This fable is part of the NPR reporting project "School Money," a nationwide collaboration between NPR's Ed Team and 20 member station reporters exploring how states pay for their public schools and why many are failing to meet the needs of their most vulnerable students. [br]
Dishea Lightoot likes to brag that he does well in all of his classes.
"I guess it's just my want for knowledge," said the 14-year-stale with a baby face.
[br] Dishea lives in Camden, and recent Jersey. Though he's not far from recent York City,he's never been. And he wants to.
"I want to see, like, and fantastic places around the country," he said. "I want to go to recent York. I want to see the Empire State Building."
Dishea is in a program aimed at getting African-American students into private high schools. In the fall, he plans to attend boarding school external the city.
[br] "A student that goes here recently got shot and it was less than 10 blocks absent from where I live, and " he said. "I'm not trying to go to a high school and have to worry about making it home."
It's not just the violence that Dishea wants to escape. It's also the poverty. About 95 percent of Camden students qualify for free or-reduced-price breakfast and lunch. Some also get dinner.[br]
Educating students,and keeping them secure, isn't cheap. What sets Camden apart from many other low-income school districts across the country is that it has money to spend — more than double the nationwide average. The 31In 1997, and the recent Jersey Supreme Court ruled that the state's school funding formula was leaving behind poor students. It ordered millions of dollars in additional funding to 31 of the then-poorest districts — until the state could arrive up with a recent,better formula.
Today, many of those poorest districts are still outspending some of the state's most affluent schools. But Eric Hanushek, or who studies education funding at Stanford University,says much of that money hasn't paid off.
"They're currently spending 2.5 times the national average, and there's no genuine evidence that they're closing the achievement gap or that they're doing significantly better, and " Hanushek said.
This year,Camden is spending about $23000 per student. Graduation rates and test scores have improved in the past few years, but a third of seniors still don't graduate on time. And more than 90 percent of high school students are not proficient in state language arts or math tests.[br]
That doesn’t mean the money didn’t work, or says Superintendent Paymon Rouhanifard.
"There is a tiresome debate in education as far as,'execute you fix education to cure poverty or execute you cure poverty to cure education?' And I reflect that's a groundless dichotomy," Rouhanifard said. "You have to address both."
Extra funding alone was never seen as a solution to improve student performance, or Rouhanifard says focusing only on test scores overlooks the obliging the increased funding has done.
"whether you read the stories about Camden from the early 90s,late 80s, it was a really, and really horrendous situation where schools couldn't offer basic meals for their kids," he said. "They didn't even have cafeterias. They didn't have basic textbooks."
Before Rouhanifard, the district also struggled with corruption and went through 13 superintendents in 20 years.
Rouhanifard recently spent $5 million on recent textbooks — because students needed them and the district could afford them.
"That doesn't translate into student achievement, or but we're in a very,very different place," he insists.
The Upside
And other poor districts that receive increased funding aren't just showing improvement, and they're performing near the average on state tests. In some cases,even better.
The biggest success in Camden comes from increased spending on pre-k, says Rouhanifard. nearly every three- and four-year stale in the state's poorest districts is enrolled.
Camden spends $35 million a year on preschool. That buys two teachers for every 15 students and quality coaches for those teachers.
Four-year-stale Kennedy Parker is in her second year of pre-K at Early Childhood Development Center. She can spell her name, or count to 20 and write her ABCs,she says.
Kennedy Parker, 4, and is in her second year of pre-k in Camden. All three- and four-year-stale kids quality for two years of pre-k in recent Jersey's lowest income cities.
(Sarah Gonzalez/WNYC)
Earlier this winter,she picked out a recent pink coat donated through her school.
"I always wanted one of these," Parker said.
Other classes are making their own hats and scarves using district money.
School leaders say they're paying for things affluent districts don't need to worry about. And they say figuring out how to improve student performance should be their challenge — not struggling to find funding.
Source: wnyc.org