It’s the bang of an education that matters and educators control the bangs.
Schooling is all about the bang, not the buck. Bucks matter and never doubt the truth that bucks drive the school bus. But, more important than counting the dollars being spent by a school, count the bangs. Count the essential knowledge, skills, and life values children learn through schooling. When we count the benefits and then reconcile the cost we can make schooling achieve its noble purpose — educate all children for their future lives. Budgeting should be outcome specific not dollar certain.
It is spring in public education and school boards and administrators are constructing budgets for the 2021-22 school year. Historically, this annual ritual begins with understanding the revenues available for next year’s school programs and parsing out the dollars. Budgeting aligns available funds with existing and continuing programs and perhaps new programs. Budgeting assures continuity. The greatest planned spending is payroll. Education is a human-rich enterprise supporting teaching and learning in classrooms, gyms, rehearsal halls, studios, labs, and on a variety of fields. An inferred objective of budgeting is to assure continuing employment of staff. At the end of the budgeting process, we roll 95%-plus of this year’s programs and program costs into next year.
Consider these three events and then rethink the budgeting process.
- We write and rationalize the 2021-22 budget in the spring of 2021. Approval of the 21-22 budget allows the school to prepare for teaching and learning that starts in September 2021. Spending for 21-22 starts during 20-21. We know the bucks we will spend.
- We summarize the learning achievements of the 20-21 school year in the summer and fall of 2021. These are the bangs. We budget bucks for future bangs without knowing the bangs of the previous bucks.
- Annual budgets spend 100% of available bucks to achieve 80% or less of the needed bangs. Typically, we learn that 3-4 out 5 children successfully achieved success in their annual curricula and 1-2 out of 5 children did not.
Budgeting bucks before bangs means we budget for a lot of unsuccessful education. Every annual budget includes bucks allocated to last year’s unsuccessful bangs. By the time a 4K class graduates, the district will budget more than a million bucks to reconcile unsuccessful annual bangs.
Get out a clean piece of paper and start over. Start with a graph not a spreadsheet.
Map the needed benefits, the learning outcomes you need to achieve by June 2022. Create a clean and clear cause-effect graph of teaching that begets essential learning in one school year. Plot the units of knowledge, skills, and values to be taught. Show how they build upon past learning and lead to the next annum of teaching and learning. Include corrections for unsuccessful learning in this school year. That is, teaching time to assure that all children learn successfully at the point of instruction. Put the remediation and interventions here at the time of initial instruction.
Do this for every curriculum, not just reading and math. Plot the learning trajectory for Art….through Woodworking. Each teacher plans for 100% teaching and learning success resulting from their 21-22 curriculum. A teacher’s plan includes extra tutorial time, paraprofessional time to work side-by-side with children to ensure on-time learning, differentiated materials to ensure learning that appeals and attends to each child’s learning challenges, and extra time for constant assessment of each child’s learning throughout, not after, the school year.
Calculate the bucks needed to accomplish these teaching and learning plans. The total per teacher and for all teachers will be greater than a usual annual budget. It should be, because this is the cost of ensuring that every child achieves the bangs of their school year.
Compare this bang first budget with a prior year’s actual spending and the bang first budget will be smaller. How is this possible? We ghost costs from one year’s budget to the next for the remediation of unsuccessful teaching and learning. These ghost costs are in special education, summer school, tier three RtI, children retaking failed courses, and all the instructional time/cost of correcting what should/could have been successful initially. Add up all the costs of subsequent year remediation for a graduating class of seniors to find the millions of bucks spent for unsuccessful education.
The greatest loss though is human. Every time a child is unsuccessful in learning and we do not make an immediate repair, we reinforce the idea that their successful learning is not important to us. Children drop off until they drop out. The price of a child’s dropping off is a cost the child pays for the rest of her life.
We used to label bang first planning as backward design or outcome based education. In backward design and outcome based education, we began with an understanding of successful learning and designed our instructional delivery to achieve that picture of success. For a variety of reasons, outcome based conversations became uncomfortable because budgeting per usual got in the way. We planned for outcomes but budgeted for dollar limited delivery system. We were bucks first. Now, we know better.
Plan for the bangs and you will get bangs.