• The number of children living in poverty has increased by four million since 2000, and the number of children who fell into poverty between 2008 and 2009 was the largest single-year increase ever recorded.
• The number of homeless children in public schools increased 41 percent between the 2006-7 and 2008-9 school years.
• In 2009, an average of 15.6 million children received food stamps monthly, a 65 percent increase over 10 years.
• A majority of children in all racial groups and 79 percent or more of black and Hispanic children in public schools cannot read or do math at grade level in the fourth, eighth or 12th grades.
• The annual cost of center-based child care for a 4-year-old is more than the annual in-state tuition at a public four-year college in 33 states and the District of Columbia.
Those statistics are summarized from The State of America's Children 2011 Report, issued last month by the Children's Defense fund. They appear as the heart of Charles Blow's New York Times column this morning, The Decade of Lost Children, from which I have quoted them. Blow also quotes from this report from the Center for Budget and Policy Priorites, the second paragraph of which reads:
Of the 47 states with newly enacted budgets, 38 or more states are making deep, identifiable cuts in K-12 education, higher education, health care, or other key areas in their budgets for fiscal year 2012. Even as states face rising numbers of children enrolled in public schools, students enrolled in universities, and seniors eligible for services, the vast majority of states (37 of 44 states for which data are available) plan to spend less on services in 2012 than they spent in 2008 – in some cases, much less.
Blow describes the data from the Children's Defense Fund as "grim." The title of his piece is about a decade, but his conclusion acknowledges that it is far more dire than ten years:
We risk the creation of an engorged generational underclass born of a culture that has less income equality and fewer prospects for mobility than the previous generation.
Our policies should be about the children. What we are doing hurts them, and thus hurts our nation, now and for the foreseeable future.
Let me reflect on this.
Today is August 6. On the Christian calendar followed by Catholics and Orthodox and many Episcopalians, it is the Feast of the Transfiguration. Historically it is the 66th anniversary of Hiroshima, the first use of a nuclear weapon upon human beings. Today the political world is focused on the event being held by Rick Perry at which he is expected to announce his candidacy for this nation's highest office - the event officially sponsored by Focus on the Family, but practically an action of the very scary New Apostolic Reformation. All of the events of this day could serve as the basis of a diary, and the last certainly seems very appropriate for a political blog.
But politics should be about more than winning offices. It should be about the policies we wish to see enacted into law. Or in some cases, it should be about policy decisions we want to prevent because of the impact they have. Our policies must of course be about the here and now, but we must always be mindful of the future. In that sense all of our policy making should in some way be about the world we are creating for our children, for they are the future of our nation and our society.
Certainly our rhetoric seems to reflect this. Those who argue that the deficit is so crucial point out how we will burden future generations with its impact. Organizations and individuals who advocate for aid in places like Somalia, now being devastated by drought, are likely to cite the half million children who may have died.
Policy implementation requires financial resources, and at a time when those resources are in short supply, clearly priorities must be established.
Perhaps it is because I chose late in life to be a teacher i am very focused on the impact of policy upon young people. Perhaps because the students I teach, while adolescents, are quite capable of grasping the impact of things in the news, I recognize that one topic of our discussions about government will be the impact of those policies upon them, both now and for their futures.
So I find myself questioning policy decisions, because I see how they hurt the children. The almost theological insistence of Republicans not to allow the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest to have expired last year has handicapped the federal government's ability to provide aid to states and local governments already hurting. It has meant the elimination or limiting of programs that could help children - at least some of the educational programs already cut, such as reading programs and programs for gifted youngsters, take away opportunity for children in schools in poor communities to develop their potential for themselves and for society.
Policies that did not regulate the financial sector and that continue to refuse to hold individuals and corporations accountable for the damage they have done have crippled some communities and many states in their ability to generate the revenues necessary for public institutions such as schools and libraries - and of the latter remember that it is often in public libraries that poor children have access to the internet and it is often only libraries that given them access to books.
Conservative "teAA+party" (a deliberate "misspelling) Republican control of legislatures and Governor's offices has meant state abandonment of support of public schools, often in order to shift resources to wealthy and corporations, some of whom have bought those policies through the infamous ALEC - the American Legislative Exchange Council in which corporations have votes on the policies to be implemented in the states.
There is something perverse if we think the profits of corporations and those who run them are more important than the present wellbeing of our children and the future possibilities they should be able to anticipate, a future other than being a low-paid worker in a corporation against whom they do not have the protections of collective bargaining, and perhaps - if people like the Koch Brothers get their way - of safe working conditions, of an environment not despoiled by irresponsible corporate action intended to maximize profit regardless of costs imposed upon others.
It has been more than a decade since this began. We can clearly trace some of our problems nowadays to the Reagan administration. But it goes back further - after all, some deregulation began under Democratic President James Earl Carter, and the infamous Powell Memorandum was written in 1971.
The pace of the damage to our young people has been accelerating. What resources remain in schools are inappropriately being shifted towards more testing. Public resources are going to text book companies, to hedge fund operators who profit from real estate deals with charter schools, to excessive salaries for those operating charter schools or providing "services" like Teach for America.
Yet for all the "sturm und drang" over these items, it is far more basic.
Some states are exploring cutting back to a 4 day school week.
If child care costs more than college, how do poor families work the hours necessary at the low wages available to them to even support their families.
What about the increase in demand for food assistance programs?
How about the increasingly bare shelves in food pantries?
We can look ahead to the impact of the recent "deal" on the debt ceiling and recognize that it is possible that it will prevent implementation of important parts of the Affordable Care Act, and the health of our young people will continue to be at risk, as the health of the parents is placed under even more dire threats.
I have no biological children. Each school year I have at any moment some 14-16 dozen children in my instructional care. I react with many more of the almost 3,000 in our school. My professional life is focused on making a difference for them. Teaching is my most essential political action. The words I write and the actions I take on behalf of teachers and teaching, including as serving as a union rep, are because I am trying to provide the best educational experience possible for those young people, an experience that requires good and empowered teachers.
I feel as if I am failing, because we as a nation are failing. We have allowed our political priorities to be skewed, and those who will suffer will be our young people.
They will be deprived of the necessary nutritional and medical assistance to be healthy enough to learn.
They will see their class sizes increase, their educational choices shrink, the quality and experience of their teachers diminish.
Their opportunities for future advancement will begin to disappear, as the costs of post-secondary education skyrocket, the number of slots at state universities and community colleges gets limited, and financial assistance beyond an excessive loan burden begins to fade away.
Young people are not idiots. They will begin to recognize, as did some of my students last year, that their futures are becoming more bleak.
Some will experience that as their families lost income, or in some cases can no longer afford their homes.
Others can understand what the policies we now implement mean for them, now and in the future.
It should be about the children.
Insofar as it is not, our policy is immoral and destructive of this nation.
I wish it were otherwise.
I will continue to try to make a difference, both within and without the walls of my classroom and my school.
What I do is important, but insufficient.
It should be about the children.
We should be giving them hope. Instead we offer them the real possibility of despair.
Politicians of both parties and all ideologies, are you paying attention.
Let me remind you, one more time.
IT SHOULD BE ABOUT THE CHILDREN