Today, California is expected to issue pink slips to at least 26,000 teachers across the state.* Teachers and supporters will be marching in the streets, wearing pink to show their solidarity with those facing lay offs. The saddest thing about Pink Slip Friday is not the teachers losing their jobs (although that is a tragedy) but what it signifies for students in California and America as a whole.
This Fall, I opened up a Stand for Children meeting with an excerpt from the Nation magazine from the last great depression. At that time, I thought I was reading a distant cautionary tale. Today, just a few months later, it doesn't seem quite so far off.
Public education is threatened with something little short of an absolute breakdown in vast areas of the country. Alabama owes its teachers $7,000,000....One or more phases of school service have been eliminated or curtailed in more than half of the city school systems of the nation....
In the present emergency, moreover, there has been added to the usual reactionary business interests, the voice of the bewildered and overburdened small taxpayer, who may actually be bearing a disproportionate share of the cost of education. The equalization of the tax burden by a form of taxation placing this load where it belongs, State and federal aid to education throughout the nation, the strengthening of teachers' associations everywhere, and determined action against false "economies" by all who realize what is at stake will be needed if the schools and the teaching profession are to be saved from disaster.
(Read the whole article, here.)
As of this date, our nation's largest state economy will officially spend less per pupil than any other state in the nation. We no longer live in the 1930s, and kids who don't get an appropriate math and science education now will simply not be able to compete in the future economy. There will be no making up for this, without immediate intervention to curtail this national trend.
For all the talk of bank bailouts and emergency stimulus packages, our greatest economic emergency has been taking place steadily for decades in schools across America, and has now picked up such a pace I don't know that we'll ever catch up.
* Edited to add a link:
Pinkfriday09.org, which lists current pink slips issued at
26,029, as of two days ago. 26,590 as of today.