MONEY WILL NOT SOLVE OUR PROBLEMS

Millions of Americans play a game of financial roulette with their meager wages, a game called “The Lottery.” Even though 82% of all lottery tickets are purchased by low-income minority men, these low-income players continue to buy tickets. And after years and years of buying tickets, some of these people finally get their wish and win their millions. However, over time, the money doesn’t stay around. 65% of all lottery winners go bankrupt in less than 15 years. It is a sad reality that so many poor people play such a statistically foolish game, and furthermore, those who win the game still end up loosing.

The problem is that these people thought money would fix their problems. They thought that if only they had more money, they could finally “make it”. But in reality, money didn’t fix the problem. Adding more money only proved what had already been demonstrated: they were not good at keeping money around. They didn’t understand how money behaved, and unless they got their act together, the sudden influx of money, ultimately, was destructive.

With the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, an extra $80 billion will be appropriated towards education in just a few short years. Education in America has just won the lottery. And that concerns me.

This concerns me because it is false to suppose that money is the most critical resource needed, or even an essential resource, for turning around a school. Money certainly would be nice, but it is a fact of pedagogy that in a classroom, the ability of a teacher to teach effectively is not determined by what they have. It is determined by what they do with what they have.

All the things that money can buy (technology, more rooms, more teachers, better books, etc.) ultimately get wielded by a human being called a “teacher” or “administrator” and these things will only amplify the abilities of that teacher or administrator. Does getting a new projector in a school really help the students if the teacher just uses it to show movies with little or no connection to the curriculum? Does getting a set of graphing calculators all of a sudden allow your students to understand math? Is money really what is keeping students from being excellent?

Being a great teacher is like being a great musician. A musician wields the instrument and uses it to make great music, but the quality of the instrument is only a small limiting factor. I would rather listen to Mozart play on a keyboard than listen to a pupil play on a grand piano in Carnegie Hall.

I once looked into buying a violin, and at the shop, the violinist said, “The quickest way to a better sound is to buy a better violin. But it is not the best way to get a better sound. The best way to get a better sound is to practice.” I worry that we are in a situation where we just want to buy the better violin because it is the quickest way to make things “sound better.”

American schools, as they stand, are not junk. They aren’t filled with garbage. Sure, there are things that we could do to make them better, but there are plenty of teachers engaging students and fostering learning with very meager resources. These are the Mozarts playing on the keyboard. They don’t begin their lesson plans by stating, “If I only had such and such, then I could do this and that in class today.” They begin their lesson plans by stating, “OK, I have such and such, and I can use those things to do this and that.” Learning is occurring in their room, whether or not there is an $80 billion pool of money to help improve their environment. It’s the artists in the building, not their instruments, which will cause our nation’s schools to transform into fertile ground for our next generation.

Under-performing schools have a much greater need for human capital than they do for financial capital. High-quality educators and administrators are the limiting resource, and we need more and more people to step up to the plate and answer the challenge that our future demands of us. And these educators know that, with or without massive amounts of money, the responsibility is up to them.

American Education just hit the lottery, but a large influx of money does not guarantee success. It only provides a window of opportunity. Whether or not we will be “bankrupt” in 15 years (like the 65% of all lottery winners) will be determined by those of us in the buildings and in the position to determine how these funds are wielded. It all depends on whether or not we have the people in place who will wisely channel these resources and utilize them to make positive change, or if the money will be squandered and dissipate into nothingness. Our future will answer the question for us, but the past tells us that the odds are not in our favor.

Who’s up for a challenge?

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P.s. The statistics for this article were located here , here, and and here.