Budgetary Birds of Prey
American public education bears the brunt of a continued negligence to solve the country's most pressing crises
This article is a follow-up to my previous post about the contemporary conversation around public education.
The term “budget hawk” has got to be a complete misnomer at this point. Hawks are supposed to be precise, methodical, and efficient. With the current status of the national deficit sitting at a paltry $36 trillion, we can conclude that these people are none of those things. At the very least, they’re wildly ineffective. This is because the same groups whining about spending are the same groups advocating for tax cuts, and, unsurprisingly, this has not been helpful. The idea that any of these people actually care about the budget, the national debt, or overspending is laughable when ultimately it’s just a self-serving ploy to oppose spending they don’t like. Something like “budget starling” might be more appropriate, or if we want to just get real about it: “annoying ass mf” feels the most apt.
Constantly chirping about the deficit, budget hawks zero in on cutting spending as the only solution. This includes cutting anything from education to the arts to social security to Sesame Street. Remember when that dumb shit was a story? Good times. Anyways, these people never have that same smoke for, say, the Department of Defense, whose ballooning budget outpaces the next several countries combined. Instead, other areas of government, and sometimes pieces of legislation, come under fire by these budgetary birds of prey because to them, there’s just no way we can afford to allocate money that way. Budget hawks come in many forms, and, while they aren’t the subject of this article, the general opposition to government spending provides context for the “why” behind why a lot of important and helpful policies never come to fruition.
Returning to the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee hearing held back in June, Senator Bill Cassidy (who will chair the committee in the next congress) and his witnesses provide testimony for the case against a national $60,000 teacher minimum wage. We covered all of the wokeism condemnation in the previous article, but there are two other important components of their testimony to cover. First, there’s Senator Cassidy’s gigantic chart, which presents the idea that while education spending has increased, NAEP (National Assessment of Education Progress) scores are decreasing. Compelling stuff.
Second is the testimony of Mr. Robert Pondiscio, Senior Fellow in Education Policy from the American Enterprise Institute. He puts forth the agreeable idea that too much is being asked of teachers these days. They are overworked to the point of leaving the profession altogether, and their expanding range of responsibility has made it next to impossible to adequately teach. This is all true. Teachers are absolutely stretched thin; they are fleeing the profession, and people are becoming progressively disenchanted with the idea of teaching. All interesting realities to present as a case against raising teacher pay, though.
As it pertains to teachers, their mass exodus has prompted the hiring of uncertified teachers in Texas. States like Oklahoma, Arizona, and Florida have dropped the requirement of needing a bachelor’s degree. Given that teachers are the most important factor regarding student achievement, these stopgap solutions only exacerbate the problem by placing unqualified and unenthusiastic educators in classrooms, resulting in increased turnover. It is undeniable that raising teacher pay works as a retention strategy. $60,000 is still too low, but it’s a start. Beyond just teacher pay, Sen. Cassidy and Mr. Pondiscio hone in on spending as a root issue for education failures and ignore the socioeconomic realities of people and communities that are also part of the equation. It’s not just about the money. It is systemic. But if the two of them want to put money under a microscope, then that’s where we’ll start.
That’s What The Money Is For!
It is important to note, again, that the Department of Education’s oversight is relatively small. Just about every aspect of public and private education is handled at the state and local level, including funding. The DOE’s primary functions are the distribution of funds (amongst states that then distribute it from there in accordance with federal designations), research and data collection, and ensuring equal access to education nationwide. Of course, states and cities and districts all spend their money differently. Even then, over the last 10 years, the majority of money they’ve spent comes from state, local, and private sources. Only 8% came from the federal government! Still, much like Mr. Pondiscio’s testimony, Sen. Cassidy’s chart is not incorrect on its face. On a per pupil basis, states are spending more and more, and outcomes are unfortunately still unsatisfactory. It’s disingenuous, however, to present those individual facts as 1:1. If that were the case, then surely a decrease in spending would result in an increase in test scores. Yet the 10 states with the lowest public funding per pupil all have mixed standing. Utah spends the least of all states yet ranks near the top in Pre-K-12, but Oklahoma, Nevada, and Arizona all round out the bottom 5 in spending as well as the bottom 5 in those same Pre-K-12 rankings. It just doesn’t make sense to blame the spending when in reality it’s about where it should be going. Raising teacher pay comes to mind.
The second testimony of the night came from Dr. William Kirwan, chancellor emeritus of the University System of Maryland, and Chair of the Commission on Innovation and Excellence in Education. In his testimony he talks about the commission’s 3-year study of other cities and nations around the world with high academic success (he cites Finland, Shanghai, Singapore, and Ontario). The commission concluded that there were 5 pillars to success for these education systems:
Invest in early childhood education and development
Prepare, compensate, and treat teachers like true professionals
Develop a fully aligned, periodically updated, and rigorous K-12 instructional system
Invest significantly in students needing the most support to be successful
Require a high degree of accountability at the school level
He goes on to talk about number 2 in depth, given the nature of the hearing, but every one of these was presented to the Maryland General Assembly and then incorporated into the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future legislation, which was enacted in 2021. He goes on to reference a DOE national survey that showed Maryland now leads the country in new students entering teacher preparation programs.
The degradation of student outcomes brings forward the necessity for massive change. What’s happening now isn’t working, and Dr. Kirwan presents a platform for comprehensive reform across the nation. A national minimum wage for teachers is only a part of this. States and cities have so much autonomy when it comes to the money they spend that even if some of them perform above national averages, it doesn’t help that scores are decreasing nationally. You cannot talk about national spending as a singular causality if how that spending is delineated varies all the way down to the individual district. It’s not just about spending oversight either. It’s about all of the things Dr. Kirwan listed as a package. You can’t just do one; you have to do them all. What Dr. Kirwan is presenting isn’t new, but the study he brings forth is contemporary and direct about the standards the US needs to match.
In his opening testimony, Sen. Cassidy specifically states, “…but the federal government dictating how states spend their money does not address the root cause of why teachers are struggling to teach in the classroom. More mandates and funding cannot be the only answer we come up with. We must examine broken policies that got us here and find solutions to improve.” To have this be a part of your opening statement and not see Dr. Kirwan and his commission’s findings as the answer you’re looking for is nonsensical. If the way things are isn’t working, then change is needed. That change must involve an increase in federal resources, both spending and oversight. As it stands, Sen. Cassidy doesn’t even want one of those things. It’s not just him, though. It is a direct initiative of Republicans as an oppositional party to deny the federal government the spending and oversight it requires to adequately address areas of need. Even worse, for these annoying ass mf’s, it goes beyond just education.
It Starts At Home
Bernie closes the hearing with an appeal to examine the priorities of the United States. Prioritizing education in this country means ending the charade of a nation without the means to solve its problems. Among other things, defense spending and tax cuts all cost this country an unfathomable amount of money. They get through Congress with virtually zero pushback. The testimonies of both Sen. Sanders and Sen. Cassidy, as well as their witnesses (excluding Ms. Neily, whose “schools have gone woke” rhetoric was the subject of the article preceding this one), all make the case that they care for teachers and students. They all agree that teachers are overworked and underpaid, and students are bearing the brunt of that. What appears to be missing from Sen. Cassidy and his witnesses, though, is an understanding of why those issues exist and how they have compounded over time.
Rising absenteeism is an issue brought up extensively in the hearing, and rightfully so. The data is staggering. Post-pandemic numbers show that chronic absenteeism nearly doubled from 2019 to the end of the 2021-22 recording period. With that came a massive increase in the number of schools facing high to extreme levels of absenteeism. These numbers have slightly decreased based on early 2022-23 data, but any sort of regression to pre-pandemic levels appears fraught. A lot of the root causes of absenteeism are all issues that intensified during the pandemic. Food and housing insecurity, social anxiety, lack of reliable childcare, as well as growing distrust in science and institutions, have all fractured the cohesion between schools and the communities in which they serve. Teachers list most of these as the top issues plaguing students outside of school. Schools can certainly help alleviate these things if given the resources, but they are not solutions. Those solutions exist by addressing needs at the socioeconomic level. It is within the power of Congress to do so, but they don’t. Teachers are then left to pick up the slack.
The outlook is equally grim when we look inside the classroom. In the same Pew Research study linked above, teachers find that a lack of interest, disruptive students, and cellphone use are the primary in-classroom challenges. Teachers are then stretched thin trying to subsidize the work of parents, social workers, and therapists. Every testimony from the hearing says as much. Poverty and a lack of reliable healthcare in this country have compounded the sociological hardships facing the most vulnerable people in our communities, and it snowballs into the classroom. The inability to access necessary medications or special treatment that would alleviate behavioral problems. The inability to see a doctor and get a child properly diagnosed at all. Unfettered corporate pandering has let Instagram and TikTok run away with addicting children (and adults, speaking for myself there) to their phones. The return on investment for getting a good education has become progressively slim while still getting more expensive. These don’t just apply to students either. These same inadequacies plague parents and caretakers, making it even more difficult to raise a family and set their children up for success. This is all extremely broad, but that’s exactly the problem. It’s not just a Republican thing either. Democrats are just as culpable for their negligence. Congress has spent decades ignoring everyday Americans in favor of their corporate benefactors and has let these issues go completely unresolved. It has created a cycle of teachers leaving the profession, resulting in worse student outcomes.
As Dr. Kirwan mentioned in his testimony, the best school systems in the world regard educators as consummate professionals and see them in the same light as architects or CPAs. In America, they have been infantilized, demonized, and relegated to babysitters who do math problems sometimes. There is little disagreement about what the failures of our education system actually are. Despite that, the obstacle for major change remains penny-pinching politicians who insist upon the country’s inability to pay for the things that matter most. Any solution to these deeply interconnected issues is going to involve spending the money to do it. Whether it’s reinstating the COVID-era child tax credit that cut childhood poverty by 30%, raising the national minimum wage, a federal jobs program to build affordable housing across the country en masse, or free breakfast and lunch for every student at every school, solving the education crisis in this country begins with fixing its most intrinsic problems. We are the richest country in the history of the world. It’s not about spending. Our priorities just lie elsewhere.
After roughly 90 minutes, the hearing comes to an end. Papers are shuffled, hands are shaken, and life continues as normal. The futility of a hearing like this is what’s most frustrating. Despite pleas from the witnesses that the country is failing its children, it falls on deaf ears in the name of “it costs too much”. Really though, it’s “we don’t care.” You will always hear politicians use this excuse. They say it about Medicare for All, they say it about free public college tuition, they say it about the Green New Deal, and they say it about free childcare. It’s tired and negligent in the most repercussive way. America is not a serious country because it’s not serious about making itself better. Oftentimes, we hear that differences in political approach are based on differences in opinion. That mindset needs to be strapped to a rocket and launched into the sun because it’s untrue, and it lets people like Sen. Cassidy get away with what’s really happening. Many people in our government are not there to make things better. They are there to enrich themselves and the donor class they serve. Crippling education and maintaining an uneducated populace is a part of that. The sooner we get real about it, the better off we’ll be.