The Legal Price of Harming the Classroom
by Darrel Stufflebeam
January 29, 2010
The Legal Price of Harming the Classroom
Whenever Taylor Swift is treated badly by a guy she writes a song about it; you’d think they’d learn. Whenever anyone discusses educational issues with me I politely explain my opinion—and then usually write an article. In this case, the educational issue in question is the legal ramifications of harming the classroom.
So, instead of spending this article citing research or offering rhetoric about knowledge being power or the decline of intellectual reason I’m just going to explain the law. Many of us would argue that educational law is flawed (I’m one of them) but, as Americans, we know we have to respect and obey the law or suffer the consequences. The legal consequences of not protecting our classrooms are quite severe.
We take state assessments in math, reading, writing, social studies, and science. Math and reading tests are mandated by the federal government and the others are mandated by the state of Kansas. All of the tests impact state accreditation and, for math and science, our students must improve their scores until, in 2014, all students must achieve Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP). Our funding has been (dramatically) cut but the legal requirements haven’t been.
Punishments for failing to make AYP start out pretty severe and progressively get worse. Ultimately, if a school fails to achieve AYP for five years in a row it would eventually have to reorganize and/or “restructure”, which would include identifying and firing personnel responsible for the failure. The school also loses accreditation. That level of failure is not unlikely for schools. In fact, if the law doesn’t change, that level of failure will be the rule and not the exception. In some states it already is.
Our schools have had incredible success over the past few years. We’ve won the highest state and national awards possible (one National Blue Ribbon Award and another probably on the way!) and I think one could make a strong argument that, academically speaking, our school district is one of the very best in the state. We still must improve, however, because most of our assessments still fail to achieve 100% AYP. Should we cut academic expenses now and pay the legal price later?
We have one of the lowest local property taxes in the state because we already have comparatively high student-to-teacher ratios and no extra classified staff (cooks, custodians, etc…). There are very few viable options for cutting academic expenses without seriously harming our student’s education and there are very few viable options for cutting classified staff without seriously impeding our ability to operate schools. Our budget can be viewed on our website (www.rockcreekschools.org) under “District Information”.
How about other programs like sports, FFA, band, choir, or debate? These programs aren’t legally mandated but, believe it or not, many of our students want to come to school because of these programs—not just for the math and reading. They teach important things and they turn our schools into real communities. Do we cut these people and things?
We’re creating a list of potential budget cuts and ranking items based how harmful it would be for students if we cut them. Not surprisingly, we’re ranking items that hurt our legal (and, therefore, academic) priorities higher but that doesn’t mean we want to cut the other things. After all, if it isn’t important it wouldn’t be in our budget to begin with.
Please support our school board as they go through this very difficult process. During the process, we should all try to keep an open mind by occasionally questioning our own opinions. I’ll do the same—although there are no questions about what the law demands.
