Penny Wise ...

(Cartoon by John McPherson and found here.  Click on image to enlarge.)

So, the Great Recession is over.  More people are working which means more taxes are coming into state coffers.  You'd think that in our rational society this would mean states would ease up on the cut-backs in social services and education.  You would, unfortunately, be wrong.

Here are some of the sad details:

Schools have always had to fight for more funding, but Noble Prentis [Elementary School's]  problems were exacerbated during the recession when state budget cuts left schools, like many other public services, foundering. Now, the state's general fund revenues are up $150 million since 2008, but Kansas officials are in no hurry to restore spending cuts the economic downturn made necessary.

It's not just Kansas. Conservative legislators committed to the idea that smaller government works best are passing tax cuts that they say help stimulate the economy. They are moving to make recession-era budget cuts permanent.

Even some Democratic governors, stung by the painful cutbacks of the economic downturn, are hoping to rebuild reserves: Gov. Jerry Brown has proposed that California's surplus go to a rainy day fund, while his fellow Democrats are calling for the state to restore services. ...

"Some states are choosing to make reduced services the new normal," said Michael Leachman, director of state fiscal research at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.  [Emphasis added]

Hey!  No biggie.  Pack those kids into the classroom.  The bright ones will rise to the occasion.  The rest, ah well, them's the breaks.  Besides, this whole idea of a free public education is passé.  

I grow old, I grow old.
I shall wear my trousers rolled.

One Of These Is Not Like The Others

(Political cartoon by Jen Sorensen and published 6/27/12 at Daily Kos. Click on image to enlarge and then please return.)

I can see the sneers and eyerolls of the corporatists from here: "Why, that's just silly."

Why, yes. Yes, it is silly. Just as silly as trying to run a government or a university like a corporation, which is the whole point.

Once again, for the eleventy-seventh time: a corporation/business is completely different than a government, and completely different than a university. The aims, purposes, and goals are different. The purpose/goal of a business is to make money for its owners/shareholders by providing a product or a service. The purpose/goal of government is to provide for the general welfare of its people. The purpose/goal of a university (or any school at any level) is to educate (not propagandize) its students. Profit is the centerpiece of a business, its raison d'etre. Profit plays no role in government and public education, or at least shouldn't.

In fact, it is not even necessary for a government or university to break even all the time. There will be situations which call for deficits until the money can be found via tax increases or surcharges to cover the difference. This is not to say that schools and governments should not be careful with the public's money. Waste and fraud should be eliminated across the board, whether in education spending or defense spending. But the goal is not profit.

Jen Sorensen is a University of Virginia alum, so her comments on the U-Va scuffle appended to the cartoon are especially pertinent:

While this particular battle may have been won, the corporatization of higher education remains a problem. More than anything, this situation has revealed the dangers of the awesome hubris that can develop among certain wealthy individuals in positions of power. The handful of people behind Sullivan's ouster included a couple billionaire hedge fund managers and a condo developer from Virginia Beach with a soft spot for the musings of David Brooks. Such experience does not qualify one to make sweeping decisions in secrecy about a major public university. Here's a suggestion for those who think their success in extracting wealth from the marketplace means they're brilliant Renaissance People capable of running anything: take a few of those millions and buy some humility. Please.

Yes.

Things That Make You Go Yes!

And now for a little good news.

The state of Minnesota has decided to do something to promote early childhood education. A multifaceted program to enhance literacy, starting with the preschool, is being introduced with funding from multiple sources.

Early literacy is emerging as the new front in the battle to narrow Minnesota's academic achievement gap between white and nonwhite students -- which persists as one of the largest gaps in the nation. From policymakers to schools and businesses, the urgency to ramp up reading has intensified as Minnesota schools grow increasingly diverse, particularly with more non-native English speakers. ...

Like states from Iowa to Florida, Minnesota's literacy push is centered on ensuring reading well by third grade -- a critical year when children shift from "learning to read" to "reading to learn." In 2011, about one in five Minnesota third-graders failed to read at basic levels, or nearly 13,000 students. Emerging research on brain development, a stronger reliance on student test scores and the state's latest goal to narrow the achievement gap to half by 2018 are further driving efforts. [Emphasis added]

Being able to read is a critical skill for students, which is (I know) stating the obvious, yet in these years of "No Child Left Behind" and teaching to the test this skill is too often ignored. The place to start then is early in children's lives. Somebody finally gets it.

A child who isn't proficient in reading by third grade is four times more likely to drop out of high school than a proficient reader, according to a 2011 report by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. ...

Legislators have taken note. Starting this fall, schools have to report reading scores to their communities and have a specific literacy plan. They will receive $85 for each third-grader who passes the state reading test or shows growth in reading -- part of up to $48 million in literacy incentive aid. Legislators also dedicated $5.5 million more to the Minnesota Reading Corps, a nine-year-old AmeriCorps program whose literacy tutors work with struggling 3-year-olds through third-graders.

What is such stunning good news is that it's not just the state government which is willing to put money where it counts, so are the Minnesota business and nonprofit communities:

The growing momentum is prompting state agencies, nonprofits, businesses and schools to collaborate more than ever.

Leaders of three state agencies are teaming up in the Children's Cabinet, a collaboration that helped the state score a competitive $45 million Race to the Top early education grant announced in December. Target, Cargill, General Mills and Medtronic combined last year to give $13 million to Minneapolis schools over three years, with Target's $6 million going toward reading initiatives.

Go read the entire, rather lengthy article and discover what a little common sense and a lot of dedication can accomplish. Then match it with the education efforts in your community and state. If your schools aren't matching up, do the right thing and ask your school board and state legislators to do something about it.

Hillary Clinton was right: it does take a village to raise a child.

This Is Very Cool

Every once in a while I come across a little news article that really takes the freezer burn off my heart. This is such an article, and it talks about a new movement in Germany.

Take a book, leave a book. In the birthplace of the printing press, public bookshelves are popping up across the nation on street corners, city squares and suburban supermarkets.

In these free-for-all libraries, people can grab whatever they want to read, and leave behind anything they want for others. There's no need to register, no due date, and you can take or give as many as you want. ...

The public book shelves, which are usually financed by donations and cared for by local volunteer groups, have popped up independently of each other in many cities across Germany including Berlin, Hannover and Bonn, and also in suburbs and villages.

Each shelf holds around 200 books and it takes about six weeks for a complete turnover, with all the old titles replaced by new ones, he said.

The program has been so successful that other countries have requested information on the process. While the Germans are still fine tuning, they have been willing to share that information to increase reading habits. And book sellers are beginning to notice that the availability of free books hasn't cut into their business at all. In fact, several have reported an uptick as the reading public is, well, reading more.

Would such a program work in the US? I don't see why not. Yes, we have free public libraries, but many of them are either closing or cutting back the hours and days they are open because of state and local budget crunches. Most of them are located inconveniently far from those who because of their own budget crunches can't take advantage of them. Having these small book shelves in different areas takes an edge off those problems.

It's a nifty idea, one that I hope succeeds all over the planet.

How Embarrassing

This week's foray into Watching America set me back on my heels. There's been a lot of rumbling about the state of US education, but I hadn't realized that the rumbling has been heard and dissected in other parts of the world. Argentina's Argenpress has a sobering analysis about our education system and the article's conclusion matches its headline: "United States: Goodbye, Public Education."

The United States currently has problems of all sizes, shapes and colors. One of the most serious is the crisis of the public education system. The low scores of academic performance and the failure of standardized tests on the part of tens of thousands of students from poor and marginalized communities combine with constant budget cuts and the trends toward privatization of the public education sector.

Add to all this a fundamental problem: Public education has undergone a qualitative shift in its operation and objectives. Education is no longer seen as a right; it has become a business opportunity. Teachers have become employees who pursue the "success" of their "clients" — the students — and the role of education authorities is in the process of being reduced to mere administrative functions at best. [Emphasis added]

And the Obama administration is currently leading the charge to a business model which has no connection to the reality of how our children learn.

As part of its Race to the Top program, the government is incentivizing states to raise their limits on the number of charter schools in exchange for federal funds.

Furthermore, the current administration seeks to replace roughly 5,000 poorly performing traditional schools with charter schools. The government has made the juicy sum of $3.5 billion available to the states to subsidize the "change" of these poorly performing schools. The more poorly performing schools that close, the more money the states receive. ...

This type of school, financed with public funds, does not need to operate under the same rules as other public schools. It usually selects its students instead of accepting everyone, which allows it to deliver better results. Its teachers are not necessarily unionized; therefore, they lack labor rights. And it can accept private investment, which allows it to establish other regulations. [Emphasis added]

The emphasized portion of that quote is key: not every student in the region being served by the school will be accepted, thereby creating separate classes of students, some of whom will be relegated to "lesser" schools. That is bad enough because it runs so contrary to the American ideal of education. But here, ironically, is the stunning part, something our new "education" overlords don't want us to know: their expensive toys don't always work:

But something odd happened on the road to "success." According to a broad investigation carried out by experts at Stanford University, only 17 percent of charter schools were better than traditional public schools, according to standardized test results. 37 percent were worse in comparison, and 46 percent were virtually identical.

This is how our money is being spent. How embarrassing to have another country recognize our stupidity and to trumpet it.