The tax bills passed by Republicans in the House and Senate have some differences, but they jointly express disdain for students, public schools, higher education, and the importance of learning and opportunity.
Jeff Bryant explores the education details of the two bills, which will be reconciled in a conference committee.
The Senate plan “would double to $500 the $250 deduction teachers get for purchasing school supplies with their own money, rather than eliminate the deduction as the House version does. And while the House would eliminate deductions for student loan interest, college tuition and expenses, and tax breaks used by university employees and graduate students, the Senate proposal would preserve them.
“But many other features of the Senate plan would deeply harm students and schools.
“Both the Senate and House bills propose an excise tax on private college endowments with assets of more than $100,000 per student. Endowment funds are used to help pay for academic programs, campus facilities, and student services, private college leaders and advocates say.”
Endowment funds are also used to pay for scholarships. Taxing these funds will reduce the funding available for students who can’t pay tuition in expensive private colleges.
“The biggest threats to local schools in both plans are their proposals to end federal deductions for state and local taxes (SALT) that households take when they itemize. The House plan limits the pain with a $10,000 ceiling, but the Senate plan does away with the deduction altogether.
“Any reduction to the SALT federal subsidy will imperil the largest sources of school funding to education by eliminating the federal tax benefit to schools, discouraging new state and local tax initiatives to support schools, and pressuring state and local officials to cut local taxes to appease tax payers who can no longer deduct those taxes from their federal returns.
“Another feature of the House bill that the Senate also proposes would increase how much schools pay for long-term debt by eliminating a tax exemption school districts get when they refinance their debts at lower interest rates using certain types of bonds.
“According to Education Week, in the most recent year reported, districts carried $409 billion in long-term debt – a rate of $8,465 per student – and paid $17 billion in interest on those loans. Taking away any ability to write off some of that interest as a tax exemption would decrease money districts have to pay for teachers and student learning opportunities.
Bryant writes that education funding for K-12 remains below 2008 levels in 29 states.
“The cuts to K-12 spending have “serious consequences,” CBPP authors contend, including crippling efforts to hire and retain the best teachers, reduce class sizes, expand learning time, and provide high-quality early childhood education.
“Of the 10 states that have cut state and local education spending the most – Florida, Arizona, North Carolina, Nevada, Georgia, Idaho, Alabama, Oklahoma, Michigan, and Utah (in descending order from 25 percent to 8.6 percent) – all have had a Republican “trifecta” in charge, including a Republican governor and Republican majorities in both chambers of the state legislature.”
He writes that:
“The Republican war on learning will have long term negative consequences to the nation.
“While the House tax plan’s cut to SALT deductions would “put nearly 250,000 education jobs at risk,” according to analysts at the National Education Association, the Senate plan to end the deduction would plunge the dagger deeper, potentially leading to a loss of $370 billion in state and local tax revenue over 10 years, the NEA calculates, and endangering 370,000 education jobs.
“Changes to higher-education tax benefits in the House tax plan “would cost students and families more than $71 billion over the next decade,” The Washington Post reports.
“Our country’s future depends heavily on the quality of its schools,” the authors of the CBPP study argue. The decade-long effort to cut K-12 school funding they chart “risk(s) undermining schools’ capacity to develop the intelligence and creativity of the next generation of workers and entrepreneurs.”
“Perhaps, the whole strategy behind GOP tax plans and budget cuts boils down to a short-term need to cut education in order to offset the large cuts Republicans are providing to wealthy families and corporations.
“But next year’s mid-term elections – in which a third of the Senate, 36 governors, and three quarters of states’ legislators are up for re-election – will give the rest of us a chance to speak up.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
As I have described it, the Wars on Democracy, Education, and Science are three fronts in a single campaign —
☞ The Place Where Three Wars Meet
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I want to see a congressman read yesterday’s December SAT science passage, attempt to get any of the associated questions right, and then assess public education funding needs. Something is very broken with a system that expects kids to rise to the ludicrous expectation that most kids understand this passage at age 16 but also wants to cut funding from the system that is being unfairly tasked to bring all students to this level of skill (note – my son is taking AP Chem, and had a prep seminar for the SAT and he was very frustrated by this – I can’t imagine what it must feel like for a kid who just doesn’t have the support system to have a shot at something this pretentiously difficult):
A single particle, such as an atom or a neutron, when fired into a piece of copper, causes a fountainlike cascade of disturbance, knocking countless copper atoms out of their positions in the metal’s crystalline structure. A few trillionths of a second later, most of the atoms settle back into the crystal’s lineup, but a handful are permanently displaced, misaligned and unable to fit back in anywhere. If that material is in an environment with radiation, such as part of a nuclear reactor, over time those wayward atoms migrate and build up on the part’s surface, leaving behind voids that can make the material brittle. “After irradiation the size can increase up to 10 percent because of the atoms moving to the surface,” says Blas Uberuaga, a materials scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. “And that’s bad because if you make parts that all fit together, and then they swell, nothing fits together like it’s designed to.”
With the development of new fusion and fission reactors, researchers are looking for more radiation- resistant construction materials. It’s known that materials with a nanocrystalline structure often resist radiation damage better than regular, “bulk” versions of the same compounds. In the former, the material is made up of tiny grains, each one of which is a single crystal. When the grains are agglomerated, their crystal lattices don’t line up, so there are boundaries between the grains. Such grain boundaries are undesirable in some applications, such as in electronics, where they impede electron flow, but they are known to make substances stronger as well as more resistant to radiation damage. However, until recently the complete mechanism behind this radiation resiliency was not well understood on the atomic scale.
As Uberuaga, Xian-Ming Bai and their colleagues report in the March 26 issue of the journal Science, the group performed computer simulations of nanocrystallinecopper undergoing radiation damage to figure out what happens inside the metal. The loose atoms, a type of defect known as interstitials, are attracted to the grain boundaries because there’s a little more room there than in the rest of the crystal. “Conventionally it has been assumed that once a defect gets to a boundary it just disappears, it gets very quickly to the surface or something like that,” says Uberuaga. However, their simulations found something new, as Bai explains: “We found that some of the absorbed interstitials at the grain boundary can come out to annihilate vacancies. So this is a new mechanism behind the self-healing phenomenon.”
Rather than just acting as a transport route to the surface, the grain boundaries seem to be a temporary sink for the loose atoms. The vacancies diffuse through the material much more slowly than the interstitials. But in a nanocrystal material, the chances are good that a grain boundary is relatively nearby, which can hold the atom until it finds a vacancy. “If the interstitials just got swept away somewhere else, that healing would not be able to occur. So that local trapping is crucial,” says Uberuaga.
In addition, the large number of grain boundaries in nanocrystalline materials gives the vacancies a shorter finish line for their catch-up race. “The vacancies don’t have to diffuse all the way to the boundary. There’s this extra zone in our simulation of about a nanometer or so where the interstitials can come out and directly zap the vacancies,” says Uberuaga.
Bai and Uberuaga suspect that the self-healing mechanism they’ve found will work with certain other metals and ceramics, and could reopen the consideration of whole classes of structural materials thought not to be sufficiently radiation resistant for use in reactors. Radiation does tend to make the crystal grain size grow over time in some metals such as copper, but using an alloy of two materials that don’t mix, and therefore can’t create larger crystals, could solve that problem. A bigger roadblock may be that nanocrystalline materials are not yet mass-produced. “There are a number of challenges like that before any kind of reactor material is really designed from the nanoscale,” says Uberuaga. “But these results give some insight into what kind of interfaces you might need to get some benefit in nuclear environments, both for fission and fusion reactors.”
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Gosh, I love this blog, where brilliant people–LIKE YOU– who know something share their knowledge. Thank you. that was fascinating, and i didn’t know it. I love when I learn something that I did not know!
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Simple answer we are not ready for Nuclear power until all 16 year old’s understand the above passage . Pretty much Germany gets it.
(LOL)
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Maybe this is why congress is hell bent on destroying schools. They know it’s an impossibility to have kids rise to the college board’s definition of college and career ready so why bother. And running nuclear physics labs for 10th graders is best left to fund at the local level.
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For SAT, a student doesn’t have to actually understand the passage, just pick multiple-choice answers. Curious if liberal arts-types could answer the questions because one can re-read SAT passages.
Was the test passage made public so quickly?
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Don’t you have to understand the passage to pick the right multiple choice answer? And, college board usually gives 2 answers that could be correct but one is more correct.
The kids on the Reddit SAT board posted the reading passage.
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No Effect on Comprehension Seen From ‘Reading First’
By Kathleen Kennedy Manzo https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2008/11/18/14read.h28.html
The $6 billion funding for the federal Reading First program has helped more students “crack the code” to identify letters and words, but it has not had an impact on reading comprehension among 1st, 2nd, and 3rd graders in participating schools, according to one of the largest and most rigorous studies ever undertaken by the U.S. Department of Education.
While more time is spent on reading instruction and professional development in schools that received Reading First grants than in comparison schools, students in participating schools are no more likely to become proficient readers, even after several years with the extended instruction, the study found.
Among both the Reading First and comparison groups, reading achievement was low, with fewer than half of 1st graders, and fewer than 40 percent of 2nd and 3rd graders showing grade-level proficiency in their understanding of what they read. On a basic decoding test, however, 1st graders in Reading First schools scored significantly better than their peers in the comparison schools.
The final report of the Reading First Impact Study, released today by the Institute of Education Sciences, is part of the $40 million evaluation process for the program, which was rolled out in 2002 as part of the No Child Left Behind Act.
An interim report on the findings, released in May, drew scathing criticism from supporters of the program, who suggested the design of the study was flawed because it did not consider the likelihood that Reading First principles and practices had spread to schools outside the program. (“Reading First Doesn’t Help Pupils ‘Get it’,” May 7, 2008.)
Other studies have found that a significant proportion of schools serving struggling students have incorporated explicit instruction in the basic reading skills that have been found to be essential in learning to read—phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension—and are the foundations of the Reading First program.
But Mr. Whitehurst dismissed those claims yesterday, saying that although there may be some “bleed over” into non-Reading First schools, the classroom observations and survey data show that the schools are not so similar.
“The schools were not doing the same thing,” he said. “There were differences in professional development, there were differences in their use of reading coaches, … and there were significant differences in classroom practices.”
The program came under scrutiny for management problems at the Education Department during implementation, and later lost nearly 62 percent of its $1 billion annual allocation in the fiscal 2008 federal budget. Two congressional panels have recommended that funding be eliminated altogether in the fiscal 2009 budget, which has yet to be finalized in Congress.
Vol. 28, Issue 14
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Kids cannot read because they are ignorant o the info that they encounter for the first time! https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/25/opinion/sunday/how-to-get-your-mind-to-read.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fopinion&action=click&contentCollection=opinion®ion=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=6&pgtype=sectionfront&_r=0
The problem is not bad reading habits engendered by smartphones, but bad education habits engendered by a misunderstanding of how the mind reads.Many of these poor readers can sound out words from print, so in that sense, they can read. Yet they are functionally illiterate — they comprehend very little of what they can sound out. So what does comprehension require? Broad vocabulary, obviously. Equally important, but more subtle, is the role played by factual knowledge.
Current education practices show that reading comprehension is misunderstood. It’s treated like a general skill that can be applied with equal success to all texts. Rather, comprehension is intimately intertwined with knowledge. That suggests three significant changes in schooling.
First, it points to decreasing the time spent on literacy instruction in early grades. Third-graders spend 56 percent of their time on literacy activities but 6 percent each on science and social studies. This disproportionate emphasis on literacy backfires in later grades, when children’s lack of subject matter knowledge impedes comprehension. Another positive step would be to use high-information texts in early elementary grades. Historically, they have been light in content.
Second, understanding the importance of knowledge to reading ought to make us think differently about year-end standardized tests. If a child has studied New Zealand, she ought to be good at reading and thinking about passages on New Zealand. Why test her reading with a passage about spiders, or the Titanic? If topics are random, the test weights knowledge learned outside the classroom — knowledge that wealthy children have greater opportunity to pick up.
Third, the systematic building of knowledge must be a priority in curriculum design. The Common Core Standards for reading specify nearly nothing by way of content that children are supposed to know — the document valorizes reading skills.
and there is this http://www.readingrockets.org/article/catch-them-they-fall-identification-and-assessment-prevent-reading-failure-young-children
On the one hand, many children enter school with adequate general verbal ability and cognitive weaknesses limited to the phonological/ language domain. Their primary problem in learning to read involves learning to translate between printed and oral language. On the other hand, another significant group of poor readers, composed largely of children from families of lower socioeconomic or minority status, enter school significantly delayed in a much broader range of pre-reading skills (Whitehurst & Lonigan, in press). Since these children are delayed not only in phonological but also in general oral language skills, they are deficient in both of the critical kinds of knowledge and skill required for good reading comprehension. Even if these children can acquire adequate word reading skill, their ability to comprehend the meaning of what they read may be limited by their weak general verbal abilities.
Children with general oral language weaknesses require extra instruction in a broader range of knowledge and skills than those who come to school impaired only in phonological ability. What is well established at this point, though, is that both kinds of children will require special support in the growth of early word reading skills if they are to make adequate progress in learning to read.
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The tax plan is a litany of bad ideas designed to further cripple public education and limit opportunities for other people’s children. The Republican party has been taken over by libertarians and extremists. They no longer feel compelled to do anything to invest in the common good. They no longer listen to reason, facts or science. I cannot fathom why the Republican party seems to inspire such loyalty when they do nothing for many of the voters in their party.
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I repeatedly think of the argument put forward by President Johnson which goes something like, if you give people a reason to feel superior to someone else, they will let you pick their pockets.
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ciedie aech: you make a point that is critical to understanding many seemingly contradictory and confusing situations where people don’t just grievously hurt themselves but keep picking at their own self-inflicted painful wounds.
The LBJ quote I found online [repeated word-for-word on various sites and courtesy of Bill Moyers] goes as follows: “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
Slightly predating the above, Bob Dylan’s tribute to Medgar Evers, A PAWN IN THEIR GAME, contains the following verse:
[start]
A South politician preaches to the poor white man
“You got more than the blacks, don’t complain.
You’re better than them, you been born with white skin,” they explain.
And the Negro’s name
Is used it is plain
For the politician’s gain
As he rises to fame
And the poor white remains
On the caboose of the train
But it ain’t him to blame
He’s only a pawn in their game
[end]
So to use a bit of the tone and language of the self-proclaimed “new civil rights movement our time” aka the corporate education crowd: despite any “shrill” and “strident” protestations to the contrary, this 1960s description of a self-serving “divide-and-conquer” strategy applies with full force to the chief beneficiaries and enablers of $tudent $ucce$$.
Thank you so much for your comments.
😎
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and thank you for yours!
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NOW You have the real thrust of wha is happening to the schools.
As I have commented in your past day’s posts: “MAKE NO MISTAKE ABOUT THIS POST -TRUTH MOMENT in America — the alternative facts manufactured by the top man in the nation. our leader has opened the door to challenging TRUTH, and NO SOCIETY SURVIVES WHEN THE DECISIONS THEY MAKE ARE BASED ON FALSEHOODS, MISINFORMATION AND BLATANT LIES!
“The destruction of the distinction between truth and falsehood is the foundation of dictatorship
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Thanks Diane!
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What a mess! What a country! All the G.O.P.s hollow vows to uphold “family values”…blah, blah, blah. It IS a “war on learning”….and it’s a war on children.
Wilco’s “War on War” immediately came to mind when I read this piece. Of course, it’s the title of the song but there’s more…. Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy reportedly said of his lyrics, “I think somehow you need to get to a certain point in your life where the notion of failure is absurd.”
Rich, poor, Democrat, Republican, we’re all going to die. Meanwhile, what the hell kind of country are we leaving behind for our kids?
Wilco on Letterman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5j2ykHinIPg
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I truly think Dump and the GOP hate America. Dump and the GOP are: Making America GRATE, not great.
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/end-americas-war-america/
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I think the Republicans have gamed this out far more than we are giving them credit for .
The tax cuts will cost them tremendously on the National level . But as Bartlet says once democrats are in office they will use the deficits to ham-string them . Of Course the Democrats will never reverse the cuts .There is some stimulative effect to tax cuts short lived and minor . But democrats will be afraid of the recessionary affect of tax increase that are not matched by increased Government spending. This has been the pattern since 1980 . When the top marginal rate was 63 % . So if we are at 39% ,who raised taxes on who? The Gains rate was eliminated on all investment but your personal residence in the 86 reform, it was fully restored by Bush 1 and Clinton. So tax cuts are baked in. Unless you are radical enough to reverse them .
But what will happen in the states . Democrats and Republicans will be knocking on peoples doors for local office and school boards . Both will be promising to cut your taxes . Cut my taxes who am I going to believe? !!!!!!! . Republicans are not anti education they do love teaching creationism in Christian Madrassas .Humor aside the blue states will go the way of Wisconsin as hurting taxpayers whose standard of living is still sinking in spite of being trickled on, install Republican governors who take away Teachers bargaining rights and vouchers are issued for those less expensive religious schools …..
Shortly after the Republicans will recover on the National scene . Vomit time again .
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I would think that if (by wild good fortune) Reps were trounced at the polls in ’18 [& ’20], it would be seen as a mandate to reverse the reverse-RobinHoodism of the Rep tax reform– perhaps also as a mandate to curb the debt in a visible way.
Which would be a mandate for reining in richie-rich goodies like low long-term cap gains tax rates, loopholes enabling corps to pay far less than the [lowered] corp tax rate, elim of estate tax, max inc tax rates that fail to capture approp taxation at the ultra-high end. Perhaps also shoring up soc sec by raising the annual limit on FICA-taxed income, & a teeny but symbolic cut in def spending.
I don’t think you can just go by what’s happened in the last 35 yrs. The changes you cite were just the usual Rep/Dem admin jockeying– significant but not extreme changes responding to proximate economical changes. This Rep tax-reform bill by contrast jumps the shark into extremist territory: it’s full of long-dreamed-of, pent-up druthers of anti-New-Dealers which could only see the light of day when Reps held all 3 houses AND populace ready to be fooled again due to extended flat growth & uncertain economic future.
You are willing to concede that House/Sen could be turned Dem, as many [incl 1/2 Trump-] voters see thro the sham, & many of the rest will see the light w/n 1 – 2 yrs. So why could new Dem majority not seize bull by horns & respond to their mandate in 1st 18 mos by repealing/ changing this bill’s harmful trajectory?
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We must get active in 2018 and elect Dem controlled House
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Lets start at the bottom . How much will they change what Republicans have done .
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-09-12/why-american-workers-pay-twice-as-much-in-taxes-as-wealthy-investors
Until I see the Democratic party make the same commitment to raising taxes and using if for Public Goods running on that promises ,as the Republican party has to cutting taxes . I am not holding my breath . I will vote for primary opponents and do exactly what I have done since 92 pull the lever or circle the dot and then puke.
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Right-O, Diane.
Joel, you haven’t answered me Q. Is not this the moment to be seized by Dems (given trouncing of Reps at next vote)? Passage of the Rep tax-reform bill seems a watershed moment, making visibly clear to voters the [ongoing] shift from wage-earners to passive earners– as exemplified so well in your linked example of the $300k ER doc vs the $300k trust fund baby, the former taxed @ 34%, the latter at 14%.
Why not now [next year] to begin proposing a turnaround? What is to prevent the Dems from seizing the moment to co-opt the popularist position from the Republicans, at the point when obvious to all that they ran on it, then bait&switched?
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Would a country that had appropriately been funding public education for the past 40 years so future generations were educated and enlightened have elected Trump? Think about it. Is this a grand scheme by the Republicans to “dumb down” the masses so that people like Trump are elected?
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I am skeptical of any ‘grand schemes’ along these lines, other than those concocted by Friedmanesque/ libertarian ideologues (who admittedly now have a foot-hold among legislators & DofEd). Sadly, I believe we pro-public-ed types will always be fighting an uphill battle against the anti-intellectual bent of our culture, which has always been with us. Reps don’t have to work hard here; whenever the public budget is tight, ed, as the afterthought it is among the unwashed masses, will be first on the chopping-block.
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I know quite a few young teachers. Many are just now getting apartments with roommates, or getting married and moving in with their spouses. None of them itemize. None of them are able to deduct the $ spent in and on their classrooms.
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If the damage of this tax bill were limited to its affect on any particular group of lower income voters (vs the 1% ) it might be a wash . You would have to sit down and work the numbers . But any tax policy is a discussion of social engineering . The home owner mortgage deduction a decision to encourage home ownership.The child tax credit encourages people to have children . ……..
Okay so your teacher does not Itemize , but lets say I do . When I lose
30 thousand dollars in deduct-ability for State and local taxes the first thing I do is vote for people who will limit Public Worker bargaining rights . Your young teachers may be sharing apartments for a long time.
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I am not a finance geek but we spend 4 times the amount of money educating say 2nd graders than they did when I was in 2nd grade 50 years ago and for no gain and probably a loss. In Texas we have more and more and more property to tax for schools and part of our Lottery also goes to pay for schooling. So, Texas should not come up short of money for schools although I think we do. We, as a country, just misspend it on needless technology and testing. I am willing to pay for more teachers and to pay teachers more but to pay for testing and technology is a waste.
They say that a college graduate of today knows about what a high school graduate of the 1950s knew. This is not progress but regress.
So, school budgets are too high because of these items and maybe some others.
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“They say that a college graduate of today knows about what a high school graduate of the 1950s knew.”
Who says? And what, precisely, did they mean by “knows”? I find this very hard to believe. My own kids in 8th-gr (around 2000) were learning more in midsch math than I was taught in an equivalently prestigious hisch. They also were learning essay formats & research criteria in middle-school that was parallel to what I learned in hisch. And I would venture to say that tho my Ivy League core-courses delved deeper into psych & soc & modern history, those topics were barely touched in my hisch, whereas they were studied & discussed in my kids’ hi-sch.
PS: my youngest, by virtue of being a SpEd student– tho he had Spanish in gr2-5– had to wait until 10thgr to continue– but then benefited from a modern-pedagogy conversational course, where he learned more in 2 yrs than I or other 2 sons learned in SpI-II– my only child to continue for-lang in coll, just cuz he found it ‘easy’.
But then, my kids got thro K12 just ahead of the stds/assessments/ accountability armageddon you mention. Can it be that in the 7 yrs since my youngest graduated hisch, the dire stat you quote has proved true?
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They say a lot of things and have been saying them for a very long time . That does not mean that they are based in reality . We have bashed our young for generations. People do believe a hell of a lot of things and repeat them to justify what they believe . Not necessarily base in reality . We have a skills shortage . “Every Idiot ” knows that. Except the market where wages have been stagnant in the areas that the shortages supposedly exist. Six million jobs left open for lack of skills ,except 5.5million of them are for home health aides (sarcasm don’t bother fact checking that ) . ……………..
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Thanks for your comments bethree and Joel. Saves me from wasting virtual ink.
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