Today, my state’s (North Carolina) governor, Mike Easley, called for financial audits of all NorthCarolina high schools “..to determine how to best use resources to improve student performance.”
The audits go beyond the normal financial review conducted annually by school districts to match the allocation of funds to student performance, Easley said. The findings would help the state establish a set of “best practices” schools could use to boost student performance, whether that means adding technology, decreasing class sizes or retaining veteran teachers, he said.
“We don’t have money to waste, and we don’t have time to waste,” he said. “We have to figure out how to get the best bang for our buck.”
WRAL.com – News – Easley Calls For High School Audits
There are a lot of directions I could go with this, but I think that initially it will be interesting to explore any differences between how districts of low performing schools allocate resources compared to districts with high performing schools. This is a deeply complex issue that goes way beyond budgeting.
I suspect that they’ll learn that it isn’t the budgeting as much as it is funding. But as long as we are convinced that we’re paying all we can for education now, there isn’t any way that that conclusion will surface. A teacher told me once that we should provide “..the best education that we can afford.”
That is so 20th century!
Easley said in his speech,
“We don’t have money to waste, and we don’t have time to waste,” hesaid. “We have to figure out how to get the best bang for our buck.”
I think that he’s wrong in saying that we do not have money. But I think that he is dead-on that we’re running out of time!
“Easley Calls for High School Audits.” WRAL.Com 19 Sep 2006 19 Sep 2006 <http://www.wral.com/news/9884269/detail.html>.
technorati tags:warlick, easley, highschools
Blogged with Flock
Is there a way to share the benefits of school libraries with the govenor. There are several research reports out there that show the benefits of good school libraries and I think that may be the answer to the problems in having schools that give back the results that we would like to see in the students of the United States.
Or as we like to say here in Minnesota, David, – “the best education possible at low bid.”
Doug