At Frederick Douglass Academy High School, where I am a veteran Chicago Public Schools mathematics teacher, we are constantly asked to do more for our students while fewer and fewer dollars are allocated to help us do so.
We have only one full-time school counselor and one school psychologist, who is present only two days per week at our West Side school. We lean on outside organizations to provide after-school programming for our students and rely on teachers to implement restorative practices in the classroom to deal with the fallout from neighborhood violence.
Each day, my classroom is filled with chronically stressed children who deal with enormous loss and tragedy. How do you console a student who has lost a friend to gun violence or is afraid to walk to school? They are anxious and crave attachment to people they can trust. They are also brilliant.
Unfortunately, we often lack the resources and personnel to give these kids the support they need to realize their own brilliance and ensure that they don’t fall through the cracks. Yet with each new budget, each blow to the funding coming into our schools, it gets harder and harder to meet the needs of our students and provide them with the educational opportunities they deserve.
In my own quest for answers, I learned that the state of Illinois accepted the primary responsibility for supporting public education when it rewrote its constitution in 1970. In the nearly 50 years since, elected officials have shirked this responsibility by failing to allocate the dollars needed to ensure all students’ educational needs are met.
The Illinois School Funding Reform Commission was convened in 2016 to solve this problem and recently presented its recommendations, including a call for an additional $3.5 billion to be spent on schools over the next decade. Sadly, if history is any guide, we shouldn’t hold our collective breath.
But once again, it is up to lawmakers to agree on a fair funding formula for public education. At present, Illinois’ formula is the most regressive in the country, according to a report by the education advocacy group Advance Illinois, sending the least amount of money to the communities and students who need it most. Illinois desperately needs a new funding formula, one that recognizes the needs of students and distributes money accordingly.
And yet, even if a new formula is put in place, there are disparities and financial crises at play at the district level. For example, the $46 million in mid-year budget cuts announced Monday by CPS are being rolled out unevenly across schools, according to data published by DNAinfo.com. I want to believe that there are strong reasons for these discrepancies, but right now I feel like we lack the information to interpret these cuts accurately.
Not only am I having trouble making sense of it all — the cuts, the reduced money coming into classrooms like mine and the lack of action from elected officials around reforming our formula — I am struggling to find ways to interpret this information for kids without deteriorating their sense of pride or self-worth.
If we agree with philosophers like Plato, investing more resources in students like mine is worth it. In his ideal "Republic," leaders make strategic educational investments in underserved communities — not just because it is fair but because it is in the best interest of society. Plato recognized that the investment in education pays off when students emerge from their communities to become the next generation of leaders.
I can attest to the leaders who are developing at my school. The other day one of my students, who had become homeless earlier in the school year, asked me what the "Omega Point" was to my lesson. Remembering vaguely that "Omega Point" was a spiritual concept, but confused as to how it related to my math lesson, I asked him what he meant. He responded, "What is the purpose of your lesson?"
Students like this are working diligently to become the leaders we need to navigate future challenges. We need their talent and fresh thinking, we need the perspective they bring, and we can’t afford to lose them simply because they were born in the wrong ZIP code.
I hope that our elected leaders come together around fair funding and that our district is able to land on a set of budget changes that allow for greater protections for our most vulnerable schools and students. Beyond being the right thing to do, it has the added benefit of being a smart investment in Illinois’ future.
Steven G. Fouts, Ed.D., is a math teacher at Frederick Douglass Academy High School in Chicago and a member of Educators for Excellence, a teacher-led education policy organization. He also works with the Republic Foundation, a Chicago-based organization providing leadership development to K-12 students and teachers.
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