Arrogance From Jonah Edelman
I just received an email from Jonah Edelman, National Executive Director of Stand for Children. He acknowledges that Oregon may have a $1 Billion deficit or revenue shortfall to fill (The Portland Tribune recently extimated $2 Billion). Edelman writes
Do you think we should accept the idea that school funding has to be cut? Do you think, because legislators have a lot of tough choices to make, we should be “understanding” and abandon the idea of improving teaching quality and achieving other reforms in our schools?
Look Edelman, we are all in this together and it’s time for everyone to feel some pain. Otherwise, you will have the equivalent of a knife fight over programs. The idea of one program thinking thinking it can’t cut somewhere is arrogant.
IMO, the key areas will be food, shelter and medical care. Let’s get the basics met then start looking at frills.
I’m not so sure; but it would appear that most, if not all sectors of our society will need to do some serious belt tightening to get past these economic conditions. I’ll leave it at that since each school district should be challenged at a local level; however, this might be the time to ask teachers and administrators to take pay cuts and listen for the hoopin’ and hollerin’ from the teacher’s unions. It would be foolish to expect schools to go full steam ahead or to be exempted from a recessionary economy.
We have school funding questions here in California. Our education budget is larger than some third-world countries’ entire budget.
The question isn’t “cut funding”, as it we’re taking away kindergartener’s milk and cookies. The solution is, keep the funding that goes to the classroom, and cut the funding that goes to administrators, unions, union PACs, and other non-essentials. If the teachers who don’t want to be in the union could keep that part of their pay that gets taken out, they’d effectively be getting a pay raise.
I don’t know about Oregon, but down here, the thought of “… abandon the idea of improving teaching quality and achieving other reforms in our schools? ” would just make people laugh. We haven’t been doing that since about 1960. In spite of the billions we vote for every few years.