My superintendent makes $275,000 a year (or 4 1/2 teachers).

I’d really like to pinch those guys (and gals).

In the real world vs. the theory of policy reform, administrators in most of the country spend a lot more time dealing with sports than student achievement, and no national mandate is going to change that in the short run. Paying for gas for field trips will not only divert money but attention.

The attention gap is huge because there are only so many minutes in the day for consuming research, planning reforms, and initiating them. As time and money shrink, a greater premium is place on quick fixes, fearfulness grows (partially because even the sponsors of silver bullets often know that they are CYA not real solutions) and that was the formula for the failed NCLB I. Worse, it will hit different budgets differently. One reason, I suspect, that schools have invested so heavily in online test prep (even though the people who sponsored those initiatives did not really believe that they would produce more than bells and whistles) is that a huge amount of infrastructure could come out of capital budgets. Similarly, it is far easier to fund quick fixes like after-school seat time, I mean remediation, or credit recovery, out of Title I than it is the invest in balanced programs to help our most struggling students.

A couple of years ago I found myself with 240 students (with 1/3rd on IEPs, parole, on or off medication for mental illness etc) while my colleagues had an average of 200. While we we getting fifty or more at risk kids per class, the school was full of millions of dollars of new computers, software, and salaries for curriculum facilitators etc. The problems stemmed from two deficits, the lack of operating funds for teachers while other budgets were overflowing, and the attention deficit. Administrators had their huge checklists of responsibilities, made longer by NCLB, and on their checklists the balancing of teacher allocations occurred after two months. Had the ceiling fallen in on the top administrative offices during thunderstorms, would they have endured two months of bad weather that would wreck expensive computers before acting? But when metaphorical storms caused by money wipe out the schools of children, the adults are just told to have high expectations and keep the focus on instruction.

We will be further distracted from the real challenge — poor kids and poor schools — as everyone faces a shortfall. And if we get back to the real issue and take a cold hard look, we will see that the budget problems faced by schools will be the least of educators’ problems. It is the budget problems faced by families that will have the biggest effect. Families will break up, incarceration and drug abuse will increase, health problems will be more debilitating. As students bring the trauma to school, classroom disruptions and violence will increase.

Outsiders should remember what we see every November. As Thanksgiving approaches our family-toxic society, then peaking during Christmas, every imaginable social pathology always pervades schools. Then as educators are wrestling with those immediate and real issues, we’re likely to hear some junk about doing more with less, and accelerating the rate of student performance and all of those other cold-blooded theories.

In football, when a rainstorm or a ice storm hits on game day, does the team with a high-risk offense continue to run plays that require firm footing? Of course not. In any institution with reality-based accountability, leaders are expected to adjust to changed circumstances. A field goal kicker that can be expected to hit a field goal at the 50 year line with a fifty mph wind at his back, is not expected to do the same while kicking into a fifty mph wind.

But you know what? Coaches are expected to adjust to changed conditions, and that does not diminish our enjoyment of sports. If we really care about poor kids, does it take anything away from our efforts to acknowledge the vagaries of reality?

Again, the solution is not to extend the blame game to others, and we should remember another sports analogy. The reason for a “blitz” in football is to throw the opponents off balance so they will make mistakes. We are seeing an economic blitz. Now is the time to remain calm, simplify our game, and regain control of the tempo, not dump more shame into an increasingly stressful environment.