Brother, Could You Spare Five Grand

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Educators are always looking for new and exciting ways to reach and teach our students. We look for strategies and programs that will keep them encouraged and engaged in learning. There are hundreds of programs out there to choose from and picking the right one is a momentous challenge. If you are able to find a program you like, which you think will work with your students, and which you think will allow them to achieve and perhaps surpass the grade level expectation the school system has for them, then the issue always boils down to money. The companies or organizations that design and build these programs cannot do so for free, nor should they be expected to. They deserve a fair return on their investment of time and talent in researching and creating these programs. These folks do understand that school systems are under unreasonable fiscal restraints imposed by law makers and taxpayers who don't value education so they try to make the programs as affordable as possible, but they can't be expected to take a loss just because the programs are for schools to use. State legislatures, and even our Congressional members, take a different attitude. They question the need to spend money for improvements in educational resources a all. Yet they demand that the very students whom they want to spend less money on each year do better on the standardized tests. Today, several of my colleagues and I had a wonderful program demonstrated for us. It is built on and updates a program used successfully by schools around the country for the last 40 years. It allows for individualizing teaching and learning to the students based on how the students learn best and it automatically differentiates for their learning level and style. While not completely sold, the group did agree to a four-week trial period during which we'll be able to give the program a test-drive of sorts. The trial is for one teacher and one student. What it will allow us to do is determine how easy the program is for the teacher to use, whether it will be time effective, and to take a look at the student end of the program to see if it is something our students could benefit from. Should we decide the program is something we'd like to try, one team will be selected for a pilot program using the software. If it goes as expected and we see improvement in student achievement and learning, the program will be expanded, as funding permits, until the whole school is using it. The only impediment to the success of the program, should we decide it will be beneficial to our students, is the lack of available funding. The cost to implement the program school wide works out to less than $8.00 per student here at my school. The question is, will the pikers who hold the purse strings be willing to part with it.