Belle Chesler, Defunding
Children, A National Crisis of the Soul
Posted by Belle Chesler at
7:50am, April 18, 2019.
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Who even remembers? After all,
it happened in ancient times. November 9, 2016, to be exact, at newly elected
president Donald Trump’s victory rally, when he so memorably said, “We are going to fix our inner cities and rebuild our
highways, bridges, tunnels, airports. We’re going to rebuild our
infrastructure, which will become, by the way, second to none.” During that
campaign he had similarly sworn that he would deliver a trillion dollars in infrastructure spending
over the decade to come. And when he finally unveiled his vaunted plan, in February 2018, for no
less than $1.5 trillion dollars, it promptly disappeared without a trace in a Congress his party
still controlled. In its wake, the only infrastructure left obsessively on the
president’s mind or on anybody’s table was that “great, great wall” of his
(which won’t get built either).
In this, the president is
following in a distinctly twenty-first-century tradition of disinvestment, one
that would have been a mystery to my parents and other members of that World
War II and Cold War generation. They would have thought it un-American that, in
2017, the American Society of Civil Engineers, issuing its latest “report
card,” gave the country’s infrastructure -- from roads to dams, levees to
bridges, rail lines to drinking water -- an overall grade of
D+. Among the categories that received its own special D+ were America’s schools: “the nation continues to underinvest in
school facilities, leaving an estimated $38 billion annual gap. As a result,
24% of public school buildings were rated as being in fair or poor condition.”
And the literal state of those buildings is, as TomDispatchregular Belle Chesler makes clear today,
just one facet of the underinvestment in and deteriorating conditions of the
American public school system, itself part of the deteriorating infrastructure
of American democracy. And when it comes to those public schools, Donald Trump
and crew aren’t even pretending that they might ever have a plan to invest in
or rebuild them. Tom
Making American Schools Less
Great Again
A Lesson in Educational
Nihilism on a Grand Scale
Three weeks ago, I sat in a
cramped conference room in the large public high school where I teach in
Beaverton, Oregon. I was listening to the principal deliver a scripted
PowerPoint presentation on the $35-million-dollar budget deficit our district
faces in the upcoming school year.
Teachers and staff members
slumped in chairs. A thick funk of disappointment, resignation, hopelessness,
and simmering anger clung to us. After all, we’ve been here before. We know the
drill: expect layoffs, ballooning class sizes, diminished instructional time,
and not enough resources. Accept that the teacher-student relationship -- one
that has the potential to be productive and sometimes even transformative --
will become, at best, transactional. Bodies will be crammed into too-small
spaces, resources will dwindle, and learning will suffer. These budgetary
crises are by now cyclical and completely familiar. Yet the thought of
weathering another of them is devastating.
This is the third time in my
14-year-career as a visual arts teacher that we’ve faced the upheaval,
disruption, and chaos of just such a budget crisis. In 2012, the district
experienced a massive shortfall that resulted in the firing of 344 teachers and
bloated class sizes for those of us who were left. At one point, my Drawing I
classroom studio -- built to fit a maximum of 35 students -- had more than 50
of them stuffed into it. We didn’t have enough chairs, tables, or spaces to
draw, so we worked in the halls.
During that semester I taught
six separate classes and was responsible for more than 250 students. Despite
the pretense that real instruction was taking place, teachers like me were
largely engaged in crowd management and little more. All of the meaningful
parts of the job -- connecting with students, providing one-on-one support,
helping struggling class members to make social and intellectual breakthroughs,
not to speak of creating a healthy classroom community -- simply fell by the
wayside.
I couldn’t remember my
students’ names, was unable to keep up with the usual grading and assessments
we’re supposed to do, and was overwhelmed by stress and anxiety. Worst of all,
I was unable to provide the emotional support I normally try to give my
students. I couldn’t listen because there wasn’t time.
On the drive to work, I was
paralyzed by dread; on the drive home, cowed by feelings of failure. The experience
of that year was demoralizing and humiliating. My love for my students, my
passion for the subjects I teach, and ultimately my professional identity were
all stripped from me. And what was lost for the students? Quality instruction
and adult mentorship, as well as access to vital resources -- not to mention a
loss of faith in one of America’s supposedly bedrock institutions, the public
school.
And keep in mind that what’s
happening in my school and in Oregon’s schools more generally is anything but
unique. According to the American Federation of Teachers, divestment in education is occurring in every single
state in the nation, with 25 states spending less on education than they did
before the recession of 2008. The refusal of individual states to prioritize
spending on education coupled with the Trump administration’s proposed $7 billion in cuts to the Department of
Education are already beginning to make the situation in our nation’s public schools
untenable -- for both students and teachers.
Sitting in that conference
room, listening to my capable and dedicated boss describe our potential return
to a distorted reality I remembered well made me recoil. Bracing myself for the
soul-crushing grind of trying to convince students to buy into a system that
will almost by definition fail to address, no less meet, their needs -- to get
them to show up each day even though there aren’t enough seats, supplies, or
teachers to do the job -- is an exercise in futility.
The truth of the matter is
that a society that refuses to adequately invest in the education of its
children is refusing to invest in the future. Think of it as nihilism on a
grand scale.
Teachers as First Responders
Schools are loud, vital, chaotic
places, unlike any other public space in America. Comprehensive public high
schools reflect the socioeconomic, racial, religious, and cultural makeup of
the population they serve. Each school has its own particular culture and
ecosystem of rules, structures, core beliefs, and values. Each also has its own
set of problems, specific to the population that walks through its doors each
day. Coping with the complexity and magnitude of those problems makes the job
of creating a thriving, equitable, and productive space for learning something akin
to magical thinking.
The reflexive blame now
regularly heaped on schools, teachers, and students in this country is a
misrepresentation of reality. The real reason we are being left behind our global peers when it comes to student
achievement has to do with so much more than the failure to perform well on
standardized tests. Our kids are struggling not because we’ve forgotten how to
teach them or they’ve forgotten how to learn, but because the adults who run
this society have largely decided that their collective future is not a
priority. In reality, the tattered and rapidly deteriorating infrastructure of our national
system of social services leaves schools and teachers as front-line first
responders in what I’d call a national crisis of the soul.
So it’s no surprise to me that
teachers, even in the reddest of states, have been walking out of their classrooms and demanding change.
Such walkouts in Arizona, California, Colorado, Kentucky, North Carolina,
Oklahoma, Washington, and West Virginia have reflected grievances more
all-encompassing than the pleas for higher pay that have made the headlines.
(And in so many states, they are still being paid less than a living wage.) Demands for just
compensation are symbolic and easy for the public to grasp. The higher pay won
through some of those walkouts represents an acknowledgement that teachers are
being asked to do a seemingly impossible job in a society whose priorities are
increasingly out of whack, amid the crumbling infrastructure of the
public-school system itself.
The idea that the real world is somehow separate from the
world inside our schools and that issues of inequality, poverty, mental health,
addiction, and racism won’t impact the capacity of our students to thrive academically sets a dangerous precedent for
measuring success. Assuming that the student living in a car, not a home,
should be able to stay awake during a lecture, that the one returning from a week
in a psychiatric ward should be able to instantly tackle a difficult math test,
and that the one whose undocumented father was just picked up by Immigration
and Customs Enforcement officers should have no problem concentrating as her
teacher diagrams sentences in English is a grand delusion.
In fact, among the many
demands of teachers and their unions during the strikes of the past year
were calls for more financial support for comprehensive
social services for students. In Los Angeles, teachers fought for legal support for students in danger of deportation.
In North Carolina, teachers are planning a new round of strikes that will,
among other things, demand Medicaid coverage expansion aimed at improving
student health. In Chicago, teachers included a call for affordable housing in their negotiations and
so drew attention to the importance of supporting students both in and out of
the classroom.
If schools are expected to
pick up the slack for the gaping holes in our social safety net, it follows
that they should be designed and funded with that purpose in mind. If
teachers are supposed not only to teach but to act as counselors, therapists,
and social workers, they should be paid salaries that reflect such weighty
demands and should have access to resources that support such work.
Why Prioritizing School
Funding Matters
There is a large disconnect between the lip service paid to supporting
public schools and teachers and a visible reticence to adequately fund them.
Ask almost anyone -- save Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos -- if they support teachers and schools
and the answer is probably “yes.” Bring up the question of how to actually
provide adequate financial support for education, however, and you’ll quickly
find yourself mired in arguments about wasteful school spending, pension funds
that drain resources, sub-par teachers, and bureaucratic bloat, as well as
claims that you can’t just continue to throw money at a problem, that money is
not the solution.
I’d argue that money certainly
is part of the solution. In a capitalist society, money represents value and
power. In America, when you put money into something, you give it meaning.
Students are more than capable of grasping that when school funding is being
cut, it’s because we as a society have decided that investing in public
education doesn’t carry enough value or meaning.
The prioritization of spending on the military, as well as
the emphasis of the Trump administration and congressional Republicans on
a staggering tax cutfor the rich, corporate tax evasion, and the dismantling of what’s left of the social
safety net couldn’t send a louder message about how much of a priority the wellbeing
of the majority of this nation’s kids actually is. The 2019 federal
budget invested $716 billion in national security, $686 billion
of which has been earmarked for the Department of Defense (with even more staggering figures expected next year). Compare
that to the $59.9 billion in discretionary appropriations for the Department
of Education and the expected future cuts to its budget. Point made, no?
However, since federal school
contributions add up to only a small percentage of local and state education
budgets, all blame can’t go there. In Oregon, for instance, restrictions placed on property taxes in the 1990s
artificially limited such revenue, forcing the state to start relying heavily
on income taxes to keep schools afloat. Corporations are an important source of
income for states. Yet, though corporate profits in the U.S. rose by $69.3
billion to an all-time high of more than two trillion dollars in
the third quarter of 2018, over the last 40 years the states’ share of
income-tax revenue has fallen to half what it was in the 1970s.
Take Nike, whose worldwide
headquarters are located only a few miles from the high school where I teach.
It stands as a shining
example of a corporation that has profited handsomely from sheltering income abroad while evading local tax
responsibilities. Nike has a special relationship with the state of Oregon,
which taxes only the company's local profits, not those earned elsewhere. Adding
insult to injury, according to The Oregonian, by the end of 2017, Nike had
put $12.2 billion of its earnings into offshore tax shelters. Had that money been repatriated, the
company could have owed up to $4.1 billion in U.S. taxes, which means it has a
modest hand in the monetary shortfalls that leave schools like mine in
desperate straits.
In reality, Oregon’s economy
is thriving and yet how little it all matters, since here
we are again on the precipice of another crisis.
In 1999, the state government
formed a committee made up of educators, legislators, business leaders, and
parents to create a reliable budgetary tool that would correlate school funding
needs with student performance. This “Quality Education Model” set out a standard
for what a “quality” education would look like for every student in Oregon. In
the 20 years since then, the state legislature has reliably failed to meet the
funding goals set out by that model. This year, it calls for $10.7 billion in
education spending, while the state legislature’s joint ways and means
committee recently released a budgetthat included spending of just $8.87
billion on the school system. Such annual shortages of funds have, over time,
helped create the present gaping hole in our public education system. And each
year that hole grows larger.
Restoring Faith in Our
Nation’s Institutions
Public schools represent one
of the bedrock institutions of American democracy. Yet as a society we’ve stood
aside as the very institutions that actually made America great were gutted and
undermined by short-term thinking, corporate greed, and unconscionable
disrespect for our collective future.
The truth is that there is money
for education, for schools, for teachers, and for students. We just don’t
choose to prioritize education spending and so send a loud-and-clear message to
students that education doesn’t truly matter. And when you essentially defund
education for more than 40 years, you leave kids with ever less faith in American institutions, which is a
genuine tragedy.
On May 8th, educators across
the state of Oregon are planning to walk out of schools. The action, a
precursor to a strike, is a direct response to the inadequate funding in the
upcoming state budget and a referendum on the continuing divestment in public
education. Teachers like me will be stepping out of our classrooms not because
we don’t want to teach, but because we do.
Belle Chesler, a TomDispatch regular, is a visual arts teacher in
Beaverton, Oregon.
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