Education Reform & Out of School Factors

The solutions are all things that I hear from the many people I know who teach in public schools. It's a unity horse among teachers that out of school factors have huge effects on school performance.

It's how the solutions are implemented that create divisions. Many people wonder why the government has to get involved in making sure kids get what they need from home when that should be the parents' responsibility. Well, of course it falls on the parents first and foremost, but not everyone lives in a household with model parents, and the kids born into those families aren't to blame for their situations and need that extra push to get on equal footing with their peers. We can't afford to wait around for their parents to suddenly become invested in their kids' education. And then there are those parents who do care but live in poor households. Community organizations are great but can be overwhelmed with kids in need and a lot of organizations aren't exactly swimming in pools of money.

I love this. The sentiment is true and it is true of all of us (regardless of political leanings).

When I served with AmeriCorps I was placed at a school with high-needs/underserved populations and noticed a lot of these similar trends and it's part of what led me to decide on social work rather than teaching as a profession. I couldn't do my job as an instructor because my students were tired, hungry, generally neglected, had overall tumultuous home lives, very little stability, and parents facing extreme financial hardships. The turn-over was incredible, and we had a lot of students come directly into 1st grade (K was optional) without knowing more than a few words of English.

Most of these things, quite honestly, were not even the fault of the parents, and obviously there is nothing the kids can do about it. My school actually had a really great, engaged parent population, and the district went out of its way to accommodate participation and feedback from monolingual Spanish-speaking parents so they and their children didn't slip through the cracks, which I thought was awesome. The bottom line is that even though the parents were working hard and doing their best, they were not able to provide for their kids what they needed to be successful students. These issues were the result of systemic inequity and poverty and a lack of adequate social programs, coupled with community organizations that were overextended financially and staff-wise. They just could not keep up with the level of need, and I'm talking about a community with a HUGE economic divide between rich and poor, so there were comparably generous donors than in other surrounding areas.

These multi-issue problems with the education system and with cyclical poverty in general (since so many of those issues listed above relate to poverty either directly or indirectly) is what makes it so hard for me to say, with regard to domestic policy issues - fix this but not that, cut this but fund that. Everything is so delicately interconnected and cuts to one area could have a devastating effect on performance in other areas.

Rugbywife, the NCLB funding thing was/is a disaster. Some states also have additional requirements for performance that come with financial losses for the school and it really puts a strain on the school having to improve more and more each year with fewer resources. Overall it is very reminiscent of the way US schools are funded to begin with. The property taxes as the basis for public school funding does nothing but perpetuate a cycle in which the students in need of the most support are served by the most financially strapped schools, people who can afford to move to areas with better school districts do, creating "flight" out of the worst communities and leaving the most disadvantaged kids with fewer options (in some ways the voucher system mirrors this) and driving up the values of the homes in the better districts, thus giving them more funding.

Out of curiosity, how are schools funded in Canada? Does it differ by Province? I'd be curious to know how it works and what your thoughts as a teacher are about the effectiveness of the funding structure.

I should add...in terms of what our test 'score'...we test literacy and numeracy in grade 3 and 6 and then in grade 9 numeracy again, grade 10 literacy. If you don't past the grade 10 literacy test by the time you are done school you do not graduate with an Ontario Secondary School Diploma (you get a certificate of completion of credits I think).

The goal is that students will achieve level 3 or 4 on the testing...that means a 'B-' or higher...each school board sets out their own goal in their Board Improvement Plan for Student Learning. Ours is that 80% of students will be achieving level 3 or 4 on their tests. My husband's school, in a very affluent neighbourhood, had a result of 92% of students achieving level 3 or 4 in grade 6 reading results...that means only 3 of their students didn't achieve provincial standards. My old school, in a slightly lower socio economic area, with a huge level of ESL and a Spec. Ed. population double the board's average had scores in the either the late 60s or high 70s for % of students at level 3 or 4. Because of that we were considered a "School in the Middle", which means teachers were provided with extra professional development and time to work on planning targeted interventions to improve learning (aka: test scores!). DHs school never gets that support.

I think this is partially why I don't *get* the whole voucher system. Schools in less affluent neighbourhoods do have lower test scores overall but they aren't funded differently here. They don't fundraise as much money as richer schools BUT the government here just put in a piece of legislation that states that schools cannot use money raised by the parent association to pay for things that the government should have been paying for/could have been paying for. Example: government spends money on computers...a school in an affluent neighbourhood can't spend 10s of thousands on computers when a poorer neighbourhood can't because they didn't raise as much money. They can buy team uniforms, or pay for buses for field trips, or other stuff (I don't know the list, I would have to search for it) but if it is something that should be paid for by the government a school can't use fundraised money to buy 'more' for their school. I am sure many people find this unfair but really it is about equity across the system.

That last bit at the bottom would NEVER fly in the US, but I love it! I probably just should have been Canadian.

I get the voucher system in that I get why parents concerned about their kids' education would want a voucher system or lottery system or charter school system to try to get their kid into a better school/district. It certainly does that for some students and when it does that is great. What is not great is that it's incredibly complicated to navigate, drains high-performing students and involved parents out of lower-performing schools and into schools with similar parent and student populations, and results in less funding for the poorer school districts because often students take "their" allotted student $ amount with them when they transfer schools, leaving their home school with even fewer resources for serving their remaining students. The voucher system, in particular, operates on the free market principle that schools with compete with each other to get the best students and that underperforming schools will die off and close as they are unable to sustain student populations due to students leaving for better schools. In reality this doesn't really work because schools are not businesses and public schools are required to serve ALL students regardless of ability or performance. This disadvantages students with disabilities or other school-related challenges in addition to low-income or students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds who may perform at a lower level due to a multitude of factors. Then there is the socioeconomic implications of the voucher system or charter school system in general, in which middle class parents are more able to navigate the application process/lottery process for the better schools, transportation issues with students going out of their "home" school and into a school further away (obviously some parents have greater ability to assist with student transport daily and many schools do not provide bussing for students "choicing" into district), and the fact that some schools counsel out students or families that they don't think will be high-performers or put restrictions on attendance by requiring parent volunteer hours or other involvement that disproportionately impacts low-income parents.

It is a great solution for the *individual students* who are able to take advantage of it considering that our current system is horribly broken, but a magic bullet that should be implemented system-wide as a fix for the education system as a whole? Please no.

I don't get ANYONE who says that the education sector can be run like a business. It just isn't possible, the two sectors are nothing alike. We dot get to pick and choose our students where I come from, you get what you get and you work with it. It's why I don't agree with merit pay in education, ever.