Category: classsize

Farcical, but Not Amusing

STATE LEGISLATURE (NCGA): Goll-lee Moses! We’re spending way too much on education! The public schools are eating up dang near 40% of our whole dadgum budget! DISTRICTS: We need money for textbooks. We need money for classroom supplies. We need more money to pay for these expensive class-size reductions that y’all are requiring, but haven’t paid for. If you won’t increase our allotments, we’ll have to lay off all of our Art, Music, and PE teachers so we can build more classrooms and hire more K – 3 teachers. NCGA: Taxpayers will have our heads when they see how much we’re spending on the schools! We’re giving y’all the same amount we gave you 10 years ago—why isn’t that enough? Where’s all that money going, […]

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Are We Funding Our Schools Adequately?

Amid gasps of outrage from the conservative blogosphere, the Wake County Board of Education (BoE) submitted their annual budget request to the Wake County Commission during the first week of May, 2018. Each year when the official request is submitted, letters from the BoE and district Superintendent that accompany the full report inform the commissioners about the school system’s plans to improve the quality of district schools and provide some context for the present budget request. Monica Johnson-Hostler, Chair of the Wake BoE, wrote a more succinct letter this year than in 2017. She does not mince words when it comes to recent funding shortfalls: “state support, which provides the majority of funding for the school system, has lagged behind local efforts.” She adds that “public […]

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Really Bad Legislation

The 2016 unfunded class-size reduction mandate is just one example of legislators’ strangely punitive relationship to district superintendents and public-school administrators throughout North Carolina. No matter what, the requirements that stem from this legislation would be mind-bogglingly expensive to enact. Yet somehow, state legislators are blaming local districts for not planning carefully enough, or for misallocating funds that could miraculously have built the required schools, installed the required trailers, and hired the required teachers in record time. Multiple lawmakers have admitted that the legislation entailed some unintended consequences and was rushed through as part of a budget package, which limited  opportunities for debate. Senate Pro Tempore Phil Berger was quoted in the Asheville Citizen-Times defending the law. Berger states that the 2016 “state budget included […]

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Class-Size Reduction Sounds Like a Futile Waste of Resources

Bryan Hassel, co-founder of Public Impact and an education consultant in Chapel Hill, NC, makes a very straightforward and convincing case that the NC General Assembly made a big mistake when it passed legislation as part of the 2016 state budget to reduce class sizes statewide in Grades K through 3. You can read his full blog post at Education Next, but here’s a summary of his main arguments: Smaller class sizes mean that schools must hire significantly greater numbers of teachers each year. The finest teachers will reach fewer students each school year if their classes are reduced by 5 – 10 students. Such teachers will effectively be rendered less, well, effective. As a follow-on to his first argument, Hassel notes that larger and […]

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