Defenestrating Thoughts from the Bivouac

Google is one of the corporate sponsors of Impact on Education, an advocacy group for Public Education in Colorado. As a sponsor, Google was given a table at Friday’s “Education Matters” breakfast forum. Despite the early hour (7 am!), I attended the event.

I found it very interesting and a little disappointing. Obviously as an advocacy group for public education, they are very much in favor of higher funding (e.g. taxes) for public schools. Yet much of the data they presented seemed to not support their desire.

Here are two of the facts that stood out:

• Colorado near the bottom of states in educational funding. Yet Colorado is one of the best states for education in the country.
• All schools in Colorado (by law) have the same amount of funding (except for a small window of allowed private fundraising). Yet there is a wide discrepancy in the quality of schools, as some of the school districts in Colorado are the among the best in the nation, while other are among the worst.

The conclusion they said? We need more money for schools.

Huh?

Both of these points show that (1) money is one of many factors and (2) at the current level of funding, you can have high achieving schools.

This is where the irony comes in; the organization is unable to separate “ends” and means”.

What they want is the “ends”, namely good public education. However, they no longer separate the “means” (funding) from the ends. So even though evidence may suggest that they should concentrate on other factors, funding is what they will blindly support. While funding is, of course, important, we need to step back and look at the big picture.

Whenever education and funding comes up, I’m reminded by something my dad told me once. Consider schools in 3rd world countries like India, the school doesn’t have a roof or electricity, kids don’t have paper and pencils, and teachers are paid basically nothing. Yet, how is it these kids can read and write, but our kids, with all the wealth, facilities and curriculum, can’t?

I think the big factor is the student’s attitude and their desire to learn. And most of this attitude comes from the parents and their peers. Do the parents value education? Does the student peer set support kids that get good grades?

This is of course very important. And is likely to explain a good deal of the difference between the high achieving and low achieving districts in Colorado.

Desire is also a big part of this. And that’s tied to the return on investment of an education. In many 3rd world countries, an education is a matter of life or death. If you can get a job, you get paid and can buy food. If you don’t, you won’t have anything.

In America, between our social programs and the fact that anyone with a pulse can get tons of credit, the return on investment of an education is less drastic. If you goof off in school, life may be tough, but you won’t starve to death.

(And just to be clear, I’m not against social programs…)

In conclusion, I think it’d be good if organizations spent less time lobbying and pushing for more funding. Funding is important, but some of their resources should be used to address the other factors that impact our students’ success.