September 18, 2012 7:07 AM

Greetings from Edumication Nation: Whoo needz skoolz? Wee haz Jesus!!

States have made deep cuts to their education budgets in the years since the Great Recession, and as their budgets remained crunched by lower levels of tax revenues, more than half are spending less on education this school year than they did last year, a new analysis from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found. Overall, 26 states will spend less per pupil in fiscal year 2013 than they spent in 2012, while 35 are still spending less than they did before the recession…. Alaska, Alabama, and Washington are leading the way in education cuts, reducing funding by at least $200 per student…. Seventeen states, according to CBPP, have cut their education budgets by at least 10 percent over the last five years.

With school starting nationwide, I find myself thinking a lot about education these days…or more specifically, or collective refusal to see education as an investment and not an expense that can be cut to balance a budget.

Money’s tight all over; the recession has hit everyone hard, and when the going gets tough, budgets gets squeezed. I get that; but part of the process of making tough decisions is determining priorities. What sorts of things are absolute necessities? What can we get by with less of? And what’s far enough down the list of priorities that we can do without if necessary? These are tough decisions, and as such should not be made lightly…and certainly not without examining the possible long-term effects.

In what has to be one of the epic leadership meltdowns of the 21st century, far too many states seem to have decided that education isn’t a priority on par with…say, providing tax breaks to the wealthy. To call the decision to reduce funding for education penny wise and pound foolish would be an understatement. It displays an astonishing lack of vision and foresight. Education isn’t an expense; it’s an investment in our future. Not that we shouldn’t be looking at increasing efficiencies even in education, but less in not more.

What to some may seem a sensible reaction to the New Austerity will without a doubt have consequences down the road. Our ability to compete in an increasingly global economy will undoubtedly be adversely impacted. That may be hard to understand if you’re not used to looking into the future, but if you believe in Newtonian physics (Every action has an equal and opposite reaction), it’s hard to miss the implications of de-emphasizing education. You might not notice the difference now, or next week, or next year, but five, 10, 15 years down the road you WILL notice when Americans no longer have the skills or the intellectual candlepower to compete with China, Korea, India, and numerous other countries which understand the long-term importance of teaching their children the skills they’ll need to compete in the global economy.

Education is an investment in our future. Idiocracy will be the result of seeing education as overhead. I shudder to think how far we’ve traveled down the path to idiocracy.

blog comments powered by Disqus

Technorati

Technorati search

» Blogs that link here

About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by Jack Cluth published on September 18, 2012 7:07 AM.

Fox News Channel: Where geography majors go to die was the previous entry in this blog.

Teach them to hate while they're young and you'll have a Conservative for life is the next entry in this blog.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.

Contact Me

Powered by Movable Type 5.13-en