Education and the Economy

With our economy on the brink of disaster, I started to wonder what that meant for education. In a world of NCLB, schools are already feeling the pinch of being under funded. I ran across this article on Education Week, which spoke to the topic of the upcoming national budget for education. At this point, the status quo of funding has been extended until March, so that the next president can decide in the future what to do with the funding. If the economy continues to go downhill, the new administration won’t have much more to give to education. What happens to our schools if the budget does not change, especially if the rest of the economy is in shambles? If for years the national government can’t raise funding, how does that affect the use of technology and getting that to schools?
There is already such a disparity between schools in different areas in regards to their access to technology. I think more and more it is going to fall on the teachers to find creative and mostly inexpensive ways to create a global and technology rich classroom. This article from Edutopia, spoke about a project called Flat Classroom, created by Vicki Davis and Julie Lindsay (both of which have interesting blogs!). This is a great way to create a global community using Web 2.0 tools that are almost (if not all) free to use. Along with a lot of the tools that we have explored through the last online class, I think we can make it work. I believe that many teachers think you need highly sophisticated, expensive equipment in order to use technology. It is our job to spread the fact that you can do this on a tight budget. There is going to be more and more of a push to integrate technology-so it’s time to get creative!There are so many issues to think about with the current state of our economy. Let’s hope that we can work through this to make sure that our students don’t suffer. Just because we aren’t given everything we need, doesn’t mean we can’t still get it done.