We should be outraged

Credit to the Centre Daily Times for running this recent AP story above the fold: “Cutbacks in state aid for public schools hit Pennsylvania's poorer school districts the hardest, slashing nearly three times as many dollars in aid per student compared with wealthier districts.

On the same weekend of that story, I heard the following comparison of the “top” and “bottom 50” of Pennsylvania’s 500 school districts:

	Avg. teacher salary	Avg. education	% of students in poverty
“Top 50”	$74,000	Master’s +	17%
“Bottom 50”	$44,000	Bachelor’s	47%

Of course, correlation does not imply causation. Higher teacher salaries do not “cause” better education; it’s far more complicated than that. On the other hand, it’s pretty hard to say that teacher salaries don’t matter, or that level of education doesn’t matter - or that poverty doesn’t matter.

Which, of course, is exactly what the Corbett administration is saying, has said, and has backed up through action. As hard as the state budget cuts were on every Pennsylvanian school district, poor districts were hit the hardest.

It should also be noted that as part of this year’s omnibus school code bill, all reference has been removed of the ‘costing-out study’ that was developed during the prior administration. The study, of course, acknowledged the Commonwealth’s responsibility towards equity in education funding.

As a member of a district that came out of this relatively well, perhaps I shouldn’t say anything, but there’s no other way to put it: it’s unconscionable, and probably unconstitutional.

A post-script:

This article from Dana Goldstein is worth noting.

In a review of a recent book by Steven Brill - he of "Rubber Room" fame - Goldstein takes issue with the commonplace claim that teacher effectiveness can overcome the disadvantages of poverty. (The impact of some of these disadvantages - food insecurity, lead poisoning, etc. - should be hard to ignore.)

Well, no one disputes the value of good teachers, nor - it ought to follow - the importance of "focusing education policy efforts on sustainable teacher quality reforms such as ... requiring new teachers to undergo apprenticeship periods working alongside master educators, and creating career ladders that reward excellent teachers who agree to stay in the classroom long-term and mentor their peers."

However..

"the work of the many researchers Brill cites shows that while teaching is the most important in-school factor affecting student achievement, family and neighborhood characteristics matter more. The research consensus has been clear and unchanging for more than a decade: at most, teaching accounts for about 15 percent of student achievement outcomes, while socioeconomic factors account for about 60 percent."

I share Goldstein's frustration that this point has to be made over and over again.