Education is Expendable

While the federal constitution has not been so interpreted, the constitutions of each of our fifty states pledges each child a quality education, generally interpreted to mean primary and secondary public education. Yet in many states, teachers have gone five to ten years without a raise, class size continue to escalate, in many school districts there are text books only for a fraction of attending students, modern computers are sorely lacking and underpaid teachers have to reach into their own pockets to pay for classroom necessities.

We used to be first in public education. Science. Math. Reading comprehension. FIRST! Now, we are not first in anything, and we tend to enter the global performance standards way down at number nineteen. We have no problem giving mega-wealthy taxpayers huge cuts that they really do not need, but we have no trouble decimating those basic governmental support systems that are most responsible for sustainable economic growth: infrastructure, medical and scientific research and education (all the way up to college). Without investment in these sectors, we are essentially living off the investment in these arenas by past generations, but we are absolutely destroying our future. China is laughing. They are stepping up big time.

What happened? The April 8^th Los Angeles Times explains: “For decades, many state courts enforced that right, striking down school funding schemes as inequitable and inadequate. State legislatures and governors mostly dragged their feet in response, achieving partial compliance with court orders at best. Still, court interventions led to increased funding that studies showed improved educational achievement.

“Then came the Great Recession. States used budget shortfalls to justify cuts to education spending. The devastating effects are still being felt today. General funding per student remains below pre-2008 levels in at least 12 states, down more than 11% in West Virginia, 15% in Kentucky, and a staggering 28% in Oklahoma, the largest percentage decline in the nation. In total, 29 states provided less overall state funding per student in 2015 than in 2008. California was in a similar situation in 2015 with state school funding down 11%. That was notably before the Local Control Funding Formula and Gov. Brown’s latest budget proposing billions to fund it.

“The recession also emboldened state legislators, and their foot dragging turned into foot-stomping defiance to court-directed increases in school funding. The New Jersey, Kansas and Washington supreme courts have held state legislators’ feet to the fire, insisting on compliance despite, in some instances, being threatened with impeachment and efforts to unseat them in judicial elections.

“Those three courts are the exception, however. The majority of state courts have opted to retreat. For instance, the California Supreme Court — the first state high court to strike down a school funding system as unconstitutional in 1971 — recently declined to review two cases invoking its right to education, one challenging teacher tenure statutes, the other alleging that school funding is constitutionally inadequate.

“A number of courts retreat by deferring to their state legislatures to devise the remedy. The legislature predictably resists or returns with a modest plan, which then provokes successive rounds of litigation, and in the end judges usually throw up their hands. As one court put it, all but admitting defeat, getting the legislature to make a good faith effort is ‘the best we can do.’ State legislatures thus win by attrition.” Simply put, state courts are increasingly declining to step into what is effectively a legislative role, and state legislatures are bought and paid for by ideologues, special interest and politicians who basically run on frugality.

Our heavy polarization has effectively made education a pawn, a symbol of spending that should be contained. With the demise of science as a driving force – climate change deniers have done more damage than mere environment challenges; science itself has fallen into disfavor – its handmaiden, education, has dropped in priority. But we live in highly competitive and very complex technical world, and those who cannot field the best and the brightest get shoved aside.

There are plenty of nations whose emphasize that they expect to leave the self-defeating United States in the competitive dust. For the rising generations, effectively, their parents and grandparents have sold them down the river.

Those rich enough place their children in chi chi school districts or high-end private schools. They don’t feel like paying the bill for those access the rest, the public schools that are subpar! That their children will step into a heavily polarized world of very few haves and lots of have nots, a chaotic and perhaps even dangerous, combustible combinations, does not seem to enter their minds. A society with too much anger and not enough hope is ripe for revolution. Further, the mass of domestic consumers needed to fuel business will have decreasing levels of discretionary income to spend on all those products and services created or provided by those rich segments of our society.

I’m Peter Dekom, and our government seems unable to understand the difference between investing and spending, inaccurately equating both as waste.