Shame on you for working to improve your local school!

Parent Cafe
21

This is not about volunteering or reading to kids. It is about inequities in funding. Mom2twogirls gets it.

It is just plain improper for parents to fund a library teacher. That is part of a public school budget that needs to be publicly funded. This may require advocacy, and the same capable parents who contribute to pay for the library teacher could be advocating. In our state, parents aren’t even allowed to fund something like this; even for an ed foundation there are limits on what can be funded, and that includes faculty and staff positions, and capital improvements.

This is because these things are supposed to be publicly funded.

Once a group of parents does this, the government can then expect this expense to be covered by parents in the future. As I said, was say this happen with sports uniforms, bus fares and so on. Once parents paid, it never went back in the school budget.

I once spoke up at a meeting and suggested that in the long run it would be better to go without the music classes that were threatened by a tight school budget, than for parents to fund them. If parents funded them, we would never get them back on the public budget. If parents did not fund them, then the loss would be felt, advocacy would increase, and then over the long term the music classes would go back on the public budget.

This is about money and politics. The more wealthy parents do, the less the fed, state and especially local government will do.

22

There are socio-economic differences among elementary schools in our well-off district that is reflected in the PTO fund raising. One school (also the biggest) raises much more than the school in the less well-off section. The previous administration tried to limit the fund raising, or at least the amenities allowed to be purchased at each school, but that seems to have changed lately.

PTOs or the Ed Fund are not allowed to pay salaries. The money is used for technology, smart boards, library renovations, playground renovations and other “extras”. We would not be allowed to fund an extra teacher.

There is a difference in what people are willing to spend on their own kid’s school and what they might give to other schools. Not sure that if PTOs were limited in how much money they could raise, that money would flow to schools in poorer areas.

My Ed Fund experience was kind of like yours compmom. I was often the one suggesting we not fund something either because it should have been funded by the district or because it didn’t make sense. Buying laptops for one classroom because that teacher asked, without considering the overall need for laptops in the grade or the district. We also had some principals complaining that their parents gave money and that money should come back to their school in the same proportion. The PTOs were the main fund-raisers.

No school choice here. School districts set by town boundaries and schools by neighborhood.

23

@compmom “This is not about volunteering or reading to kids. It is about inequities in funding.”

That is not what I think when I read in the article that, “Instead of going to Trenton or Albany to fight for public schools, they are running the town’s science fair.”

It sounds like he is saying that he disapproves of parents running the science fair too. He is not only talking about donating money.

This suggests to me that the author is not a parent. Every parent understands that it is their first job to help their own kids. Opposing that will just cause parents to do it privately, so fewer kids benefit.

24

He doesn’t disapprove of parents running the fair or reading or volunteering. It is just that parents tend to do this in their own school and it replaces advocacy at the state level. If your school doesn’t have a librarian, and you either volunteer or donate for the position, then your school is all set and there is no need for you to advocate. If, instead, you feel strongly that all schools need a librarian, then you go to Trenton or Albany or write editorials or whatever.

So, again, I say, it is not about volunteering or reading to kids, it is about inequities in funding.

I agree that our first job is the well-being of our own kids, but that well-being can benefit by watching us advocate for others, honestly.

And the author states quite clearly that she is a parent.

This issue comes up a lot in the media and in discussions locally: not sure why there is so much resistance to it here.

25

Some of you all are reading a lot more into this than there actually is.

*Neither Greene nor Reich recommend restricting parents groups as they raise money for their schools. Greene believes that the best way to decrease inequality in schools is to focus on recruiting higher quality teachers to work in disadvantaged school districts, perhaps with higher salaries, while Reich thinks that policy reforms, like eliminating the charitable status of these education foundations, would make this system more fair.

Greene added that preventing parents from raising money for the schools would undermine parents’ connections with their schools. Their fundraising efforts, whether they be bake sales or fancy dinners at a country club, create a reservoir of good feelings for schools. He asked, “do we really want to kill that reservoir?” Besides, if the rich can’t provide their schools with playgrounds and laptops, they’ll send their kids to private schools and opt out of public education all together.*

These people aren’t idiots; they are public policy researchers and experts who have been studying this for a long time. Nothing was said about shaming parents for donating to their own kids’ schools or preventing parents from donating to their own kids’ schools.

The article is about awareness more than anything else. There are probably a lot of parents who have never thought about the fact that clustering into a wealthy enclave and focusing all their efforts onto their own kids’ schools amplifies the inequality between their schools and the poorer districts’ schools in complex ways. In fact, there are a lot of wealthy parents who maybe have never been not well-off and don’t realize that not all districts have robust PTAs and successful silent auctions and banquet fundraisers.

Flip it around, and the other way works too. My parents and the other parents in my working-class district balked at school fundraisers when it was selling that wrapping paper and candles and stuff. They simply believed public schools meant government funding and the idea of supporting the school with their own monies over and above that was unfathomable. It’s not just that they didn’t want to do it; they literally had no concept of it.

You don’t know what you don’t know. Until an article like this brings it to your attention, perhaps.

26

I like the idea of adopting a partner school from a low-income district. Every time parents donate for something in their own school, there could be a check box to add a little more or match the donation to go to the partner school.

Parent funds should not be used to hire staff. That’s a bad idea.

In our district, the board of education has to approve every PTO donation. So if one school’s PTO raises $10,000 and wants to use it to fund iPads, the BOE would have to approve that that is an okay use of funds for that school and that the donation would not make that school substantially unequal from others in the district. Of course, this does nothing to address the horrid conditions in poorer districts, but it a very good policy for keeping these gifts in check within the district.

27

@brantly But of course, as soon as the gifts aren’t approved or are diverted, the parents will stop giving.

I agree with some of what @compmom is saying. If librarians are needed in the schools, they shouldn’t be funded privately. But what about German teachers? My guess is that my children’s high school is one of very few in our state to offer German (in fact, most don’t even offer French). If we should lose the German class due to budget cuts how exactly would it be wrong for the community to pitch in and hire one? It’s clearly not a necessity, since virtually no other school district has bothered to offer German.

Our community just built a new high school that will eventually house about 1,200-1,400 students. A $30 million bond issue was approved, but bids came in at about $37 million. So we have 80 percent of a school. They have said they are going to try to get the rest of the school built through private donations; the citizens aren’t likely to approve any more taxes. Is this wrong? Is it better to just let the kids do without?

28

Don’t forget that private schools raise money too. They directly ask parents for money, a lot more than parents contributing to public schools.

29

@compmom offered a truth back in #10 that a lot of people are forgetting in their defenses of fundraising for their own kids’ schools even when it creates inequities across schools:

In the end, there are a lot of legislators who’d rather all education be privatized. The sort of high-end fundraising you see sometimes, it just makes it easier for them to justify such a move.

30

@julliet "These people aren’t idiots; they are public policy researchers "

The facts are that money, fancy new buildings, and lots of computers really don’t matter much to getting a good education. Education spending has more than doubled in the last 30 years and test scores are unchanged.

We know what will improve education, especially in lower income areas, in this country and neither party has the backbone to put kids first and do it.

The groups that are getting results with their kids are the wealthy parents, and the education-focused parents. But instead of writing about what successful parents do that poorer families can inexpensively emulate (did their kid read and do math homework on Saturday?), these yahoos try to even things out by complaining about the people who are actually doing something right. In my book that makes them idiots.

You can do more to improve student outcomes with involved parents, than any amount of money can get you. Everything students need to know is written in books.

31

Homeschoolers prove this in droves. With minimal expenses in many cases, homeschoolers have higher test scores than public school students, have higher acceptance rates to college than public schools, and have a much higher college graduation rate than public school students.

By far, my best employees are college graduates who were homeschooled. They can soak up information like no tomorrow. You can give them a book, tell them learn this by next week, and it is as good as done and totally understood.

32

And so how would he change it so the situation in Newark doesn’t happen (when Gates gave millions to that school district)?

33

Most of the teachers in our schools are still sending home a pile of papers at the beginning of the year where parents are asked to hand write their email addresses as well as a lot of other info. Each teacher has their own paperwork for this and it takes a long time to get through this first night’s parent homework. The teachers then collect these and type all the email addresses into their computers. If you are the unlucky parent where they made a typo, maybe you won’t get your class mailings. There are obviously better ways yet only one or two teachers are using them. So the knowledge is there, has been there for years in the school, but the vast majority of the teachers don’t adopt a simple and free technological solution. So call me skeptical when I am then told the school needs a lot of money to buy some cutting edge technology which all these teachers need to provide a better education.

Our high school is now issuing laptops to all students, at tremendous expense. Yet I see no difference in the education my second, laptopped kid is getting from what my first unlaptopped kid got. In fact, after instructional time was spent issuing and setting up the laptops, some teachers explained in no uncertain terms that homework is required to be hand-written.

34

Juillet, we are in a working class district that is also a summer community, so wealth for 3 months, and year-round mostly trades people. But demographics are changing. One thing that drives me crazy is the trips to Europe or South America for language students. I go to school committee meetings and protest the $3K cost every year, saying that this is a public school. Oh well. My kids chose not to go in favor of keeping piano and dance in their lives- it was a choice they made themselves.

Anyway, if German is a popular offering, then rather than private donations to keep it (which would not be allowed in our schools), assemble the evidence of benefit, write up posters and leaflets, and advocate to keep the program. In our area you can petition to raise an issue for vote at town meeting.

Staff and programs, and, to my mind, technology, should not be privately funded. (Our ed foundation only did two smart boards for one year. After that they got the picture and the town had to fund technology in the schools. )

I realize not all communities have town meetings or accessible city councils, so I don’t know the mechanism everywhere.

If parents raise money for German, it will never ever be publicly funded. You might as well just pay for a private teacher if you want to go that route.

These short term bandaids hurt in the long run.

The hard part is that each and every one of us doesn’t want our kids to go without for even one year, in the interest of longer term funding. It was very hard to say, okay, go ahead and cut funding for orchestra, for instance, because the absence will be so strongly felt after a year and public support will be so much stronger after that year, that it will be restored for a long time- but that means no orchestra for my kids for that year.

35

This is missing the fact that every student is entitled to a free, appropriate education. Low income families shouldn’t have to try to make up for inadequacies in their districts due to disparities in funding.

Unfunded mandates come fast and furious from our state legislature, and contractual requirements – 90% of medical premiums covered (free for retirees), longevity bonuses, $25k cash retirement incentive, 5-18% yearly step increases when many in the community are getting no raises at all – put a stranglehold on local districts. The difference in the quality of public education between low income and middle/upper income districts is broad and reading to your kids at night isn’t going to close it. How many parents here send their kids to financially poor colleges and tell their children to read more at night to make up the difference?

36

We homeschooled and I’m a huge fan, but it’s a pretty selfish and privileged lifestyle choice. Not everyone has that option and it pulls kids out of public school whose parents have the time and energy to devote to education. While it is possible to homeschool with minimal expenses in many cases, one parent gives up paid employment, which has both immediate and long term repercussions for the family. Low income families may not to be able to afford that luxury. Some affluent families don’t believe they can afford the long term financial consequences to interrupting a career. All the homeschoolers I know did very well in college and graduate/professional school, and now do well in their careers. However, they all come from households where the homeschooling parent usually had an advanced degree. Their end result would probably have been the same if they had gone to public or private school rather than homeschool.

So I don’t think that is a very good comparison. Assuming they have the innate intellectual ability and potential, kids without highly educated parents and kids whose parents have to work long hours should be able to get the education they need from public schools to achieve high test scores and graduate from college. That is supposed to be the point of public schools.

I agree with dfbdfb:

adding: and homeschool students get one-on-one instruction. Let’s not minimize what an important difference that is, especially in early education. The surprise to me is always when they don’t do well. But of course, some students have issues and challenges that would have still been issues and challenges in any educational environment.

37

My working class parents and others around them happily baked for the election day bake sale and my dad brought the Girl Scout cookie sheet to his workplace where “I” (meaning he) sold a lot of cookies. They both grew up in cities and in schools that likely did not even have a PTO, but understood that the school needed extras.

There is also an awareness that it is very difficult to make change in government and that there are no easy answers to improving impoverished schools, so some may think why not put their time and money where they can see a real impact. It might work better for richer schools to specifically partner with a poorer district and on specific projects that could improve that particular school. The real issue is income inequality, with all the political baggage that comes with

trying to change that. I am no longer optimistic that the gap will improve any time soon. But I also don’t think that taking away the charitable status for Ed Funds would have any impact on money flowing to poorer scshools.

With the current budget caps and other limits, even relatively rich schools don’t have funds for maintenance or for extras. We had to float a bond to replace school roofs and boilers, because there was no money in the budget for those things. As Austin says, the unfunded mandates (including the lack of promised federal funds for special ed) and the sky-rocketing cost of health care have squeezed budgets even in areas that include affluent areas.

38

@austinmshauri The problem comes in deciding what is appropriate or adequate. If a rich school district offers German, does every school district in the state need to be given enough money to offer German? What if very few students want to take German?

If one school is able to take its chorus to Disneyworld or Europe or whatever, must every district be given enough money to do so? If one district is able to build an Olympic-sized swimming pool, must every district be given enough money to build one? Most states have a minimum education foundation in place. So the issue is, once every school has a level of funding that is deemed to be “adequate,” should districts be allowed to supplement that funding to provide both luxuries and additional educational opportunities.

39

The issue is that there are a lot of poor areas where they don’t have a level of funding for what most of us consider to be adequate.

40

The usual comeback is that money doesn’t make a difference, and that parents have to be held accountable. Of course, if all parents could provide what their kids needed, maybe we could get rid of public schools all together and insist everyone either homeschool or make their own plans for more organized private education. Many would be willing to fund a neighborhood school. It wouldn’t have disadvantaged my kids if public schools had disappeared. It certainly would have disadvantaged most kids in my neighborhood and it hurts all of society when we don’t adequately educate all the kids. We are losing a lot of potential talent. It is a huge waste of potential human resources. And education sometimes enables whole families to escape poverty. We can acknowledge that reality even if we don’t know how to fix the problem. It really is eventually everyone’s problem if we look at the big picture. imho