March 19, 2008

It's 7 a.m. and My School is Leaking

Posted by Aaron Tang at 3:52PM

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It has been raining for the past 48 hours in St. Louis, and my school is leaking.

I get to the building at seven every morning, but on rainy days I am confronted with a vexing decision: which staircase should I take to my third floor classroom?

If I take the south stairwell, I will have to step through large puddles and risk slipping and falling on the stairs. The puddles are generated by a constant flow of water out of large holes in the ceiling, such as the ones in the pictures to the right.

If I take the north stairwell, a different source of unpleasantness confronts me: a school security guard who believes that every teacher in the building is her enemy. Her particular gripe with me? I think it is that I am too kind to students when I ask them questions like "what are you doing," "where are you going," and "why are you doing that" instead of immediately assuming that they are guilty of something and writing them an office referral.

This choice that I face on each rainy morning conveys a challenging, parallel problem that faces our nation's efforts to improve chronically failing public schools much like the one where I teach. The problem is this: with a scarce amount of resources available, should it be a priority to fix physical capital shortfalls, or human capital problems?

It's a tough choice to have to make. But it's an even harder admission: do we really have to tell parents that either the building their child attends will have roof leaks and ancient textbooks, or their child's teachers and other personnel will be lackluster?

The answer? Yes... in the current political climate. WIthout a sea change of political will to bring about smarter, better resource allocation and tough, common sense policies, principals will continue to face impossible decisions. We have one working water fountain and, for a time, we had one working boys bathroom in our entire building. But we also had several negligent teachers who were wasting hundreds of hours of students' lives each week. With a budget already $600,000 in the red, what room is there to fix both problems?