Some explanations from a former teacher to help those who don't understand. Like with most things, this is barely scratching the surface. #nyc #newyork #education #schools #budget

Cole Hannah Jones recently wrote this viral essay in the New York Times about sending her daughter to one of these failing schools. The main premise of the piece is that these struggling schools in New York City are underfunded and under-resourced. PS 307, where Jones chose to send her daughter, gets over $43,000 per student. Compare that to one of the best public elementary schools in New York City. PS 77 on the Upper East Side. School only gets $15,400 per student in funding. The story that all underperforming schools are underfunded is a sticky myth that just won't die. This is a topic that I have expertise in as a former high school teacher in a New York City public school

that many people would describe as underfunded. I was curious, so I took a look at my former school's payment profile and saw that we spend $34,000 per student per year. Now that didn't really attract to me because I distinctly remember each June having to scour every hidden crevice of the school just to make sure that about 100 students had a

graphing calculator for their algebra regions. The truth is, there is no myth of underfunded schools, there is just a severe misunderstanding as to what exactly it means to be underfunded. And there are quite a few factors that result in schools having fewer resources despite spending more money per student.

Number one, our overhead costs are the same but our student population is lower. Low income schools are under enrolled because, guess what, nobody wants to send their kids However, the cost to keep the lights and the heat on in a two-story building is the same, regardless of whether or not that school has 200 students or 500. The same overhead cost with fewer students means the school is spending more per student,

but that per capita increase doesn't result in increased resources. Number two, teaching high-needs populations is incredibly expensive. One percent of the students at the elementary school that she highlighted are English language learners, and eight percent are students with disabilities. But the elementary school that Hannah Jones sent her daughter to has nine percent ELLs and thirty percent students with disabilities This means a school needs significantly more budget for English language teachers special education teachers mental health counselors occupational therapists physical therapists speech therapists or one

paraprofessionals for the students. If you have a handful of students that require a special education teacher in their classroom, that can be solved fairly simply with a self-contained class. But if half of your students do, suddenly you need to either double your teaching staff or ensure that all of their classes have two teachers in them, one gen ed and one special ed. Meaning, Hannah Jones' overfunded school is spending more because they legally require significantly

more staff just to operate. And number three, all of this ignores the hundreds of thousands of dollars PTAs are able to raise for schools in affluent neighborhoods. This is why at the high school that I graduated at, our extracurricular options were Model

UN, mock trial, debate club, wrestling, basketball, volleyball, math team, college bowl, chess club. We even had an anti-bias task force. Meanwhile, at the school I worked at, their options were basketball, volleyball, and the one non-profit theater group that partnered with our school.

My $34,000 per student school could not afford to pay teachers the per session required to hold other extracurriculars throughout the year. When we say a school is underfunded, we don't mean that they're spending less per student. We mean that nearly every single dollar of their school budget is used just to get the staff in the building

and food on the student's plate. This isn't an instance of poor schools just not knowing how to use their money correctly. This is an instance of people severely underestimating exactly what it means for a school to be underfunded.