Although I tend to concentrate these posts on K-12 education, I had the distinct privilege to spend yesterday involved in a meet-up with an exceptional group of college students in the state of Georgia who have organized to push back against the austerity budget cuts, fee hikes, and tuition increases being inflicted on public schools and universities by the Republican administration in that state.
The organization, Georgia Students for Public Higher Education or GSPHE, began as emerging grassroots campus efforts to resist egregious tuition increases formed a coalition more capable of mobilizing a statewide public campaign. Eventually, the organization allied with immigrant student groups, such as the Georgia DreamersGeorgia Dreamers who are pushing for an open pathway to citizenship for undocumented youth who were brought to this country and for fair access, tuition, and treatment of students who are undocumented.
I was there to explain "the bigger picture", but these young students were already up to speed. Unlike the out-of-touch leaders of the Democratic Party and the sycophant punditry "on the left" who follow them, these young adults had already made the situation analysis and had come to all the right conclusions:
* Access to quality education is a matter of human rights, and public schools are a cornerstone of our democracy - not just in the US but around the world.
* Current calls to cut education are not a necessary response to the housing crisis and ensuing financial collapse - on the contrary public education has been the constant target for attacks since the Reagan administration, if not longer.
* The efforts to transform public universities and K-12 schools are not about "reform," but are instead being driven by a concerted, broad, and well-organized coalition of forces bent on monetizing students, privatizing pubic schools, and transferring public assets into private hands (although the efforts to privatize universities differs from the efforts aimed at K-12, which I will come back to).
* Attempts to transfer the assets of our public schools into the hands of privateers and profit seekers is similar to how other public assets - in transportation, criminal justice, the military - are being sold off to "entrepreneurs" despite the fact that these contracts rarely lead to costs-savings to the public - indeed they often cost more and the service to the public declines.
* What's happening to public schools, teachers, and students in Georgia and across the US is part of a worldwide effort driven by a neoliberal ideology imposed by the IMF and the World Bank.
Even though these students hadn't heard of Diane Ravitch and were unaware of the ins-and-outs of ESEA they didn't need to. They already instinctively "got it" just from their experiences of organizing against something that curtails their right to an education and threatens their future wellbeing. And as the meeting progressed, we linked up - via Skype - with others around the world who got it too, and I began to wonder, "Is this where it begins?"
In much the same way that the end of apartheid in South Africa began when students staged protests against a law prohibiting instruction in schools to be in any language but Africkaans and English, and student sit-ins were a catalyst for advancing the Civil Rights movement in the US, were students around the world going to have to be the ones to lead the push-back against the advancing effort to transfer public assets around the world into the coffers of the very wealthy and powerful?
A jeffbinnc Golden Oldie
From Aug 15, 2010. Original HEREIn compiling the news for this weekly feature on OpenLeft, I find myself straddling two practically parallel worlds of education and the progressive left. And unfortunately neither understands the other very well. You would think that because Brown vs. Board of Education was one of the truly landmark events in the progressive movement, that there would be a permanent synergy between these two communities. But even though the Wall Street Journal seems to believe that teachers and the Democratic Party are grand partners in a money laundering scheme, the reality is that there is disconnect and dysfunction between these two communities that is readily obvious and sorely debilitating to each.
In the world of education, there's a peculiar language that seems impenetrable to outsiders: i3, RTTT, CMOs, Response to Intervention, differentiated instruction. Sides are taken over issues that seem only tangentially related to mainstream news. And not only is "politics" rarely brought up, but any kind of left-right polarity resembling the political world seems sketchy at best. For a profession that you would think would epitomize a progressive outlook - that of cultivating the minds and souls of future generations - educators only occasionally refer to the existence of something "progressive" about their calling, and when they do, it is obscured in some hazy academic debate that happened a long time ago in a university far, far away.
In the progressive left, education is rarely a point of discussion among prominent bloggers and pundits, and when it is, the discussion is usually uninformed or not particularly, well, progressive. A quick glance at the dkosopedia entry for "education" gives you a pretty good idea of the sad state of the progressive left's knowledge of education.
Furthermore, even when the two separate worlds of education and the progressive left intersect, which is all too rare, the cross-over tends to benefit neither.
Why does this matter? It matters to educators because today, more than any other time in recent history, they find themselves to be reduced to pawns in a political war not of their choosing. Unable to practice their profession to the standards they would hold themselves to, fearful of the future of their livelihood, and saddened by the sight of underserved children forced into test-taking factories, they find themselves powerless and without a strong political base to push back against the Washington Consensus that is ruling their world. It matters to the progressive left because how can it profess to be a legitimate force for positive change if it's willing to turn its back on the nation's children - which I've been maintaining in Left Ed that it currently is doing.
Events this week provide the perfect examples of what I'm talking about.
On Democracy Now! yesterday, there was a segment with Raul Grijalva, co-chair of the Progressive Caucus, and one thing that was discussed was the very real threat of education becoming a focal point for Obama's intense desire to find some symbol of his bi-partisan intentions:
JUAN GONZALEZ: Congressman, I'd like to ask you, in terms of this battle over the agenda now that will occur not only in Congress, but obviously the administration-President Obama has to decide how he is going to move forward-one of the things I noted in the first few days before and after the election is this discussion of education reform as becoming the way that Republicans and the White House can work together. Haley Barbour talked about it, saying, "Hey, if you want to talk about charter schools or performance pay for teachers, the Republicans are ready to make deals." And Arne Duncan said similar things yesterday, that he believes that there's room to move together, Democrats and Republicans, around education reform. Will the what some people consider the dismantling of public education become sort of the New Deal that the Obama administration tries to make with Republicans, as Bill Clinton tried after the 1994 elections to make welfare reform the way to win back some popularity? Is your sense that this is beginning to shape up this way?
REP. RAÚL GRIJALVA: Yeah, that's my sense and also my concern, to be quite honest, in that, you know, we had an opportunity to reauthorize elementary and secondary education. We didn't do that. Now we go back to a session in which the Republicans are going to control the Education and Labor Committee, of which I'm a member, and to deal with the issues that we already rejected. We told Secretary Duncan that his four prescriptions for fixing schools, which were essentially to privatize, close them-we rejected them as a caucus of that committee, as a Democratic caucus. I see those coming back on the table. And, you know, what essentially it does, it makes-when 80 to 90 percent of the kids going through school in this country are coming from urban and poor communities, and this is the time we invest in public education. So, yeah, I see that as a place where people are going to look at a common agenda between Republicans and the White House, but I also see it as a-it could be for public education-very, very slippery slope. And we have to be very cautious and very protective of public education as one of the agenda items.
Indeed, the GOP's deep hostility to public education--as well as their hostility toward the federal government and Barack Obama personally-may, ironically, turn out to be the best protection that public education has over the next two years. An article in the Washington Post starts out with the promise of possible bipartisan agreement, but down in the weeds comes to acknowledge as much. It begins:
As the massive propaganda campaign against American public education rolled out this week, I was immediately struck dumbfound at how so many of the elitist crowd who send their children to private school, such as "Waiting for Superman" director Davis Guggenheim, convey their heartfelt angst over the mythical "failure in American education." Although I've yet to see Guggenheim's film, I'm totally puzzled as to why he would be so emotionally absorbed by an institution that he has deliberately held at arm's length. And I'm reluctant to take much stock in NBC's "in-depth conversation" about education that has largely excluded public school educators from the center of the discussion.
So instead of focusing on all the media insanity this week, I found more interest in three other items that to me had a more sane and sensible viewpoint on school improvement.
The first, was the release of a new study by Reading Is Fundamental, Inc., the oldest and largest children's and family nonprofit literacy organization in the United States. The study, available from a link at Valerie Strauss's The Answer Sheet blog, reveals that something very simple - access to printed reading materials at an early age - can have profound effects on the literacy achievement of children.
During this weekend that we observe the role of working people in our society, edublogger Tom Hoffman reminds us of how much harder the work of educators is being made by the leadership in Washington DC. Pointing to a criteria used to evaluate school systems that apply for Race to the Top competitive grants, Hoffman notes:
"This means education leaders can use the assessment system to hold school professionals accountable for outcomes as well as inputs, more strategically manage human resources and make much better-informed personnel decisions. (emphasis in original)"
In other words, according to our nation's education policy makers in DC, educators are not only accountable for numerous student "outcomes," especially ever more and more batteries of test scores, they're also going to be held accountable for what goes into school systems.
So let's see now . . . educators - who increasingly have little or no control over curriculum (state legislatures, boards of education, and soon, the Common Core Standards from the feds), financial resources (taxpayers and politicians), assessments (testing companies), instructional strategies (becoming more the case in charter schools ascribing to SLANT and other mandated practices), and, of course, the students themselves - are now going to be accountable for the "inputs" that go into schooling as well?
With work conditions like this, it's a wonder that more educators in the US don't resort to what they sometimes do in other countries:
In compiling the news for this weekly feature on OpenLeft, I find myself straddling two practically parallel worlds of education and the progressive left. And unfortunately neither understands the other very well. You would think that because Brown vs. Board of Education was one of the truly landmark events in the progressive movement, that there would be a permanent synergy between these two communities. But even though the Wall Street Journal seems to believe that teachers and the Democratic Party are grand partners in a money laundering scheme, the reality is that there is disconnect and dysfunction between these two communities that is readily obvious and sorely debilitating to each.
In the world of education, there's a peculiar language that seems impenetrable to outsiders: i3, RTTT, CMOs, Response to Intervention, differentiated instruction. Sides are taken over issues that seem only tangentially related to mainstream news. And not only is "politics" rarely brought up, but any kind of left-right polarity resembling the political world seems sketchy at best. For a profession that you would think would epitomize a progressive outlook - that of cultivating the minds and souls of future generations - educators only occasionally refer to the existence of something "progressive" about their calling, and when they do, it is obscured in some hazy academic debate that happened a long time ago in a university far, far away.
In the progressive left, education is rarely a point of discussion among prominent bloggers and pundits, and when it is, the discussion is usually uninformed or not particularly, well, progressive. A quick glance at the dkosopedia entry for "education" gives you a pretty good idea of the sad state of the progressive left's knowledge of education.
Furthermore, even when the two separate worlds of education and the progressive left intersect, which is all too rare, the cross-over tends to benefit neither.
Why does this matter? It matters to educators because today, more than any other time in recent history, they find themselves to be reduced to pawns in a political war not of their choosing. Unable to practice their profession to the standards they would hold themselves to, fearful of the future of their livelihood, and saddened by the sight of underserved children forced into test-taking factories, they find themselves powerless and without a strong political base to push back against the Washington Consensus that is ruling their world. It matters to the progressive left because how can it profess to be a legitimate force for positive change if it's willing to turn its back on the nation's children - which I've been maintaining in Left Ed that it currently is doing.
Events this week provide the perfect examples of what I'm talking about.
In recognition of today's celebration of our nation's birthday, I was planning on writing something inspirational and patriotic. Perhaps something about how America's "noble experiment" of universal education for all, regardless of social and economic standing, epitomizes the democratic spirit of our country. I thought I would expound on how public schools present us with the perfect example of how the future of humanity relies not solely on the rights of the individual but also on a "shared effort" among everyone in a community to ensure the well-being of future generations.
I thought I would take the patriotic bond we're all feeling today as an opportunity to remind people that the functions of schools extend way beyond, as Larry Cuban puts it here, "transferring knowledge and skills from adults to children." From the early grades - where little children are taught about "taking turns, no hitting or biting, washing hands, working independently, cooperating with others who look and act different" - through the middle and upper grades that prepare students for the the workplace and citizenship. I felt today would be the perfect time to point out that public schools are a "hotbed for democracy".
While it's true that our educational system cannot right the wrongs that are inflicted on children in every corner of American society - especially in violent, impoverished cities like Chicago and conservative, rural states like Oklahoma - that does not mean that universal public education is a systemic failure. After all, businesses fail all the time and our economy is currently in shambles, but there's no broad based movement to declare capitalism a failure.
So I was getting set for an emotional appeal to acknowledge the history and value of our public schools - what they really mean to this country. And then this flashed across my monitor. Resembling the bland countenance of Kim Jong Il, here we have the nemesis to everything American public education reveres: democratic input from the citizenry, local control, education of the whole child, equality of opportunity and access. And my friends, when you see the arsonist setting your house ablaze, you'd better not pause to reflect on what the house means to you. You'd better man the fire brigade.
Similarly, my Quick Hit linking to Charles Murray's ridiculous NY Times op-ed exempting voucher schools from the same kind of accountability being used to pummel traditional public schools also drew the attention of Diane Ravitch, who quite rightly pointed out the "double standard" that "when public schools fail to raise test scores, it is a sign of their decrepitude and failure; when voucher schools fail to raise test scores, well, so what, they weren't supposed to do that."
As if on cue, charter school cheerleader Paul E. Peterson anted-up to the stupidity of school "reformist" arguments by claiming that "what makes charters so important today is not so much their current success, on average, but their long-term potential to innovate." Got that? Charter schools don't have to prove they're any good at all. It's all about "choice" and "innovation." But in the meantime, those traditional public schools had better measure up!
In the meantime, what is the track record for "innovation?" When it comes to teacher preparation - another whipping post for the reformists - not so hot. Edublogger Claus von Zastrow uses a new report from The National Research Council as evidence of the whole folly of chasing after reformist innovations:
"We spend an awful lot of time in this country debating the relative merits of 'traditional' and 'alternative' approaches to education. We'd do far better to spend our time looking for what works, whether it's new or old, sexy or boring, alternative or traditional.
The National Research Council's new report on teacher preparation bears out this point. The report's authors found that 'there is more variation within the "traditional" and "alternative" categories than there is between these categories.' What's more, they found 'no evidence that any one pathway into teaching is the best way to attract and prepare desirable candidates and guide them into the teaching force.'
And that's our biggest problem. We lack evidence to inform our ever more strident debates between new and old."
(emphasis not added)
In the meantime, the number of scandals involving those "innovative" charter schools has grown so large that there is now a new blog devoted entirely to keeping us up to date on the whole disgraceful matter. (BIG hat tip to Jim Horn.
My reason for these scattershots across the arc of the education debate is to hammer home the point that the policy ideas of the Obama Administration and other school reform enthusiasts are not based on any evidence whatsoever that any of the new "innovations" they are pushing for - charter schools, basing teacher evaluations on student test scores, alternative certification - will work.
Earlier this week, the edublogosphere was swarming with links to this memorandum from the US Department of Education warning of the "vulnerabilities in the oversight of charter schools." (h/t The Frustrated Teacher)
Since 2005, there have been 40 investigations of charter schools using public funds fraudulently. What these investigations have found is that charter school officials have used taxpayer money to pay for things like "an extravagant lifestyle" (Minnesota), "spa treatments and personal vehicles" (California), "purchases at stores such as Louis Vuitton" (Illinois), and "funeral expenses" (Wisconsin - that's what passes for fun there).
There have been 18 indictments, 15 convictions, and 24 cases are still being pursued. But because this memorandum was sent as a warning for further vigilance in regard to this type of crime, it's easy to assume that the problem is apt to get much worse. And in fact there's ample proof that it is.
Taking an unusual detour into education policy this morning, there's a story that caught my eye yesterday when the DC Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee and the Washington Teachers Union reached tentative agreement on a contract. It pertains to private foundation funding.
D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee and the Washington Teachers' Union have reached tentative agreement on a new contract, ending more than two years of closely watched and often-rancorous negotiations, union and District officials said Tuesday.
The proposed pact, which must be ratified by union members and approved by the D.C. Council, provides teacher salary increases of more than 20 percent over five years, with much of it paid for through an unusual arrangement with a group of private foundations that have pledged to donate $64.5 million.
[...]
The private funding sources for the contract are expected to draw scrutiny from teachers and council members. The proposed pay package would be financed with grants from four private donors: the Eli and Edythe Broad, Laura and John Arnold, Robertson and Walton Family foundations.
Letters from each of the private funders were submitted Tuesday to D.C. Chief Financial Officer Natwar M. Gandhi, who must certify them as fiscally sound for the deal to move forward.
Private money has played a significant role in public education for years. But union officials said Tuesday that there was no precedent for private foundations underwriting salaries of schoolteachers. What makes the arrangement more unusual is that some of the proposed private funders are not known for their support of unionized teachers.
The Walton Family Foundation, created in 1987 by Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton, has invested heavily in non-unionized charter schools, and critics say its contributions reflect an agenda that promotes privatization of public education. Weingarten said the District's fiscal situation and the national economic downturn left few options.
"Given the crisis, this is a very novel and clever way of trying to solve an immediate problem," Weingarten said.
While private money has played a role in public education, the use of private foundation funding to pay teachers, from what I understand, has never been done before. It raises twin questions for me, the first of which is the role in which foundations like the Walton Family Foundation with a policy agenda play in influencing district policy, especially when it comes to items like charter schools and merit pay. An increasing role for foundations with an agenda effectively gives them a seat at the table. The second concern is that it may be hard to force them to give that seat up. One colleague compared it to giving the school district a credit card- a private foundation comes forward with essentially free money (e.g. the city does not have to raise taxes or cut programs to pay the teachers the raises negotiated under the contract). It may be very hard to walk away from that money in the future, even in times of economic prosperity. As Saunders notes:
But Nathan Saunders, the Washington Teachers' Union general vice president and a candidate for president in next month's union elections, said educators need to look carefully at the larger implications of allowing private foundations such a major role.
"This is a significant moment not just for teachers, but for public employees," Saunders said. "This is heavy medicine."
While the alternative- lacking funding for the salary increases and merit bonuses- is also problematic, these are important questions to ask. It may be a very dangerous road to go down in which district officials and unions have to give up a stake in setting education policy to an additional player, a stake which may be hard to take back.
Unlike the battle over health care, the broader progressive community has yet to wake up to the scope of battle that's currently going on in education. This story was published in the March 18 edition of Random Lengths News in tandem with reporting on local demonstrations to save public education in California on March 4.
Fighting Back Against The War On Public Education
By Paul Rosenberg, Senior Editor
The March 4th demonstrations to defend public education-centered here in California, but extending across at least 30 states and several other countries-were long overdue in the eyes of some leading education activists and critics. "These protest movements are really healthy. I hope that political leadership listens to them," said Gary Orfield, head of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA . The Civil Rights Project has been tracking the re-segregation of American schools since the late 1980s.
Due to deep funding cuts, sharply increased fees, reduced class offerings and increased class sized, Orfield sees their prospects dwindling, absent a struggle.
"We project that here in California, which educates one-ninth of the students in the country that we're going to be on a path to lower average education levels for the first time in the history of the state within a very few years," Orfield told Random Lengths. "That's going to devastate our future development."
Education scholar David Berliner-co-author of The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, And The Attack On America's Public Schools, published in 1995-is a leading voice among critics who have been battling the tide of hysterical attacks on public education for several decades now. "I'm wondering where they were all along," Berliner said about the widespread involvement of teachers. Referring to the Williams v. California lawsuit over systemic second-class educational conditions for poor and minority communities, settled in 2004, Berliner said, "Every teacher in the state should have walked out."
Better late than never, perhaps. And better that students themselves have taken center stage. But when it comes to the war on public education, it's much, much later than most people realize. In the future, it could mean "a timetable for the demolition of public education in the United States" in 2014, according to a new book by Diane Ravitch, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. Ravitch had been a long-time advocate of conservative education "reforms," including GW Bush's "No Child Left Behind" [NCLB] Act. But in 2006, she came to realize that none of the promised gains were materializing, and that NCLB's provisions meant that the result of this failure could and would be used to dismantle public education as a whole, unless changes were made to existing law.
On Thursday, March 4th, California's college students staged statewide protests that were the epicenter of an international day of action against the mindless bipartisan war on public education. The actions were called for coming out of student protests last November, and were joined in by teachers and staffs from K-12 as well as all three branches of California's higher education system, along with student-lead actions in 30 other states and some countries overseas. At Democracy Now, Juan Gonzales reported:
Students and teachers held hundreds of demonstrations on Thursday as part of the National Day of Action to Defend Public Education. Hundreds of thousands took part in what was the largest day of coordinated student protest in years.
Much of the day's focus was on the university and state college campuses of California, where students face a 32 percent tuition hike. Thousands of California students staged a one-day strike and took part in rallies from San Diego to Sacramento to Humboldt County.
At UC Santa Cruz, students blocked both entrances to the school before 7:00 a.m., essentially shutting down the campus for the day.
At UCLA, 300 students staged a five-hour sit-in outside the chancellor's office.
The blog StudentActivism.net, written by Angus Johnston, a historian of student activism and student government, offers a great wrap-up of the day (not that things are necessarily wrapping up). California -- not to mention the rest of the country -- saw a ton of activity today. A huge day for students.
But the real challenge is what happens tomorrow. As Johnson writes --
Today was more about activists talking to each other, working with each other, than it was about talking to or working with -- or working to overthrow -- university power structures.
At Calitics, Courage Campaign Public Policy Director Robert Cruickshank (aka "Eugene" or "Robert in Monterey")--also a speaker at one of the protests--reported:
From Anger To Action
Yesterday's outpouring of protest against the deliberate decision to destroy California's public education system was characterized by one dominant emotion: anger. And that was exactly as it should be. If you're not angry at the collapse of our schools, colleges, and universities, and the stealing of an entire generation's future, then you're really not paying any attention.
I spent the day at Cal State Monterey Bay, hearing student after student take the microphone to express their anger at what has happened to their dreams. This was not a violent anger, but instead the kind of deeply rooted anger that anyone would quite rightly feel when they have been betrayed. The state of California has betrayed these students, having asked them to work hard to succeed in school and promising an affordable quality education, only to yank that promise away from them in order to deliver tax cuts to huge corporations.
On other campuses, anger was clearly the dominant emotion, such as the students at UC Santa Cruz who shut down the campus, or the students at UC Davis who tried to block Interstate 80 in order to show the rest of the state what it feels like to have your life disrupted by forces beyond your control.
Anger can be a very healthy emotion. It focuses the mind, and can create a sense of determination. That too was on display at the events I attended - a belief that this anger was being expressed in order to build a mass movement of students, faculty, staff, parents, and other Californians who know that this state has no chance whatsoever at prospering in the 21st century if these cuts are not reversed. It is further evidence of how effective and valuable the March 4 actions were.
Students now understand what is happening to them and why. Their education is being gutted and their already meager financial resources are being stolen from them by a state government that believes corporations matter more than students. That propping up the failed status quo matters more than building California's future. Most of the speakers I heard understood this very clearly, almost instinctively. It has been beaten into them these last two years.
On Thursday, September 24th, an estimated five thousand people attended a rally on Sproul Plaza at the University of California, Berkeley. The rally and subsequent march through campus and downtown Berkeley-scheduled to coincide with and planned in support of the University of California (UC) Faculty Walkout that took place on all ten UC campuses-brought together undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, university workers and alumni to protest the budget cuts at Berkeley and stand up for public education across California.
Along with all the other doomsday scenarios describing a gradual collapse of momentum to establish a national health service, it's also possible that Democrats will produce a minimal system of national healthcare that gradually gets worse.
Republicans won't just lie down and die if some form of national healthcare becomes a reality...
What they will inevitably do instead is cut away at the core of the program by highlighting anything that can be sold to the public as a "problem," or by selecting a few specific sub-programs to pillory as extravagances that only benefit a few patients, and so on.
Republicans didn't destroy public education in California by declaring war on it. Republicans were always totally in favor of quality education for everybody!
But in these hard times do we really need music education? In these hard times do we really need a library in every school? And gradually schools were transformed into prisons, with 50 kids in a high school classroom, and who are you to say that 50 is too many?
Republicans will inevitably try to do exactly the same thing to any kind of national healthcare, large or small, and with the unlimited support of corporate media conglomerates, and the collapse of newspapers, and marginalization of the progressive blogosphere, which is already marginal enough...
The Republicans will probably win again.
This is a nation of tax-cutters right down to the bone, because every day and in every way the media conglomerates are selling a picture of taxes as essentially wasteful, and almost entirely useless, and without the disaster-Presidency of the obviously inept George W. Bush, and a war that turned into an obvious fiasco, it's hard to believe that Democrats could have won their majorities on both sides of Congress, and a whole big chunk of those majorities is Blue Dog tax-cutters anyway.
As long as the media are mainly controlled by right-wing corporations, (and what other kind of corporation is there?) we can only look forward to perpetually renewed and eventually successful attacks on every government program that benefits the average citizen.
De-consolidating the media may not be the sexiest theme in Washington, but without it, every other element of the progressive agenda will eventually be suppressed, including national healthcare and public education.
In addition to his segment on Obama's Vietnam this Friday, Bill Moyers also focused on funding for public education with Vartan Gregorian. The situation with public education is virtually identical with that of public infrastructure-30 years of underfunding and neglect, thanks largely to the movement conservative "tax revolt." In fact, the two are really one and the same, since an educated public is the human infrastructure on which our country is built. And conservatives don't give a damn about any of it.
BILL MOYERS: All across the country it's the same. State governments are staring down the barrel at $300 billion worth of deficits for the next two years. Twenty-six states already have either cut their budgets for higher education, raised tuition fees, or done both. When it comes to college affordability, this report from The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education gives a failing grade of "F" to 49 of the 50 states. Tuition at public four-year colleges is up an average of more than $6,500, at two-year schools, almost $2,500. Yet even with the increases, THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION reports that many college buildings are outdated, inefficient, even crumbling. So what's to be done? Some took hope when President Obama spoke up for higher education in his inaugural address.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age.
BILL MOYERS: If the colleges and universities do wind up big winners in Washington, no one will be happier than this man, or more responsible. Long a dynamo for the cause of public education, Vartan Gregorian bears testament to the value of a lifetime of learning.... Last October, Gregorian convened a group of educators to urge whoever would become our next president to invest in higher education. Their meeting later resulted in this two-page newspaper ad, an open letter to then President-elect Obama asking that whatever economic stimulus package comes out of Washington, five percent of it - around 40 to 45 billion dollars - go to higher public education.
Considering that the Treasury and the Fed combined have already given trillions to the financial sector, $40-50 billion to higher public education is less than a pittance. It's an insult, really. But it's what they're asking for.
STATE BLOGS
