educators to administer dozens of hours of standardized tests.  These teachers have rejected a direct command from district authorities based upon their principled belief that these tests are wrong.

The boycott also illustrates the importance of collective vs. individual action.  I’m not one to disparage the Scarface-from-Half-Baked school of one man armies, but there’s no way this boycott has an impact without coordination.  If one teacher stands up and none of her co-workers stand with her, you’re looking at a national geographic lioness on baby wildebeest type slow death scenario (represented in the professional world by a series of subpar performance reviews followed by a prolonged, awkward force out).  Instead, school district officials “acknowledge that some of the teachers’ concerns have merit and will be discussed as part of a long-planned review of all district tests this spring.”

Finally, this small band of Garfield teachers has inspired hundreds of others in Seattle and across the nation.  Nearly the entire Garfield faculty stand by the boycotters, teachers at three other area schools have voiced support or joined the boycott, Seattle PTAs and student organizations are on board and leading national educators like Jonathan Kozol, Diane Ravitch and Noam Chomsky have written in solidarity.

The boycott is important and praiseworthy independent of its strong argumentative merits.  The district Superintendent who paid for and instituted MAP in Seattle Public Schools also happened to be a board member of the company who sold the test, a fact she didn’t reveal until after finalizing the contract.  The MAP tests also appear to be particularly poor at assessing student progress.  In addition to these local issues, many national education analysts have attacked the proliferation of standardized tests in general, saying they eat into teaching time, destroy creativity and incentivize schools to defund music and art programs.  But arguments against flawed standardized tests can’t fight their own battles – they need an army.  Imagine the impact a dozen, a hundred or a thousand similar boycotts could have on education policy in the United States.