Responding to a cut of $43 million by the state in education spending and to higher energy and other costs, school officials in Jefferson County [Kentucky] have raised lunch prices, eliminated 17 buses by reorganizing routes, ordered drivers to turn off vehicles rather than letting them idle and increased property taxes.
and:
West Virginia officials issued a memorandum recently to local districts titled “Tips to Deal With the Skyrocketing Cost of Fuel.” Last week, David Pauley, the transportation supervisor for the Kanawha County school system, based in Charleston, met with drivers of the district’s 196 buses to outline those policies. Mr. Pauley told them to stay 5 miles per hour below the limit, to check the tire pressure every day and to avoid jackrabbit starts.
As others have noted, school transportation is notoriously inefficient, wasteful and polluting. Rather than characterizing the above as evidence of a terrible financial crisis, it would make a lot more sense to call it what it is: a case of rising fuel prices causing schools to implement common-sense fuel efficiency measures that should have been in place a long time ago, and we're all better off as a result.
Also:
In interviews, educators in many states said they were seeing more needy families than at any time in memory.
The national poverty rate didn't change in 2007 and while the economy seems to have deteriorated since then, I doubt poverty has suddenly yanked back up to where it was in the early 1990s. The article also cites an increase in the number of students applying for free- and reduced-price lunch. It's worth noting that those numbers held steady and in some cases rose all the way through the late 1990s, even as poverty fell to historic lows in 2000, so that measure doesn't have a great track record in terms of sensitivity to changing poverty conditions.
The point being, we (a) live in a big, diverse country, and (b) have not vanquished the business cycle, so there will inevitably be places and times when the fiscal fortunes of schools and students take a turn for the worse. But if you simply pick and choose the most alarming numbers and quotes, you're almost surely going to portray things as worse in the aggregate than they really are.
3 comments:
So this summer in their spare time, while planning for the challenges of NCLB and all of the other challenges, our central offices should make the old yellow busses disappear and create a new green system. Of course, the after-school tutoring, and the choice measures of NCLB, require even more transporation of students during the off hours.
We need to get more social providers into our high poverty schools, and bring our kids out into the community, and it is obvious that our most challenged schools need full time busses and fulltime drivers for field trips. Our central offices don't follow that common sense approach because a) they are incompetent, or b) we lack time and capacity, or c)someone misplaced our magic wand. Maybe you are right, if we really had high expectations and clicked our heels three times, a shiney new fleet of green busses would appear tommorrow.
You are right about one thing. When poverty fell in the 1990s, student performance increased. By 2000, we not only had almost no fights in our school; we rarely heard harsh words. When the economy declined after Sept 11, we lost 10% of our teachers. In our enthusiasm for turning around the school, we didn't complain much about cutbacks. The problem was all of that pain that students brought to school. Almost overnight, our small school had 150 fights but that was just the tip of the iceberg. When the economy falls, and vulnerable families collapse further, what are the students supposed to do with thier pain? I don't have an answer except to just jump into the battle and do your best with what you got, and try to work out better approaches.
But I do know that simplistic dogma and critism unfounded in reality is not helpful.
Thanks for the anti-alarmist commentary. Though I have to say that I think the way we measure poverty, in general, vastly understates how pervasive it is. The formula Bloomberg has put into effect for New York seems a lot more accurate to me, taking medical costs into consideration, for instance.
Of course, this still doesn't mean that poverty is necessarily worse now than it was a couple years ago. But generally there are probably a lot more truly poor people than the current poverty rate measurements lead us to believe.
Just a couple of data-points to add to this. Last time I checked, they haven't changed the formula for calculating the poverty rate since some where in the 1970s (at least that's what I dug up, I'm OK if I'm wrong). And a few things have changed since then. But just to give an example, the poverty threshold in 2007 was 10,590. But let's take a peek at what you actually need to "survive" (which is allegedly what the poverty rate measures - the point at which below that you're not surviving). Wider Opportunities for Women does a Sufficiency Standard, and they've done if for every state. In DC, "self-sufficiency" wages for a single adult $21,224. In Fairfax, it's $30,517. That's a gaping chasm between what Census thinks is "poverty" and what poverty actually means.
Interesting that someone as focused on data kinda missed that one. Kind of like the data point I heard on NPR last year that the rate of those insured has gone up - but a good chunk of that increase comes from folks enrolling in Medicaid, which requires an income ceiling.
But what really struck me from your post is that you're dismissing some stories of places trying to make hard choices - and you're doing it with an outdated calculation (one, that mind you is for the nation, and obviously some of the stories that you quoted have a bunch of local context that gets lost when you use a national figure).
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