Can These Schools Be Saved?
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Money talks
In wealthy school districts, it drowns out the sound of the teachers.

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By Catherine Davis

May 26, 2000 | I taught fifth grade in a district where it was not uncommon for families to donate more than $1,000 to their child's school throughout the course of the year. This windfall of cash transformed our small public school into an exceptionally flush campus, on a par with many of the private schools in the surrounding area.

Unlike other California public schools, where state funds have been repeatedly slashed, my students had weekly art lessons, a library program, a drama coach who directed a play for the fourth- and fifth-grade students and computer classes four days a week. Donations from my students' parents even made it possible for me to have an aide in my classroom nine hours a week, which meant frequent opportunities for one-on-one tutoring. My classroom closets were crammed full of fancy art supplies, books and the newest educational software.

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When I was first hired to teach in this affluent district, I thought I had scored a pretty honey gig. But after teaching there for several years, I felt frustrated and stifled. The parents who made extraordinary donations to the school assumed that their generosity would be rewarded with power. They expected to have a commanding voice in administrative and classroom decisions, to have control over curriculum.

As a teacher in the district, I was expected to coddle this belief, preferably with a grateful smile on my face. In the end, the extreme parental pressure and hyperinvolvement in the classroom became one of the main reasons I left teaching for a new career.

A typical example of the kind of clash that ultimately drove me from the classroom was an incident involving reading. Part of my students' homework was to read silently for 30 minutes every night and to keep a log of what they had read. At the beginning of the school year, a parent in my classroom suggested I create a contest in which the student who read the most pages in a quarter would win a prize.

This type of competitive reading program was at odds with my teaching philosophy. I wanted my students to learn to love to read. I wanted them to think about the content they were reading rather than obsessively tally the number of pages they had turned. I explained this in a detailed note to the parent who had suggested the contest.

The next morning, a group of my students rushed up to me on the playground and excitedly explained that the fifth-grade class that read the most silent-reading pages was going to win a pizza party. A note from the parent who had suggested the contest explained that he understood that I didn't want to set up a competitive climate in the classroom among individual students, so he went ahead and offered to buy a pizza party for the fifth-grade class (out of the three fifth-grade classes at our school) that read the most, shifting the focus from individual students to the class as a whole.

Clearly, this parent had good intentions. But he also expected to have things his way. He ignored my reservations and threw in some pizzas to convince me that I should take his suggestion. He sealed the deal by telling his daughter about the plan, knowing she would tell everyone else and leave me with the option of crushing the spirit of students prepared to speed-read for a pile of pizzas. So much for autonomy in the classroom, the teaching credential and professional expertise.

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