For the past few weeks, social media has been flooded with posts from teachers sharing Amazon wish lists and urging others to stock their classrooms with basic supplies. Creating such lists has become commonplace in recent years as teachers look outside of their schools and districts for materials to meet their needs.
The most frequently requested items include dry erase markers, Kleenex, Lysol wipes, erasers, tape, pens, colored copy paper, file folders, and pencil sharpeners. Others request learning items such as a microscope, map, or globe that seem essential to student learning.
This raises an obvious question: Why don’t school districts provide teachers with what they need?
Given that American public education spends nearly a trillion dollars annually, there should be no shortage of funds. In fact, in his book Battle for the American Mind, Pete Hegseth states, “The United States spends more on national defense than China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, India, France, Britain, and Japan combined. And yet America spends even more on education than it does on defense.”
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, total spending on public elementary and secondary schools in the 2020-2021 school year was $927 billion. That equates to an average spending of $18,614 per student—a whopping $446,736 for a class of 24 students.
It seems reasonable to assume that these tax dollars for public education should be enough to pay for essential classroom supplies like dry-erase markers, tape, and pencil sharpeners without teachers having to ask taxpayers to order these supplies through Amazon and pay for them out of their own pockets.
So where does all the money for public education go if not for the basic needs of the classroom? About half of the funds are eaten up by bureaucracy and never reach the classroom. In the fall of 2022, there were nearly four times as many administrators working in public education as in 1950.
Enormous sums are spent on teacher training, most of which have nothing to do with improving student academic performance. For example, USA Today reported in 2023, “Public schools spend more than $20 billion annually on teacher training to help the nation’s teachers, the majority of whom are white, teach across racial lines.”
Despite this enormous expenditure, none of the 42 school districts surveyed, which have a total enrollment of more than three million students, evaluated the impact of the training using metrics or evidence.
Another example is Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia, which spent $24,000 in 2020 on activist Ibram Kendi’s books, which are full of so-called “anti-racism” ideas, including his view that “racial discrimination is not inherently racist.”
And as if that wasn’t enough, the Fairfax County School District spent another $20,000 on a one-hour teacher training session with Kendi, which works out to $333.33 per minute. Imagine if teachers received a $333 grant to purchase basic classroom materials instead.
Then there’s California, where the 2021 state budget approved by Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, allocated $3 million to train public school teachers in “LGBTQ cultural competency.” But this isn’t just happening in Democratic cities and states; it’s been happening for several years. In Missouri, the Lee’s Summit R-7 School District Board of Education voted in 2019 to pay $97,000 for a consultant to train teachers and district staff in racial equity.
These absurd expenses for training teachers in radical content rather than academic instruction have increased in frequency and scope.
For example, the Hayward Unified School District in California’s Bay Area spent $250,000 this year on “Woke Kindergarten” training for teachers. The training apparently took precedence over the alarming educational reality that fewer than 12 percent of Hayward students are at grade level in English and fewer than 4 percent in math.
Instead of teaching teachers how to effectively teach reading and math, they were taught how to “stop the white phenomenon” in their classrooms – even though less than 3.5 percent of the school’s students are white.
These are just a few examples of misguided spending that is imposing a radical political agenda on teacher education, which has become the norm across the country.
It’s past time to remove taxpayer dollars from funding woke training and instead ensure that students come into classrooms with the basic learning materials they need – pens, pencils, and paper. School districts must be held accountable for spending an average of nearly $500,000 per classroom per year.
These teachers’ Amazon wish lists are a direct reflection of public school districts’ financial mismanagement and misplaced priorities.
Classroom teachers should be empowered to set aside a few hundred dollars a few times a year for the needs of their classrooms. Teachers will put these funds to far better use than those in district offices who write huge checks to woke consultants who push radical gender and racial ideologies on teachers under the guise of professional development.
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