U.S. Department of Education
This fall, your child will not head off to an average school.
We talk about education generally, with broad sweeping strokes about policies and programs and average this and median that. But your children go to school very specifically, and as a parent—particularly a parent who may pay more than average attention to public education debates—you should remember this.
The average starting teacher pay in your state may be, say, $40,000. In states like Arizona or Colorado starting averages veer closer to $30,000. There may be new teachers in your school who make less (which may explain why you meet them working evenings in a grocery store). Is your district trying to hire and keep the best, or are they just looking for short-term warm body fill-ins?
Likewise, the average amount of money spent on students can vary wildly from school to school. My own home state of Pennsylvania has won notoriety for having the most unequal funding in the country. Our poorest schools spend 33 percent less per pupil than our richest districts. You could discover that your school spends thousands of dollars less per pupil than the average. (And if it spends far more, you might ask yourself what’s happening in those schools that pull the average down.)
You need to ignore the averages in your state and look at how much money your schools actually spend—and on what. Are teachers underpaid, overworked, and looking for the first available opportunity to get out? How much money will be spent on your child, and, if that number strikes you as low, where is the bottleneck? How much money does your district lose to charters or cyber-schools? Find out who sets the policies that affect your school spending. For instance, charter school costs are beyond your local board’s control, so call your state legislator. But decisions about spending on programs and salaries are made locally, so call your board members.
Are you concerned about issues like Common Core? Chances are your state has adopted some version of the infamous standards, albeit under some new alias, but their impact can shift greatly depending on how your local school decided to deal with them. In some schools you will find teachers still chained to the standards. In other schools, teachers have mastered the fine art of following their own best judgment and just filling out the paperwork so it looks like the standards are being followed.
You may have heard that schools across the country have been totally messed up by concerns about high stakes testing. That’s true—on average. But across the country there are schools where administrators have chosen to let their staffs teach, come what may, and other schools where administrators have made high test scores their own personal white whales. It will make a huge difference to your school which kind you have.
You may have heard that “some” schools or “many” schools or even “all” schools have huge problems with discipline, that too many schools reflect the inequity and racism of our society at large. But there are as many disciplinary systems as there are schools, and each one is filtered through the particular individuals who administer them. Do not assume that you know how your student’s school handles disciplinary matters, or what it could reasonably consider a disciplinary matter (this seems to be a frequent complaint about charter schools, as parents declare, “Why, I never imagined a school would discipline a child for THAT!”).
Your child’s school will also face challenges that are strictly local, of course. None of the issues I’ve listed will be on the front burner at my school in two weeks, because a month ago our school board decided to combine our high school and middle school under a single new administrator. At this point, none of us knows what the heck that means for our day-to-day operations. Sometimes local noise drowns out the national issues.
Finally, when it comes to issues of class and race, there is no “average” or “usual” for schools. Whatever happened in the past at your school, last year is now a century ago. Ask your school how they are going to address the events of the summer. If they don’t have an answer, or don’t understand the question, that’s a problem.
Your child will attend one specific school, with its own specific sets of issues, its own financial challenges, and its own pedagogical peculiarities. You can find out about the specific issues of your school by reaching out to the people who work there (and if you are met with a wall of resistance, you have identified yet another problem that needs to be addressed). You need to consider what specific actions you might take to help further the cause of education.