Education Week reports on yet another survey finding that we teachers spend our personal money on students – Educators Prepare Early, Spend Their Own Money for New School Year.
That’s not new news, as I’ve documented in The Best Data On How Much Money Teachers Pay Out Of Their Own Pocket – What Do You Spend?
But this survey is another opportunity for me to plug what I think would be a great experiment for a foundation to fund.
Here’s what I’ve written before:
Maybe it’s time for the feds, or a state, to start an education equivalent to the increasingly successful guaranteed cash grant programs to family providing no-strings attached monies.
In other words, instead of blowing their bucks on non-teacher initiated projects, give a large group of teachers $10,000 each to spend on their students anyway they deemed fit – books, field trips, snacks, bean bag chairs, etc. Really, is there any downside to doing something like that?
It wouldn’t seem fair, but I guess you have a control group of teachers who didn’t get anything (though, come on, they would have to get something for participating!), and then use multiple measures to assess success (like we did in our Long Term English Language Learners pilot program) – not just standardized test scores.
Since most ed research experiments are not successful (see Feds Find In New Report That Most Of Their Funded “Innovations” Didn’t Work – Perhaps Its Time To Fund Teacher Initiatives?), what do they have to lose?
And, if it works (as I assume it will), perhaps we teachers would be able to stop shelling out our own cash for student books, food, tissues, band aids, etc….
Education Week reports on yet another survey finding that we teachers spend our personal money on students – Educators Prepare Early, Spend Their Own Money for New School Year. That’s not new news, as I’ve documented in The Best Data On How Much Money Teachers Pay Out Of Their Own Pocket – What Do school reform Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…
