Cutting Back on Higher Education
W. Barrett, CmpE department, SJSU
9/11/2003
On this second anniversary of the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York, it seems appropriate to dwell on an equally severe crisis facing us as citizens and visitors of California and the United States.
This is the crisis of public education, and the assault on its funding by some in the Republican party.
It should be obvious to every student in the CSU system that classes are being cut, fewer classes are being offered, and that – for the first time in its long history – the CSU is proposing to restrict the number of students to admission.
Some 60,000 students will be turned away from the UC and CSU systems due to yet another round of budget cuts. The next ones, expected next year regardless of who becomes governor, are estimated at 20%.
The culprit, of course, is money. It takes a lot of cash to support one student toward his/her pursuit of a bachelor’s or master’s degree. Most of the cash comes from state grants – the state puts up about $3 for every dollar of tuition. At least, it used to. With the big increases in tuition already in place, and more increases to come, the figure is more like $2 for every tuition dollar.
There are some who claim that much of those funds are wasted in some way. By eliminating the “something else”, so goes one argument, the CSU could take on those extra students and reduce the tuition.
That’s an illusion. The bulk of the income goes to faculty salaries and support staff salaries. Some of it is spent on maintenance, but the state has also been providing special grants for building renovation and replacement. State law in fact requires that money allocated for teaching purposes, under the full-time equivalent student formulas, be spent on teaching, not on something else. And the CSU is remarkably efficient in squeezing maximum educational services out of those precious state dollars, to benefit as many students as possible.
Yet the “something else” is also important, and funds for that have been steadily shrinking since the 1960s. The “something else” includes laboratory facilities and technicians, for example. Our department has been rather successful in coaxing local corporations into funding specialized labs, and they’ve been immensely successful by way of teaching aids for our engineering graduates. But the same companies have not been as generous in giving us funds for more mundane functions, such as technician salaries, supplies and maintenance for those expensive labs.
Regarding instructor salaries, a recent Spartan Daily opinion page (Sept. 10, 2003) discussed the pros and cons of providing a “cost of living” increase. Without getting into the “pros” and “cons”, let me make a few comparisons between the corporate life and the academic life, starting with the salary issue.
Salaries at Corporations
Even in this tight job market, most of the CmpE faculty could resign tomorrow and by next week hold an industrial position that pays at least double their current teaching salary. What’s more, most companies give generous raises to their best employees, provide generous health plans, and offer discounts on stock purchases, bonuses and other benefits. As the company prospers, by-and-large its employees are also rewarded. More business and higher productivity means higher salaries and benefits.
Businesses are free to pay high or low wages to its employees without regard to any fixed guidelines. They are only constrained by the market. If a company can hire someone for a job at $20,000/year, why should it pay more? And if someone demands $150,000/year for a vital position, and there’s no one else qualified, it will be approved.
This is a reflection of the market conditions associated with corporate jobs. If you work for XYZ corporation, and prove to be valuable through patents, development work, publications and the like, you must be rewarded for that, or another company will snatch you up.
In my six years at Hewlett-Packard, which I regarded as a very good company to work for, I knew few top engineers lasting more than a year or two. As they learned their craft and proved their mettle, they were also targeted by other companies ready to make them “offers they couldn’t refuse”. I personally knew a group manager who was recruited to Apple, headed up a major section on the Macintosh development, and retired ten years later with a multi-million dollar fortune. If salaries and benefits for the top people at a company don’t keep pace with the competition, the company will suffer for it. After all, the top people may “only” be pulling down $150,000/year, but they may be directly or indirectly responsible for millions of dollars in product sales.
Salaries at Public Universities
Public universities are a different story entirely. Salaries at the CSU are strictly controlled by the state and state guidelines. Also, since a university has no product to “sell”, there’s no way of measuring the dollar value of any of its employees, or even of deciding whether someone preferentially deserves a “raise”.
The university’s product is degrees conferred upon its students. If it could then somehow “sell” the student to some “buyer” at a profit, there’d be no problem with finances. Unfortunately, that constitutes slavery and the United States already fought a war over that. (Slavery lost, for those who slept through their AMS lectures).
Instead, state universities are heavily subsidized from state tax revenues, in addition to charging tuition of its students. Some additional money comes in from corporation grants and alumni fund-raising, but SJSU hasn’t done very well in that area. Research programs are relatively weak at SJSU (we aren’t a PhD-granting institution), but some departments benefit financially from those. What remains as a problem for every chair is somehow filling every classroom with a qualified teacher, paying for supplies and secretarial staff. Offering a bonus or stock options for a “course well-done”, is impossible. Given that the tenured professors must be paid (and would be the last to lay off), then the tenure-track profs, there’s a certain budget left over for the lecturers and graduate assistants. Times are now tough in CmpE and other departments, so some lecturers will be dropped, and few graduate students will be offered assistantships. The course load (student-to-teacher ratio) continues to climb – it’s now 125 students per teacher in the CmpE department.
There are significant incentives to seek research grant funding, since that implies a higher income. A research grant may pay considerably more than a teaching salary – there are no upper limits on that, other than one’s ability to attract the funding.
There are few incentives to improve one’s teaching skills, to upgrade a laboratory, to be more diligent about grading homework, to write new course material, write fresh exam problems, etc. These teaching efforts are written up each year (by the teacher), and can possibly result in a tiny raise (that “cost-of-living” allowance), tenure or promotion, but not much else.
Tenure-track professors have the incentive of a promotion or reaching tenure, and are partially measured by these teaching efforts. (As much or more emphasis is placed on research and publications). Full professors have little incentive in either direction (teaching vs. research/publication), other than an inner drive, consulting fees, and possible goading by the chair. Lecturers have plenty of incentive, if they want to keep their position, since their contract is renewed every year.
The long and short of it is that the public university -- and the CSU in particular – is bound by rigid salary guidelines and long-term promotion strategies that provide little incentive to improve teaching skills. The rigidity also makes recruiting and management of a department difficult at best. Salaries are determined by legislative committee in Sacramento, not by department chairs and college deans.
But in a sense, the faculty are engaged in the market system. An EE professor is qualified to work in management or development at many small and large companies, and he/she could very likely demand a larger salary. Given that situation, why do any SJSU faculty remain here? Why is there no “giant sucking sound” (to quote Ross Perot) out of the universities and into industry? That’s a complicated question. Here are several reasons for a good teacher to want to stay with the academic life:
· Freedom to pursue any area of research, and publish findings about it.
· Interesting and diverse colleagues.
· Flexible hours.
· Satisfaction of working with students.
· Some of us qualify as senior citizens. (Perhaps you’ve noticed) We’re too old for industry, and wouldn’t like the 9-5 regimentation anyway.
· SJSU permits essentially unlimited consulting work, provided it doesn’t impact our teaching responsibilities. Consulting can be lucrative. Consulting contacts often arise from our teaching and research.
· The personal growth opportunities are unlimited.
· There are many career teachers here, who could not imagine any other sort of profession.
Notice that many of these depend on individual attitudes. Some of us have the luxury of indulging in our private whims. Most of us have to provide clothing, food, and housing to our spouses and children. They aren’t particularly impressed by anything in this list.
The Student Perspective
From the perspective of a student, it seems that the rapidly rising tuition and fees, plus the already high living cost in San Jose, along with the larger class sizes and cutbacks in programs, add up to a totally unfair and losing proposition. It’s reasonable for a student to wonder whether it’s worth it.
Many of our engineering students are wondering if there’s going to be a job for them after graduation. The Mercury-News used to have a thick section listing high-tech jobs, most of which require a technical degree. That section almost vanished two years ago and hasn’t returned. I don’t know what the graduates of the classes of 2001 and 2002 are now doing (they don’t keep in touch), but I suspect there’s a lot of pain and disillusionment among them.
Why, indeed, continue to study and work toward the degree? Well, here are some reasons:
· Many actually enjoy learning, and can afford to do that without regard to future professional engagement. Ending up with a paying job in their field is a nice cherry on their sundae.
· Others look at their college years as preparation for professional life, and are willing to study subjects that they may hate, with that goal in mind.
· A few see their college work as a hurdle to jump, using whatever means possible, so that they can grab a high-paying job. I feel sorrow for these folks, working so hard at something distasteful, for what may not be a pot of gold at the end of their rainbow.
Whichever is the case, a college degree definitely pays off. Starting salaries for a computer engineering graduate is typically $40,000/year. If the engineer is productive and is favored by his/her company, more money and promotions are likely to follow. Engineering is still a path to upper management in most corporations, where the sky is the limit with respect to salaries.
Those without a college degree are going to find it increasingly difficult to obtain and hold any job, at any salary level. If they are fortunate enough to be hired into a corporation, they are likely to be in a dead-end service position. They are also most likely to be laid off. In any case, their opinions and ideas within the company will be considered of no value. After a few years of that, most people will feel that they should have earned that degree.
When my father married, in 1928, he had a ninth-grade education and some electronics training through the US Army. The stock market crashed the next year, 1929, and I was born in late 1930, just when the depression was sinking in. He held down numerous really dirty jobs, entailing very hard work, at low wages, until he was hired by a local auto repair shop, called Jack’s Tire Service. The owner, Jack, liked my father because he knew something about radio and electronics. He needed someone to install car radios, which were just becoming popular. My dad was among a very few in Grand Island, Nebraska, to know something about that.
That job led to several years with the local police force, where one of his responsibilities was servicing the new police FM radio system. Again, his electronics training paid off.
My father was largely self-taught. The Army electronics course was just the beginning for him. He bought more books and read magazine articles on radio and TV, and eventually became a skilled service technician in these fields. He also taught himself refrigerator repair, photography, wood-working, metal working, watch repair, gun smithy and more. Needless to say, I acquired many of these skills by just “hanging around”, watching him and getting tips.
I often wonder how he would have fared today. A few weeks of Army training in electronics wouldn’t get him into the door at Intel or Netscape. I feel he would have had a strong urge to take courses toward a degree. The days in which someone could just be a “regular fellow” with a high-school degree, and expect to enjoy a productive working life, are gone. Even many of those with a degree (but with the wrong degree, or poor marks) are finding no employment.
The Societal Perspective
Why should the general public be taxed to support higher education? That education in fact benefits only a percentage of the population. In California, less than half the graduating high school class goes on to earn a bachelor’s degree. What does the other half get out of this, other than some kind of life-long regret that they, too, didn’t move on to earn a BS or BA?
Some find it difficult to justify any form of public education, and resist paying the taxes to support it. We have a president (George W. Bush) who campaigned on a platform of “no child left behind”, who is married to a former primary school teacher, and who pushed through legislation that – he claimed – would improve our public educational system.
The ESEA Act of 2002
In fact, his educational reform bill (the ESEA, or Elementary and Secondary Education Act, also known as the No Child Left Behind act, signed into law on Jan. 8, 2002) essentially laid down more requirements that all public schools must meet in order to qualify for federal funding [3], among them:
· uniform testing of all children once each year,
· minimum standards, enforced by an exit test, for a high school degree,
· all teachers to be “highly qualified”.
These appear to be reasonable standards. The Act also called for an additional $15 billion in funding to support the new requirements. The administration recently cut that to $6 billion, and none of that has yet been allocated in the federal budget. So only the standards remain, and must be met for any school system to receive any federal aid. Before this bill, federal funding provided was about 8% of a typical school’s budget. The school systems can ill afford to lose that funding, so most are struggling to meet the new requirements.
Uniform testing is not a terribly bad idea, except that it’s difficult to write good tests that actually measure a child’s training and capabilities. Worse, the ESEA permits the states to set their own standards of proficiency. The “proficiency bar” may be high or low depending on how a state feels about its educational program. Once that proficiency level is set by the state, the schools are expected to meet that standard, and then improve their student’s proficiency in subsequent years. The false assumption here is that the state standards are much too low, so the ESEA is supposed to prod them into raising it.
It happens that the California standards are already quite high. (A more thorough discussion of this issue can be found in [3]). They’ve been independently judged to be among the highest in the nation. This doesn’t mean that all our children are meeting them; many fail. The state has also refused to lower the bar, for obvious reasons, but now, under the revised ESEA, we are expected to raise them even further or risk punitive measures against the school systems.
“Because we set very high standards, California will not be able to meet the growth benchmarks in testing”, predicts Pixie Hayward Schickele, a CTA Board member who chairs the CTA ESEA Workgroup. “Texas and Arkansas, however, will easily meet the expected benchmarks on their tests because the standards adopted in those states are not as rigorous as California’s”. [3]
The high school exit test, given for the first time in May, 2003, resulted in a fairly high percentage of students failing the test. They haven’t been awarded their degree, for good reason, but what about their future? Will the military accept them? Or will they populate the streets selling drugs? There’s no provision in the act for any form of vocational training for these forced drop-outs.
The “highly qualified teacher” requirement has many school system principals reeling, and wondering if it’s time to retire. California has a huge shortage of credentialed teachers in its classrooms. (Not empty classrooms, just many classrooms with an “uncredentialed” teacher).
Because of the low teaching salaries, it’s almost impossible to find certified math and science teachers in any school system. (Certified means the teacher has taken enough education courses to earn a teaching degree). As to qualified, forget it. Very few grads of any teacher’s college have also passed any courses in real math or science.
The best math and science teaching in most junior high and senior schools is done by professionals interested in teaching as an after-career move. Few of these techers have taken any education courses, and are waived in by the school system on the basis of critical need. Because of the downturn in silicon valley, there are plenty of these in the Bay Area and Los Angeles area, and their resumes are filling up baskets in all the school systems.
Can they be hired under the new federal guidelines? That isn’t clear. As with the testing standards, the states are expected to submit their definition of “highly qualified teacher” to the federal Department of Education, and are also responsible for making sure that the school are in compliance. California has done so, and its definition included those working on emergency permits as well as teacher interns. As of February 2003, there has been no response from the education department, although some form of rejection is expected.
Should these part-time and uncredentialed teachers be forced out of our classrooms, our “education president” will have succeeded in gutting the science/math education in most public schools. The new ESEA will certainly create many more students with no high school degree.
The state funding situation is dire. California and most other states are facing unprecedented shortfalls in revenues. The lower revenues are primarily due to the implosion of the dot-com information industry, and the resulting stock market free fall in year 2000. These in turn produced major layoffs, unemployment, drop in salaries, and, of course, drop in spending. State revenues come from the state income tax and various sales taxes, mostly, and both of these were hit hard.
40% of the state revenues must go to education, by state proposition. Governor Davis and the legislators had to cut education spending, though they would prefer to keep it at about previous levels. The state must balance its budget, and that clearly calls for some combination of new taxes, higher taxes and reduced spending. Republican legislators have adamantly opposed higher taxes, and have enough votes to block any budget they don’t like. A 75% approval is now required to pass a budget that contains any tax increases, and the Republicans, while in a minority, have enough votes to effectively veto any tax increase.
The Right-wing Republican Agenda
Several years ago, Hillary Rodham Clinton referred to a “vast right-wing conspiracy” that was determined to unseat her husband as President. We know how that turned out, as an attempted impeachment trial that passed the House, but was defeated in the Senate by a few votes.
At the time, she was ridiculed for that remark. Nevertheless, as many recent books and articles have shown [1, 2], she was exactly correct. There was – and almost surely still is – a right-wing conspiracy of conservative politicians and commentators whose agenda is somewhat mixed, but still has considerable voter support. Of course, George Bush appealed to that consensus, through various means, including supporting prayer in schools, no gun controls, restrictions on abortion, reversing environmental constraints, and more.
Cutting taxes is his standard answer to all problems, including social problems. Lower income tax rates is supposed to make more money available for private citizens to overcome social problems.
What’s behind these attitudes and why are they so politically powerful?
We must first separate out a considerable wing of the GOP, which is rooted in deep-South fundamentalist religious faith. This is the group that despises homosexuality, opposes abortion, wants school prayers, opposes teaching evolution in the schools, and the like. Many are also left-over racists, whose opinions are no longer politically correct, but who will lash out in the ballot box against what they consider the destruction of the “white race”.
These people come from all walks of life. Most are lower-middle and middle class. They have political clout because they have connections to large churches, and most of the ministers have caved in to fundamentalism doctrine. I would conjecture that few of these religious conservatives have any rational appreciation of our constitution, bill of rights, separation of powers, and – most important of all – separation of church and state. These people are most likely to see something in public life that they don’t like, and are ready to pass a law to stop it. For them, “abortion is murder”, so we must have a law to prevent abortions. They are easily taken in by slogans – “they’ll have to pull my gun from my cold dead hands”.
The power of the religious wing cannot be ignored by either party. Although Bill Clinton was clearly on the side of religious tolerance, he was always careful to point out that he was raised as a Baptist and never left the fold.
There’s a small wing of fanatics centered on the issue of gun controls that I must count among the religious fundamentalists. They are as fanatical about their opposition to BATF, the FBI and any form of gun control as the religious fundamentalists want to see the ten commandments displayed in every federal courthouse. The seat of their influence is the National Rifle Association, and its director Wayne Lapierre never misses an opportunity to criticize the ACLU and “other liberals”.
A second large wing is the “traditionalist” Republicans. Most of these don’t bother following the news, unless it’s about another Clinton scandal. If they read newspapers at all, it would be the sports pages or the Wall Street Journal for the latest stock prices. The golf game or the next NFL game on TV is what makes their day. They have little or no grasp of politics, and less interest in it, but their Daddy and grand-daddy voted Republican, and so do they. Reaching them through any kind of public dialog, including Presidential speeches on national TV, is impossible. I personally know many people in this camp, and find it impossible to even bring up any political subject. One of them thought that Gray Davis had “stolen all the money”, and if he were just forced to “give it back”, the deficit would be covered. Patently ridiculous, but this person was in earnest.
A third wing consists of what I choose to call “intellectual conservatives”. (I happen to feel that this is a contradiction in terms). These folks have followed the erudite William F. Buckley for years, then have gravitated to Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Pat Buchanan, William Safire, David Brock and others. Several newspapers and magazines have served this group by supplying plenty of one-sided information about those horrible “liberals”, the Clinton scandals, and the like: the Spectator, Washington Times, and the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal have published plenty of their stuff. Lots of people are still buying into these tabloids and picking up Limbaugh on the radio. They were influential enough to tip the 1994 election in favor of Newt Gingrich and a wave of Republican Congressmen.
The last wing is the most insidious of all these, and the most hidden. This is a small group of ultra-wealthy conservatives who are actively using their considerable resources to reward conservative writers and politicians, and punish liberals. David Brock [1] identified Richard Mellon Scaife as one of the principal financial contributors to the conservative cause. Scaife is an heir to the Mellon Trust, and is reportedly worth several hundred million dollars. He is also a Clinton hater, and Brock documents large expenditures made by him to dredge up many malicious stories about the Clintons and members of the Clinton White House. These found their way into television news stories broadcast on ABC, NBC and CBS, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the New Republic, and even some appeared in the New York Times. Most of these stories were never checked by the journalists and news anchors. Most were broadcast nationally without bothering to call their victims for a rebuttal, in a dazzling display of journalistic arrogance.
Sidney Blumenthal [2] documents many slanders made against him while he was a press journalist in the Clinton White House. Most were released to nationwide television audiences with no supporting evidence whatever, and without calling him first for a reaction.
This bizarre scandal-mongering factory churned on throughout the Clinton Presidency. The goal, of course, was to bring down the President through an impeachment. It culminated in the Starr investigation, whose history should be well known to anyone over 21.
Why should anyone want to fund such an all-out school for scandal, sending rumors of pay-offs, sexual trysts, cover-ups and the like through the national media? Blumenthal offers several reasons, but was unable to fathom the depth or intensity of the hatred produced by so many conservative writers.
On the one hand, I cannot forgive those so-called journalists for falling in line with the rubbish vendors. On the other hand, I understand the forces behind them – and those forces are a few very wealthy individuals who have discovered that wealth can not only buy pleasure, but political power and influence.
The Arrogance of Wealth
What does it mean to be worth a hundred million dollars in the US, today? Of course, anything you want can be yours, including those illegal enough to send you to prison. You can live anywhere in the world, including places where your taxes can be lowered appreciably. You can afford your own protection service, your own island with 24/7 guards, your own private physicians, hospital, roads, airport, and school system.
In short, the ultra-wealthy need no services that any government need provide. So why should they be required to pay taxes? What’s more, why pay taxes to provide social services that their own family and probably their descendents won’t need?
This is the illusion of the would-be aristocrat. With enough money, you can live like a French aristocrat before the revolution. This breeds arrogance. It can also breed contempt for government and those who benefit from or serve government.
It follows that whenever the federal government attempts to interfere with your activities, whether it be through the tax collector, environmental constraints, labor issues, firearms control, etc., that that interference will be taken personally. It’s an assault on their “freedom”, which was earned through their superior wealth.
The Aristocratic Dream
The aristocratic dream is essentially one of independence from public services, and, by extension, from having to pay any taxes for public services. This dream, or a limited version of it, has filtered down to many in the middle and upper-middle class, mostly through bad experiences with the public school system, or a dislike of the homeless, mentally ill, drug addicts, and “welfare queens”. The government seems powerless to “control” classrooms and these “undesirable” people, and in fact, subsidizes many of them. That’s the “liberal” attitude in a nutshell to most conservative radio talk-show hosts.
So the answer to declining public schools is private schools, charter schools, and school vouchers. The first two are becoming increasingly affordable to everyone. Vouchers essentially make private schools available free of charge, hence their political popularity. Property taxes going to public schools are seen as a form of confiscation to parents paying tuition to a private school. Tuition payment is also non-deductible, adding to the insult.
Drug addicts deserve what they get. Treatment maybe is OK, but not to excess. After all, no one in “our” group is addicted. The answer to street crime (addiction, homelessness, etc.) is to pull out of the city and live in a gated community. A good strong SUV, like a Hummer, can resist carjacking, possibly even a bombing or rifle fire, and serves to get the kids to and from school, me to the guarded office building, and everyone to the shopping mall.
Who needs public schools, or any public social programs?
A Right-wing Assault on Public Education
There are many, including myself, who have come to believe that the ESEA revisions, along with several other right-wing ideas that have been put into federal law, constitutes an assault on public education, with the goal of crippling it to the point of incapacity. They can then claim that “public education isn’t working, so we need to privatize it all”.
Here are few recent legislative sanctions against schools, from [3]:
· Making schools pay for “supplemental services” provided by faith-based or religious organizations. (This is part of Bush’s “faith-based” initiatives program)
· Closing public schools and reopening them as charter schools.
· Turning schools over to private companies
· Turning schools over to the state
· Replacing all staff “relevant to failure”
I can add this to the list:
· Requiring schools to provide an after-school program for latch-key children.
This was passed as a state proposition in California last year, as an initiative proposed and financed by Arnold Schwarzenegger. This is a fine idea, except that it is yet another unfounded mandate, and one that the private and charter schools can ignore. The public schools have had to cancel some regular classes in order to provide staffing for this mandated program.
We’ve already argued that the “highly qualified teacher” requirement can be a killer for most public schools. The testing “standards” provision will penalize California and other states that have high standards, but reward other states with low standards. And, of course, these only apply to the public schools, not charter or private schools.
Unfortunately, most of these programs are popular. Schwarzenegger’s proposition won a majority vote and is now the law. There’s a large background of charter school applications waiting to be filled, and each one approved means the death of another public school.
Vouchers
The public seems to want school vouchers. Many inner-city schools are in terrible condition – dirty, dangerous, with drugs and gangs -- and there’s seldom enough funding to improve them. So the parents of the children in them will clearly seek a way to get their child into a better school, and vouchers offer that opportunity.
However,
“If we open the door to vouchers and dismantle public education as we know it, the people who are going to lose are the poor”
“Vouchers will take the best the brightest students away from public schools that are already underfunded. It worries me very much to think that we could be heading in that direction.” [3, CTA board member Lynette Henley]
Why Public Schools and Public Services?
Why, indeed? The fact remains that the community and the future needs a basic level of public education and social support programs. Public education probably more than social support, since the children are the future.
Almost everyone, conservatives and liberals alike, agree that roads, fire departments, water, sewage and police services are important public services. (Libertarians will disagree with this). These are obvious in every community. You get to see what your taxes pay for.
There are many public services that we can’t easily see or tend to overlook, but are also vitally important to a healthy society. Here’s a few of them:
community hospitals, public health service, school nurses, county plat records, FCC regulation of electromagnetic spectrum, SEC regulation of stock transactions, labor laws, public libraries, public courts, public defenders, water resources, environmental protections, border patrol, banking regulations, fraud protection, credit card regulation, anti-trust regulation, military protection.
The list could easily grow into the hundreds. These are government services, some very small, that would result in devastating losses should they be defunded. Mostly, they operate so smoothly and quietly that we aren’t aware of their benefits. Those who claim that “government is the enemy” (former president Reagan) are speaking nonsense.
Consider public education. Why should everyone support public education through tax revenues, even those with no children, grown children, or children in private schools?
My favorite answer is that this is the price we pay for living in an educated society.
It doesn’t matter whether or not you have children. You will be encountering thousands of people during your lifetime. Then ask yourself whether you want even a small percentage of those to be desperate, out of work, angry, and possibly armed with a lethal weapon?
We owe it to our future, and to children and their grandchildren a civilization full of productive, educated people.
The would-be aristocrat believes that he/she is self-sufficient. That’s an illusion. If they have their way, their children will be living in a totally different sort of world, one in which there are few if any job opportunities, in which companies will fail (bringing down stock prices) due to a lack of educated workers, in which every trip in the SUV brings the danger of a carjacking or worse, in which the best home security system will be defeated by a car bomb, and in which no city street is safe to walk on, day or night.
Consider that most very productive and creative individuals (science, politics, religion, arts, writers) do not come from wealthy or even modestly wealthy families. There are exceptions, of course – the Rockefellers and the Kennedys come to mind. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton were born into well-to-do families. But by and large, the scions of wealth end up idle, contributing little or nothing to the social well being. They are, in short, much like everybody else on the street, except that their bank account is huge.
Brilliant people are not born to brilliant parents or
wealthy parents, per se. They
just come out of the milieau.
Here’s a short list of individuals who have done very well for themselves, despite being born to rather poor working parents, or abusive parents, in some cases:
Thomas Edison. Benjamin Franklin. John Adams. Henry Ford. John D. Rockefeller, Sr. Steve Wozniak. Steve Jobs. Bill Gates. Bill Clinton. Hillary Rodham Clinton. Jimmy Carter. Lyndon Johnson. Dwight Eisenhower. Kofi Annan. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Woodrow Wilson. Abraham Lincoln. James Madison.
This list could easily be extended to include thousands of individuals whose names have become household words.
My point is that if we, as a society, fail to provide basic educational and social services to all our people, regardless of their wealth, we will also see many fewer leaders arise in the future. We will instead see many more drug addicts, more gang violence, more anger and destruction.
We will also see many more acts of domestic terrorism. Timothy McVeigh was recently executed for bombing the Oklahoma City federal center. He found it quite easy and affordable to rent a van, fill it with kerosene and fertilizer, then use it as a car bomb. Timothy was loosely affiliated with a right-wing anti-gun control, anti-government group.
How many more angry young men like him will emerge from a dysfunctional society that finds itself unable to provide health care and a good educational experience for its citizens?
References
[1] David Brock, Blinded by the Right
[2] Sidney
Blumenthal, The Clinton Wars
[3] Sizing up the ESEA, the California Educator, February 2003, pp 7-19.
Also see a recent article by Ruth Rosen, in the San Francisco Chronicle:
http://www.sfchronicle.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/09/11/ED140260.DTL