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Montana's
future depends on its students understanding the place in which
they live
By
Michael Umphrey
for Headwaters News
Montana's future is being decided right now in its 176 public high
schools. They are foundational institutions. If they fail, none
of our economic or cultural developments will succeed.
Unfortunately, getting the resources our high schools need in today's
political climate might take a political miracle.
Only 29 percent of new teachers who graduated in Montana last year
had any interest in looking for jobs in this state. While starting
salaries in Oregon and Colorado are nearly $30,000, some Montana
districts offer less than $20,000.
It would be hard to imagine a more sure way for a self-governing
society to ruin itself than to teach bright young people to organize
their lives around making money and then to pay teachers a pauper's
wages. But that's what we're doing.
After a decade of neglect, it would now take an increase of about
$80 million to raise average teacher salaries from their present
$32,000 to a more competitive $50,000. But education leaders only
asked the last Legislature for $67 million, and legislators agreed
to less than half that.
This wasn't because we couldn't afford more, but because political
opponents disagreed about the mission of the schools.
The good news is that an integrating vision has been developing
for some time -- one that both Democrats and Republicans support.
For several years now, a grass-roots movement has been spreading
through America, going by many names: character education, civic
education, service learning, community-centered teaching, and place-based
instruction.
At the heart of these various approaches is a simple and unifying
insight: We cannot separate education from community.
The various strands of this insight lead to an equally simple conclusion:
We can revitalize our high schools by making the study of community
their central organizing principle.
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Creativity
suffers when funds are scarce
By
Greg Lakes, editor
Headwaters News
May 1, 2002
In recent headlines from throughout the region, there
are examples of high schools reaching for new levels of commitment
for and from their students, and clear evidence that states' struggling
economies depend largely on the education they give their youth.
But there are many more examples of strapped states trying to maintain
increasingly desperate schools -- not a good climate for innovation.
A private school on Montana's Blackfeet Reservation offers immersion
classes in the tribe's native language, a step toward adding
to the thinning ranks of elders who can still speak Piegan and toward
saving the language and a large part of the culture from extinction.
The immersion school concept started in Hawaii and is beginning
to spread among native tribes throughout the West.
New schools in New Mexico and Colorado offer a high-tech emphasis,
training junior
high through grad school students in Albuquerque in blossoming
fields of optics and photonics, and preparing Colorado high school
students for computer-related fields.
Meanwhile, the responsibilities of mainstream schools seem to keep
getting more complicated, while the resources dwindle.
A study by Idaho's Andrus Center, released in the midst of the most
recent legislative session, said one of the keys
to economic recovery for ailing rural Idaho was consistent investment
in education.
Instead, legislators faced with dramatically declining revenues
lopped
$23.3 million from public school funds in spending for this
year qand cut next year's budget requests by $13 million. They also
cut 10 percent from the university system budget, eliminating 140
jobs.
Lawmakers said they had increased school funding enough in recent
years to cover a temporary setback, but critics said it showed the
state's declining commitment to education and a budget process that
funds
schools after most of the other bills are paid.
When the Great Falls, Mont., high school district advertised for
a new principal,
it received only eight applications for what the local paper
said should be considered one of the state's premier administration
jobs. Local school officials blamed the lack of enthusiasm on ever-increasing
demands of the job that convince qualified teachers to stay put,
and a salary too low to draw qualified applicants from elsewhere.
In Alberta, a simmering dispute between public school teachers and
the government erupted
in job actions that disrupted classes across the province. Teachers
wanted more pay, and the government wanted to cut raises to offset
lower revenue projections. Both sides agreed to arbitration two
weeks ago and school life returned to roughly normal while a more
civil process settles contract disputes.
And Utah's largest school districts planned to cut
160-plus jobs to cope with legislators' funding cuts.
Test scores in New Mexico schools shows the gap
widening between Anglo and Hispanic students, prompting some
observers to question whether public schools will ever be able to
adequately educate low-income and minority students.
A Kids Count study concluded Colorado
had the nation's fourth-highest rate of high school dropouts,
exceeded only by Nevada, Arizona and Texas, although school officials
questioned the accuracy of the results.
And if doing more with less weren't distraction enough, the school
board in rural Joes, Colo., dropped its plan to require
science classes to teach creationism after residents threatened
to sue, and the Arizona House defeated 26-22 a bill
that would have posted the national motto, "In God We Trust,"
in every public school classroom.
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Join
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