I couldn’t get too far out of college without making a reference to my social science background, and so I am capturing the past week with “the resource curse.” Properly used, the resource curse signifies the contradiction that states rich in natural resources have a difficult time developing their economies because of how profitable it is to exploit and export their resources at a high rate at the expense of other industry.
In the context of Teach For America, the resource curse really just means classroom resources are a challenge to find, purchase and put to use appropriately.
Last week the 40-odd Teach For America CMs along with scores of new teachers in Clayton County Public Schools received a week of “Professional Learning For New Teachers” sponsored by a Race To The Top grant to the district. As participants in the teacher induction program in Clayton County, we will receive support from a mentor teacher, have a series of classroom observations and access to professional development. The program, from what little has been shown so far, is a great way to improve teacher quality (including the needed quality improvements among CMs like myself) internally rather than through high-stakes performance evaluations and few labor rights.
Discussions about teacher quality aside, the resource question recurred during the week as I began to make more specific plans for the classroom, make inventories of existing supplies and run price checks on what I would need. The central issue slowly became apparent: classroom resource availability is a cause and/or indicator of educational inequity and larger socioeconomic injustices in the United States.
There are three “streams” through which funding could come for these resources but did not for different reasons — showing the systemic problems visible before day one of my official teaching post even begins.
(1) The school district: The most logical provider of resources for the classroom — posters, paper, notebooks, organizing systems, student trackers, presentation materials — would be the school district in which we are employed. However, Clayton County Public Schools faces a $65 million budget shortfall over three years due to a small local tax base in a county abandoned by more affluent residents in recent decades.
Additionally, the patchwork of federal grants and Title I funding to low-income schools has been inconsistent to the point the district can no longer offer a stipend to new teachers to get their classrooms off the ground. Consider that in both higher-income areas such as Cobb County Schools which give away free supplies by the cartload and in other professions a new employee receives what they need to do their job most basically. I do not register this as a complaint but as a statement about the frustrations of systemic inequality.
(2) Corporate donors: An issue hounding Teach For America nationally in recent weeks or at least in my reading of it has been the organization’s close relationship with politicized donor groups such as the Walton Foundation. The foundation donates heavily to groups which favor school choice and merit-based evaluation for teachers, both of which may be good but are controversial. Furthermore, Teach For America allocated $3 million of this donation to almost double the size of the Greater New Orleans Corps. The federal government through AmeriCorps also funds about 30% of the organization’s yearly operating budget.
These donor relationships are all well and good, and I fully support corporate social responsibility. However, we must mindful of political aims which hide behind 501(c)(3) donations as well as how the money is spent once it reaches Teach For America. I highly respect the work TFA does in its regions, and the organization amply gives us support, mentoring, services and instructional material during the year. There remain ways funding could be targeted efficiently in the transitional period for first-year CMs, especially given how the organization may try to spend money pushing boundaries elsewhere.
With the school district having financial difficulty supplying new teachers, would it not also be good for TFA to consider providing or reimbursing CMs for a certain amount of supply expenses?
(3) Entrepreneurship: What I have witnessed as a result of the previous two streams not working well for CMs in supplying classrooms in the past week has translated into what most enterprising folks would consider when no one gives them what they need — seeking it out as an entrepreneur!
The careful combing through supply giveaway days which go directly from corporation to teacher, from non-profit grant-giver to school and from philanthropic individual donors to teachers in a Kickstarter model all result in a hodgepodge, difficultly-timed and time-consuming process to get basic resources on a very tight budget.
I remain convicted about the work Teach For America and activists for public education undertake, and have not questioned my commitment to the cause or the methods in light of the issue getting resources in the classroom to better teach students. Yet in a practical way for the first time I see the extent to which injustice, inequality and the imperfectness of the solutions to that inequality play out in a very material way.
With students arriving in my 5th Grade English class in exactly one week, I can only hope to push back against the resource curse and confront the larger questions and responsibilities of teaching which are waiting for me.
