How much money is enough money for schools?

Schools all over the country are debating how much money is enough? They all seem to claim they don't have enough money.

I don't believe money is as much the issue as the two major teacheer unions are, and some other factors are. For one thing there is a lot of money now going to schools, and it is not distributed as it is meant to be. Second you can have a good teacher that tries to get her teaching as honest and teach the kids as much as she/he can, and one that is there for the money, if something waas to come up, who do you think the Unions would support? Hint the one that tries will not be the correct answer.
School Boards are another place where much of the money goes for raises and bonuses when the schools are hurting for what ever.
I am well past the point of thinking that the public school system is due for a major overhaul!

http://www.startribune.com/191/story/1101442.html

It will never be enough. Not as long as the Democrats owe favors to the teacher's union every year for monetary support and lots and lots of volunteer time.

It doesn't help when big players in the media(read MPR) treats any news critical to education or the teachers union with kid gloves.

Do you think they do, Shelley? Or do you think they need to undergo reform?

"I am well past the point of thinking that the public school system is due for a major overhaul!" -Dan R. What is the public school system due for?

Sorry, Gary, I didn't quite catch that: If that task force couldn't/didn't get to the bottom line, shouldn't it be reinstated? Do Minnesota schools need more [guessing you'd strike money] reform, or maybe even a vision?

Look at what's happening with charter schools. The teacher's union has been squeezing the legislators to cap charter schools. They won't say it, (and you folks won't ask it) but it's because so many charter schools are non-union.

Look at Minneapolis, two to three years ago, they were supposed to close a few schools to cut overhead and the school board didn't have enough guts to stand up to the angry crowd and close down the schools. Did you see how many Minneapolis public schools are open running at 60% or less capacity! That's alot of utility costs, maintence costs, and employees! WOW. If they can't make the tough decision this time I won't feel sorry for them anymore.

No school reform won't happen until the union is taken out of or their power reduced. It's a union problem. They don't like competition, that's what killing the system.

The establishment will never be challanged by the Democrats and their allies in the mainstream media.

Julia, try reading Stephen Gould's Bully for the Dinosaur, an essay he did on textbooks in the public school system. This is just one of the many, many reasons the school systems are in dire need of a major overhaul.

Being I am probably the ONLY one here that is been in a public school as a student in here since the 80's I can say that their is a lot of room for improvement. Money would help a lot. So would people smart enough to spend said money.

Making it easier to get rid of crap teachers would also be good. I had many great teachers that were moved around because they were low on the totom yet a few crap teachers that were always there.

And finally, this has nothing to do with rebulican or democrate. The republs have been in power for years until recently and they didn't do anything to fix the problem,

I don't understand how people can bitch and moan about spending to much on the youth and their education. It is mind boggleing to me.

You can't have a future if you don't invest in it.

I'm not suprised that most people with an opinion on this would be for reform. I am often amazed that no political party seems to mention what reform might actually look like.

At the end of the conversation with the union leader, she repeated the labor based notion that more one on one labor hours were needed than ever before. This notion has been refuted in every sector of the economy. Most jobs have changed in the private sector, while many jobs have been sheltered by union resistance in the public sector.

We all know what distance education is, how it can downsize education as well as it can downsize an office. Most of us have been to the meeting at work where someone says, "We have to do more, with less".

When we say reform, we mean distance education.

Both Education Minnesota (the Democrats) and the Republicans have distorted the debate over school funding. At Minnesota's level of funding, the debate should not be on how much to spend, but rather what we should spend the money on.

I for one would like to see teachers utlized LESS. I would like to see LARGER classrooms. We have long known that kids learn more from kids than they do from adults. I would like to see peer teaching re-introduced into the school system.

Hint, in order to teach a subject, you have to know it well.

No matter how much money they get they need more......Private schools spend less on average per student than public schools yet consistenly outperform them in matriculation and testing results. If the Teachers union wants to get raises for their members I think that is fine, as long as any raise is performance based just like anyone elses raises are. If you selling cars and each year your nembers go down, you don't get a raise you get fired. School choice would certainly be a motivating factor for all schools to perform better. Why can't parents get a voucher for "tuition at the school of their choice, if the school costs more they can pay the difference.
This way schools that consistently underperform will eventually be forced to improve or close. Private schools will expand, the better schools will attract the better teachers and thusly be able to pay them more.

Public education as it exists now is broken. Throwing more money at it is not going to repair it. Why is the Teachers Union so opposed to privatization and performance linked pay scales? Is their argumant really that children today are dumber than a generation ago? We went to school with chalkboards and pencils and books that were a few years old.....There is no incentive to succeed...These kids are pushed on to the next grade whether they are prepared or not. The Teachers Union opposes teesting requirements for the students as well....Every means of evaluating performance is something they fight. Yet they continually expect more for doing less.

Good point about the associated costs, Gary. Utilities, general maintenance, and a host of employees beyond the teachers can add up. I'd be interested to hear you debate with a union person.

Thank you for the recommendation, Dan R.

Nathan S. I really, really appreciate you joining the discussion. You do bring a recent first person perspective to the table. Do you think new administrative processes and some streamlined structures to remove poor employees/teachers would really do it?

Oh yeah, who hasn't been in that meeting, Tim Nelson? The business behind business is about streamlining and cutting expenses. Personally I think distance education has its own difficulties, but maybe someone who has that experience - or even home-schooling, which has similar challenges - can address that.

"I would like to see peer teaching re-introduced into the school system." If memory serves, you've made that suggestion in the past Greg. I would love - I mean really LOVE - to see a Minnesota based example of this in action, and a detailed outline of how they went about implementing/maintaining it.

"Public education as it exists now is broken. Throwing more money at it is not going to repair it." - chris w. Scrolling up, chris, I'd say you've got company when it comes to that thought.

I have to wonder if education is such a deeply personal topic that we'll never arrive to general consensus. Tim pointed out that he's amazed no political party shows what educational reform might actually look like. I'd say that requires vision and courage.

Courage is the operative word because the necessary changes are inevitably going royally piss some group off. No politician will ever admit to planning to do that before an election and most likely won't after they're elected because they become addicted to the power of the position. The ffounding fathers never envisioned career politicians, they knew it led to corruption, I don't think they foresaw that a senator would or congreesman would so centralize his voting base as virtually have a seat for life. We really need to eliminate the two party system and private donations to politicians. Create a federal election fund to be divided equally among the candidates and institue a two term limit for the senate and four term for congress. A politician not answerable to a party chairman/money man or not up for re-election is more likely to be true to his principles and those who elected him/her. After all they have to go back and live amongst them soon.

Julia, I really do think that it would help. Once I got to college at the end of every semester we were given the oppurunity to evaluate the class and the teacher. I had one class that was so horrible and so many people gave the teacher such a horrible and deserved eval. that she was released. This could easily be used in a high school setting.

Surely it would have to be weighed but I think it would help a lot. This could easily be implimented on the high school level. Most students that age are mature enough and would give an honest assesment of said teacher that the administration could get an honest look at what the kids really think of the teacher.

Also, somone mentioned bigger classes would be good. I can honestly say that is the WORST idea for the education process. Smaller is better. the real answer would be to seperate kids to their learning style better.

I am a visual learner, I do have a hard time in classes where all the teacher does is stand and lecture. Some people prefer learning that way.

"I would like to see peer teaching re-introduced into the school system." If memory serves, you've made that suggestion in the past Greg. I would love - I mean really LOVE - to see a Minnesota based example of this in action, and a detailed outline of how they went about implementing/maintaining it.

Just ask anyone who went to a one-room school house. I have a brother-in-law who attended a one room school near Blooming Prairie for his entire K-8 education. The teacher would lecture and provide basic instruction, but the older kids were expected to provide tutoring and mentoring to the younger children.

As a side story, my brother-in-law bought the land and the school years after it was decommissioned. Sadly the building had been destroyed by vandals and the weather -- so he held a big party inviting a number of former students -- and as is every kids satisfying but sad dream -- they bulldozed the school and burned the debris.

Not to be an ass but honestly, how many people actually go to a one room school?? I mean, I remember haveing 40 people in some classes. Gym classes had 75.

There is no practicle way to have that kind of time in a day. Classes are formatted generaly at 45 or 50 minutes each. All of the class time is generaly taken up in lecturing or working in group projects.

There was quite a bit of group work in my school, but there would be no way to make time for students to get one on one student learning time.

Knowing a few people who are teachers in the Minneapolis School System say that all the wrong decisions are being made.

First, Peebles, should never been run out of town. She was a go getter that tried bucking the system and the system fought back. NEVER CHALLANGE THE SYSTEM!

Second, they should have closed down those schools a couple of years ago. They know, the teachers know it, but it takes guts. Which they don't have.

Third, they didn't hire Dave Jennings. Think about it. Having a guy with real world business experience, having a guy who has the ear of a whole boatload of Republicans back at the statehouse, and being a Republican who was sympathetic to their cause, and instead, they picked someone from "the club", and the mysery continues.

Think a white male could ever get that position again. I doubt it.

Greg I respectfully disagree with you about LESS teachers. This is one of those things that sounds good in theory (the "have to know it to be able to teach it" idea) but in reality and practicality it's not a good idea.

I don't see any comments on here by any teachers. I taught high school for 5 years, the later 4 years in a suburban public school. Large class sizes are one of the biggest problems facing schools. I taught Spanish. My class sizes were typically between 35-40 students; the counselors didn't hesitate to ask if I would take "just one more" when the class was already full at 39. With classes this big (particularly in my subject area) very few students will learn much. As my father once put it, it was "mass production" of Spanish students. With classes that big too much time and energy is spent on crowd control. Opportunities for quality interactions between teacher & student are severely limited by this size of classes. Teachers are accused of not knowing their students as individuals, not customizing teaching methods to learning styles and needs of the students.

Nathan has a pretty good idea of what the reality of public schools is today. Good teachers are let go because they don't have seniority and/or tenure and ineffective teachers are allowed to continue doing what they please. Students and parents can complain all they want but under the tenure system and with the unions it is very difficult to fire a teacher unless they have commited a crime or had a serious breach of ethics.

Many teachers fear working without a tenure system as a saftey net. The common fear is that if an outspoken parent gets upset because their student got a lower grade than anticipated and the teacher loses their job over it. Yes, this is a reality and teachers are pressured by parents and administrators to give inflated grades for a wide variety of reasons.

The best use of additional money in schools would be to hire MORE teachers and reduce class sizes. Smaller classes allow teachers to be more flexible in their teaching methods and enable lessons to be customized to the learning styles of the students. Nathan mentions courses where the teachers just stand and lecture the whole time. Sadly, when classes are too big there isn't as many options for varying presentations.

Additionally I would like to see sports taken out of schools. I know this is an unpopular opinion and there are arguably many benefits of sports. I don't disagree with this - I simply would rather see schools be for academics and sports be a community organization, similar to many European countries. It saddens me to see how much more highly we value sports than education.

I would hate to see sports out of school. I mean, I went to Duluth East and we went to state ALL THE TIME. It was great. We got second in boys hockey my sophmore and senior year, second in basketball those years, and we won boys and girls X-country skiing and running virtually every year.

It was a lot of fun going to the assembly's and the games a great part of the HS experience.

I can understand where people come from when they say they want sports out of schools, but it would be a lose for the kid.

I began my teaching career with four years in Minnesota and have now added five in Missouri. Throughout my college classes and since I entered the profession, I have seen these issues debated with very little change. I have seen the difference which a union makes for teachers, and being in a state where unions are virtually forbidden (because they cannot strike) is like. Minnesota's education system is far ahead of Missouri's in all sorts of ways, and I have little patience for throwing blame at Minnesota's teachers' unions or at any other part of the system either. It doesn't solve anything.

I do tend to believe that the system is broken at all sorts of levels because of the organization of information flow within it. I work in a school where teachers have tried to organize collaborative efforts to address major school issues only to be put down by our superintendent who was apparently threatened by the group power we represented. Wherever education exists within a hierarchy that prescribes how communication will take place, it will fail to achieve a real transfer of knowledge because of the natural human resistance to being told what to think and what to believe. Cooperation solves problems and competition creates them. So while we blame schools or their respective parts for the problems of excess cost, the problem goes far deeper into the entire structure of communication within our society.

Pop quiz question : Half the school day will be on-line by the year 20__. (fill in the blank)

Extra credit : The Chinese language is taught from China, to Minnesotans on-line today. True or false.

Some classes in the future may be very big indeed. Word gets around about the best teachers in the State, Country, World.

It's pretty clear that adults have been blabbing about what needs to happen in education for decades, with no real results to show for it. But no matter what WE decide, you can't shove learning down students throats. Especially in a world changing at lighting speed, we better start to listen to and understand where students are coming from.

Schools in Minneapolis are closing. Yet much of the loss of enrollment is because students are leaving-- to charters, alternative schools, suburban schools. We need to know why! Join us at http://studentsspeakout.ning.com as we begin to post what students have to say. Let them know you're listening. Ask questions-- what do you want to know from students?