The New American Value: Ignorance is Golden

To some, it’s just a fiscal necessity. Gotta cut spending, even if it hurts, with token cuts to defense (but lots of new technology and expensive replacement weapon systems) and some government pension plans. But education is so far off the back burner, it seems to have fallen off the stove!

“American 15-year-olds continue to turn in flat results in a test that measures students' proficiency in reading, math and science worldwide, failing to crack the global top 20… The Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, collects test results from 65 countries for its rankings, which come out every three years. The latest results, from 2012, show that U.S. students ranked below average in math among the world's most-developed countries. They were close to average in science and reading.

“‘In mathematics, 29 nations and other jurisdictions outperformed the United States by a statistically significant margin, up from 23 three years ago,’ reports Education Week. ‘In science, 22 education systems scored above the U.S. average, up from 18 in 2009.’… In reading, 19 other locales scored higher than U.S. students — a jump from nine in 2009, when the last assessment was performed…. The top overall scores came from Shanghai, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, Macao and Japan, followed by Lichtenstein, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Estonia.” NPR.com, December 3^rd. But think how much money we saved by not educating the next generation!

“Across the country, public schools employ about 250,000 fewer people than before the recession, according to figures from the Labor Department. Enrollment in public schools, meanwhile, has increased by more than 800,000 students. To maintain prerecession staffing ratios, public school employment should have actually grown by about 132,000 jobs in the past four years, in addition to replacing those that were lost, said Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington.” New York Times, December 21^st.

And that’s assuming you want to keep our standards at the pre-recession levels, when we were already falling in international statistics. We probably needed to hire more than a million additional public teacher then, and 1.5 million today to stop the hemorrhaging. “‘We can’t have the doublespeak where everybody talks about how important education is to our being globally competitive,’ said Daniel A. Domenech, the executive director of the American Association of School Administrators, ‘and then education is not a priority when it comes to funding.’” NY Times.

When school budgets are replenished, sometimes the money doesn’t actually go to educating our children. “In Pennsylvania, although the state’s education budget is now above prerecession levels, a large proportion of money is being diverted to replenish underfunded pensions, leaving less for actual classrooms, said Michael Wood, research director at the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center… The cutbacks have been particularly pronounced in less affluent school districts, which have trouble raising local property taxes or asking parents’ associations to fill in gaps.” NY Times.

The net result is overcrowded classrooms, less individual attention to those students who need the most help moving on and even fewer teachers to teach the most difficult and necessary subjects to a generation that will be relegated to menial jobs with little hope for advancement or decent compensation without the necessary skills to compete with developed and emerging countries whose children have not only mastered the basics but have gone on to excel in more complex and demanding skills.

“Teachers say the delicate balance of a class ecosystem, with its range of personalities, academic abilities and social skills, can be upset by just a few more students in the room. Still, research on the importance of class size in helping students learn is mixed. Although a study in Tennessee in the 1980s showed that children benefited from smaller class sizes of 13 to 17 students in the early grades, other studies have shown few effects.” NY Times. As we continue to grow our deficit to cover non-essentials, particularly wasteful defense spending that accumulates our deficit at an alarming rate, we are denying future generations the skills they will need to earn enough to pay back that debt.

“In 2012, the most recent year for which complete data is available, the U.S. approved $645.7 billion in defense budget authority (fiscal year 2013 dollars). This figure includes funding for the Pentagon base budget, Department of Energy-administered nuclear weapons activities, and the war in Afghanistan.

“This number is six times more than China, 11 times more than Russia, 27 times more than Iran and 33 times more than Israel. Though China is often cited as the country’s next great military adversary, U.S. military spending currently doubles that of all of the countries in Asia combined. In 2012, the U.S. consumed 41 percent of total global military spending. The U.S. also remained in the top 10 highest spending countries as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), one widespread measure of military spending, trailing behind countries such as Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, and Israel, all of which have a significantly lower total military expenditure as well as a lower total GDP.” ArmsControlCenter.org, April 24^th. Exactly what is that military designed to protect? A system that is collapsing on itself because it spends so much on military excess?

I’m Peter Dekom, and we really need an entirely new set of priorities for this nation if we expect to the see the United States continue as a viable nation 50 or 100 years from now.