Tea Party Sells U.S. Short in Race to Bottom: Alexander Heffner
It’s morning in America, at least for the Tea Party. And now a movement that has electrified the country is poised to radically cut education when schools are already in desperate straits.
When conservative legal scholar Robert Bork was nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court, Senator Ted Kennedy said his America would be a land of “back-alley abortions, segregated lunch counters, and rogue police.”
The Tea Party’s America seems to embrace a comparable vision: a nation of illiterate and uneducated youths, of empty classrooms and laid-off teachers and counselors. Their recipe for reform would seem to ensure that the U.S. will continue to trail in the race to be the most-educated nation.
Education should be hands-off territory, for it is the most powerful tool to spur American innovation and economic growth.
The U.S. isn’t moving fast enough to compete with India, China and other emerging-market countries. Infrastructure and Internet connectivity in America are crumbling wrecks compared with the rest of the industrialized world.
While U.S. universities are still considered the world’s best, surveys show American public education to be in dismal condition, plagued with an increasing dropout rate, a dramatic achievement gap in mathematics and science, and a ubiquitous civic illiteracy.
Benchmark Deficiencies
According to data collected over the last decade by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a majority of students aren’t proficient in reading, history or math at each of the critical fourth- or eighth-grade benchmarks.
Meager teacher pay -- about $150 a week less than comparable occupations, according to the Economic Policy Institute -- explains these student deficiencies. Studies consistently show that starting salaries for teachers in the U.S. are considerably less than in other developed countries.
Schools shouldn’t pay teachers who aren’t first-rate. But, as in any profession, healthy entry-level compensation is vital for nurturing a talented workforce. It doesn’t help that less than 5 percent of the federal budget is allocated to education.
And yet, on Nov. 2, many Americans voted for candidates who plan to abolish the Department of Education and radically slash federal and local school budgets to a point of no return.
Last Legs
Victorious candidates, such as Senator-Elect Rand Paul of Kentucky, have been empowered to literally choke the life out of the nation’s schools, threatening to diminish teacher pay and technology in classrooms. During the campaign and in post- election talk-show appearances, Paul, like many of his Tea Party comrades, has advocated abolishing the Department of Education and across-the-board spending cuts for schools.
In a campaign questionnaire, Paul rejected the need for any federal education dollars: “I am against any federal funding or control of education. Most teachers despise No Child Left Behind. If you want to be rid of it, you must also oppose federal funds!”
Moreover, critics of education spending argue that sizable federal and state deficits demand such cuts, and this year’s crop of elected economic conservatives is promising budget reductions in every conceivable way.
At the same time, the Tea Party is ignoring teachers and neglecting classrooms without computers and Internet access. Elementary schools are on their last box of chalk and pencils.
Miriam Nightengale, the principal of the High School for Law, Advocacy and Community Justice in New York, says she is concerned about future cuts.
“We had to borrow money from the city to start the year in order to keep teaching positions and we will have to repay the debt either from this year’s funds, or from next year’s.”
Paper Rationing
Nightengale adds that it has gotten so bad that the school is “rationing the amount of paper each teacher gets.”
“We don’t have the funds to replace computers as they die. We are running on recovery money which will not be renewed next year. How can we continue to offer our students a rich variety of choices when we cannot fund our staff needs to support them?”
In Newton, Massachusetts, Principal Joel Stembridge says that his school, Newton South High, has lost dozens of teaching positions over the last few years. In the past year, Stembridge said, he decided not to cut teaching faculty positions, and instead reduced his support staff.
“We really can’t do that again, so any further cuts would be to classroom teachers, resulting in higher class sizes. If additional funds were available, I would restore some of the lost faculty positions from prior years.”
Oversized Classes
Nightengale’s and Stembridge’s schools of oversized classes and understaffed faculty aren’t atypical.
In Wisconsin, where gubernatorial candidates competed to be considered “cheapest administrator,” Bruce Dahmen, the principal at Madison’s James Madison Memorial High School, said declining funding won’t make the cut.
“It is essential that our schools receive the resources that are needed to meet the needs of all students,” he said. “The high school education is the gateway to success.”
The education crisis is real, not imaginary.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan can’t provide the antidote alone, but the agency’s Race to the Top competition, millions of dollars in funding for new tech-based learning engagements, and blueprints for future investments are building a foundation.
Candidates who would claim they want to restore economic discipline, even at the expense of educating children, are now in power. To ensure America’s greatness, it’s probably wiser to listen to our teachers than to the Tea Party freshmen.
(Alexander Heffner, an undergraduate student at Harvard University, is director of the education and journalism initiative ScoopSeminar.org. The opinions expressed are his own.)
To contact the writer of this column: Alexander Heffner at aheffner@fas.harvard.edu
To contact the editor responsible for this column: James Greiff at jgreiff@bloomberg.net
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