Aristotle got it right when he said, “All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth.” Once upon a time America professed to believe in a strong public education system—at least for some children. And we still talk about public education as the great equalizer and pathway out of poverty but continue to fall far short in assuring millions of poor children, especially those of color, upward mobility.
As if children and families were not suffering enough during this economic downturn, many states are choosing to balance budgets on the backs of children and to shift more costs away from government onto children and families who have fewer means to bear them. That is a shameful trend in public education today. Even when students are in school, they’re getting less than they used to. Of the 46 states that publish data in a manner allowing historical comparisons, 37 are providing less funding per student to local school districts this school year than they provided last year, and 30 are providing less funding than they did four years ago. Seventeen states have cut per-student funding more than 10 percent from pre-recession levels, and four—South Carolina, Arizona, California, and Hawaii—have reduced per student funding for K-12 schools more than 20 percent.
These cuts have major effects on critical learning opportunities. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has found funding cuts in Georgia will mean shortening the pre-kindergarten school year from 180 to 160 days for 86,000 four-year-olds. Since the start of the recession, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Texas, and other states have cut funding from early education programs to help close budget shortfalls. New Jersey cut funding for afterschool programs. In a 2009 survey of California parents, 41 percent reported their child's school was cutting summer programs. Cuts limiting student learning time are likely to intensify in the coming year. An American Association of School Administrators survey reports 17 percent of respondents were considering shortening the school week to four days for the 2011-2012 school year and 40 percent were considering eliminating summer school programs. Summer learning loss is a major contributor to the achievement gap between poor and non-poor children. Districts across the country are beginning to cut extracurricular activities and to charge fees for supplies like biology safety goggles or printer ink.
These education cuts come at a time when American education is in dire straits. The United States ranks 24th among 30 developed countries in overall educational achievement for 15-year-olds. A study of education systems in 60 countries ranks the United States 31st in math achievement and 23rd in science achievement for 15-year-olds. More than 60 percent of all fourth, eighth, and 12th grade public school students in every racial and income group are reading or doing math below grade level. Nearly 80 percent or more of Black and Hispanic students in these grades are reading or doing math below grade level. A recent report by the Education Trust notes more than one in five high school graduates don’t meet the minimum standard required for Army enlistment as measured by the Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT). Among applicants of color, the ineligibility rates are even higher: 29 percent of Hispanics and 39 percent of African Americans are ineligible based on their AFQT scores.
Children should be getting more quality instructional time, not less, to prepare to compete in the rapidly globalizing economy. Instead they’re being held back and provided less school days and hours by stopgap solutions to budget problems they didn’t cause. Too many adults seem to lack a moral, common, and fiscal sense context for making decisions about what to cut and what to invest in. The Children’s Defense Fund’s first publication in 1974 was on Children Out of School in America. We documented two million children not enrolled in school, including hundreds of thousands of children with disabilities. As we went door to door interviewing thousands of families in 30 census tracts for that initial study, we never thought to ask the question, “Is your child home today because her school is closed to help balance your district’s budget?”
At the Children’s Defense Fund we believe education is a basic human right and an essential tool for evening the odds for all children and promoting upward mobility for children left behind. Education gives you the tools to improve not only your own life but the lives of others and to leave the world better than you found it. How can we expect our children to create a better America if we don’t give them a good education? Cuts being proposed in Washington and in the states and localities around the country may be saving a few dollars on a balance sheet today—but they will cost us dearly tomorrow as a nation. How shortsighted we are. Where are our priorities? What are our values?
Follow Marian Wright Edelman on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ChildDefender
Glad the little ones are getting computer savvy, but the young teacher---honestly, I thought --Weather Channel--- as she used the screen. **Those screens cost $$ and I'm hearing the Schools crying for funding__.
My definition of teaching ability (I of think war-torn countries) If the school is building is gone, could a teacher still teach with a chalkboard and no school books available. If they can still teach the kids with no props, then THey are winners with me...Honestly, the flatscreen was over the top to me.
Too many adults seem to lack a moral, common, and fiscal sense context for making decisions about what to cut and what to invest in.
We pay more money for education than any other country, then we score 25th in the industrial world. This seems to be a waste of money. So people turn to home schooling, church schools, and private enterprise. Can you blame them?
Why can't teachers teach? We don't accept such failure from other professionals we hire.
The continued siphoning of funds from public education hurts all communities, but primarily the poor ones, because they receive, by far, the smallest percentage of public funds allocated to public education. Until the belt tightening is felt just as keenly in affluent neighborhoods, the will of the voter won't be effected enough for them to demand it be any different. Until then, middle- and upper-class America will continue to believe the Waiting for Superman clap-trap and blame educators for public school's failure on behalf of the impoverished.
But that's only in the more affluent areas. The kids who happen to live in the wrong zip code don't have the outside resources to pull from to uplevel the quality: they don't have massive volunteerism from parents (how can they? Parents are working to survive), they don't have non-profit fundraising machines that can fill the gap between what the state awards the district and what they really need to keep teachers on payroll and programs intact, and they don't have the political voices (read: money) to champion their cause.
I think the public education crisis is the biggest issue our nation faces, second only to re-regulation of the financial industry and making corporations pay their fair share of taxes.
Why you ask?
So personnel contracts appear out-of-wack with a district's total budget.
Why?
To sell to the public, the reason schools have budget issues due to teacher contracts, not the excessive cuts in per pupil fuding cuts at the State levels. However, the propaganda campaign is that teachers are overpaid, healthcare benefits are too high, and their pensions are 'entitlements' and to be cut.
Why?
It's all about the new myth of teachers, compensation, funding, and continued efforts to break the unions. Educators are a solid voting block, their hope is to change the rules of funding, compensation, and sell the message schools are suffering due to personnel contracts. NOT state funding cuts that are excessive for children. Look at Texas, Florida, Wisconsin, Michigan per pupil funding cuts. Totally out of whack with the state budgets.
Our most at-risk students are and will suffer as their safety nets in schools are cut: after-school tutoring, summer school, higher class numbers. All will effect their ability to maintain on-grade level growth each year.
These conversations need to be broader and wiser, to say it's economically based is false, short-sided and dangerous. Unfortunately, it's easier to paint educators/education with a broad brush of ineffective, inefficient system.
Students no longer eat breakfast or do homework. They have little or no parental interaction, and often lack self-control or respect for themselves or authority. I was in line at the Verizon store the other day and the woman in the next line said "this phone cannot have a camera since my teen daughter isn't smart enough to NOT send nude pictures of herself to everyone." YIKES!
Education has boiled down to "public daycare." You have to feel sorry for teachers who mistakenly thought they would be able to teach children and guide them on a journey of discovery.
Yes, our schools are now the most expensive form of daycare. But our government now wants "pre" K-12, and serve all 3 meals, longer days, and a 12-month school year. It will cost a fortune, and we'll need a million more teachers, for what?
We take all comers, regardless of income, race, religion, gender orientation or disability, and try to teach them HOW to learn. The curriculum provides the basic facts; starting around fourth grade we try to help them develop skills in critical thinking and the ability to build new knowledge from everything they experience. We do not indoctrinate, we do not force anyone to believe anything. We present the facts and teach them how to use those facts to reach conclusions.
All of that is within the context of falling budgets, which mean larger classes, fewer resources, and a consequent decrease in the amount of attention each student gets. The 180-day school year is already not long enough to get all the way through a fully comprehensive curriculum, and May and September are lost to anticipation of or recovery from the three month break they get. Throw in disengaged parents and major public figures who deny scientific and historical fact, and you have a recipe for something close to failure.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Education_Association
The National Education Association (NEA) is the largest professional organization and largest labor union in the United States,[2][3] representing public school teachers and other support personnel, faculty and staffers at colleges and universities, retired educators, and college students preparing to become teachers.
The NEA has 3.2 million members and is headquartered in Washington, D.C. With affiliate organizations in every state and in more than 14,000 communities across the nation, it employs over 550 staff and had a budget of more than $307 million for the 2006–2007 fiscal year.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Federation_of_Teachers
The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) is an American labor union founded in 1916 that represents teachers, paraprofessionals and school-related personnel; local, state and federal employees; higher education faculty and staff, and nurses and other healthcare professionals. It is affiliated with the AFL-CIO.
The AFT is the second-largest education labor union in the United States, representing about 1.5 million members as of July 2010, of whom 250,000 are retired.[1]
Unlike the largest U.S. education trade union, the 3.2 million-member National Education Association, the AFT has since its founding been affiliated with a trade union federation (the old American Federation of Labor until 1955 and the AFL-CIO since then). A proposed 1998 merger between the two was rejected by the NEA's annual meeting.
FYI, the highest spending country is Cuba. That's why Cubans win so many Nobel prizes and receive so many international patents.
But if they show up NOT ready to learn (and too many do, because we've got a level of child poverty unheard of in other developed countries), the results aren't as good. Then they need more interventions, and those are likely to be interventions that other first-world countries don't have to pay for, because their wealth inequality doesn't look like that of a third-world country.
If we're going to keep letting the 1% get richer on our backs, one of many problems that creates is that it will be more expensive to educate the 99%. But as the article rightly points out, we're moving toward a system of just not bothering.
But this argument is distracting from the real questions we need to be asking. Fareed Zakaria aired a special on education a couple of weeks ago, and hit the nail on the head. Not only are we not spending enough, give the amounts of money we divert from education for administration, replacing books every few years, etc. But we are not looking at how to change our classrooms to make teaching more effective, and compete with countries that are doing it much better. One of the techniques that GPS explored was new software being used to teach math. The software is project driven by the students, not the teachers, lets all of the kids in a class progress at their own speed, and gives the teacher access to reports that tell them where each student is at any time. And it appears to be working better than anything else - anywhere.
This is the sort of thing we need to be discussing. This is the sort of thing that will bring about the types of changes in our schools that can give us the jump start that will make American education number 1, again.
Maybe the best thing we can do is hire all the asian teachers we can find, and not worry about reforming our current army of union teachers that think they are over-worked, underpaid, and doing the parents job anyway.
The Federal government has historically stepped in when local communities and states are unable or unwilling to provide the needed resources and access. Except for standardized testing, which is actually performed by each state, government interventions have little impact on my classroom except is a very positive way.
That's not the only way to fix the problem. But it's an approach that would probably produce benefits.
It's sad to see how many Americans can not do simple things anymore, and until we once again value intelligence as a virtue, our society will continue it's downward spiral.
I think that the Occupy UC and Cal State actions and the issues discussed here are linked. We are seeing the degree to which education at all levels is deeply dysfunctional in the US. What can we do? Here are 4 suggestions
1. We can and should concentrate on pre-k. The evidence is in that young children learn very quickly -- everything from languages to numbers. So spend money there.
2. Make classes smaller. Almost every problem will be improved by small class size. Again, evidence suggests that smaller classes enable more contact with the teacher which equals better learning.
3. Give them breakfast.
4. Stop teaching to the test. With #2, teachers will actually have the time to read papers, organize student projects, and engage in learning experiences that have some real value.