I've taught for over 20 years and I think I've nailed down how school districts make money. You will notice several prominent urban districts are once again pleading and demanding money even though they seem to regularly pass bond issues and get more money for facilities that have little to do with learning. I know it's not getting in teachers' pockets.
Several of my peers with similar credentials and years are barely midrange on our districts salary levels although most of us are retiring within months. How does that work out? It is because the district uses a skewed method of comparing teaching fields to "real world" compensation. By that reasoning anyone in humanities is paid less than anyone in the desirable STEM subjects. That may sound favorable, but I'm not really sure even those teachers are being as highly compensated as the usual folks: coaches, administrators and the mid level bureaucrats that school boards deem "necessary" for the districts to achieve accolades.
So where is the money coming from and where does it go? It's no secret that Technology is one of the buzzword topics politicians find so attractive. They like Technology because it's something they can quantify in number and dollars for votes. So politicians sign off on billions of dollars in programs and hardward intended for nebulous STEM programs. Here's where the fun part comes in. Administrators will often be sought by producers of hardware and programs so that those providers can become preferred vendors. Now I'd like to believe no money changes hands, but seriously do you believe that?
Listen to this timeline:
2007-When I first began working my district we had PC's. When I tried to write a grant for Apples I was told by our school and district IT departments that they would not support any maintenance.
2009-A new superintendent takes a job and almost immediately he moves to have EVERY STUDENT from K-12 issues an Apple IPad-that's issuing 50K+ IPads plus every teacher was issued a Power Macbook and IPad. So we had to shift all our programs to a new paradigm. What was ironic is while we made this costly move, when we had problems with our browsers (although we had Apple products we were using Google Apps so we had to use Chrome) we were told to download free virus scans. Suddenly we saw staffing for IT being cut in half. Hmmm
So we dithered about for seven years-kids gradually stopped paying the meagre $35 insurance fee because they could do as much on their phones plus many of the devices ended up broken or hacked thanks to the downloads of movies, games and such which were played during class all the time.
2016-We're using Apple devices, Chrome browsers, Google apps and Microsoft Office. This situation with multiple platforms would continue until.....
.....2018...we were issues new Apple Airs-good thing since my down button had stopped working and my e and r keys had become unidentifiable. The Air's didn't work like the Power Mac's and the procedure to save 19 years of documents, presentations and lesson plans didn't fully work for anyone. So most of us are starting nearly from scratch to rebuild some very complex programs. But that's not all-not content to gift us with a new learning curve for devices, our Fearless Technology Leaders also decided we need to learn an entirely new method of presenting classes with their work. So now we have to learn Canvas from scratch. It is bulky and not at all intuitive. I have nine shells-some for multiple classes and multiple shells for others. There is no easy fix to align them meaning that rather than uploading material once, I will have to do it NINE TIMES. This is not efficient and there was no reason for it since most of us had finally settled into Google Classroom last year.
In this story is the answer to how districts make money so they can pay ridiculously high salaries to star players-coaches, administrators, band directors. They get grants from politicians for the sake of votes, then the administrators cozy up to potential vendors to get sweetheart deals and possibly kickbacks and to perpetuate the "need" for new software, the leads of Technology ALWAYS advocate for changing the software, because that means someone will have to install, introduce, teach and remediate for those programs UNTIL THE NEXT ONE COMES ALONG. So all that money for "Education" never gets to classrooms or Teachers. Instead it creates a new ruling class of highly paid administrators who can retire early on lucrative buy outs while the rest of us are lucky if we see $2000 a month after we retire. Read it through, look at your district--you know I'm right.
