I’m a public education activist in Seattle and I’ll try to answer your question (but understand this is coming from Washington State).

First, crowded classrooms. Resources get diluted as you have more kids. Bill Gates likes to say that “class size doesn’t matter if you have a good teacher.” A good teacher IS vital but any teacher will tell you there is a critical mass beyond which they cannot know or react to individual student needs.

Second, there is generally equal state funding through out each state. However, there are high needs students. Some get covered by federal funds for Special Ed or ELL or homelessness but beyond those high-cost needs, there are also children with behavior issues that need more attention. Bigger classes, high needs and behavior issues and you have a teacher who may or may not be able to give a class what it needs.

Third, states do NOT fund equally. Washington State has been in the bottom quarter for funding in the US for decades. We do not even fund to the national average. It really hurts the overall school because schools also need counselors, librarians, arts and the funding is just not enough.

Fourth, PTA. You would be surprised at the HUGE gaps in what PTAs from school to school (and booster groups) can raise. In Seattle Schools we have a few schools that don’t even have a PTA. We have some high schools, that between PTA and booster groups, raise nearly $1M a year. And, many of our PTAs in Seattle, because of budget cuts, are now funding basics like maintenance in their school.

Fifth, readiness. Students come to school with different degrees of readiness and it greatly affects their learning. It makes for challenges as a teacher tries to give more acceleration/depth to advanced learners while trying to keep the remedial students at grade level.

They are all challenges.

And bravo to Mr. Stowell – a great teacher.

“THE EDUCATION OF MINORITY CHILDREN©
by Thomas Sowell

Will Rogers once said that it was not ignorance that was so bad but, as he put it, “all the things we know that ain’t so.” Nowhere is that more true than in American education today, where fashions prevail and evidence is seldom asked or given. And nowhere does this do more harm than in the education of minority children.
The quest for esoteric methods of trying to educate these children proceeds as if such children had never been successfully educated before, when in fact there are concrete examples, both from history and from our own times, of schools that have been sucessful in educating children from low-income families and from minority families. Yet the educational dogma of the day is that you simply cannot expect children who are not middle-class to do well on standardized tests, for all sorts of sociological and psychological reasons.
Those who think this way are undeterred by the fact that there are schools where low-income and minority students do in fact score well on standardized tests. These students are like the bumblebees who supposedly should not be able to fly, according to the theories of aerodynamics, but who fly anyway, in disregard of those theories.
While there are examples of schools where this happens in our own time– both public and private, secular and religious– we can also go back nearly a hundred years and find the same phenomenon. Back in 1899, in Washington, D. C., there were four academic public high schools– one black and three white.1 In standardized tests given that year, students in the black high school averaged higher test scores than students in two of the three white high schools.2…”

http://www.tsowell.com/speducat.html

Can you enlighten me?

Julia Booth