One of the overt agendas of the current administration's plan or our country is to weaken public education. There are even people who would propose that we abolish the Department of Education. (See
http://www.theocracywatch.org/schools2.htm )
Because public education is one of the first warriors of a civil society to fall in the war being waged against taxes by our tax cutting/burden shifting president and his crew, we need to look carefully at what happens to school budgets this spring. All over the country, we are facing higher local taxes as tax burdens from the tax cuts are being shifted onto property taxes. And when property taxes go up, people look for easy targets, and when your kids are no longer in school, school taxes seem like soft targets. And they are. In some palces, they are the only budgets tax payers get to directly vote on. People get mad as hell, think "taxes are bad" and vote donw the budgets without ever looking at 1) how they got that high, 2) what they cut in and cut out and 3) what happens to the schools in the long run if you cut those taxes.
I decided that what was needed was some aggressive framing of SCHOOL TAXES = MORAL TAXES. I genuinely believe this. So I share with you here a letter I have sent to my local PTA (and other lists) in Ithaca, New York. I am leaving in all the local details, but think my readers will find that the bulk of this argument can be used elsewhere. Step forward and tell your story. Where were YOU when paying school taxes was considered an honorable thing to do?
Word of clarification: Our local superintendent and her cohorts have given themslevs huge raises in the past few years, while cutting teachers and teacher salaries. She adopted the slogan "A District Dedicated to Leaving No Child Behind," while ignoring diversity, and proposing cuts in teachers in favor of more administration. It was a classic Rethug move. My battle is to get people to fight the waste at the top and keep the funds intact for teachers and aids and services. And for the record, Ithaca has GREAT schools. I want to see it stay that way. So, now for my letter:
"Blowing" Our Money on Education
In the small town in Northwest Montana where I grew up in the 1960's and 70's, second and third generation Scandinavian, Polish, German, English, and Irish immigrants argued about lots of things. I watched my parents and friends' parents argue about religion, about politics, about music, about food, about hunting and fishing. We argued about what level Hungry Horse Dam should be kept at. I heard knock down drag out arguments about the relative merits of Rainier Beer (It's the Water, and a lot more!)compared to our local brand, Great Falls Select. People got rowdy about what kind of breeding you should have for your Quarter Horse. (Three Bars breeding was going to give all horses navicular disease -- just you watch.) Things got ugly when we talked about the Vietnam War. It seemed to me that the adults I saw around me argued a lot, and walking across Kalispell meant one crossed lots of little symbolic lines in the sand drawn to delineate just about every issue you could come up with, bar one: public education.
To live in Kalispell meant you supported public education, fiercely. We were proud of our schools, from the one room school houses out in Creston to the "big fancy" schools like Hedges and Russell Elementary, where "rich, city kids" (Kalispell, then population 8,000) learned. To these children and grandchildren of immigrants, the very idea that public education was there for everybody, supported with everyone's tax dollars, was a fact on the ground. To argue about this would be , well, immoral, un-American. Don't go there.
When the schools needed money, our teachers sent home pleas that we pass tax levies, mimeographed on pieces of paper we were required to share with our parents. Voters never turned them down and my parents and their friends were very proud of this fact. It was, well, our VALUES. To vote against what our community of teachers and parents said was needed for our schools was regarded as just simply NOT US. And as a result, everyone was proud of our successes, from our nationally recognized speech and drama teams, to the kids who went to the state science fair and national spelling bees year after year, to our Future Farmers of America program that was best in the nation. We could do this as a community because teachers and parents were very empowered in the budget process. We paid for this, but we spent our dollars wisely.
I remember my vigilant sixth grade teacher, Miss Forsyth (rumor had it she hunted bear with a bow and arrow during bow season), telling us that if she ever found the guy who was spreading rumors about the school tax levy, she'd fix him in her steely gaze "right there in Akers Grocery Store till he crawled back to the selfish hole he crept out of." She had worse in mind for him if she discovered he had gotten a public education himself. We spent a lot of time imagining Miss Forsyth doing just that. Most of us knew that gaze and the power it had to top you dead in the tracks of your flawed moral reasoning. Imagine! Suggesting that you not support public education with taxes!
What was the moral reasoning she was setting straight, that seemed assumed among these fine, hardworking people? It was simply this: If you think education is expensive, try ignorance. Put another way, society can not afford to have some people be stupid and uneducated. It is simply the gravest danger to the American dream these people sought to live. And the bottom line was this: Public education should never be at the whim of generous people, but shared by the community at large FOR the community at large through taxes. The great project of full public education in the United States must have seemed to many of these immigrants and immigrants' kids, perhaps no more than a generation removed from famines, pogroms, civil wars and calamities in Europe, like the best idea for fixing social ills ever imagined. Don't mess with that. Beer and horse breeding and water levels and war were fair game for argument, but dollars for education: never.
I got to wondering if this was my nostalgic memory of my childhood, fed through the lens of my education obsessed family. So over the past few years, I have gotten to talking to folks from back home, and have raised this issue of education in the local tax scenario. Many of my childhood friends have ended up as school teachers, and my family members had kids in the public schools. I was stunned to learn that one's commitment to public education was indeed the social marker of being a real insider in this now very populated region of Montana. Rich or poor, left, right, or center, you paid your school taxes with pride. People bemoan the failure of tax levies for education, and the under-funding of public education because people just "didn't understand what we had." I learned I was far from nostalgic. Perhaps the most commonly held value of the children of the "greatest generation" as the unwavering commitment to public education. And God help the person who should be discovered selling ideas intent on undermining that pillar of all that was decent and noble and fair about America. And all agreed that such a noble view of education was dependent on parents and teachers having a front seat in deciding what is important and how that budget is put together.
I got to musing on these things in the last month, as our schools have been front and center in all of our minds. But as I have read the recent coverage of this development, and our upcoming school budget in the Ithaca Journal, my child-of-a-Norwegian Montanan skin tingles a bit. And I can feel the piercing gaze of Miss Forsyth. It might be coming from my eyes.
Bear with me a bit more:
Yesterday's paper (Ithaca Journal, March 31) carried the front page headline: New Budget Has Plans for Your Wallet." I thought to myself, "How about framing it this way: `New Budget Has Plans for Our Schools." The framing of the piece immediately sets us up to be opposed to taxes, as if paying for public education is immediately a suspicious activity, one to be avoided. The article went on to discuss how salaries and health care are what is driving the budget increase. Gee! We are going to blow all our money paying our teachers a good salary and giving them health care! What next? Letting senior citizens blow their money on food and medicine?!? I could hear Miss Forsyth challenging each of us with a child who has a favorite teacher: "Tell Miss X or Mr. Y to their face you don't want him to live well and have adequate health care. Run along now. Go tell `em."
Today, I read the Journal coverage of the budget again, and discovered that on the table is the cutting of up to six elementary school teacher positions. NEW to the budget, however, is the addition of two new administrative positions, at about $100,000 each. Is Judith pastel getting another raise? I'd like to know. Michael Cuddy? Let me know how he fares. If they tell us we need to give these administrators raises so we don't lose them, let me offer them this: Can I help you pack?
So, the bottom line for me, now apparently channeling Miss Forsyth from her grave in Conrad Cemetery in Northwest Montana is this: I pay my school taxes with pride. I am glad to have the fine schools we have here. The recent passion about our schools suggests to me this is a shared value in Ithaca, as well, and look what we get: a district consistently ranked in the top 100 in the country.
But I want this line drawn in the sand: No teaching position should ever be cut, or a teacher salary and adequate health care coverage blithely dismissed by our local paper until we have been satisfed that sacrifices could not be made elsewhere and education of our kids won't suffer one bit. Raises and perks for our top down, disempowering superintendent and crew seem like a good place to start looking for cuts. If the school budget is being squeezed because we shifted other taxes onto our local budget and the burden is too great, well, let's look at how that happened. But don't mess with my kids' teachers. (And for the record, my children are legion and sit in every classroom in the district.) That's my line in the sand. I will continue to pay my school taxes with pride. But I am watching who gets cut in and who gets cut out, and where this squeeze on public education came from in the first place.
Now, I think I'll go get me my bear. See you in the grocery store!