Hmmm.

Read this article and identify what you see as the problem from the facts given.

I can't get over the fact that the math teacher in the magnet school could not walk down the hallway in seach of needed textbooks for his classroom without an outside reporter holding his hand, and showing him a computerized database form.

What books, if any, was he teaching from?
Does he not communicate at all with his department chair?

The story seems to conclude that standardized tests should be thrown out because the children have no books to learn the necessary materials. It seems to conclude that an overworked administrator should be micromanaging the book ordering process at each of the district schools. But...

the story shows us that the box of brand-new schoolbooks were there, down the hallway. The teacher just didn't have the gumption, or the knowledge perhaps, to follow up on how the process worked. He didn't seem to put much effort into taking care of his classroom. This isn't a money thing, this is a responsibility thing.

How many administrators does it take for the teacher to get the books from the bookshelf down the hall into his students' hands?
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ADDED: Here's the part that astounded me:

When I visited an algebra class at the Academy at Palumbo, a magnet school in South Philadelphia, a math teacher, Brian Cohen, seemed surprised by the information I presented to him. Palumbo’s records showed that the school used Fast Track to a 5: Preparing for the AB and BC Calculus Exams, a book published by Houghton Mifflin. However, the quantity of books in the system read “0.”

“That’s strange,” said Cohen after I sat in on his Algebra I class. “I’m not sure why it says we have zero copies.” Had that branded curriculum had been selected but never ordered? Or had the books had been ordered but intercepted somewhere along the way?

I asked if we could go look in the book closet and Cohen took me down the hall. On the way, we stopped to chat with a colleague of his who taught calculus. “Do you have enough books?” Cohen asked.

“I do now,” she said. “Some school in West Philadelphia closed, and I managed to get all the textbooks from there. I had a friend who hooked me up.” But she wasn’t using Fast Track to 5; she had a different calculus book that wasn’t on my record sheet.

Urban teachers have a kind of underground economy, Cohen explained. Some teachers hustle and negotiate to get books and paper and desks for their students. They spend their spare time running campaigns on fundraising sites like DonorsChoose.org, and they keep an eye out for any materials they can nab from other schools. Philadelphia teachers spend an average of $300 to $1,000 of their own money each year to supplement their $100 annual budget for classroom supplies, according to a Philadelphia Federation of Teachers survey.

Cohen and I arrived at the math department “book closet,” which was actually just a corner inside the locked and empty office of the math department chairperson. “Here’s where we keep the extra books,” he said, gesturing to two short wooden bookshelves. A medium-sized box with open flaps sat on the floor. Cohen looked inside. “Well, we found the AP Calculus books,” he said. The box was filled with brand-new copies of Fast Track to 5.

It would have been easy to blame this glitch on the lack of a centralized computer system. The only problem was, such a computer system did exist, and I was looking at a printout from it. The printout said Palumbo had zero copies of the book, but 24 books were sitting in front of me in a box on the floor of a locked office.

The Philadelphia schools don’t just have a textbook problem. They have a data problem—which is actually a people problem. We tend to think of data as immutable truth. But we forget that data and data-collection systems are created by people. Flesh-and-blood humans need to count the books in a school and enter the numbers into a database.

Usually, these humans are administrative assistants or teacher’s aides. But severe state funding cuts over the past several years have meant cutbacks in the school district’s administrative staff. Even the best data-collection system is useless if there are no people available to manage it.

I wonder if the teachers' unions object to the teachers keeping these records, or carrying the books down the hallway to distribute. How does the teacher even create lesson plans if he doesn't know what textbook is ordered, nevermind synching to the tests?

Or perhaps... it's easier for some teachers to stick with their older materials, and not bother updating with new books? Either way, I don't think this writer demonstrated there is a money shortage so much as not making the best of what resources are already there, in terms of books and people.