Editor’s note: This commentary is by Peter Berger, an English teacher at Weathersfield School, who writes “Poor Elijah’s Almanack.” The column appears in several publications, including the Times Argus, the Rutland Herald and the Stowe Reporter.
When I first moved into my middle school classroom 30 years ago, our small school housed grades 4 through 8. We parked our cars in an unpaved lot, which worked out fine because there weren’t many of us.
About 10 years ago the school board and community closed the little elementary school across town, built a sizable addition onto ours, and brought grades K-8 under one roof. This was supposed to save money, but like most consolidation plans, it didn’t deliver exactly as promised, a fiscally disappointing result that can be traced mostly to benign wishful thinking. It’s worth noting, however, that in many cases consolidation boosters’ financial forecasts qualify less as wishful thinking and more as willful deception.
Anyway, along with our bigger school, we got a bigger parking lot. While adding four more grades meant we needed room for more teachers to park, the new paved lot seemed to go on forever. I couldn’t imagine how we’d ever fill it.
We now fill it. I no longer know whose car is whose, and I also no longer know some of the people I bump into in the hall.
My school isn’t unique. According to a comprehensive 2014 study, “the number of non-teachers on U.S. school payrolls has soared over the past fifty years.” Nationwide, “non-teaching staff comprise on average fifty percent of all staff” and account for “one quarter of current education expenditures.” Non-teaching positions have risen 702 percent since 1950, with the “teacher aide category” the “biggest driver of growth” after 1970.
This staffing expansion can partly be traced to the exponential growth of special education over recent decades. In addition, schools have been “restructured,” “reformed,” and “transformed” from their original, longstanding mission, delivering academic and vocational instruction, into “complex institutions” recast as social services providers. From serving three meals a day to babysitting into the evening, from birth control to child care, from dentistry to family counseling, schools are now expected to solve what A Nation at Risk identified in 1983 as “personal, social, and political problems that the home and other institutions either will not or cannot resolve.” Risk warned then that shifting those responsibilities to the nation’s schools would “exact an educational cost as well as a financial one.”
It has.
It still does.
I’m not saying that many of these additional non-teacher employees don’t work hard, or that they don’t work well. In my school some are invaluable. As for school reform’s serial “innovations” in theory, practice and staffing, I won’t argue that the way schools worked 50 years ago is automatically the way they should work today if you don’t argue that the passing of time means that what schools used to do is automatically obsolete and inappropriate for the 21st century.
It’s not a coincidence that school staffs have expanded at the same time central offices, as well as state and federal agencies, have asserted greater direct control over what happens in classrooms.
It’s the nature of the added positions that’s often problematic. For example, while today’s class sizes are frequently smaller, student behavior has typically grown worse, owing both to societal conditions and to reform theories and school policies which mandate that teachers tolerate bad behavior. Aides are tactically stationed in classrooms as extra supervising adult eyes and ears.
Others are there to comply with specific requirements written into students’ special education plans. Even when there’s little or nothing the aide can do to help the student in the classroom, and even though the aide might better assist him at another time during the school day in a small group setting, special education officials’ philosophical preference for “inclusion” dictates that the additional staff member be present in the regular classroom.
Some aides are assigned to accompany individual students throughout the school day. These employees attempt to manage disruptive behavior and goad unmotivated students into doing their school work. Sometimes we’re paying people to write down adolescents’ homework assignments because the adolescents won’t write them down themselves.
Instructional assistants can be helpful. Personal wardens and babysitters are harder to justify.
It’s not a coincidence that school staffs have expanded at the same time central offices, as well as state and federal agencies, have asserted greater direct control over what happens in classrooms. Despite the insistence of politicians and education officials that centralization and consolidation are more cost effective, the consequent greater distance of policymakers and supervisors from actual teaching and learning has commonly delivered higher costs and worse results.
Here in Vermont, for example, our Legislature recently mandated local district consolidation as an administrative cost-cutting measure. Our state education officials, including many who lobbied for the new consolidation law, last week pressed the Legislature for additional funding to administer it.
Meanwhile at school, since many employees holding newly created positions are, thanks to consolidation, directly accountable to central office supervisors, their new salaries are frequently funded via central office lump-sum assessments passed along to local school districts. In such cases the only way local district taxpayers can vote their disapproval of the central office staffing additions, assuming they’re aware of them, is by voting down their entire local school budget, something local communities are usually reluctant to do.
Despite the fact that most new hires don’t teach in regular classrooms, they’re counted as staff when officials calculate staff-to-student ratios, those lopsided statistics cited to justify personnel cuts and more consolidation. In a further irony, the staff members who are cut are often classroom teachers, not the new specialists, psychologists, counselors, behavioral interventionists, home-school liaisons, individual aides and central office supervisors.
My observations over the years have led me to conclude that diverting school efforts and resources into social services, while sometimes constructive within measure, has contributed overall to the declines in achievement and behavior everyone complains about.
You’re entitled to disagree with me.
But before you support district consolidation, you should know its real consequences.
Before you accept ratios and demand staff cuts, you should know how those ratios are computed and what many new school employees really do.
If we continue to saddle schools with the task of solving the nation’s personal and societal problems, we can’t be surprised that we need more people working in them.
We also can’t be surprised when fewer of our students are learning as much as they should.
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