There are two major deficiencies in our public educational system. First, most students are graduating with poor reading, writing, and mathematics skills. Second, the community lacks resources to adequately fund a strong school system.
The students suffer because our standards are too low. Former Education Commissioner Alton Davis once commented "When mediocrity becomes the standard of excellence, our community and our culture are lost." When a student graduates with honors from a high school they should not be taking three or four skills courses when they enroll at UVI.
Part of the problem stems from a decline in English usage within the classroom. After reviewing common grammatical and spelling errors in student papers, some of my colleagues at UVI suspect that students compose in Creole dialect and not in English. Students lack books and basic school supplies necessary to reinforce basic skills. Teachers need more support through workshops and training programs to polish techniques that encourage students to master English and mathematics. Clearly someone needs to be focused on school standards and the business of running our schools.
It takes far more than $6,000 per student per year to provide a decent education. Until recent austerity measures were implemented, our public school system was authorized to spend about $122.6 million per year. The Department of Education also has approximately $22 million in Federal grants allocated to specific educational programs. According to 1998 reports in the Daily News about 90 percent of the $122.6 million is spent on personnel (salary and benefits) and 45 percent of those funds are spent on non-teacher, non-classroom personnel working for the Department of Education. That means that only $67 million is actually spent in the classroom ($3300 per student) and we allocate $55 million for administrative support that amongst its many activities raises only $22 million in federal grants. If we target per student expenditures at $10,000 with no change in administrative overhead and pay our teachers the additional $16 million promised, we would need $198 million and still only be spending $7,000 per student. In the State of New York, 40 percent of the school budgets are Federal funds. In the Virgin Islands only 15 percent of our budget is federally subsidized. Clearly someone needs to be focused on getting and administering federal grants.
One solution is to have the superintendent of schools responsible to the Board of Education and to develop site based management of all public schools. We need to get our inefficient and non-responsive territorial government out of the day-to-day management of our schools. The school board, the superintendent, and site-based managed schools will be far more responsive to input from parents and the community than a large government agency that works for the governor. The Department of Education, as part of our government, is in a far better position to solicit and manage all federal grants as well as to provide regulatory oversight on all local school systems. There is no fixing the current system because political bases are entrenched.
Teachers and school administrators should not be government employees. Rather, like the faculty and administration of our University of the Virgin Islands, they should have quasi-government status with all the benefits and fewer of the encumbrances.
Richard Hall, Ph.D., is a biologist and teacher at the University of the Virgin Islands and has taught physiology, biology, and other courses in critical thinking at private and public colleges, universities and medical school.
