i wish ED advocates would shut about about needing more funding.

One of the crop of Fordham Fellows (a TFAer from Atlanta, whoot!) blogged yesterday about how we need a new model for the profession of teaching.

I absolutely agree. In our nation’s worst schools, being a good teacher is, in the long run, a losing proposition. I regularly worked 75-80 hours a week when I was teaching. 75-80 hard, heart-wrenching hours, and it was still never enough. There were still papers that went ungraded, positive calls to parents that didn’t get made. I could have worked 24/7, and it wouldn’t have been enough. I was tired, and I was 22. Four years out of the classroom, I feel too old to do it again, and I’m not even 30 yet.

So, G proposes that we have two teachers per class and split the teaching day, nurse-style, with an overlap between for debriefing. I love it! I added in my comment my hope to one day see year-round school with every Wednesday as a planning day. The folks who put together afterschool programs would have to get creative about how to occupy the babies on these days, but it would give teachers a chance to actually plan, grade, contact parents during time they’re actually getting paid for. I choose Wednesday because my kids always seemed most attentive on Mondays, so this would, in effect, give me two Mondays per week, YMMV. Hell, my flame taught at a crappy-ass technical school with low standards that paid for shit for a few years, and even THEY got a full planning day per week.

Anyway, the reason I felt moved to put pen to paper is because the first commenter mentioned that “From a practial standpoint, though, how would you see this arrangement accomplished? With districts strapped for cash as it is, what incentives do they have to spend money on TWO teachers for every classroom? Would each teacher only receive half a salary? That seems like an unfair deal, if you ask me.”

In the case of large, urban districts, I beg to differ. I also am pretty sure (without pulling any real numbers) that most of the kids served by insanely bad schools are in these urban areas. So, I think my point is an important one. We have this friend, R, who made more than my flame and I put together. His wife also (usually) worked, yet these people were always having their phones cut off. I would not call them “cash-strapped.”

Atlanta Public Schools spends over $14,000 per student per year, more than twice what some of the districts in rural Georgia spend. Now, I don’t know where all that money is going, but while scores are creeping up in APS, it doesn’t match up with the progress its peer districts nationally are making.

A colleague recently told me that when you do a scatter plot of achievement vs. per-pupil expenditures for every district in Georgia, there is a negative correlation. More money per kid, lower achievement.

That being said, I’m sure that many rural districts are cash-strapped because of the property-tax system of funding, and I heard all the stories from corps members in the Delta and other rural placements about schools with no books and kids with no shoes. I just think that we should get districts’ financial management systems up to par and their priorities for spending a) in the right place and b) on stuff we’re pretty sure makes a difference before we start crying about needing more funding. Right now we’re flushing money down the toilet while begging for more.