Reply to Janney PTA Guerrilla Tactics!!!

Forum Index » DC Public and Public Charter Schools

Reply to "Janney PTA Guerrilla Tactics!!!"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Just looked it up.

DCPS gives Janney, everything included, $10k per kid.

It gives CW Harris $19k per kid. And $15-18k per kid to a ton other of the "lowest-performing" schools.

Crazy world.[/quote]

Do you realize that CW Harris hosts 3 specialized, self-contained classrooms for students with serious disabilities? That alone increases the funding per student because the adult/student ratios must be so much lower and in many cases special equipment is needed.

All of you who are triggered by schools serving high-needs children of all descriptions thinking that they are getting something your kids are entitled to make me ill.

If you can't be empathetic to those children and their families you could at least be thankful that your kids don't need those services and haven't experienced trauma and poverty. There but for the grace of god ... [/quote]

Yah, the enrollment+minimum numbers (the baseline) are $8,636 for Janney and $9187 for Harris. That's essentially even considering Harris is so much smaller but they both have basic admin structure. Harris has $5k "per pupil" SPED funding but that's obviously a misleading average considering the high needs kids they serve. They also get $2k/kid from Title and High Risk funding. But there are almost no high risk/title kids at Janney.

So (appreciating that this is kind of a silly exercise because kids experience a school not their "per pupil" number) general ed, non-low income kids at Harris and at Janney would get roughly the same per pupil funding, but only the kid at Janney would get the supplemental $1k+ from parent fundraising. Of course there are no or almost no general ed, non-low income kids at Harris and only a smattering of high risk kids at Janney. [/quote]

So it's perfectly fine for base per pupil funding at Harris to be $550 greater than Janney, but if Janney parents donate so that the per pupil amount at Janney ends up $450 greater than Harris that is wrong, wrong, wrong!  
[b]That difference is essentially meaningless. It's based on allocated FTEs so, for example, both schools have one Principal but the per pupil cost is higher at Harris because there are 200 students vs 700. Similarly like a PE teacher would have some kind of a curve towards maximum per pupil efficiency as you add more kids until you added a second PE teacher, etc)[/b]

First, the PTA contribution at Janney is likely meaningfully less than $1000/pupil (not my school; I'm guessing based on what I know based of my kids' school).  Remember that a significant number of people -- appropriately -- don't donate or donate less than whatever is asked.
[b]I used these numbers which are a few years old. [url]https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/study-parent-groups-in-northwest-dc-raise-thousands-for-schools/2017/04/12/22d42ef2-1f94-11e7-a0a7-8b2a45e3dc84_story.html?utm_term=.78947c6bf2b9[/url] It depends on if you include fees or just use fundraising so I went in the middle which is roughly $1k if you use these numbers and current year enrollment.[/b]

Second, there is not a movement to reduce school funding in DC.  PTA contributions are not in conflict with tax paying.  And if there are any grumblings are school funding, it's from people who don't use the public schools, not the public-school-using, PTA-donating parents.
[b]This is false because watch you are about to do it.[/b]

Third, is money really DCPS's biggest deficiency?  How the money gets spent may be questionable, but the overall budget is not skimpy.  Arguably, DC should be spending more outside of the schools to support needy families with problems that now get dumped on the schools.
[b]There.[/b]

Fourth, do you really think that if Janney PTA raised no money, that that would somehow benefit the Harris students?  The most likely outcome is that the Janney parents would be lobbying for equalizing the base per pupil funding, which would only hurt the Harris students.
[b]They would likely lobby for higher base funding which would help Harris, because as I've already pointed out the base funding is not meaningfully different.[/b]

Fifth, if the donor parents didn't contribute to their PTA, they would still likely spend that money on their kids.  The benefits just wouldn't be shared by their schoolmates.
[b]I mean, okay. Whatever you need. This would be more compelling at some of the charters but Janney is pretty homogenous.[/b]

I get the frustration with social and economic inequities.  But this is a weird focus for addressing the inequities in our society.  There are so many more-substantive issues with truly negative consequences rather than hyped-up, theoretical ones.  I just don't see any benefit to discouraging people from adding money to the public school pie.
[b]The whole point is that it doesn't add money to the public school pie. I'm so confused by what you mean here.[/b]

And, yeah, I would have been turned off by the shaming fundraising letter too.[/quote][/quote]

I know we're all just here to yell at each other but I wanted to point out one more kind of fun rabbit hole when thinking about per pupil spending particularly whether PP is right that Harris's baseline $550 more than Janney is meaningful (it's not). Actually Janney gets considerable minimum funding to make up for it's efficiencies of scale that would put it even further behind as a "per pupil" figure. The whole point is that they are as equal as they can get them. But the rabbit hole is about "FTE" and "actual teacher salary" and "actual teacher value" (that last one is not a policy term I just made it up for use here). These numbers are all based on average teacher salary across the district. So if my school's AP US teacher is a 20 year veteran with a masters, and yours is a TFA 23 year old, they are counted the same in terms of "per pupil funding" even though the first teacher probably makes at least double what the second one does. Traditionally this has created a lot of inequities both across schools and within schools (like if there is an advanced track that has more expensive teachers) as far as the actual cost of the actual teachers spending time with students. The problem is that it only matters in so far as you believe the pay scale has anything to do with "actual teacher value" which it probably does but not nearly enough to justify a huge policy shift especially if you are invested in the idea of measuring and rewarding teacher quality and you want to do away with the old salary scale altogether. Also it would get really messy in terms of budgeting to use actual salaries. I believe NYC at one point looked into using a rolling building-wide 3-year average but I think it went away.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics