This Report was released by the American Federation of Teachers.
Education Underfunding Tops $19 Billion over Decade of Neglect
Report Unveils Link Between GOP Tax Cuts and Gutting of Public K-12 and Higher Education Post-Recession
PITTSBURGH—Governments in 25 states have shortchanged public K-12 education by $19 billion over the last decade, with low-tax Republican states guilty of the worst underfunding, a groundbreaking report by the American Federation of Teachers, released today, reveals.
“A Decade of Neglect: Public Education Funding in the Aftermath of the Great Recession” details for the first time the devastating impact on schools, classrooms and students when states choose to pursue an austerity agenda in the false belief that tax cuts will pay for themselves.
The comprehensive report offers a deep dive into the long-term austerity agendas and historic disinvestment that sparked the wave of nationwide walkouts this spring.
Among the findings: K-12 education is drastically underfunded in every single state in the United States. When you control for inflation, there are 25 states that spent less on K-12 education in 2016 than they did prior to the recession. But there are signs of the negative impact of austerity even in states with relatively stronger investment in schools.
Chronic underfunding explains why, in 38 states, the average teacher salary is lower in 2018 than it was in 2009, and why the pupil-teacher ratio was worse in 35 states in 2016 than in 2008.
While the recession may have forced budget cuts on our schools, the report exposes how Republican legislators and governors prolonged the damage by cutting taxes for the rich at the expense of public schools.
A majority of Americans instead support repealing tax cuts for the rich and using that money to invest in education, infrastructure and healthcare.
The report measures each state’s “tax effort”—that is, how much they tax, compared with how rich they are. Of the 25 states with the worst K-12 funding, 18 of them have taxed their residents less since the recession. Five of the 11 states with the lowest K-12 funding—Florida, Nevada, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Texas—are also among those with the lowest taxes on the rich.
The problem only gets worse in higher education, where 41 states spent less per student, creating a massive affordability and accessibility gap. This explains why tuition and fees for a two-year degree in 2017 rose at three times the rate of inflation when compared with 2008, and why the cost of a four-year degree rose even higher, putting college woefully out of reach for far too many Americans.
“These problems belong squarely at the feet of elected officials, many of them Republicans, who rather than investing in our future, insisted on ushering in counterproductive austerity,” said AFT President Randi Weingarten. “When legislators choose to prioritize millionaires over children, our country suffers. And when our education secretary says that money doesn’t matter in schools, we tell teachers, parents and children that they don’t matter either.”
The report was accompanied by a key resolution, considered by delegates today at the AFT’s biennial convention, to turn the data into action. “The Fight for Investment in Our Future and the Fight Against Austerity” states, in part, that the AFT “will … investigate legislative, policy and grass-roots solutions to increase investment in public services, including the identification of new revenue streams,” and “will work to channel the activism we are witnessing across the country in this moment into a movement for enduring change by electing pro-public education, pro-worker candidates in November.”
Read the full report here.
posted at Oped News
https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/AFT-Documents-Massive-Unde-in-General_News-Austerity_Diane-Ravitch_Education_Public-Assets-To-Private-Wealth-180717-773.html#comment706710
Go to this comment below, for many embedded links!
ISN’T IT TIME THAT THE PUBLIC KNOWS THE WAR ON TEACHERS began the war on our PUBLIC SCHOOLS, the only road to income equality!
You cannot have an educated citizenry and elect a Trump. Shared knowledge that MAKES DEMOCRACY POSSIBLE. An ignorant citizenry is the goal. https://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/periodicals/hirsch.pdf
See my series where most of my links are from the blog of former asst Sec’y of Education Diane Ravitch. who wrote * Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools.
My series 15,880 Districts in 50 States: already divided for conquering offers the TRUTH.
https://www.opednews.com/Series/15-880-Districts-in-50-Sta-by-Susan-Lee-Schwartz-140921-34.html?f=15-880-Districts-in-50-Sta-by-Susan-Lee-Schwartz-140921-34.html
Read the series on privitization http://www.opednews.com/Series/PRIVITIZATION-by-Susan-Lee-Schwartz-150925-546.html
Read the many links to how legislatures took down public schools even as the media blamed teachers. http://www.opednews.com/Series/legislature-and-governorsL-by-Susan-Lee-Schwartz-150217-816.html
The EDUCATIONAL INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX https://greatschoolwars.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/eic-oct_11.pdf took over in the nineties, and saw to it that schools system administrators at the TOP, mandated what students would know. Teachers like me, who knew what learning looked like, and had practiced pedagogy for decades would never use the Gates crap. We had to be removed, our voices silenced. Hundreds of thousands like me, were thrown out…and the unions did nothing.
Here is my experience http://www.perdaily.com/2011/01/lausd-et-al-a-national-scandal-of-enormous-proportions-by-susan-lee-schwartz-part-1.html.
I was famous, in NY STATE, and chosen to be the Harvard/Pew cohort for the authentic New Standards research. I was the NYSEC Educator of Excellence, as my 7th grade students had the highest scores on the citywide exams in the nineties. I would never have used the Gates curricula crap
The Republican Party should change its name to The Koch Party.
Or maybe, the Red Party, after Helsinki
“will … investigate legislative, policy and grass-roots solutions to increase investment in public services, including the identification of new revenue streams,”….
I do not know what is meant by “new revenue streams,” but I do know that this statement could be an open door to pay-for-success contracting and so-called social impact bonds (SIBs) for education, both of these financial products sold to investors on the promise of returns on investment ranging from 7% to 13%.
In other words, monetizing the cost of educating selected populations of school-age and post-secondary students and designing financially attractive investments in programs is one way to find “new revenue streams.”
Moreover the Obama administration made that method of paying for education “legitimate,” thanks to a $200 million USDE grant to “incubate” these financial products. The incubation period is over. SIBS, also known as pay-for success contracts, are authorized in ESSA.
I have posted about SIBs several times. ESSA authorizes their use for “Prevention And Intervention Programs For Children And Youth Who Are Neglected, Delinquent, Or At-Risk” in Title I, Part D, Section 4108 (I).
Pay for success contracts date back to 2011, but are now marketed internationally. The contracts are designed to assert that social and civic services can be delivered better, and with more bang for the bock, if taken over by investors and their representatives who know how to scale up worthy efforts, make them more efficient, and lower costs. If the public agency agrees to the terms of the contract, the “savings to taxpayers” from the improved service and lower costs are paid to the investors.The investors make money by having an “intermediaries” take over the management of the service, and designing a package of benchmarks for success the will favor returns to investors.
In theory, this is a win-win—better social and civic services at lower costs. But savvy intermediaries rig these contracts—lawyers, accountants, marketers, program managers and program evaluators—so there is little risk to the investors and a big loss of independent control and public voice in managing the programs.
This is exactly what is happening with pay-for-success contracts for preschool programs in Utah and in Chicago, and with others in the works internationally. The “savings” gained for investors are coming from an enrollment process designed to rule out preschoolers who may require IEPs—special education services– among other strategies. Cohorts of students are tracked from the time they enter the program, with tests of readiness for Kindergarten, progress in grades one and two, read-by-grade three tests and others. The investors are fine with denial of special education services in preschool and beyond if they can make money in the process. This website tracks current programs including the Utah preschool program. http://www.payforsuccess.org/project/utah-high-quality-preschool-program
I hope that readers of this blog will become informed about the really crass monetizing of human beings being put into play by the organized efforts of billionaire-funded foundations and venture capitalists who distain democratic governance and who have complete faith in their power to do everything better that anyone else. This website shows how the investors think about the metrics that will “rationalize” their profit seeking. https://robinhoodorg-production.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2017/04/Metrics-Equations-for-Website_Sept-2014.pdf
The most well-documented source of information of this idea of “new revenues,” including amazing graphics of interlocking relationships among the profit-seekers parading as do-gooders, comes from Wrench in the Gears. Try this and hold on to your lunch. https://wrenchinthegears.com/2018/06/10/heckman-and-pritzker-pitch-apps-as-poverty-solutions-yielding-a-13-return-on-investment/ and others
The one deficit in this report is that it only focuses on the Great Recession and afterwards. It doesn’t take into account what may have been done to schools BEFORE the Recession. Utah, for example, loses a billion dollars a year in state funding due to a combinaton of two factors: 1. Changing the Uniform School Fund, which used to go completely to K-12, to sharing it with higher education. And, 2. going to a flat tax for everyone. Those things happened after the 2006 voucher referendum, when the Utah State Legislature wanted to punish schools and teachers, but before the recession.
Rob Kall Headlined this today, at OPED when I posted it.!
Hope you see many views!
The thing about this is, with all the Trump-induced chaos, we may be too dizzy to notice what an astonishingly sustained boom the economy and the financial markets have been undergoing. In other words, these “worst of times” have been occurring during the “best of times.” This boom will end, and the end may be a hard fall. And that will bring austerity back with a vengeance. That’s scary for states and localities that have never really recovered from the last wave of austerity. Unlike many, NYC has been especially flush cash. The sustained boom in financial markets and real estate has financed very big increases in city payrolls under BDB. Huge market gains have led the city to cut back its pension fund contributions. When the correction (and hopefully it will not be worse than a correction) comes, get ready for 2008 all over again, including a resumption of the attacks on public employees and their pensions. (You probably didn’t really notice that the attacks on pensions had abated, did you?)
This is the world that will be coming into focus when the Fog of Trump clears.
There was an amazing boom in the 1920s. The stock market kept rising.
Then came protectionism and tariffs
Guess what happened next?
And what came after that?
The post war world has been a balancing act.
Now we have a clown knocking it over. In love with that Dancing Bear.
It might help to know that Trump and the GOP have no claim on what is happening to the economy at this time. I read what the Congressional Budget Office said about today’s economy back in 2015.
But “Those projections by CBO, based on the assumption that current laws governing taxes and spending will generally remain unchanged, are built upon the agency’s economic forecast.”
https://www.cbo.gov/publication/49892
The massive tax cuts from Trump and the GOP will mostly benefit the wealthy and the increased spending changed that prediction and I think the fall will be a hard one when it comes.
Wait and see and when the crash arrives, if the Democrats have taken back the Congress and the crash caused by Trump and the GOP happens after the 2018 midterms, Trump and the GOP will repeatedly blame the Democrats —- and FOX and the rest of the Alt-Right Deep State misleading, lying media machine will help spread the lies.