by Keri D. Ingraham
For several weeks, social media has been flooded by teachers’ posts with Amazon wish lists, soliciting others to stock their classrooms with basic supplies. Creating these lists has been commonplace in recent years as teachers look outside their schools and districts to fill their supply needs.
Some of the most popular requested items are dry erase markers, Kleenex, Lysol wipes, erasers, tape, pens, colored copy paper, file folders, and pencil sharpeners. Others request educational items such as a microscope, map, or globe, which seem essential for student learning.
This raises an obvious question: Why aren’t school districts providing teachers what they need?
With K-12 public education in America spending nearly $1 trillion per year, there should be no shortage of funds. In fact, as Pete Hegseth notes in the book “Battle for the American Mind“: “The United States spends more on national defense than China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, India, France, United Kingdom, and Japan combined. Yet America spends even more on school than on defense.”
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, total spending for public elementary and secondary schools during the 2020-2021 school year was $927 billion. This equates to spending $18,614 on average per student—a whopping $446,736 for a classroom with 24 students.
It seems reasonable to expect that these taxpayer funds for public education should be adequate to pay for classroom essentials such as dry erase markers, tape, and pencil sharpeners without teachers asking taxpayers to use Amazon to order and pay for these supplies from their pocketbooks.
So where is all the public education money going if not for basic needs in the classroom? Roughly half the funds are eaten up by bureaucracy and never reach the classroom level. As of fall 2022, nearly four times as many administrators worked in public education as in 1950.
Enormous sums are spent on teacher training, most of which has nothing to do with improving student academic achievement. For example, USA Today reported in 2023, “public schools spend more than $20 billion annually on teacher training to help the nation’s teachers, a majority of whom are white, teach across lines of racial identity.”
Despite this massive spending not one of the interviewed 42 school districts, which collectively enroll over 3 million students, assessed the training’s impact based on metrics or evidence.
Or take Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia, which in 2020 spent $24,000 on activist Ibram Kendi’s books, which are filled with so-called “anti-racism” ideas, including his notion that “racial discrimination is not inherently racist.”
If that wasn’t enough, the Fairfax County school district spent another $20,000 for a one-hour teacher training session with Kendi, which equates to $333.33 per minute. Imagine if teachers were instead given a $333 allowance toward purchasing basic classroom supplies.
Then there’s California, where the state budget approved in 2021 by Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, allocated $3 million for public school teacher training in “LGBTQ cultural competency.” But this isn’t just happening in blue cities and states, and it’s been going on for several years. In Missouri in 2019, the school board of Lee’s Summit R-7 School District voted in favor of paying $97,000 for a consultant to provide racial equity training for teachers and district staff.
This absurd spending on training teachers in radical content instead of academic instruction has increased in frequency and amount.
For example, this year, the Hayward Unified School District in California’s Bay Area spent $250,000 on ‘Woke Kindergarten’ training for teachers. Evidently, the training took priority over addressing the alarming educational reality that fewer than 12% of Hayward’s students reach grade level in English and fewer than 4% reach grade level in math.
Instead of training teachers how to teach reading and math effectively, teachers were instructed on how to “disrupt whiteness” in their classrooms—this despite the fact that less than 3.5% of the school’s students are white.
These are just a few examples of misguided spending to inject a radical political agenda into teacher training, which has become the norm nationwide.
It’s past time to pull taxpayer money from funding woke training and instead ensure students come to classrooms stocked with the necessary basic learning materials—pens, pencils, and paper. School districts must be held accountable for spending, on average, nearly $500,000 per classroom per year.
Those Amazon wish lists from teachers directly reflect the financial mismanagement and misplaced priorities of public school districts.
Classroom teachers should be empowered to allocate a few hundred dollars a couple of times a year toward meeting the needs of their classrooms. Teachers will put those funds to far better use than those in district offices who cut massive checks to woke consultants to push radical gender and race ideologies on teachers under the guise of professional development.
– – –
Keri D. Ingraham, Ed.D., is a senior fellow at Discovery Institute, director of the American Center for Transforming Education, and a senior fellow at Independent Women’s Forum.
Photo “Teacher” by Yan Krukau.
