Making Bricks Without Straw in North Carolina's Schools

I didn’t’ expect to spend my first day of summer break thinking about next school year. But I also didn’t expect the State of North Carolina to pass their anti-education budget yesterday.

After the budget passed, the State of North Carolina became 49th in the nation with spending per pupil. Last year we spent about $8,300 per student and with this new budget we will be spending $7,800 per student. That sounds like a lot of money but when you consider that the national average is $10,500, North Carolina still falls short. That amount becomes even less significant when you look at how much money North Carolina spends per inmate each year. According to the North Carolina Department of Correction website, during the 2009-2010 fiscal year, NC spent over 23,000 for each minimum security prisoner, over 27,000 for each medium custody prisoner, and over 32,000 dollars for each high security prisoner. I’m bad at math, but even I was able to figure out that the Senators and Representatives of North Carolina are willing to spend FOUR TIMES as much on a maximum security prisoner than a public school student. And NC isn’t alone in this. There are many states who spend more on their criminals than their children (Yes, I'm shocked I just linked you to a Fox News Article, too). It makes me sick to my stomach to realize that we live in a society that will spend more money to keep people locked up than they will to teach them how to read and think.

And yes, I am thankful that there are prisons that keep dangerous criminals off of the streets and out of my house while I am sleeping (or sitting on my couch writing a self-righteous and snarky blog). And I am also aware that the prison systems are taking cuts with this new budget as well (the state is eliminating many positions in the criminal justice department and closing 4 minimum security prisons—which means county jails will be flooded so that will likely raise local taxes—just to name a few of the cuts). But I can’t help but wonder (idealistically and probably naively) if we had pumped that money into the schools from the get-go, whether we would need as many prisons. If students were able to learn in classrooms with 10 other people instead of 30, would they have turned out differently? If they all had teachers who weren’t forced to take on part time jobs, would they have received better instruction? Would they have been less likely to drop out? (And considering that 82% of America’s prisoners are high school drop outs, these factors could mean a lot for our state and national budgets). And yes I know that no matter how much money we spend on education, there will always be crime. There will always be crazy people who are a threat to humanity. But I do think if we spend less on drop-out prevention and more on prisons, less people will graduate and more people will end up in prison (duh). Of course, I recently read an article that was celebrating how NC’s graduation rate was higher than the national average. But it’s really easy to graduate people when you require less and less out of them. So, I didn’t really celebrate that study.

Looking at this budget, I know that next year is going to be tougher than ever. 46% of our instructional supplies budget is gone. The need for these supplies will not disappear; in fact with class size growing, more teachers will have to supplement their own classrooms and students with these supplies. And because of the current economic crapfest, more and more parents are looking to the school systems to help out. Teachers already spend hundreds of dollars on supplies for their classrooms each year and I cannot imagine that increasing by almost 50% as a response to this budget. And to add insult to injury, this will be after teachers have gone 3 years without a raise while each year picking up more and more responsibility. (And while technically salaries are not decreasing next year, in my county teachers will be taking an almost $1000 pay cut by losing dental insurance and because of increasing premiums on health insurance). Considering that the State of North Carolina just cut 15% of the budget for support staff and 19% of the budget for assistant principals, these extra responsibilities will rise by about 30% next year (and that’s if I’m rounding down). Overworked classroom teachers will be asked to step up to the plate and fulfill those responsibilities and duties in addition to teaching overcrowded classes. (Average class size at my school was 28.4 this past year, and that will likely rise). This will take away from planning periods which will, in-turn, likely affect the quality of instruction.

The new budget also eliminates professional development funds completely at the state level, yet the CEU requirements for teachers to update their licenses will stay the same. Teachers will now have to pay out of pocket to fulfill their state-mandated professional development hours. Many North Carolina educators know that one of the best ways to obtain your required CEUs is with the North Carolina Teacher Academy, a program that offers weekly seminars during the summer months for teachers. I personally was enrolled in one of these programs for late this summer, but since the new budget eliminated the Teacher Academy program completely, I will no longer be receiving those CEUs or, more importantly, the valuable information from that professional development which would have improved my instruction and enriched my students.

In the midst of this entire cluster cuss of educational death, the State of North Carolina’s Department of Instruction, in its infinite wisdom, has decided that this is the ideal time to adopt a new curriculum. (Thank you North Carolina DPI. How did you know that I so enjoy being kicked square in the ribs while I am down? The fetal position is incredibly good for the lower back, but I do wish you could have done this a few years ago when I was sitting pretty in a 90/10 insurance plan with smaller classes. I regret that my co-pay and premiums have gone up so much because these X-rays will be quite expensive). With this new curriculum, that will be implemented in the fall of 2012, both of the text books (that have been used for over 5 years at this point) that I currently teach from are completely null and void. How can I teach 70% non-fiction in a text book that is less than 25% non-fiction? Especially when the latest budget saved 92.2 million dollars by cutting funds for new textbooks? And what is the purpose of a blanket curriculum across each grade level? It is completely unfair to our students in middle and high school grades. This new curriculum focuses on critical thinking skills, which is great! But what about those students who went through grades K-8 in a curriculum that did not (truly) support and enhance critical thinking skills? First we No Child Left Behinded the crap out of them, got them to Race to the Top of a water-surrounded precipice, and then in 2012 we’re going to tell them swan dive into something really deep. They don’t know how to swim and our state cut the life-jacket budget by 50%. Oh well.

I’m excited (not really) to see how this will all pan out. It will be like watching a Criss Angel special on TBS because it’s kind of like magic really, and it will also make me uncomfortable. I’m going to be asked to teach something with materials that don’t even exist. Or maybe it will be like making bricks without straw. (Yes…I realize that this is an incredibly hyperbolic and therefore slightly offensive allusion. Yes, I realize that I comparing the plight of teachers to the Hebrew slaves in the Torah. Yes, I realize that means I’m calling DPI an oppressive Pharaoh). Next year, the State of North Carolina will be providing its teachers with less and less straw, yet they will be demanding that we make more bricks. And if 85% of those bricks don’t pass inspection, we could lose our jobs! And if we need more straw to make more bricks, we’ll just have to provide our own. But we better hope we don’t drop any bricks on our toes, because it’s damn expensive to go to the doctor to get that toe looked at. And we’ll be required to go to brick-making-seminars that we have to pay for with our own hard-earned money where we’ll learn how to make bricks using all these fancy brick-making machines that we will never, in a million years, have in our own brick-making rooms. And then the State of North Carolina will just use our bricks to build prisons anyway. They certainly won’t send those bricks to community or state level colleges because the new budget cut over 10 and 12% of their funds, respectively. (Is this metaphor dead yet?)

Okay. I’m done for now. I’m officially off-duty. I can’t spend my summer thinking about these things or I will go crazy(ier than I already am). But I had to get one final education rant in before going to the pool and working on my tan. (And if you want to comment on how it’s unfair that teachers get a summer break, let me know…I can explain that. If we didn’t get summer break, the State of North Carolina would definitely be spending more money on its prison systems than it already is…I can guarantee that. But hey, maybe then NC teachers would get the health and dental benefits they deserve).