What comes first - the chicken or the egg; money to help children in our schools learn better or better learning to demonstrate schools should receive more money?
If you listen to Hamilton County commissioners who tap dance on the head of our county budget pin, you hear them say there will be no new allowance until the same educational leaders who've been failing our schools for a generation miraculously - and with the same lack of tools they've always had - figure out how to teach Dick and Jane to read better.
On Tuesday, Hamilton County Schools Interim Superintendent Kirk Kelly presented to commissioners the school system's proposed budget for next year. The $385 million budget includes a request for a $24 million increase, and the increase would require a property tax rise of about $71 a year for a $100,000 home. County Mayor Jim Coppinger said he hasn't decided yet whether his county budget will include the increase, which school leaders say will help improve literacy, expand vocational programs and improve the district's lowest-performing schools. But after the meeting, Commissioners Sabrena Smedley, Randy Fairbanks, Chester Bankston, Marty Haynes and Tim Boyd told the Times Free Press they won't support raising the property tax to boost school funding.
"I want to see some results before agreeing to give more money," said Smedley, chairwoman of the education committee.
About 60 percent of all Hamilton County third-graders do not read on grade level. Systemwide, our students tested below the state average in nine of the 10 tested TCAP categories by as many as 16.7 percentage points. Local employers say we have some 15,000 jobs filled by non-local residents because they can't find educationally qualified applicants. A recent state report that found $10 million in federal money for our low-performing "iZone" schools was wasted by lack of planning and focus. A pool-cue hazing/rape of a high-school basketball player by three of his teammates during an unauthorized out-of-town tournament trip put the victim in a hospital and led to the retirement of our former school superintendent, and rather than hire an outside interim superintendent to clean house in the system, the school board appointed Kelly who, with 35 years in the department, has for years been the man in charge of testing and accountability.
The collective price of these school system failures far surpasses what already is budgeted yearly to operate the county's 79 public schools. What do commissioners think it costs the county to have students so poorly educated that firms here have to recruit workers who pay taxes and buy products in other counties? Do our commissioners not realize that we need a new gazillion-dollar jail because ours is overcrowded with the failed students from Hamilton County - the 60 percent of one-time third-graders who could not read well enough to continue studying and learning on their own in grades 4-12?
Well, commissioners: See Dick. See Jane. See Spot run.
Your head-in-the-sand, no-new-taxes position makes about as much sense as the school board's stick-with-status-quo appointment of Kirk Kelly as interim superintendent. And both actions - or inactions - are as simplistic as that Dick and Jane early sight-word reading method. It's rote repetition with a bit of grandstanding phonics included. It is not, in today's education parlance, critical thinking.
Critical thinking, to stay with our educational analogy, is reasoning out that something has to change for our schools in improve. Simply saying no new allowance is not incentive to change. It may be a form of extortion, but not one likely to induce positive transition. Remember the Atlanta test score cheating scandal some years ago?
The bigger score is our children, and the final exam question for county commissioners is this: How does this school system attract new and top-rate leadership if you community leaders don't exemplify your own willingness to make a commitment for change?
County commissioners know a change in school leadership is needed. The pointed and often caustic questions they asked of Kelly about his budget and new funding request made it clear that many of them are frustrated with our schools and especially with school leadership. We feel frustration, too.
But throwing up our hands is not a critical-thinking, reasoned approach for bringing about the real change we absolutely must have. And frustration must not be demonstrated with a stubborn protest vote to stagnate the school system's budget.
Instead, frustration should show itself in real effort - effort like that which Smedley and Randy Fairbanks put forth in hosting Chattanooga 2.0 information forums in their communities. But a commitment of real dollars is needed, too - real dollars in a real budget (not discretionary funds) that our school system can count on and plan around for years going forward.
Without both, we cannot realistically expect to bring strong new leadership to our schools.
Commissioners, pay it forward. See Dick and Jane run.