October 23, 2006

Money To The Schools? Perhaps Not.

Filed under: Education Funding by Leo Casey @ 8:57 pm

One of the premises of the DOE’s experiment in Empowerment Schools is the idea that money should flow to the schools. Flatten bureaucracy, the theory goes, and give the savings to schools to spend on education.

A school based educator would have a hard time finding something in this theory with which s/he would disagree. But there seems to be some problems in the way in which the theory is being applied by the DOE.

Part of the Empowerment Schools initiative is the accountability program which the DOE is rolling out this school year, with its periodic assessments every six weeks. Let us put to the side, for the moment, the educational value of doing standardized testing every six weeks. Informed sources tell Edwize that schools that elect to do the off the shelf Princeton Review program will have that option subsidized to the tune of $35,000 a year — all turned over to Princeton Review. Meanwhile, schools that engage in the hard work to produce a meaningful DYO [do your own] alternative will be supported at a little more than 1/5 of that level, at $7,500.

From where we sit, that seems like money to for profit, private corporations, not money for schools.

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