Wall Street’s excesses blew up the economy. Now the question is who pays to clean up the mess. And across the country, our children are already paying part of the bill – as their schools are hit with deep budget cuts. A new report – StarvingAmerica’s Public Schools: How Budget Cuts and Policy Mandates are Hurtingour Nation’s Students – released Oct.12, 2011 by the Campaign for America’s Future and the National Education Association looks at five states to detail what this means to kids in our public elementary and secondary schools.
Every study shows the importance of early childhood
education. Analysts at the Federal Reserve discovered that investments in
childhood development have, in the words of Fed Chair Ben Bernanke, such “high
public as well as private returns” that the Fed has championed such
investments, noting they save states money by reducing costs of dropouts,
special education, and crime prevention. Yet across the country, states
are slashing funding for pre-kindergarten and even rolling back all day
kindergarten. Now only about one-fourth of 4-year-olds are served by
pre-K programs. Ten states have eliminated funding for pre-K altogether,
including Arizona. Ohio eliminated funding for all-day kindergarten.
Every parent and teacher knows the importance of smaller classes,
particularly in the early years, when individual attention is vital. Yet
across the country, schools are facing layoffs of nearly 250,000 workers next
year, many of them teachers. In Chester Upland, Pa., 40 percent of the
teachers were eliminated, with class sizes rising from 21 to 30 in elementary
schools and to 35 in high schools, prompting students to walk out.
Intelligence
comes in many forms. Successful schools offer a well-rounded curriculum –
not just the basics, but art and music, social studies, extracurricular
activities and physical education. But now schools across the country are
forced to terminate or charge extra for anything beyond the core
curriculum. In York, Pa., art, music and physical education was
eliminated in elementary schools. In Medina, Ohio, students returned to
find courses in French, German, art, music and advanced placement science and
math were eliminated.
And children, needless to say, are extremely diverse. They
learn in different ways, at different rates, and face different
challenges. Public schools educate the poor and the affluent, those with
developmental challenges and those who are gifted. Yet across the
country, schools are slashing funds for special learning instruction, for
advanced placement courses. Increasingly parents face extra fees for
programs. In Medina, Ohio, for example, it costs $660 to play a high
school sport, $200 to join the school choir or $50 to act in a student play.
And even as budgets are slashed for public schools, more and
more state education money is getting siphoned off to private contractors to
pay for elaborate tests, and to vouchers and corporate tax credits to subsidize
private and charter schools. We’re cutting billions out of educating kids
while increasing spending on testing how they are doing.
School budgets have been cut in some 34 states and the District
of Columbia. In Arizona, the cuts average about $530 per pupil. In
Florida, $1 billion was cut in next year’s budget, or about $542 per
student. Not surprisingly, these cuts fall hardest on the poorest
districts that can’t afford to make up for them the way affluent districts
can. The kids who have the greatest need for public education are
suffering the deepest cuts.
Americans sensibly value education. Every political
candidate promises our children will have the best education in the
world. Yet Washington seems largely oblivious to the carnage taking place
in our schools. Part of the president’s American Jobs Act was special funding
to avoid more teacher layoffs. A filibuster by Republican senators kept
that from even coming up for debate, much less a vote.
Meanwhile a furious argument continues about to what standard
teachers and schools should be held accountable. The administration,
still touting its Race to the Top program, wants the reauthorization of No
Child Left Behind to set the standard that all children should be “college
ready” by the year 2020. Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, introduced a more sensible
standard of requiring “continuous improvement” from all schools.
But schools are eliminating kindergarten, laying off teachers,
cramming 35 kids in a class, cutting advanced placement classes, and levying
steep fees for kids to be in the band or play on an athletic team.
Continuous improvement? Race to the Top? The grim reality facing
our kids mocks the rhetoric.
Jeff Bryant, author of the Starving America’s Public Schools
report, notes that there have been only two previous times since 1929 when this
nation cut spending significantly on its children’s education, once in the
midst of the Great Depression and once in the midst of World War II. With
schools facing budget cutbacks while the largest generation of kids since the
boomers flood the classrooms, this is likely to be the third. The bankers
who caused the mess got bailed out. The military budget exceeds Cold War
levels. The richest 1 percent of Americans, who make as much as the
bottom 60 percent of Americans, pay the lowest tax rates since the Great
Depression. But our kids and their schools are paying the price for an
economic mess they didn’t create. No wonder The Tea Party & Occupy
Wall Street have spread across the country.
