Last year, when I dropped my son off at school, my first question to the staff was “What’s changed?”
After the cuts came down, students felt a palpable loss across the board. We can enumerate the problems with leaving any school budget thousands of dollars short: less teachers per class, tired adults carrying more of the load, less electives, desolate classrooms and hallways, less people for communities to turn to, less resources, less … of everything really. I and hundreds of others spent the summer advocating to stave off disastrous budget cuts to our schools, including a rumored $500K to my son’s school. I spent time in dozens of classrooms across the city and, while everyone generally seemed like they were doing what they could with what they had, there was also a sense that they could do much better if they had more.
And that’s the thing with these millions and billions of dollars in budget cuts. Politician math is when they demand that schools run the same activities for less.
The slide towards corrosive school funding has been lubricated for decades now. Researchers often point to the A Nation at Risk report from the early 1980s as an inflection point for American schools. The commission that authored this report used the “failing schools” narrative as a rallying cry to shift the purpose to accountability and austerity. Rather than advocate for holistic learning experiences that create a well-educated citizenry, these initiatives insisted that schools need mainly to focus on achievement, particularly in core content areas. By the time the No Child Left Behind Act came around, these ideas took hold as a bipartisan impetus. 20 years later, and phrases like “back to basics,” “classic liberalism,” and “phonics” have become boons for politicians looking to strip schools from much needed resources.
At some point, society must ask itself, “if your budget reflects your values, then why do you not value education?”
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