Blog Post Week 4: Article Research

For starters, this week’s research was tough. My topic is specific and finding a peer-reviewed article on educational budgeting in California was not easy.

However, the article I found this week gave me a good insight to an actual school district and their financial problems. It was a fiscal sustainability investigation on the El Rancho Unified School District. The article also described what caused the problems and the things that were happening to improve them. Also, it gave me further proof that there are big budgeting problems in much of California’s public school system.

The main problem I had with researching is that I came to a lot of dead ends. The problem seemed to be that the keywords I used in my search were too specific. So, I used less keywords, then narrowed down my search using the subjects on the sidebar. This seemed to be much more effective, because it narrowed the search down to what I needed, without being too specific.

Blog Post Week 3: E-Book Research

During my assignment for this week, I chose a book entitled To What Ends and By What Means, edited by Gloria M. Rodriguez and R. Anthony Rolle. It was very difficult to find an e-book that at anything to do with my topic, as it is somewhat specific. This book doesn’t analyze the costs of education, but it analyzes what a community needs in its schools based on its socioeconomic status. With this analysis, it determines where the budget should be allocated in order to provide a beneficial education to students in certain communities.

            The knowledge I gained about my topic is that it takes further analysis of what a school really needs for effective education of its students, rather than just putting a budget towards certain costs. It is not as simple as teachers get paid X amount and supplies cost Y amount, so X+Y equals the cost of running a school. It is a matter of money being allocated correctly towards certain things and having the funds to do so.

            A really cool search strategy that I found to be helpful is adding an asterisk to the end of a search term. For example, I would search “budget*” and the results would contain “budget”, “budgeting”, “budgets”, etc. It seemed really helpful that the search engine did this for me, because that way I didn’t have to search for different words.

The difficulty I had during my search experience is that there is a lack of books related to my specific topic of educational budgeting. Much of the content that is related to my topic is legislature and news articles.

What I’d like to find out as I continue researching my topic is the rough percentages of where different parts of the budget go (i.e. salaries, supplies, technology). I have heard that too much money goes to administrators compared to other aspects of a school and its district.

Rodriguez, G. M., & Rolle, R. A. (2007). To What Ends and By What Means?: The Social Justice Implications of Contemporary School Finance Theory and Policy. New York: Routledge.

Blog Post Week 2: Background Information Research

In last week’s post, I mentioned that I want to research educational budgets and their allocations. To gain some insight on this topic, I researched on how educational budgets are created and what California’s current budget is (2015-2016).

To locate my first source, I searched EBSCO Host, Gale Virtual Reference Library, and Blackwell Reference Online; I couldn’t find anything relevant to my topic. Then, I searched Sage Knowledge and, after filtering through the subject education and its lower subjects, found that they published a work on educational leadership and management. In this work, there was a section on school finance laws and practices. It was perfect for my research.

To locate my second source, I did the common thing; “I googled it”. After looking through a couple of web pages, including the ca.gov page on educational budgeting, I found an EdSource page. The EdSource page was an article about California’s educational budget that Governor Brown proposed last year. I liked this page, because it had the explanations with the numbers, making it easy to understand.

One thing I learned about educational budgets is that most school administrators discuss school finances with four values in mind: equity, efficiency, liberty, and adequacy. These values help educational administrators come up with a number ($) for each student that represents fairness, provides for the amount of output a student should give, makes sense for what a student can learn within a year, and helps schools teach what they want/need to teach.

Another thing I learned about my topic is that in the 2015-2016 school year, the total budgeted spending rose to $83 billion dollars for K-12 schools, community colleges, and state preschools. That equals 71.9% of the state budget that Governor Brown signed last year (in effect July 1, 2015). 

What I would like to research further is why schools are so underfunded if the budget for public education is about 72% of our total state budget. It doesn’t make sense. $83 billion is a lot of money to spread among the public schools in California. So why doesn’t it work?

[More research to come in the upcoming weeks…]

Sources:

Houck, E. (2015). Understanding school finance laws and practices. In F. English The sage guide to educational leadership and management (pp. 239-256). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications Ltd. Retrieved from http://sk.sagepub.com.libproxy.chapman.edu/reference/the-sage-guide-to- educational-leadership-and-management/n26.i5.xml 

Fensterwald, J. (2015, June 23). 2015-16 state education budget by the numbers. Retrieved from http://edsource.org/2015/2015-16-state-education-budget-by-the- numbers/81895

Blog Post Week 1: Introduction & Information Literacy

Hi! I’m Cassidy, an almost 21 year-old mother, student, homemaker, and waitress. My fiancé and I have a one-year-old baby boy named Charlie and we all recently moved into our first home. I spend most of my time focusing on my family and our life in our new home. I also work at my family’s restaurant two days per week. The rest of my time is devoted to studying and homework. Welcome to my blog!

This is only my second session with Brandman as a Liberal Studies major. I am working towards my teaching credential. I want to become an elementary school teacher and, ideally, I’d love to teach fourth grade. I would love to teach in my hometown, a small town about 15 minutes from the ocean, on the California Central Coast.

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A specific aspect of my career path that I would like to research further is school budgets and their allocations. From my current understandings, I know that many school districts do not allocate their money in the ways that they should. Many teachers buy necessary supplies out of their own pockets and I want to research why this is the case.

Considering the lecture and readings, the areas of information fluency and literacy that I’d like to focus on are recognizing valuable/credible sources when researching online and using these sources in the appropriate manner. I know that many sources in databases are credible, and I typically do not have a problem recognizing them. However, websites can be created by anyone and I would like to be able to better assess the credibility of online sources.

Again, welcome to my blog. :)