Diminishing Return

Barack Obama says cuts in education "force kids into crowded classrooms, cancel programs for preschoolers and kindergarteners, and shorten the school week and the school year." Happily, this year at our school we will be able to have full-day Kindergarten, and we will still have one hundred and eighty days of instruction. We will also have a few more students in our classrooms as a direct result of the five schools that were closed in our district over the summer, one of which was just over the hill from us. As an ironic piece of accounting, these additional students make us ineligible to participate in a program that gives us extra funding for maintaining smaller class sizes. "This year, several thousand fewer educators will be going back to school," the president said in his weekly address. More than three hundred thousand local education jobs have been lost since the end of the recession, according to a new White House report on the impact of teacher layoffs. Again, another bright spot for us is that we will be returning all of our staff, with the exception of our on-site substitute, and our full-time PE coach has been down-sized to a lunchtime supervisor. At our school, we continue to do more with less. Nothing really new here.
But last week, I was sitting in a week-long training for math instruction. Part of being a teacher is preparing for different ways to teach and assess the things that every kid needs to know. This particular seminar was being put on by the Silicon Valley Math Initiative. They are very clever people with a lot of good ideas, but I found myself poised over a piece of chart paper with a marker, ready to respond to these good ideas when I stopped. Here I was, just a few miles away from the center of the digital revolution. All of those advances were in evidence via the regular use of smart phones and iPads and laptop computers. Yet, here I was, transcribing my group's thoughts on a three foot by four foot piece of paper that was to be taped on a wall of the high school cafeteria where we were working. We weren't using all that fancy hardware to produce our results. We were using the materials that we were most comfortable with: the ones we would be using when we returned to our school sites.
I understand that it would cost billions of dollars to equip an urban school district with the kind of machinery and software that would make us look like we were educating kids for the twenty-first century. We're talking Department of Defense kind of money here. That's not going to happen anytime soon. I get that. But wouldn't it be nice if we can't have the fancy computers and digital projectors that at least when kids went to school there was a teacher there? If there was a school at all?