is the title of this op ed by Derrick Jackson, subtitled "Lack of money is killing our schools." It is for the large part a reflection the thinking of Linda Darling-Hammond, whose latest book, The Flat World and Education: How America's Commitment to Equity Will Determine Our Future I reviewed here. It is a column I strongly recommend. Consider the first sentence:
THE NEWS says we are watching the death of public education before our eyes.
Jackson notes our national average of $9,800/student per year K-12 is "technically high" in global terms but
meanwhile, children of the wealthy are being trained at private schools at more than triple the expenditures. In the Boston area, day school tuition rates are closing in on $35,000.
Consider also these bits from the column:
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the United States ranks in some measures behind England, Italy, Japan, Scotland and way behind Germany in starting teacher pay.
Beneath the numbers is the resegregation of children on the basis of class, race and immigration status.
by 2007, five states spent as much or more on corrections than on higher education, according to the Pew Center on the States.
In monetary terms, we have given up on millions of children.
Darling-Hammond is not yet ready to declare public education dead, but worries that certain parts are dying, because
""The programs of the 1960s and 1970s that helped make education more equitable were mostly eliminated in the 1980s and never put back.
"We’re disinvesting in a significant way. With the huge decline in America of manual labor jobs that are being off-shored or digitalized, the vast majority of jobs are knowledge based. If we do not invest that way, we really can’t survive as a nation. To deeply underfund public education as we are doing does not make any sense.’’
One can argue about the performance of our schools, especially with respect to comparisons on international tests, but as I have noted, including in the review of the book by Darling-Hammond, we seem to learn all the wrong lessons from international comparisons.
What I want to focus on is something about which I have been thinking for several weeks, and that is the continued and increasing inequity in American public education. A large portion of it is due to economic inequity, which is getting exacerbated by the recent national economic crises (correct spelling of the plural). After all, local government gets the bulk of its revenue from taxes on property whose value has fallen with the mortgage debacle, and states derive their revenues from income and/or sales tax at a time when un- and underemployment are so high that both revenue sources are down significantly. Remember that unlike the Federal government most states and localities are required to balance their non-capital budgets, at best being able to draw on rainy day funds that are getting exhausted. This financial crisis is actually late in hitting education because of the funds in ARRA (the stimulus package) that prevented massive layoffs for the current school year.
And yet, the problems were already visible before the financial crisis of the last of the 8 years of the term of George W. Bush. I believe that race is playing into it. Recently Markos noted in a front page piece that a majority of the babies born will now be non-white. Public schools teach the young. As schools become more "diverse" in the sense of less white, we are increasingly seeing whites less likely to willingly pay the taxes necessary to sustain those schools. I teach in Prince George's County Maryland, whose schools are now less than 15% white, even though the County population is not so heavily skewed. It is interesting that the County is also hogtied financially, as a referendum was passed during my tenure in the system (I began teaching in the 95-96 school year) that prohibits raising any tax rates without the direct approval of the voters. At the time I noted to friends and in writing that in part that was because of how few whites had children in public schools. Some thought I was exaggerating. I do not think I was.
It is interesting that the narrowing of public education for schools "in trouble" according to the terms of either the Bush No Child Left Behind (NCLB) plan or the Race to the Top (RttP) and the Blueprint for Education of the Obama administration will fall more heavily on schools that are less white, containing blacks and Hispanics, heavily populated by English Language Learners (ELLs). Yes, there are rural schools that are heavily white that will also feel the impact, but surprisingly they have not been the focus of most policy making, because the proposed solutions are often impossible to implement in rural schools, an issue about which Senators like Russ Feingold and John Tester have long complained.
Part of the pushback Obama has experienced is because of his skin color. He has, however, governed in a post-racial manner: that is, he does not have race at the forefront of his policy making.
Darling-Hammond thinks he is the most committed to public education of any president since Lyndon Johnson, and in terms of the emphasis he has given it and the funds he has committed, that is a fair statement. But she also notes he has "to date has not squarely embraced the idea of equity" and "inequity in elementary and secondary education is continuing to widen." That inequity is largely on the basis of economic class, but unfortunately that still largely tracks with non-whiteness.
Jackson concludes his column thusly:
ohnson once said you cannot "take a person who for years has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others.’ ’’ Today millions of American children once again need our help to get to the starting line.
I teach in a predominantly black high school in a heavily black district. Many of my students of color come from solidly middle class backgrounds. It does not have to be about race. So long as we tolerate economic inequity and contain our unfortunate strands of racism and nativism, economic disparities will fall disproportionally upon people of color. In public schooling, the largest portion of local government expenditures for most communities, that means those who will be ill-served will be children of color. That means our inequity will inevitably have a racial component, and we cannot pretend that it does not.
I think Jackson is not unduly alarmist in the title of his column, which I why I borrowed it. I fear that we are headed in that direction. And unless this administration understands that the approach it is taking in its educational policies does not address this issue, then it may preside over a major part of that death.
Yesterday I celebrated the award I am receiving for my teaching. Perhaps that will amplify my voice when I express concerns as I do here. Whether or not I am heard by more, or more clearly by those already listening, I feel obligated to speak out.
For the sake of the children. All of the children.
And for the sake of all of us. For if we let American public education die, we will be entering the death throes of America as a liberal democracy.
It is that larger worry which is why I will not end this as I normally due, for I do not this morning feel any peace.