Chris Graham: A catastrophe in the making
That’s how I’m describing the budget-wrangling in Richmond that will effectively reduce state spending on K-12 education in Virginia.
The moves – forced by Gov. Bob McDonnell’s push on funding for the Virginia Retirement System for public-sector employees – are forcing the hands of local decision-makers. Local government, of course, is where the rubber hits the road. For all the talk of cuts in Washington and Richmond, when cuts are made at City Hall or the County Government Center, it’s not a budget bottom line being cut, but people and services.
And in public schools, when you’re talking about cuts to people and services, you’re talking teachers and students.
So here’s what happens: We let legislators and a governor in Richmond put out press releases about how they held the line on taxes and spending, and we force local town and city councils and boards of supervisors to raise them to meet the funding gap, or those same locally elected leaders decide they can’t raise taxes to meet the gap and in the process we force the hands of school boards to cut classroom teaching positions, which account for the bulk of spending on schools.
Now, how likely is any locally elected council or board of supervisors member to support a tax increase, right? Not going to happen, not on a wide scale, anyway. So take that one off the table. Which leaves us with … fewer teachers, bigger class sizes, less opportunities for one-on-one interaction to help struggling students …
Kids are becoming commodities now. As some commenters on one local-newspaper blog derisively refer to them, “precious treasures,” that we’re not treating as such. Kids are widgets, and we need to reduce the price-per-unit to produce them.
It’s a race to the bottom, and we can almost guarantee where this is going to end up. The kids of today, soon to be the workers of tomorrow, the business entrepreneurs of tomorrow, the leaders of tomorrow, are going to go armed into that battle for the future with less in their arsenal that my generation did, than my parents’ generation did.
It’s not debt that is our greatest enemy. To borrow from a long-ago battlefield observation, we have met the enemy, and it is us.
It’s one thing to cut corners in transportation – all that means is unsafe roads killing a few dozen more people a year. Or to cut corners in the delivery of health care – so a few more of us lack basic access and the herd thins a little more quickly as a result.
Or to cut corners in defense – wait a second, no, because we don’t do that in this country. The Pentagon is sacrosanct.
But to cut corners in education, that’s … that’s us cutting corners to save a few dollars today at the expense of our very continued existence as a productive society tomorrow.
To those who bemoan the ability of the United States to be able to continue as the world’s leading economic and military power in the face of the stiff competition expected to come from the rise of China and India to our East, well, to borrow from another observation ostensibly from the world of agriculture, you reap what you sow.
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It seems that in the last ten years, leadership in Richmond has continued to “gut” education. Once previous administrations knew that they could gut education with little dissension from the public, their problem was solved. Kaine and McDonnell have both loudly boasted of their contribution and dedication to education but the real success (NOT) of Virginia’s schools is being revealed. It’s a tough thing to put back blood after you have slashed and cut the hog and drained it of its life blood at killing time. Richmond politicians love pork at the expense of killing the prize hog.
As a public school teacher I feel compelled to comment. We are NOW seeing this catastrophe come to a reality. I currently have 23 kindergarteners. We teach them to read, write, add, subtract and basic social skills. Try doing that with 23 5 year olds, with less and LESS help each year, as the numbers go up and UP!! I use to have small group math. Three years ago I had 2 highly qualified instructional aides, with a classroom size of 18 children, do the math, thats 6 children in a group, a nice manageable size to teach. The following year, I lost an aide, so now we have 2 groups of 10. (note, the classroom numbers have now gone up to 20-21!) THIS year, another kindergarten teacher and I have to SHARE an aide! So, now we both have 23 children and we share an aide. Some days I have whole group math, some days I have 12 in a group. That is not small group math, and there is NO way I can properly teach my children. We are learning how to add the coins, there are children adding to $10, while I have others that dont even understand what a coin is, oh, but wait… I need ALL children passing by 2013!!! Ok, Ill see what I can do on this restricted, ever increasing tighter budget. When money to our schools are cut, we are essentially denying the children a proper start in life. It stinks, and we are told that next year will be even WORSE!!! Really?!?! How much worse can it get? Oh yeah, probably 30 kindergarteners, and NO help in my classroom! How’s that for a quality, free and fair education?!?!?