School Funding

In TE 401, we recently did an activity that asked us to look at and interpret data about the school funding policy in Michigan, and the gaps between the highest and lowest funded schools. From this activity, I was able to see that some schools receive up to 7,000 dollars PER STUDENT more than other schools. This seems incredibly unfair to the students in these poorly funded schools. There seem to be two opposing sides to this debate; one side argues for equal funding for all, and the other mindset is that if parents are wealthy then their children should be able to go to a school that receives a lot more money than students of poor families.

I can understand the people who want to say that their children should have advantages in school if they are working so hard for their money to reach the elevated status they are at that allows them to make such good money. However, I think that it is completely unfair to children to start them off at a disadvantage simply because their parents are not as wealthy as someone in the next town over.

School funding can literally be drastically different for schools that are not even ten minutes away from each other. I had the opportunity to visit a school in Lansing, and one in Okemos, and the differences literally took my breath away. I was angry when I walked into the school in Okemos and saw the entire school was completely carpeted, the library was three times the size of the one in Lansing and filled with books, the classrooms in Okemos had all kinds of supplies and resources, whereas in Lansing the teachers might be lucky to have half that much to work with.

I don't know how others feel, but I think that putting children into a hierarchy based upon their parents occupation and economic status is wrong.