.3 Equity in Teacher Assignments

What are the barriers to equity of education? Remember that I have defined equity as being three kinds of equity: equity of time, equity of resources, and equity of results. Now I talk about one of the barriers in that there is a lack of resources where the need is greatest. For example in the city of Chicago they did a study some years ago that showed that even after you added all the federal entitlements and you looked at the amount of money being spent per kid in every school in Chicago, you found that the poor kids were having less money spent on them in the city of Chicago then the kids of wealthy backgrounds. Now how can that be? The reason is that in the inner-city schools many of the teachers are beginning teachers or permanent substitutes. Permanent substitutes are at the bottom of the barrel in terms of salaries. Since 80 to 85 percent of the school budget is in salaries, you have teachers at the high end of the salary schedule out in the nice schools and teachers at the low end of the schedule at the not so nice schools. That means that the amount of money being spent on those kids, because you're hiring low cost teachers in the inner-city and high cost teachers in the periphery, that's where the difference comes. If you are a teacher it only makes sense for you to go and teach where it is easy. That is a good decision on the part of the teacher. If you give me the same resources and say that over here you can teach the kids that are easy to teach and over here you can teach kids that are hard to teach, where are you going to go teach? It is a very sensible decision to go teach where it is easy. I applaud the teachers who for whatever reason of social conscience decide that they want to teach where it is tough, I think that is really neat and I want to encourage it, but these are teachers who are going against the system, they are teaching the tough kids in spite of the system rather than because of the system. The system makes it much nicer to teach kids out on the periphery where there is good family support. One of the results of that of course is the kind of PTA's that have both the family involvement and the resources in the parent community to help. But the argument I would make for equity would be that sense we know that teachers would prefer to teach the nice kids rather than the other kids, then we should provide incentives for teachers to teach the kids where it is tough. Either you give them battle pay or you give them smaller classes or you give them more help. There are a lot of ways of adding to the resources to make it a desirable assignment to teach tough kids. New teachers get the hardest assignments. Isn't that a great system? New teachers will have more preparations, they will have three or four different preparations and after you've been there awhile you can get your classes organized so that you maybe have two preparations, that is a very nice, comfortable assignment and of course the senior teachers all assign themselves the honors classes in the name of we want the brightest kids to have the best teachers. The fact of the matter is that the brightest kids don't need the best teachers. As a matter of fact all kids need the best teachers and the teachers can make more of a difference with the kids whose lives are marginalized one way or the other than they can with the kids who tend to be the honors kids. I don't want to shortchange the honors kids, I want to give them their due too, but the consequences of not giving the honors kids their due are less than the consequences of not giving the kids from the wrong side of the tracks their due. The honors kids will at the worst get bored but they'll still go on to college because most of those honors kids have family support behind them. So, new teachers have the hardest assignments and I would like to give new teachers the easiest assignments and let teachers work in the hardest assignments as they go along. I promise you, you'll go in and work your way up through the system and then when it comes your time to teach the honors classes you'll line right up and say, "Hey these are the kids I want to teach," and I don't blame you for that because that is the system. You see I would like to create a system where the most desirable assignments would be the ones where the teaching was toughest. To make those the most desirable you make them desirable in terms of pay and status but also most importantly in terms of the kind of support that you need so that you have a good shot at getting the job done. Right now you are not getting any extra resources and so you are going to come away from that task much more frustrated then if you have kids that are easier to teach; that is where the system is off. So it all adds up to the fact that the fewest resources, financial and human, are in the poorest schools. Bad system. Inequitable.

	How is the system for providing resources to schools flawed? Give two examples.	Answer Here
	Mrs. Copeland is a new teacher to the Springfield Public School System that has just graduated from college. This is her first year in the classroom. In her first period class, she has 25 students, 14 of which are repeating the class for at least the third time. How should Mrs. Copeland deal with this lack of equity in her assignment, and how will it affect her attitudes towards teaching in the future?	Answer Here
	What questions do you now have about what you just read?