What happens to the 14k School Budget?

What happens to the 14k?

(A critique of school budgeting)

__________

(Rifah Elahi)

Table of Contents

Fundamental issues 3

Wasted Money 9

Why elementary level education is crucial 15

Annotated Bibliography 7

Fundamental Issues

I stretched my shoulders and squinted my eyes. I’d been staring at the screen for too long, glued to my wooden desk, in the corner of my room. Tomorrow would be my first day of tutoring a third grader and I had been sitting in front of my laptop for the past 2 hours. The combination of this being my first time tutoring in a while and the fact that I wasn’t in the US when I was in third grade, made me nervous as heck so I wanted to prepare well for the following day. “So what do 3rd graders do?” I wondered as I scrolled through their common core curriculum. “Solve problems involving multiplication and division…Understand concepts such as area”. I clicked open another tab and typed “Grade 3 NY ELA and Math state test” and then clicked “PRINT”. The sudden flashback of my fifth-grade classmates surrounding me before school for math homework help went through my mind. Most of my fifth-grade classmates didn’t have a good understanding of any of these topics so why did I expect a third-grader to? I clicked open another tab and typed “Simple arithmetic problems grade 1” and printed out the best worksheet I found. “He should know this much” I reassured myself. If he seems good with it, I’ll give him the state test as a cumulative assessment to see where he needs help. If he doesn’t, I’ll re-explain basic arithmetic concepts. I prepared colored pens to draw things while I explained and began surfing the internet for good explanation videos for addition, subtraction, and multiplication. If he doesn’t know his multiplication table well, I’d assess how quickly he memorized and based on that, assign him to memorize a portion of a table every day. For English, I’d do the first English passage on the state test with him and assign the next one for homework. I proceeded to make an online checklist of all the things I planned for him and compiled all the worksheets I printed out and set them aside for tomorrow. “That’ll do for now,” I reassured myself.

Well, things didn’t go as planned. His parent informed me at my arrival that the child has attention issues. I got a little worried since I wasn’t sure if I was qualified to teach him and the child didn’t seem very happy with the arrival of his new tutor. “Hello Pratam,” I greeted him with the widest smile I could muster. After a long pause, “Hi,” he quietly responded.

*Sigh*I will make this work. I started by making small talk with him to familiarize him with being with me and get to know about his likes and dislikes so that I can make learning more enjoyable for him.

“What’s your favorite class?” He shrugged.

“Do you like your teacher?” No response.

“What’s your hobby? Do u like tv? Video games? Do you play with toys” He jumped out of his chair and enthusiastically searched for his sketchpad and toys? He showed me all the drawings he did for class this month, how much his friends praised him, the new sword his dad bought for him and the car he’d been playing with since he was a baby and didn’t wanna share with his baby sister. After nodding along and smiling at his every word, I pulled out the first-grade arithmetic worksheet. “Pratam, can you try doing these now?” He stared at the paper for a few seconds and gave me a silly smile.

He couldn’t do them.

“No problem, I reassured him”. I began making multiple sketches of his favorite car in different colors to get him to count how many of each item there was and slowly introduce him to the concept of addition. I also drew a number line and showed him how to count using a number line (not a fan of this process but his textbook has multiple sections like this and the state test also has a few questions regarding this). I, then, showed him how to count using his fingers and what to do once he ran out of his fingers. Going to teach him every method I know and hopefully, one of them would stick with him.

Subtraction was slightly harder to teach but he understood the basic concept. It seemed like he was going to need a lot more practice with this so I created a homework doc for him, made up several subtraction problems, and assigned two videos on it. Now onto multiplication….

“Pratam, do you know your two times table?”

“......”

I looked around the room and saw a giant sheet of paper that had all the times tables written down. A great tool to try to memorize at home but mostly useless if no one’s helping him memorize it.

I, once, again, began drawing, this time apples, his favorites fruits. I put two apples in each bag and drew three bags and asked him how many total apples there were to introduce him to the two times table.

We were in the middle of memorizing the first half of the two times table when his mother entered the room with snacks. “You must be tired from having to tutor right after class?” she said while placing a plate with sandwiches on the desk. “Rifah,” she continued. “The state test is next month and I want him to do well”. I nodded. “Also, can you help him do his homework from yesterday? He doesn’t understand it. Pratam, did you show her your homework?”. Pratam sprang out of his chair and showed me a math worksheet, titled “SIMPLIFY THE FOLLOWING FRACTIONS” in big, bolded letters. How am I supposed to explain to him how to reduce fractions when he doesn't know any of his multiplication tables? I explained to his mother that I can explain to him what fractions are today but he must know his multiplication table well before he learns how to simplify them. I, then, showed her my homework plans of assigning him half a table per day and in ten days, if he did my homework well, then he should be up to five times tables. After that, I could explain to him how to reduce them. “Right now, while I can explain what fractions are, I’d like for him to deepen his understanding of addition and subtraction,” I told her.

How did he get to this point? How can he be so behind? Was there no one supervising him? WHAT WAS HIS TEACHER DOING?

“Do you pay attention in class, Pratam?” “You must listen well in class and if you can’t understand something you must ask your teacher,” I added after his mother left. How can a kid be so behind and the teacher doesn’t even take any notice of it? “I did,” he replied. “Last Friday, I asked the teacher about this homework but there were too many kids with questions and we do math last so we didn’t have time. And he forgot about it this week”. “Umm…Pratam…How many students are in your class?”. His mother said he had an attention disorder, which counts as a learning disability as far as I know. And I know that NYC public schools provide people with learning disabilities extra aid, and usually much smaller class sizes. “Let’s see,” he thought out loud. “Kids are always transferring in and out but there’s like 33 kids”. Why the hell did they put a child with a learning disability in such a large class?

My mind went back to my elementary school days again. *Clap* *clap* “Okay kids, now it’s time for math” I could vividly recall the enthusiastic voice of my teacher. “Alina hit the lights. Everyone, let’s look at the smartboard to our side. Come near the board if you want to. It’s okay to sit on the floor,” she would say as she turned on her computer. “Ooo…. How do you set this thing up again?” is usually how the first five minutes of the class would go. Then finally, the “good-with-computers” kid would be called. “JASON, come help me”. FINALLY, the lesson would start. The lectures were very cozy…too cozy in fact. As if having a class of twenty-eight wasn’t bad enough, now we gotta turn off the lights too to ensure that the kids are as drowsy as possible and make the chances of the teacher spotting someone not paying attention even lower. Sometimes, the teacher would fiddle with the markers on the smartboard and try to write on the board itself. That never continued for too long because the board wasn’t sensitive enough and it would always result in a mess. Other times, she’d get a marker and paper and project simple calculations using the camera. No, we weren’t doing anything fancy that required the usage of computers. The teacher didn’t have a PowerPoint to show us either. We mostly did problems directly in our textbooks. The entire time, the perfectly clean chalkboards with brand new chalks were lying still. The whiteboard at the back of the classroom, with markers of multiple colors, was also standing still in our classroom, perfectly fine and ready to use. I still vividly remember our introduction to division. At the front of our dim classroom, the teacher would enthusiastically solve math problems.

Now, I can’t tell for sure whether my friend sitting beside me was looking at the board or playing with her fidget spinner or whether the two kids who didn’t speak an ounce of English understood anything, but what I know for sure was that all of them were surrounded me the following morning asking for math homework help. I found it quite funny back then. Why are they asking me, the girl who moved to this country 2 months ago?

What I did recall was that homework was always checked on completion and not accuracy. The teacher would simply glance at our workbooks every morning. I still remember when my friend came over to my house and wanted to do “homework” with me, and just began writing down random numbers in the blanks so that we could hurry up and watch the show we’d been talking about. Those problems, if she understood the lesson, would’ve taken her fifteen minutes max. The following day, the teacher simply glanced down at her textbook, like she always did, and marked it as “done”. And once again, she picked up her fidget spinner when we went over the homework and the classroom was too dark and big for the teacher to notice.

—Back to the present: according to almost every research paper I’ve read regarding class sizes^1, most say classes above twenty students hinder the learning process of students. A lot of this research was based on high school students, who are much older and tend to have much higher concentration ability and be more responsible than elementary schoolers, so an elementary schooler with special needs being put into a class of more than thirty students pissed was beyond my comprehension.

“So, what do you do in class, Pratam,” I asked. I was genuinely curious; judging by how he didn’t have any basis on arithmetic and his reading level was way below his grade level, there must’ve been something he did at school. He couldn’t just be spending six hours every day for the past four years doing absolutely nothing. “Hmm,” he thought. “At first, we have reading, and then writing”.

“So, what do you do in that class? Are you guys currently reading a book?” “Umm…yeah…I think?”

“What book is it? What is it about? Do you enjoy it?”

“Umm…it….it has a green cover!”

*Sigh* I lived in a similar neighborhood as him and we went to similar elementary schools. I guess absolutely nothing has changed since I graduated. The memories of my reading and writing class in fifth grade came to my mind. I could read well no doubt. I followed along well when we read in class. The same people volunteered to read almost every day. Not me, though. I was and still am quite self-conscious about my English pronunciation, so participating to read is something I rarely do). The problem came with writing. In Bangladesh, the English essays we wrote were completely different. We’d be asked to write a short essay on something like a cat while in the states, you’d have to write about the morale of the story, get quotations that support the morale, and also use a lot of transitional sentences to explain your point. My fifth-grade self was used to none of this. I wanted to reach out for help but I was too shy to ask the teacher. When I turned to my classmates for help, most of them asked me questions instead since they had no idea what the book was about. How could they when barely any of them even read the book?

I, once again, remind Pratam to try his best to stay focused in class and warn him he’d fall behind beyond recovery if things continue like this. “What else do you do at school?” I asked while I shuffled through my bookbag looking for the English state test I printed out for him.

“Oh,” he remembered. “Our teacher gives us tablets sometimes to read pdf copies of books or do research when we write stuff,” he exclaimed! After ten minutes or so, it was quite clear how slowly he didn’t understand most of it, and how he was unable to form a grammatically correct sentence with no spelling errors. Tablets were absolutely the last thing he needed.

Wasted Money

“Do you have any other classes besides this?” I, asked. I checked his school website and they were bragging about some extra funds they recently received. I was very curious about what they were doing with that fund.

“We have a band…. Also, we go to the computer lab sometimes!”

“Oh, band? What do you do there? Play instruments? Sing?”

“Well…I’m not sure. My teacher, we aren’t got enough time to learn guitar since we meet only once a week. So, instead, we’re learning about how a guitar works. He plays a note, tells us what it’s called, and then verbally quizzes us later”.

“So…you never held a guitar?”

“No”

“Does your school have enough guitars for an entire class?”

“Yes they do…but like my teacher said, we don’t meet often enough to use the guitar”. “So do you know how a guitar actually works?”

“Not really…I mean it’s quite confusing…he paces around the front of the room with the guitar in his hand and it’s hard to see and hear what he’s talking about”.

“And what do you do at the computer lab?” Surely this would be better than the last. I mean, STEM, tech-ed, all these kinds of things give schools a lot of bragging rights; they must be doing something good at computer class right? “Hmm,” he thought. “There’s this website that has a lot of games...” I guess not… “During class, we go on that website and pick the game that we like and play it! I love the cooking game where we…” his voice faded into the background as I became more and more frustrated.

The only conclusion I drew from this was that both of these classes were a waste of time and money. Simply imagining the cost of an entire computer lab with the latest gadgets and a classroom full of guitars sent shivers down my spine. And learning that they have only had these classes once a week where they just waste their time and don’t really *learn* any necessary skills made me even angrier.

But to be honest, I was disappointed but not surprised. My elementary school was no different. We had the latest smartboards and computers that we never used to their fullest capabilities. We had all the cool musician equipment that the majority of the students never got to touch. We even had a theater class with props and everything else that my class never got to use.

Oh god…theater class. We didn’t have theaters for more than twice a week as far as I recall. As can be guessed already, we learned absolutely nothing during that class. I only remember the warm-ups we did to project our voices but no one really heard us during the actual play. Because we had so little class time (and the school thought it was a brilliant idea to have a bunch of ten-year-olds, many of whom barely understood their grade-level books written in modern English, do a freaking Shakespeare play), our teacher divided students into groups and each group would do one scene. We had no time to do costumes or props. If the students’ horrendous pronunciation of old English didn’t make the audience confused enough, having different people play the same characters with zero unity in costumes definitely did. I was the director of my scene and ‘till this day I have 0 clue about what the story “Tempest” is even about. I learned more about acting in three days in my high school English class and did a much better job with just one week of practice than I did from spending an entire year in my elementary school “theater” class. The school HAD the money and resources to have us make props and costumes. And I’m assuming that at least somebody in the school had common sense that ten-year-olds don’t understand Shakespeare so asking them to perform a Shakespearean play may not be the best idea. I’m also assuming that somebody also had the common sense to explain the plot of the play to the students before having them pick characters and memorize lines. And, I know, the last thing may be too much to ask from such an incompetent school, but it was clear we weren’t learning anything from music class due to a kid in our class jumping over the guitar one day, causing the teacher to become enraged and ban guitars from our class (because teaching children collective punishment was the right way to go was a great lesson) so our music class was spent learning how to read notes but we had 0 clue on what any of these notes sounded like. Maybe, if we got rid of our music class, and focused on one elective instead, then maybe, just maybe, we would’ve learned something useful from the school. But of course, wanting to learn useful skills and make the best out of each class is a little too much to ask.

Our computer class wasn’t much different from Pratam’s either. Expensive, latest models of computers, only once a week class, and playing games online consisted of 90% of our computer class too. The only difference was that we learned basic coding at the end of the year using some kids’ websites.

According to Campus Tech, the US spends around $14k annually per student. Growing up in an under-resourced city in Khulna Bangladesh, I vividly remember the first day I walked into my elementary school and was awed by the campus. But now, the fancy smartboards in classrooms, cool walkie-talkies that the assistant principals have, the computer labs with the latest models of screens and software, the music classrooms with all the instruments in the world, and the gymnasium with various sports equipment don’t seem that much impressive anymore. Every time I see something like that, I always think that most of these kids can’t even understand basic reading passages or do multiplication. I think about my school in Bangladesh often. There were too many kids in pre-K but it’s not like we learned much in pre-K. Most students were barely four years old and we did letters and counting numbers in pre-K. Starting from kindergarten is when we actually began learning such as how to read, and basic science and math operations. Our school was extremely underfunded and our desks were old and often broken. Our computer were very old that had boxy monitors and the old Windows XP software. There weren’t enough computers for each student so most of the time we had to share. Fancy things like smart boards were out of the question.

Yes, our school didn’t have money or any fancy gadget, but our school also didn’t have a single third grader who didn’t know their multiplication tables. We didn’t have a fancy theatre or music classes; all we had was art and there was just one art teacher throughout all ten grades. But we all learned art well enough to proudly display our art pieces all throughout our classrooms since the school couldn’t afford fancy classroom decorations. Our computers were the oldest you could find but all of us knew basic mechanics of a computer and basic programming skills by fourth grade. We didn’t have assistant principals, or guidance counsellors and other staff members walking around with cool walkie-talkies, but we had enough teachers that classroom sizes never exceeded twenty students since kindergarten. We had no gymnasium and very little sports equipment but we still did more physical activity on a daily basis than the elementary school in America: there morning assemblies every day outdoors unless it was raining. Of course, this is not to say the school didn’t have any flaws but the majority of the flaws lay in the upper-grade levels where we lacked the money for science labs and qualified teachers. Since the lab was a major portion of the countrywide science tests, it greatly hindered the students of our school since we had very little lab experience.

But what’s infuriating is that all these schools in America HAVE the money to make things better, they just choose not to. They’d much rather spend money on useless gadgets and equipment that students barely get to use. I remember when my middle school, IS 145, got its title as a “Magnet School” in eighth grade. While I wasn’t exactly sure what that meant, I understood that it resulted in our school a whole lot of money. So, guess what our brilliant school did with that money? Buy notebooks! No, I’m not talking about notebooks that we use to take notes in class (that’d be actually cool since the majority of the students from my school came from very poor families). Our school bought composition notebooks meant for “rEfLectIoN” where we write a little essay on what we learned at the end of each unit. The school purchased notebooks for every student, and every class (not even gym was spared). The sheer cost of buying at least six notebooks for about 1,600 students horrifies me. I don’t think I need to go into detail on why writing a short reflection about the “Volleyball” unit from physical education class isn’t very helpful and utter waste of time. If the school really wanted to enforce this “reflection” writing policy, we could’ve simply written them in our notebooks, loose leaves, or online and submitted them on Google Classroom instead of buying more than 6,000 notebooks. None of the “Reflection” notebooks were even half completed and students weren’t allowed to keep them either at the end of the school.

There were so many things the school could’ve done with that money. There was no female sports team; my science teacher had been working hard for years to create a team but it had always been denied. There was a growing problem of obesity in our school, a very common issue in low-income neighborhoods, but we only had a gym once a week and there was a total of three gym teachers in the entire school. Our newly-found arts program that included painting and dancing only allowed classes twice a week which is never enough if one wants to learn a new skill. Most importantly, the school could’ve hired more teachers or student aides because class sizes were, once again, quite big and exceeded well over twenty-five students per class. Many of our core subject teachers would try their best by offering extra help before the school day began and always being available during lunch periods but that was never enough.

The majority of these schools spend money irresponsibly and then later, pretend to care about the children who are falling behind by introducing VOLUNTEER tutoring programs or homework help programs after school, usually ran by teenagers. I have, personally, tutored several of these children. No amount of tutoring by older teenagers on zoom can address the underlying issue of these children not receiving the quality of education they deserve in a classroom. A sixteen-year-old volunteer can help them prepare for their test, understand a recent topic from class if they struggle to understand it, or edit their writing. What a sixteen-year-old tutor can’t do is re-teach everything they failed to learn from the last six years. It’s infuriating that these schools are given all these money to educate their students and they end up simply passing the responsibility on to teenage VOLUNTEERS to educate either student.

And, it’s also quite clear which demographic of students are the most affected by this: Students in poorer neighborhoods, predominantly those in Black and Hispanic neighborhoods. Both my elementary and middle schools were at a Hispanic majority neighborhoods. I remember asking many of my peers at Stuyvesant about the type of middle school they went to because they seemed quite familiar with the topics we were doing in class, unlike me. Most of them said they went to a gifted and talented charter or private middle school in Manhattan where majority of their classmates got into a Specialized High School. That seemed like completely different world from my middle school, where I was the only one who made it to Stuyvesant and very few other classmates made it to any specialized high school. No one in my elementary school even informed us about “gifted and talented” middle schools for us to even try applying there. I’ve also heard from another classmate of mine that majority of the students at his middle school had no idea what the Specialized High School Admission test even was- as if, the majority of the school officials at schools like these don’t think it's necessary to inform students about the choices they have if they wish to attain a higher quality of education in the future.

These schools have enough funds to provide a high-quality education to all their students (including the low-income neighborhood ones). They just choose not to do it.

Why Elementary Level Education is So Crucial

Elementary school is where we begin to develop our fundamental skills, be it academic or practical. It’s common sense that most little kids aren’t simply going to bring to themselves to the table, grab their books, and begin learning. This is where the role of parents and teachers comes to play.

Concentration abilities don’t form out of thin air. According to the organization called “Understood”, most children begin to develop their concentration abilities at the age of four to five. Children must be supervised well for them to form good concentration habits.

My mother had been monitoring our tv time since we were babies. Since I was three, she’d sit right next to me for almost two hours every day I was in kindergarten and have me study right in front of her. There was no opportunity to look away No opportunity to check Instagram or YouTube or scroll mindlessly online or play games. Needless to say, both I and my siblings did quite well at school and our teachers often praised us for being well-behaved and concentrating in class. As we got older, my mother stopped being strict about being right *next* to us while we studied but since we had been developing good habits since we were kids, we really didn’t need her to do so either. I mean, what could distract us? We were too poor to be able to afford smartphones and our computer was on the other side of the house. The most distracting thing for me would be someone watching TV too loudly from the living room or the nearby temple playing my favorite song. The first time I came across a smartphone is when my friend’s mother brought it to school and my friend was showing it to me. It seemed like a very cool gadget and I desperately wanted my parents to buy one too. At that time, I was too young to realize this, but my friend would often talk about sneaking away to the bathroom during studying and would play games on the phone.

I was able to maintain this good concentration ability of mine right until fourth grade when we moved to the United States. I could study quite well for three hours straight, take a short break, and go back to studying again. I was able to memorize things pretty fast and barely forgot past units. Even now, I can vaguely recall the majority of my history short notes from third grade and the water cycle process from second grade. I still remember all the English and Bangla poems we had to memorize for literature class. Once we came to the United States, I got to skip a grade and I started school in the US in fifth grade. Since both my parents had to get a job, we had no TV and very little homework, our parents bought us a cell phone and a laptop (my brother actually needed it since he was in middle school). There was no adult supervision, two different devices with high-speed Wi-Fi, and homework that takes no more than thirty minutes to complete. And this is where things started going downhill for me.

My concentration ability got worse and worse to the point I struggled to sit still and simply write a paragraph in middle school. The biggest factor that contributed to this was the lack of adult supervision and the increase in the number of devices I owned. In Bangladesh, I used to be quite ahead of work. My mother would check my book bag every day and set up a good routine for me. I can’t stress enough how much adult supervision impacts a child’s education. Previously it has already been mentioned, but I’ve run into way too many kids who don’t know their multiplication tables while I worked as a tutor. My brother also faced similar problems. “Since you go to Stuyvesant, I want you to tutor my child for the SHSAT. I really want me to go to a good school” they’d tell him. But the child in question didn’t know multiplication by seventh grade. The SHSAT is the last thing the parent should worry about. How did we even come to memorize multiplication tables? I remember how my kindergarten teacher would spend an entire week on each table and our class tests would basically be the times table of a number. My mother would randomly quiz me often to make sure I didn’t forget. I asked my friend how she learned her times table. Her mother would have the chart in the car, and she’d memorize it on the way to school.

Along with concentration abilities, things like arithmetic and basic English grammar are taught in elementary school. It’s very clear how important the role of an educator and parent is when kids are learning these skills. Without the basics, the child will forever struggle to adjust to school. While the government cannot control what goes on at home, the government certainly can do that at school. It’s quite evident that larger classroom sizes prevent the students’ ability to learn and the teacher from being able to concentrate on each student and notice their difficulties. It’s also very evident that technology hinders the concentration abilities of growing children. Having a huge variety of information in the palm of your hand can be quite useful if the person is mature enough, but growing children often aren’t mature enough for that. Scrolling mindlessly between studying at home or secretly checking one’s phone during lessons has statistically proven to reduce concentration abilities for children. According to Cleveland health, more and more children are having a harder time concentrating now and stated there is a correlation between how young kids are handed ipads and other devices and how it affects their concentration abilities as they grow older. This may ultimately lead to children developing symptoms of ADHD in the future. The last thing any of them need is more iPads.

What they desperately need is attention. While having all these gadgets and tools are cool, there is no point in teaching students coding if they can't do basic math, no point in students researching if they can't read or write well, and no point in getting the latest smart boards if students aren't even looking. To make matters worse, according to a site called a market brief, a study done by the tech-ed company of Glimpse-12 showed that sixty-seven percent of the software licenses purchased by k-12 schools go unused. It was the biggest source of wasted spending for those schools.

As I predicted, according to each school's website, my elementary school, middle school, and my tutee’s elementary school are quite below the state average when it comes to state test scores.

. I doubt buying more technology will be able to solve this problem but hiring more teachers definitely can. After all, computers can’t spot who’s looking down at their desks or dozing off during class but teachers surely can!

Annotated Bibliography

1. Wheeler, C. (1998, May 11). “School sponsorships challenged: New book urges parents to question use of technology: [final edition].” The Spectator, 11 May 1998, www.proquest.com/newspapers/school-sponsorships-challenged-new-book-urges/docview/269906831/se-2?accountid=36166

2. Vaishnav, Anand. "BUDGET CUTS BRING LARGER CLASS SIZES: [THIRD EDITION]." Boston Globe, Sep 11, 2003. ProQuest, www.proquest.com/newspapers/budget-cuts-bring-larger-class-sizes/docview/404863170/se-2?accountid=36166.

3. Lynch, Matthew. “K-12 SCHOOLS NEED TO STOP WASTING MONEY ON TECH THEY DON’T NEED.” The Tech Advocate, 13 Apr. 2018, www.thetechedvocate.org/k-12-schools-need-to-stop-wasting-money-on-tech-they-dont-need.

4. NYSED. “Pre-Kindergarten-Grade 5 Mathematics: Curriculum Map and Guiding Documents.” Engage NY, 21 Aug. 2013, www.engageny.org/resource/pre-kindergarten-grade-5-mathematics-curriculum-map-and-guiding-documents.

5. “K-12 Districts Wasting Millions by Not Using Purchased Software, New Analysis Finds.” Market Brief, 17 May 2019, marketbrief.edweek.org/marketplace-k-12/unused-educational-software-major-source-wasted-k-12-spending-new-analysis-finds.