Killing public schools

One comment I hear every time budgets for public education are discussed is, "You can't fix the educational system by throwing money at it."

This pisses me off on a variety of levels.  First, there's the sense that funding public schools is randomly "throwing money," as if it's inherently irresponsible to provide adequate resources for educating the next generation of citizens.  Implicit in this is that schools will just waste the money anyhow, that school boards spend their time looking for frivolous ways to spend their state and federal funding.

The worst part, however, is that this convenient and glib little quip ignores the truth of a different adage: "You get what you pay for."  If you want to obtain and retain quality teachers, ensure that they have manageable class sizes that optimize student success, and give them the resources they need to deliver top-quality education, you have to pay for it.

And it's not like if you refuse to spend tax money to fund schools, then somehow the money magically stays in your pocket.  Taxpayers will pay either for supporting schools, or for the consequences of a generation of poorly-educated, disaffected young adults whose career choices are constrained by a lack of opportunities in public schools, or who have chosen to go to college and racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans that will take decades to repay.

All of which is why the proposed federal education budget is such a travesty.

The Washington Post calls this "Trump's education budget," which is a little doubtful, given that Trump gives every impression of having never written anything longer 140 characters, much less an actual budget proposal.  The specifics, honestly, have Betsy DeVos written all over them.  The Secretary of Education is a staunch believer in federal funding for private and religious schools -- which she refers to as "school choice" -- and for cutting damn near everything else to the bone.

Here are a few of the provisions of this proposal:

• cutting a total of $10.6 billion from the overall budget for education
• cutting funding for college work-study programs by half
• cutting over a hundred million dollars from programs supporting mental health services and programs providing enrichment, honors, and advanced coursework in middle and high schools
• ending a program to provide student loan forgiveness for college graduates who work in public service
• cutting $168 million from grants to states for career and tech programs
• cutting $72 million from programs for international education and foreign language training
• cutting $12 million from funding for the Special Olympics
• cutting $96 million from a program for adult literacy instruction

On the other hand, it:

• expands support for charter schools and private and religious schools by $400 million
• adds $1 billion to programs to push school districts to adopt "choice-friendly" policies

"It’s time for us to break out of the confines of the federal government’s arcane approach to education," DeVos said.  "Washington has been in the driver’s seat for over fifty years with very little to show for its efforts."

Betsy DeVos [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

DeVos, of course, is in no position to make that kind of judgment.  She has never worked in a public school, did not send her children to public school, and her main claim to fame, education-wise, is pushing a program in her home state of Wisconsin that funneled $2 billion to private and religious schools despite peer-reviewed studies showing that these programs do not work.  And the situation in Wisconsin is by no means unique -- other states have tried voucher systems, and by and large they have been a dismal flop.  Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times gives one example:

A study released last February by a team of researchers led by Jonathan Mills of Tulane University found that students in Louisiana’s expanded program lost ground in their first two years in the program.  Those performing at average levels in math and reading — that is, at about the 50th percentile — fell 24 percentile points in math and eight points in reading after their first year in the program.  In the second year, they improved slightly in math, though they still scored well below non-voucher students, and barely improved at all in reading.

So let's take those results, and make them national by mandate!  That'd be a great idea!

It doesn't take an expert to recognize the terrible effect that such a diversion of funds has on schools.  You'd think this would be enough for even the most diehard supporter of "school choice" to say, "Oh.  I guess I was wrong, then."

But no.  Data, facts, and evidence have no impact on a doctrinaire ideologue like DeVos, who honestly doesn't seem to give a damn if public schools fail.  In fact, if by her actions public schools do decline, in her mind it will just prove what she's claimed all along; that education in America is in a tailspin.

 Look, I've worked in education for thirty years.  It's not that I think we're perfect.  There's wastefulness, there is misspent money, and I have long decried the increasing focus on trivial content and preparation for standardized tests.  But the solution is not to cut funding to the bone.  Faced with revenue loss, public schools have only one real choice -- reducing staff.  Most of the rest of the line items in school budgets are earmarked or non-discretionary -- school boards have no choice in whether to include them.  The only big-ticket item that boards actually do have control over is salaries.  But since the salary per teacher is set contractually, there's only one option: lay people off.

Which means higher class sizes, cutting of electives, and loss of program.

Not that DeVos would ever admit this.  But look at the actual results of voucher programs and charter schools, nationwide -- not the spin that DeVos puts on it, but real numbers coming from studies such as the ones described by Hiltzik in The Los Angeles Times article linked above.

The conclusion is unequivocal.  And the budget being proposed will, if passed, be a death blow to the schools that can withstand it least -- poor, overcrowded, inner-city schools.

Remember that next time you see Betsy DeVos smile her smarmy smile and say that she's pro-child.

The budget from hell

I know many of us are reaching outrage saturation with the horrorshow that is the current presidential administration, but the recently-released budget is so awful that even the pessimists have been taken a little aback.

Entitled "America First: A Budget Blueprint to Make America Great Again," this document accomplishes nothing but punishing groups that pissed off Trump in one way or another, repaying corporate interests for their support, eliminating protections for minorities, the elderly, the poor, and the environment, and slashing medical and scientific research programs to the bone.  Put more simply -- in the words of Washington Post writer Eugene Robinson -- this budget makes America "dumber, dirtier, hungrier, and sicker."

Think I'm exaggerating?  Here is a (very much abridged) list of programs the budget would eliminate entirely:

• "Energy Star" home appliance energy efficiency program
• Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program
• Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Program
• National Endowment for the Arts
• National Endowment for the Humanities
• Corporation for Public Broadcasting
• Great Lakes Restoration Initiative
• Community Development Block Grant Fund
• NASA Office of Education
• Appalachian Regional Commission
• Institute of Museum and Library Services
• Economic Development Administration
• Global Climate Change Initiative
• McGovern-Dole Food for Education Program
• Minority Business Development Agency

If you doubt that this is anything more than a symbolic flip of the middle finger at Trump's enemies -- mostly what Robinson calls "fancy-dancy elites who define and consume high culture" -- consider that the budgets of three of his top-priority cuts, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, total a little less than $750 million annually.  To put that into perspective, that's a little less than four times the amount that Betsy DeVos contributed to the Republican Party in her successful attempt to purchase the position of Secretary of Education.  It's right around the same amount that Trump himself holds in personal and corporate loans, and is half what his son-in-law, Jared Kurshner, paid for 666 Fifth Avenue back in 2006.

But as the infomercials used to say, "Just wait... there's more!"  Trump's "Make America Great Again" agenda also apparently includes hacking away at medical and scientific research.  The National Institute of Health will have their budget cut by 19%, jeopardizing grants supporting university research into new medications, diagnostics, and treatments.  The Department of Energy would see an 18% cut in every program they oversee -- except the maintenance, development, and production of nuclear weapons.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Then there's the elimination of programs like Meals on Wheels and Head Start.  Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney was asked by CNN's Jim Acosta how he can justify cutting funding for programs that help children and the elderly.  Acosta said, "Just to follow up on that, you were talking about the steel worker in Ohio, coal worker in Pennsylvania, but they may have an elderly mother who depends on the Meals on Wheels program or who may have kids in Head Start.  Yesterday, or the day before, you described this as a hard-power budget.  Is it also a hard-hearted budget?"

Mulvaney responded, “No, I don’t think so.  I think it’s probably one of the most compassionate things we can do.”

Acosta, understandably, was aghast.  "To cut programs that help the elderly and kids?" he asked.

Mulvaney shot back, "You’re only focusing on half of the equation, right?  You’re focusing on the recipients of the money.  We’re trying to focus on both the recipients of the money and the folks who give us the money in the first place.  And I think it’s fairly compassionate to go to them and say, 'Look, we’re not gonna ask you for your hard-earned money, anymore, single mother of two in Detroit … unless we can guarantee to you that that money is actually being used in a proper function.'"

Yes, you read that right: the Director of the Office of Management and Budget just said that providing education to preschoolers and meals to infirm elderly persons is "not a proper function" of taxpayer dollars, and to cut such programs is "compassionate."

What is most appalling about all of this is that most of the programs on the chopping block are hardly big-ticket items.  And even if all of these cuts are maintained, it's not going to reduce spending, or the burden on the American taxpayer, because you still have to factor in Trump's call for a 9% increase in the funding for the military -- already by far the biggest recipient of federal funds -- a total amount of $54 billion.

Oh, and I haven't even told you about the coupling of a huge increase in military spending with a proposed cut to the State Department -- an amount totaling 28% of their budget.  The approach seems to be "fuck diplomacy, we need firepower."

Appalled yet?  Maybe you'll reach the tipping point if I tell you about Trump's three weekend getaways at his own Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, costing taxpayers $10 million, and the projected $183 million a year we're paying to put Melania Trump up in Trump Tower because she doesn't want to live in the White House.

So the whole thing isn't about money, waste, or smaller government; it's about ideology, revenge, greed, and saber-rattling.  As Washington Post writer Alyssa Rosenberg put it: "Maybe [Republicans] don’t care about the arts personally, or the tourism revenue that can flow from a museum that has federal support, or the opportunity for kids in their district to get a glimpse of something that allows them to see the world in a new way.  Maybe it’s just too much fun to tweak liberals or too painful to target corporate subsidies in a way that might make big donors cranky.  But if we’re going to have this idiotic conversation every time Congress takes a crack a passing a budget, I wish we could just admit that cutting federal support for the arts and humanities is a way to fight the culture war, not to tackle the federal debt."

So the whole thing is a disaster, unless you are (1) a military contractor, (2) the CEO of a fossil fuel company, or (3) independently wealthy.  For most of the rest of us, the "Blueprint for Making America Great Again" simply adds to a military budget that already is higher than the next eight countries put together, and kills programs that foster health, research, a clean environment, the arts, and protections for children, minorities, and the elderly.

All of this puts me in mind of the quote from President Dwight D. Eisenhower, which is as pertinent now as when he said it, sixty years ago: "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.  This world in arms is not spending money alone.  It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.  This is not a way of life at all in any true sense.  Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron."

Eppur si muove

In 1633, Galileo Galilei was put on trial by the Inquisition in Rome for his claim that the Earth went around the Sun, not the other way around.

He had a nice body of evidence in his favor.  He had observed the phases of the planet Venus, had advanced a theory of oceanic tides that supported the movement of the Earth rather than the Sun, and had actually seen the four largest moons of Jupiter (now called the "Galilean moons" in his honor) circling their host planet.  He was able to show that all of the motions of the planets, as well as the apparent motions of the stars, were far more easily and simply explained by a heliocentric model than a geocentric one.

None of that mattered.  The powers-that-be had spoken, and religious dogma and orthodoxy won the day.  Galileo was found guilty of being "gravely suspect of heresy," and was put under house arrest for the remaining nine years of his life.  He was fortunate; only thirty years earlier, Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for such heretical views.

Part of what saved Galileo, of course, was that he was bullied into recanting.  He was made to swear his adherence to the scriptural account, and to "abjure, curse, and detest" his criticism of the claim that the Earth was the motionless center of the universe.  His caving to their demands probably saved his life.  But legend has it that as he left the courtroom to begin serving his sentence, he muttered, "Eppur si muove"  -- "and yet, it moves."

Cristiano Banti, Galileo Facing the Roman Inquisition (1857) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

And that brings me to our modern-day version of the Inquisition, by which I mean the climate change deniers currently in charge of the House Committee on Space, Science, and Technology, chaired by Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, and containing such shining lights of scientific knowledge as Dana Rohrbacher (who called climate change "liberal claptrap").  The general tenor of the committee can best be judged by a statement from Representative Bill Posey of Florida, who claimed we shouldn't be worried, because during the "Age of the Dinosaurs" the temperature was 30° warmer than it is now, and it didn't seem to bother them any.  But cut the guy some slack; even if he apparently doesn't know that the dinosaurs were around for 200 million years, and that there's good geological evidence of temperature swings during that time that included at least one Ice Age, he's correct that there was a temperature high -- called the Cretaceous Thermal Maximum -- that occurred when there were dinosaurs.  Okay, the average temperature during the Cretaceous Thermal Maximum was only 5° higher than it is today, so he was off by a factor of six, but that's good enough for the Science Committee, right?

Of course right.

So my point is, we've allowed science research to be put into the hands of a committee largely made up of clowns who couldn't pass a 9th grade Earth Science class.  So what did we expect would happen?

What happened was precisely what the Inquisition did to the free-thinking gadflies of its time; they squashed dissent.  Just a couple of days ago came the announcement that the committee had slashed NASA's Earth Science Research budget by $323 million -- about 20% of its total budget.  The cuts weren't even announced until six days before the vote, giving the minority of members who actually get that scientific understanding comes from data and hard evidence little time for action.  The budget passed on a party-line vote.

Chairman Smith, when asked about the budget, responded only that "The Obama administration has consistently cut funding for... human space exploration programs, while increasing funding for the Earth Science Division by more than 63 percent."

But you see, Mr. Chairman, there's a good reason for that.  The scientific consensus is that we're approaching a tipping point with respect to the climate, despite what you and your cadre, and its counterpart in the Senate -- the Committee on the Environment, chaired by none other than Senator James "Snowball" Inhofe -- would have us believe.  Some people, including biologist and environmental scientist Tim Flannery, think we might already have passed that point.  (His book The Weather Makers is one of the best, most readable summaries of the mountain of evidence in favor of anthropogenic climate change; everyone should read it, but plan to be a little depressed afterwards.)

So we've put the foxes in charge of the henhouse, and we shouldn't be surprised that they are making chicken dinners.  NASA was given the message "toe the line, or else."  They basically said, "Up yours, Lamar," and continued to push for action on climate change, giving unequivocal support to the scientists who conduct the research and actually know what's going on.  The result?  NASA's budget for climate research gets cut to the bone -- and the House passed a bill that prohibits scientists from giving advice on their own research to the Environmental Protection Agency, while allowing corporate interests unfettered access to the EPA's advisory board.

But sooner or later, the Congress will find out what the Inquisition found out: you can't legislate away reality.  If they wanted to, they could pass a bill stating that the Moon was made of Wensleydale cheese, and it wouldn't make a damn bit of difference to its actual composition.  So while our leaders put their hands over their eyes and say "la-la-la-la-la, not listening," outside the world continues to warm, the climate continues to oscillate wildly, storms continue to strengthen, and the seas continue to rise.

Chairman Smith and his herd of science-deniers can vote away our ability to study climate change, but they can't make the warming itself go away.  All they can do is assure that we have less information, and will be less able to cope with the effects of climate change when they happen.

Eppur si muove.