Key Points
- In most schools, the end user of education products and programs—the teacher—has little or no control over what gets purchased; education products and programs are bought for teachers by school and district leaders.
- This top-down purchasing system creates three hurdles to effective education procurement: (1) half-baked implementation of new programs and technologies, (2) underestimation of the teacher-time costs of implementing new education products, and (3) misplaced priority on using funds to reduce class size or hire more specialists.
- One potential solution to these hurdles is to give individual teachers control of the funds currently spent on them. Such a move would help ensure that teachers receive products and services they actually want and need, significantly increasing the likelihood of effective implementation and maximizing return on investment.
I can't even imagine how such a program would be run, especially in high school. How many books should my school buy for my classes--how many classes will I have each year? How many students will I have? What if one year I get significantly more? It seems the school would have to have a larger supply of books to carry this plan out.
Might my class have different textbooks than the math class next door? With all the emphasis lately on "equity" and "equitable educational experience"--meaning what gets taught and assessed in this class should be the same as what gets taught and assessed in that class--there would be a lot of teacher shopping and threats of lawsuits under such a plan. Principals would not be happy.
Do you trust individual teachers to make the best choices for your child? In theory you trust the school district to make good curricular choices, and in theory the school district gets a some input from a variety of people and then a committee of some form makes a decision. But there are plenty of individual teachers out there with loopy views--whole language, fuzzy math, so-called discovery learning, learning styles, technology focus--do you want these teachers making such choices? Of course, I would make the best choices for math curricula for my students, but I can't say the same for that teacher over there. He/she is a cuckoo bird.
I'll grant that I'm not pleased with the books I am currently required to use for the 3 courses I teach. I've used better books in the past--books that could actually fit in a student's backpack, too, unlike many of the books we use today. But the solution offered above isn't one I'd want to see implemented across the country or state--or even across my district, which includes a few dozen elementary and K-8 schools, under a dozen middle schools, and about a dozen high schools. It just seems inefficient from a budgeting perspective and potentially disastrous to students who get cuckoo bird teachers.
3 comments:
At my school, each teacher gets a certain amount each year. It is not much; about $500. Some years I use it on History Posters; other years, I get atlases. Other years, I need it for electronics. Other years, I don't need that much and hand some of it off to a new teacher.
As you said about those loopy teachers. I know I am a good teacher because many teachers come to me for strategies, I have been elected to various committees, and I rarely receive a bad mark by admins. However, there are the not so good teachers where their students come to my class the next year and don't know many of the basics. Would I want them picking History books full of extremely biased propaganda? We have a local group that picks things like textbooks so those loopy teachers cannot pick; we don't need individual teachers to decide.
Hi Mr. Miller,
You taught me something more important than what belongs in a textbook in a classroom. You taught me how to appreciate and listen to others with a different perspective. Since leaving your classroom, I have enjoyed using that skill you taught me and made so many new friends (where the real commonality is things like Star Trek or places we’ve traveled). I wish there was a textbook for learning that. Thanks for introducing me to a larger world.
Wouldn't it be boring if everyone was just like us? We *need* different people around us!
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