#ArmMeWith Funding

We are in the second month of 2018, and the United States has already seen its 18th school shooting. On February 14th, a domestic terrorist brutally murdered 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

Rather than acknowledging that our country does, in fact, have a gun problem (see my blog post, “Gun Country,”) several politicians, including the president, have suggested that arming our nation’s teachers may prevent future atrocities from occurring. In response, many educators, including myself, posted selfies and messages under the hashtag #ArmMeWith.

Selfies and Messages from Educators Under the Hashtag #ArmMeWith

I spent quite some time scrolling through my fellow educators’ pleas. Some asked to be armed with school counselors and resources to help students experiencing mental health issues, others begged for “common sense” gun laws. Many noted that they could simply use more time for instruction and less time for standardized testing, but the request that I saw most often was for funding.

So let’s talk school funding. NPR’s Ed Team produced a highly informative series, “School Money,” which explores “how states pay for their public schools and why many are failing to meet the needs of their most vulnerable students” (Turner et al., 2016). If you are at all interested in learning more about how our nation funds our schools, I highly suggest checking it out, but I will explain the basics.

In the United States, our schools’ funding comes from a combination of three sources of money: local, state, and federal. While the percentage that each source provides varies from state to state, the average formula is something like this: 45 percent local money, 45 percent state, and 10 percent federal (Turner et al., 2016). The money that districts have to spend on each of their students ranges widely throughout the country. For example, growing up I attended two school districts in the same suburban county in New York. The district that I attended from first to ninth grade spends $21,303 per student each year. The district that I attended from tenth to twelfth grade spends $21,037 per student (Turner et al., 2016). The amount that these two districts spend on its students are roughly the same, and I’d argue that the quality of education that I received in each district was very similar. Baltimore City Public Schools, the district in Maryland in which I taught for three years, spends $15,528 per student. The opportunities that my schools in New York afforded to me were vastly different than those that my students in Baltimore received. However, it is important to note that the amount of funding spent on each student can vary drastically within a state as well.

With that said, why is it that some districts have more money to spend on their students than others? The answer is simple: property taxes. Property taxes differ significantly from neighborhood to neighborhood. In other words, the funding that a district receives is dependant upon the wealth of the residents in its zoned zipcodes. This automatically creates educational inequity as there is less money allocated to those districts located in the nation’s more impoverished neighborhoods. (Note: equality and equity are two different notions. Equality is giving everyone the same resources, opportunities, etc. Equity is giving everyone the resources, opportunities, etc. required to meet their individual needs). Some states, however, do contribute more to their schools’ funding in an attempt to alleviate some of this inequity. According to NPR, the national average that school districts spend per student is $11,841. Eighty districts spend more than $40,000 per student, while some districts spend less than $10,000 (Turner et al., 2016). An article published in NPR’s “School Money” series entitled “Why America’s Schools Have A Money Problem” includes an interactive map that can be used to research the amount of money that your district spends on each student.

In 2016, Baltimore City Public Schools faced a $130 million budget deficit. When the state of Maryland voted for the creation of several casinos, politicians told residents that the casinos would generate money for public schools. Baltimore’s Horseshoe Casino produced more than $200 million for the state’s Education Trust Fund in 2017 alone, yet Baltimore’s schools received less state money than they did the year prior. Instead, money put into the trust fund allowed the governor and lawmakers to reallocate other capital allotted initially for schools to things like roadwork and government employees’  salaries (Broadwater & Green, 2017). Despite resistance from the community, the state of Maryland is building a $35 million juvenile detention center in Baltimore. Many youth advocates have noted their concern that the state is investing money in jails while simultaneously providing less to schools (Anderson, 2017).

Student Protest Sign, Annapolis Budget Rally, February 2017

I am sure that those of us who grew up in higher socioeconomic communities can remember receiving a school supply list from our teachers every summer. Our parents would bring us to Staples or Office Depot and buy us infinite amounts of No. 2 pencils, our favorite brand of pens, scented markers, the Crayola crayon collection that had a built-in sharpener, folders and binders of every color, textbook covers, and loose leaf paper with hole reinforcements. When we reached middle school, our parents purchased us highly-priced Texas Instruments calculators. Our parents would also provide our teachers with boxes of tissues, rolls of paper towels, bottles of hand sanitizer, and packs of disinfecting wipes. Impoverished communities and inequitable funding, however, force teachers who work in less privileged districts to provide basic school supplies that are necessary for their students to learn.

When I first started teaching at a public charter school in Baltimore, I was given a completely empty classroom, along with four dry erase markers and an eraser. The school had two printers to be used by both middle and high school teachers. These printers were probably meant to be in a small office and therefore could not handle the constant demand for papers; needless to say, they were broken pretty much all of the time. My coworkers that had worked in other schools across the district told me that we were “lucky” because our school provided teachers with an unlimited amount of paper and did not ration the number of copies that we were allowed to make from each printer.

Not knowing whether or not the printer would be working when I needed to use it was too much stress for me. I bought a small printer for my classroom, but that is not nearly where my purchases stopped. Like so many teachers across our country that work in underfunded school districts, I purchased toner, paper, pens, pencils, markers, and other office supplies. I bought tissues, paper towels, hand sanitizer, disinfecting wipes. For my professional development, I bought books and software. Of course, I also bought decor to help make my classroom more welcoming and a place where my students wanted to learn, as well as candy and other snacks for when my students earned an extra treat.

My Classroom in the Public Charter School in Baltimore

I was fortunate to work at a school that purchased English teachers a class set of their required books. However, having multiple classes of the same course and only one collection of texts meant that the books had to stay in the classroom for students to complete their work. Any reading from the books that I wanted my students to do at home resulted in yet more photocopies.

A survey completed by Scholastic found that teachers spend an average of $530 of their own money, and teachers that work in high-poverty districts spend nearly 40 percent more than that. During my two years working at the public charter school in Baltimore, I spent about $1,000 of my own money each year. When districts and families cannot afford to provide classrooms with resources, our nation’s teachers are forced to turn to crowdfunding websites to raise money to purchase supplies or fund projects. I must mention that America’s tax code does allow educators to take a deduction for the money spent on their classrooms. We can deduct a whole $250!! Please note that Republicans attempted to cut this number to zero in a preliminary version of the new tax code.

Inequitable school funding does not only affect a child’s access to school supplies. This winter we saw just one ramification of a district’s lack of funding when over 60 Baltimore City public schools closed due to freezing classroom temperatures, broken heaters, and pipes that burst. Funding determines school staffing, including the number of teachers, counselors, and custodians (just to name a few) found in a school. School funding dictates the courses that schools can offer; performing and fine arts are often the first programs to be cut when a district’s budget is tight. A student’s access to technology, extracurricular activities, and field trips are all affected by school funding, as well as teachers’ access to professional development. In this country, inequitable funding affects every facet of a child’s opportunity to receive a quality education. It is no coincidence that many of our country’s underfunded districts educate children of the global majority and children of impoverished families.

So when the president and other politicians that are in the pocket of the National Rifle Association try to tell the country that arming 20 percent of teachers would bring an end to school shootings, I have to roll my eyes. Let those actually in classrooms tell you what teachers and students need. Arm educators with funding and watch what we can do! 

Gun Country

A Student’s Visual Response to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me

I recently returned to the States from my nine-week adventure around Australia and New Zealand. It is an interesting time to be abroad as an American. Upon finding out my nationality, people were quick to ask me several questions. While questions about how Trump could have possibly become the president were by far the most popular, questions about my opinions on gun control were a close second. Many foreigners find it hard to fathom that gun violence is a regular part of American life.

As Americans, we have become desensitized to gun violence. I was in Australia on October 2nd when a gunman opened fire on an outdoor concert in Las Vegas, killing 59 people and injuring 527 others. I was in New Zealand on November 5th when another shooter took the lives of 26 people and wounded 20 more in a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas. I was studying abroad in England when 20 children and six adults were shot and murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School. No matter where you are in the world, hearing of a fatal incident such as these is harrowing, but being abroad during these tragic events forced me to reflect even deeper on the gun culture that exists within the United States.

Americans make up 4.4 percent of the world’s population, yet our country owns 42 percent of the world’s guns (Keller, 2017). According to the Baltimore Sun’s homicide map (yes, there are so many homicides in Baltimore that the local newspaper has created a database to track them… let that sink in for a minute) as of November 30th, 2017 there have been 319 homicides in Baltimore alone. Two-hundred and seventy-seven of those homicides were committed with guns.

Number of Homicides Committed in Baltimore Using Guns as of November 30, 2017

Throughout my life, my socioeconomic and white privilege have allowed me to live a life that is relatively sheltered from the role that gun violence plays in American culture. Even as an undergraduate student in Baltimore, my privilege isolated me from the prominence of gun violence in the Baltimore community. Baltimore is a hypersegregated city both regarding race and socioeconomics. Three sides of Loyola University are surrounded by colonial mansions, the majority of which are home to upper-class White families. The remaining side, York Road, is a prime example of the drastic, lasting effects that practices such as redlining have left on Baltimore’s Black communities. The term redlining refers to a federal housing policy that started in the 1930s; “It reviewed mortgages based on neighborhood districts—which, in practice, meant denying homeownership opportunities based on race and ethnicity” (Pearce, 2016). It is this policy-driven hypersegregation that is the “root cause of racial inequity, crime, health inequities/disparities, and civil unrest” (Brown, 2016).

  Map of Baltimore from the Home Owners Loan Corporation, 1937 (least desirable neighborhoods identified in red)

In his essay, “Stoop Stories,” Baltimore writer, D. Watkins, analyzes the juxtaposition of what he calls the “two Baltimores:” one that his Black friends call “Murderland,” and the other that his White friends call “Charm City.” Like many of Loyola’s students, I participated in various volunteering and service-learning opportunities throughout my undergraduate career. However, when my hour or so of serving was up, I was able to pop right back into Loyola’s bubble within “Charm City.” Honestly, I would have never learned about redlining and the other racist practices that led to Baltimore’s continued hypersegregation if it weren’t for a course on Baltimore’s history and architecture that I took the summer going into my junior year. While I took the class merely to fulfill my upper-level history requirement, I believe that it should be mandatory for all students. Years later when I had my own classroom, that history course shaped much of my teaching.

A Student’s Visual Response to D. Watkins’ “Stoop Stories”

Of the two-hundred and seventy-seventy homicides in Baltimore committed using guns, forty-six of those deaths occurred in West Baltimore, the community in which I taught and in which the majority of my students live (The Baltimore Sun). At only 15 years of age, my students have experienced trauma that most people will never experience in their lifetimes. Because of the societal inequities that my students face in their daily lives, I chose to base my English language arts curriculum on social justice issues. My students have carried multiple labels throughout their first decade of schooling—at-risk, English learners, “problem” students, below-grade-level readers; a list of pejorative lenses through which many teachers, as well as society and the media, view urban youth.

I believe, however, that my students are productive citizens in their communities and the global society. Throughout my lessons, I attempted to help my students recognize the injustices and oppression that they and others face. We then worked to posit ways in which we could work against these injustices as agents of change by identifying their assets, particularly the unique assets that they hold as youth of color and members of urban communities.

One way in which I attempted to do this was by introducing my students to the framework of “street literacy.” Developed by Caitlin Cahill (2000), “street literacy” as a perspective suggests that “literacy” is more than reading or writing a text. Instead, it also includes the skills and knowledge such as sociocultural backgrounds, rules, beliefs, and discourses that are necessary to interact with one’s environment. For example, my students must know which parts of their neighborhoods are safer than others, as well as how to engage with different members of their community. In other words, “street literacy” is the way in which we “read” or interact with the world around us. It may also act as the lens through which we view people and situations.

Many of the conversations that I had about gun violence throughout the past nine weeks made me think back to some of the work that my students produced during these “street literacy” lessons. One such assignment that came to mind was our “I Am From” poems. As the title of the assignment explains, students wrote poems about being from Baltimore. Here is one of the poems that I received (all language is original):

Where I’m from
Hustle is worth everything
Drugs fill the house and out into the street
guns hidden in the waist of a hustler

Where I’m from
Teens forced to be soldiers
little kids forced to be older
running from the law
middle finger at them screaming fuck’em all

Where I’m from
Respect is a must
Pull some slick shit
And the trigger will bust

Stuck on the corner forced to sell smack
going down this road where it ain’t no looking back

Money controls the mind of a fiend
Posted downtown Pills making them lean

Where I’m from
You have to fight to survive
Looking at people with pain in their eyes
you doing something right if you 17 and alive

While this student might be reinforcing the pejorative views of urban youth, he also explicitly states the underlying social reasons for why some youth choose such paths and thus provides evidence of his understanding of street literacy. More importantly, in the final stanza, he uses a youth lens to show how many urban youth do not have access to a “normal” adolescence. Urban youth often have to “grow up” long before they turn seventeen because of the need to understand what it means to “fight to survive” the various aspects of living in the type of community that the student describes in the first five stanzas of his poem.

In response to a recent surge in crimes committed by Baltimore youth, Baltimore’s Police Commissioner, Kevin Davis stated, “Poverty, unemployment, family dysfunctions, drug addictions – all those things are very, very real in our city… But they do not excuse violent behavior by anyone, particularly juveniles” (Broadwater & Rector, 2017).

It is easy for us as outsiders to judge the actions of these kids. We question their morals, their intelligence, their upbringing, and the choices they make. After the murder of Freddie Gray and the ensuing uprising, many demonized the youth of Baltimore. Youth of color were deemed “thugs” and accused of participating in “riots.” As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. told us, “a riot is the language of the unheard.” Our society has and continues to fail these children. How can we recognize the “poverty, unemployment, family dysfunctions, and drug addictions” that have been systemically created, yet fail to admit that many of these children are just trying to “survive” in the environment in which society has placed them?

In 2015, a British journalist, Dan Hodges, tweeted, “In retrospect, Sandy Hook marked the end of the US gun control debate. Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over.”  I recently read an article about a private school in Miami that is selling bulletproof panels for its students’ backpacks. The teachers at The Florida Christian School have been trained to instruct students to use their backpacks to protect themselves in the case of an active shooter (Diaz-Zuniga, 2017). Think about that. Parents and educators are being forced to provide schoolchildren with protective gear because our government refuses to make stricter gun laws.

The mass shooting at Sandy Hook was not the moment that our country decided that killing children was bearable. According to an article in the journal Pediatrics, an average of 1,300 children in America die from gunshot wounds each year (Fowler et al., 2017). Our country decided a long time ago that profit is more important than human life; each mass shooting is just a reminder of that fact. Many of us are privileged to live in communities where gun violence is not a prominent issue. Imagine if we could say that about our entire country? It is not only foreigners who are perplexed by our country’s gun legislation or lack thereof. I am too.