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Kansas: Court Hammers State Lawyers Over Latest School Funding Plan

By dianeravitch
July 20, 2017 //
5

The great puzzle in Kansas is how the State got such a thoughtful Supreme Court, one that actually cares about education.

Kansas is in a deep budget hole because Governor Sam Brownback cut taxes repeatedly, in the belief that low taxes would produce economic growth. Only it didn’t, and the schools are in big trouble.

The court has repeatedly ordered the state legislature to produce a school funding plan that meets the requirements of the state constitution. After years of budget cuts, the state’s schools are in dire need of money. At one point, legislators grumbled ominous threats about how they might shake up the court to undermine its authority.

But now the lawyers for the state are in court, and the justices are insistent on a commitment to a fair funding plan.

Attorneys for the state and the Legislature faced a barrage of questions from skeptical Kansas Supreme Court justices Tuesday scrutinizing the Legislature’s school finance plan.

Solicitor general Stephen McAllister and Jeff King, a former Senate vice president, sought to fend off claims from school districts that Kansas is doing too little to make up for several years in which budget cuts and funding stagnation became the norm and school budgets fell behind inflation.

The justices repeatedly interrupted their arguments to seek deeper clarification of calculations the state cited to justify adding $293 million to school funding over the next two years. And they showed some interest in potentially retaining jurisdiction once they have issued their ruling, to ensure the state complies.

McAllister and King stood their ground, arguing the state’s solution meets the court’s previous demands.

“S.B. 19 makes substantial efforts to improve the funding,” McAllister said, using the plan’s legislative bill number.

Digging into the math

In the span of Gannon v. Kansas’ seven-year history, district court judges and the state Supreme Court have repeatedly struck down Kansas’ school funding schemes as unconstitutional.

Among the justices’ concerns in this latest round of the legal battle was a statistical analysis of student achievement that the Legislature generated this spring and used to extrapolate what statewide funding should be. The calculation was based on spending levels at 41 school districts found to be performing well on certain academic outcomes.

“I understand the math,” Justice Dan Biles told McAllister. “I need to know what makes that reliable and valid, and I’m not seeing it here.”

‘I understand the math. I need to know what makes that reliable and valid, and I’m not seeing it here.’ — Justice Dan Biles
The justices homed in on methodological particulars, such as the use of averages instead of medians and whether the omission of budget changes at six school districts could have skewed the results. And they questioned whether lawmakers had cherry-picked portions of past school finance studies to minimize the state’s financial obligations.

Justice Eric Rosen asked about the state’s reliance on local property taxes to fund education through a system that allows school boards to elect to spend more. The concern is that poorer school districts are less likely to do so because of the burden on local taxpayers.

“What happens to those children?” he said, referring to students in those areas.

Categories Budget Cuts, Education Reform, Equity, Funding, Kansas

Texas: House Republicans Say “Hell, No,” to Vouchers, Again

By dianeravitch
June 28, 2017 //
6

Texas Governor Greg Abbott has called a special session of the Legislature to deal with school finance and once again to push vouchers. Once more, he will try to bribe legislators to endorse vouchers if they want more funding. No vouchers, no funding. The state cut more than $5 billion from the education budget in 2011 and has never fully restored the cuts, even though the enrollment has grown.

As usual, the camel’s nose under the tent is vouchers for children with disabilities. Note that these children have federal rights in public schools but not in private voucher schools.

The State Senate, corralled by voucher fanatic Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, supports vouchers. The House, also controlled by Republicans, has turned them down repeatedly. Republicans representing rural areas and small towns don’t want to destroy their public schools. They are conservatives: they conserve, they don’t tear down their traditional institutions.

“The top House education leader said Sunday that “private school choice” is still dead in the lower chamber.

“We only voted six times against it in the House,” House Public Education Committee Chairman Dan Huberty said. “There’s nothing more offensive as a parent of a special-needs child than to tell me what I think I need. I’m prepared to have that discussion again. I don’t think [the Senate is] going to like it — because now I’m pissed off.”

“Huberty, R-Houston, told a crowd of school administrators at a panel at the University of Texas at Austin that he plans to restart the conversation on school finance in the July-August special session after the Senate and House hit a stalemate on the issue late during the regular session. Huberty’s bill pumping $1.5 billion into public schools died after the Senate appended a “private school choice” measure, opposed by the House.

“Huberty was joined by Education Committee Vice Chairman Diego Bernal, D-San Antonio, and committee member Gary VanDeaver, R-New Boston, on a panel hosted by the Texas Association of School Administrators, where they said they didn’t plan to give in to the Senate on the contentious bill subsidizing private school tuition for kids with special needs.”

Dan Hubert is on the honor roll of this blog already. Governor Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick are today listed on its Wall of Shame.

Categories Budget Cuts, Funding, Honor Roll, Special Education, Texas, Vouchers, Wall of Shame

Do Corporations Care about American Workers?

By dianeravitch
June 22, 2017 //
38

This is an excellent article about the nations’ major corporations and their abandonment of their fellow citizens. It was written by Gordon Later and Greg LeRoy and posted by the Economic Policy Institute.

Gordon Later wrote the wonderful book “The One Percent Solution: How Corporations are Remaking America, One State at a Time,” which I highly recommend, to understand how Dark Money has taken over America, state by state.

Are these corporations so multi-national that they don’t care about their hometown or their state? Are they intentionally withdrawing their support from their fellow citizens? Do they consider Americans to be their “fellow citizens”?


When the term “Rustbelt” was coined in the 1980s and activists learned the early warning signs of a plant closing, one of those indicators was tax dodging. If a company knew it was planning to close a factory, it would often challenge its property tax assessment or seek other tax breaks. And why not? If it didn’t expect to be hiring locally in the future, why should an employer care about the quality of the schools?

The national trend today looks like the Rustbelt 1980s on steroids. President Trump’s budget proposal follows the playbook that corporate lobbyists have long pushed in state legislatures: tax cuts for companies and the rich, coupled with dramatic cuts to services that benefit everyone. The resulting permanent damage to those public services begs the question: is Corporate America intentionally disinvesting, abandoning our nation?

In recent years, states and localities across the country have made drastic cuts to essential public services. Texas eliminated over 10,000 teaching jobs, and ended full-day preschool for 100,000 low-income kids. The city of Muncie, Indiana eliminated so many firefighter positions that the area of the city that fire trucks can reach within eight minutes was cut in half. In Milwaukee, budget cuts left the public transit reaching 1,300 fewer employers in 2015 than in 2001.

Local health departments were forced to cut back everything from neonatal care to cancer screening to vision and hearing tests for school children to inspecting food safety in local restaurants. Officials reported that if the nation faces an outbreak similar to the H1N1 flu epidemic, many localities will be unable to vaccinate their residents. Budget cuts were particularly devastating in the country’s school systems. In 2010, the national student-teacher ratio increased for the first time since the Great Depression; and seven years after the onset of the Great Recession, most states had still not restored per-pupil spending to pre-recession levels.

Most striking about these cuts: the legislators who enacted them and the business lobbies that championed them treated them not as temporary tragedies to be repaired when revenues bounced back, but as long-desired permanent cuts to public services. Indeed, many legislatures locked in poorer tax bases by enacting new tax giveaways to corporations and the rich while slashing funding for schools, libraries, and health care. In the same year that Ohio ended full-day kindergarten, legislators phased out the state’s inheritance tax—which had only ever affected the wealthiest seven percent of families.

This agenda was driven by the country’s premier corporate lobbies: chambers of commerce, manufacturers associations, the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity, and the Fortune 500 corporations that have participated in the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Which begs the question about their motives: why would leading corporations seek permanent cuts to education, libraries or public transit? Don’t they need full access to labor pools of educated workers and decently-paid consumers to buy their products and services? The behavior of the nation’s biggest corporate lobbies appears to be irrational, yet it has been repeated in state after state.

One answer appears to lie in the disturbing fact that the fortunes of “American” corporations have become increasingly divorced from those of American citizens. It may never have been entirely true that “what’s good for General Motors is what’s good for the country,” as the company’s president apocryphally suggested in 1953. But it was closer to true when companies relied on Americans both to make and to buy their products. Today, most GM employees and nearly two-thirds of the cars it sells are overseas; it already sells more cars in China than in the U.S. General Motors has been highly engaged in American politics, including as a member of ALEC.

GM is not exceptional. For the first time, many of the country’s most powerful political actors are companies that may be headquartered in America but don’t primarily depend for their profits upon the fortunes of American society. Foreign sales now account for 48 percent of the S&P 500’s total corporate revenues. Among recent ALEC member corporations, Exxon Mobil, Caterpillar, Procter & Gamble, Pfizer, Dow Chemical, and IBM all earn more than 60 percent of their revenue outside the U.S. Their political interests are increasingly disconnected from the fate of American workers and taxpayers.

The net effect of corporate tax dodging is that by every key measure—share of state revenue, share of GDP, or effective rate—state corporate income taxes have been steadily declining. This creates pressure to raise other taxes, disproportionately borne by working families, who grow to resent a government that costs them more yet delivers less.

Given this reality, we take this corporate-backed push for disinvestment of America’s public sector as a big, loud early warning signal. ALEC’s agenda is not that of employers committed to their surrounding communities. It more resembles that of a company planning to cut and run. For the rest of us who seek good jobs and future opportunity for ourselves and our children, what’s good for GM is good for GM, period.

Categories ALEC, Budget Cuts, Privatization

Marc Tucker: Trump’s Budget Takes from the Poor to Give to the Rich

By dianeravitch
June 20, 2017 //
36

Marc Tucker says that Trump’s budget will not make America great again. It is a reverse Robin Hood plan, taking from the poor and giving to the rich.

“The first reaction is all gut. The budget, on its face, would represent a gigantic redistribution of resources from the poor to the rich. To say that that is morally bankrupt is to understate the case. There is no rational argument for such a policy.

“The administration makes three cases for its proposals. The first is that tax breaks for the rich while robbing the poor to pay for the tax cuts will generate so much growth that the taxes on the increased income will more than pay for the tax relief. That argument has been advanced again and again despite a continuing lack of evidence that it has ever actually worked out that way. If you want to see the most visible and colossal evidence for the failure of this theory, you have only to look at Kansas, which has been virtually bankrupted by Governor Sam Brownback’s determination to go down this rat hole.

“The second is that all the administration is doing is giving freeloaders an incentive to work. That may be a masterpiece of propaganda, but not a masterpiece of reasoning. Someone has to explain to me how taking away financial support to go to college from low-income high school graduates is going to give these “freeloaders” an incentive to work. I want to know how giant cuts to the National Institutes of Health research budget on life-saving drugs is giving freeloaders an incentive to work.

“The third and last argument this administration has advanced for this budget is that the evidence that the programs they plan to terminate work is either weak or nonexistent. Without conceding the strength of their evidence that they do not work—the evidence is at worst mixed—let’s just look at the logic of the argument. Almost all of these programs are intended to help vulnerable populations. Surely, if they do not work, the responsibility of government is to replace them with stronger programs intended to accomplish the same objective. Replacing them with nothing but “choice” suggests that the administration does not care what the question was as long as the answer is choice, which is the very definition of policy made on the basis not of evidence but of ideology.

“When I say ideology, I am referring to the belief that something is true despite all the evidence to the contrary. Does the President’s Budget Director Mick Mulvaney actually believe, despite decades of evidence to the contrary and the counsel of most economists from both parties, that giant tax cuts will pay for themselves? Or could it be that ideology is not really the problem here, that greed is the problem? Are we looking at the result of a political system that has been captured in part by the very rich, people who spend their time on the golf course telling each other that it is really they who produce economic growth and are entitled to its benefits and who now happen to have the political power to enforce those views on the rest of us? Or is it both?

“That is my gut speaking, my gut honing in on the gigantic injustice that would be wreaked on the nation if this budget were in fact to become the United States government budget. And then I relax a little bit. It will not happen, I say to myself. Ronald Reagan offered a budget like this to the Congress and the Congress virtually ignored it. So it won’t happen this time either, I say to myself…

“The truth is that the administration’s budget will make enormous cuts in exactly the kind of research and development that is the key to our economic future, will cripple the universities that have driven the development of our best technologies decade after decade, will kneecap the disadvantaged students on whom the future of all of us now depends. My whole argument hinges on the idea that our people are our future and our future depends on giving our people, all of them, a world-class education and training to match. And what is the administration’s strategy for that? It is to cut the education and job training budget to ribbons and offer us choice as its sole strategy for improving student achievement. Choice well done can help at the margins, but what I just described is not a weight that choice can bear.

“The budget is a prism that casts a shining beam on who we are as a nation, what we believe in and what kind of nation we want to be. I would argue that the budget we need is neither the budget the administration has offered nor the budget we have. The Democrats will have to acknowledge that the imperative is not to keep all the social programs we have and start adding more (yes, it is true that some are not working as well as they should and it is also true that some are there not to provide needed services but to earn political support) and the Republicans will have to give up tax reduction as the holy grail of national politics (even if that costs them the open pockets of some of their richest contributors). The question we all have to ask is, in a very constrained economic environment, how much can we afford to spend on the current needs of our people while making the investments we have to make now to enjoy broadly shared prosperity tomorrow?”

Categories Budget Cuts, Economy, Funding

Chicago: Rahm Emanuel’s Zany Graduation Requirement Draws Mixed Notices

By dianeravitch
June 16, 2017 //
22

Rahm Emanuel has a new plan: instead of funding the Chicago public schools, the Mayor–who controls the school system–has raised graduation requirements. Students cannot graduate unless they can prove they have post-secondary plans. Presumably, they will remain in high school for the rest of their lives if not.

Dare we say it is doomed to fail?

“In a radical policy change being referred to as everything from “forward thinking” to “remarkably silly,” high school seniors in Chicago, starting with the class of 2020, will not be able to graduate unless they present “evidence of a postsecondary plan.”

“The policy — formally known as “Learn.Plan.Succeed” — was announced by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel in early April and quietly approved by the Chicago Board of Education in late May.

“Under the initiative, allowable evidence of a postsecondary plan can include things such as a college acceptance letter, a military enlistment letter, proof of employment or a job offer. It can also include acceptance into an apprenticeship program, a job program or a “gap year” program. Waivers may be allowed for students with “extenuating circumstances.”

“Emanuel is slated to discuss the new policy and other education initiatives at the National Press Club next week.

“The new graduation requirement — considered the first of its kind in the nation — comes at a time when Illinois finds itself in the midst of a longtime state budget impasse and massive debt, plummeting regional public university enrollment, and at a time when Chicago’s public school system itself had to borrow $389 million just to stay open to finish the 2016-2017 school year.

“It also comes at a time when concerns are being raised anew about concentrated joblessness among Chicago’s Black and Latino youth, who also comprise the vast majority of Chicago’s public school students.

“The new graduation requirement is drawing mixed reviews among youth and education policy experts, some of whom are raising questions about its workability and practicality given Chicago’s joblessness and Illinois’ budget woes.”

Categories Budget Cuts, Chicago, Emanuel, Rahm, Funding, High School Graduation

Kansas: The Collapse of Governor Brownback’s Radical Tax-Cutting Plan

By dianeravitch
June 15, 2017 //
13

When Sam Brownback became governor of Kansas, he was all fired up with a simple yet radical idea: Cut taxes and businesses will expand and the economy will grow. State revenues dropped dramatically. School funding suffered deep cuts. Social services of all kinds lost money. And now the legislature is repudiating Brownback’s tax cuts. They voted to increase taxes. Brownback, having learned nothing, vetoed the budget. The legislature overrode his veto.

Farewell, Governor Brownback. And good riddance to failed ideas.

Categories Budget Cuts, Funding, Kansas

William Mathis: Trump’s Budget is a Model of Doublespeak and Indifference to Children

By dianeravitch
June 12, 2017 //
12

William Mathis describes Trump’s education budget as a demonstration of Doublespeak, meant to mask its indifference to children.

He writes:

“In 1965, the federal government, driven by the obligation to provide equal opportunities to the least fortunate of our citizens, passed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. It was intended to lift the nation by strengthening our poorest children and schools, improving the quality of teaching, opening the doors of higher education, and providing skills to adults. It embraced the ideal voiced by the late President Kennedy that “a rising tide lifts all boats.” And the emphasis was on building the common good. By widely investing in our citizens, we invest in the health of our society and economy.

“Those principles have found no refuge in the work of President Donald Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos; all that remains of these great purposes are a confusion of empty words made to appear as if the worst were the better. Larded with phrases like “commitment to improving education” and “maintaining support for the nation’s most vulnerable students,” Trump proposes to slash federal education programs by $9.2 billion, or 13.5 percent. This is on top of past unmet needs, since federal obligations to poor and special education children have never been fully met. Starved programs are now set to have their rations reduced or cut entirely.

“With a remarkable lack of compassion, the Special Olympics budget was zeroed. Twenty-two programs are eliminated including community learning centers, arts, pre-school and teacher improvement.

Blind to clear evidence, every dollar invested in high-quality early childhood education returns $8 in positive social outcomes such as reduced unemployment, stable families, less incarceration and the like. Yet the Trump budget treats this wise and productive investment as another area to defund: Head Start and child care are slotted for small reductions, while preschool development grants are entirely eliminated.

“The “civil rights” framing is stunning doubletalk, since a growing body of independent research shows that school choice segregates students by race, handicap and socioeconomic level.

“It doesn’t get any easier for poor and middle-class students as they get older. Loan forgiveness programs for new college graduates working in schools or government would be eliminated. Student loan interest would be increased. In Trump’s plan, 300,000 students would lose their work-study jobs. In all, $143 billion would be removed over 10 years.

“Why make these cuts? The proposal calls for an increase in defense spending of more than $50 billion (a 10 percent increase) plus tax cuts for the wealthy – and that money has to come from somewhere. By these deeds, a capacity for war is valued more than the needs of the citizenry.

“Yet, Trump says “education is the civil rights issue of our time.” This budget raises questions about whether his true objective is to cut civil rights. The proposal’s centerpiece is school choice. The budget seeks to funnel $1.4 billion, in new as well as repurposed funds, into private schools. The “civil rights” framing is stunning doubletalk, since a growing body of independent research shows that school choice segregates students by race, handicap and socioeconomic level.”

Read on.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Fraud, Funding

Lisa Haver: It Is Time to Establish Democratic Control of Philadelphia’s Public Schools

By dianeravitch
June 9, 2017 //
7

For many years, the public schools of Philadelphia have been drastically underfunded by the state of Pennsylvania. This created a series of fiscal crises, which should have produced equitable funding, but instead gave cause for a state takeover, thus blaming the city for the state’s failures. The state established the appointed School Reform Commission in 2001. The SRC appointed Paul Vallas to run the district, and he launched the nation’s largest experiment (to that date) in privatized schooling, handing over some 40 schools to private, for-profit, and university management. The experiment was an expensive failure, and he left the city with a large deficit, bound for New Orleans to push an even bigger experiment in school privatization.

The SRC has continued the Vallas tradition, closing public schools, opening charter schools, and leaving public schools in desperate straits.

To sum it up, state control has been a disaster for the children of Philadelphia.

Lisa Haver wrote an article in the Philadelphia Daily News outlining the secrecy that surrounds the deliberations of the School Reform Commission. Even the budget is hidden from public view until the SRC has made all its decisions, without considering the voices of parents or teachers.

She asks and answers questions about the role and lack of transparency of the SRC.

She concludes like this:

“Should the SRC schedule a meeting in which it plans to decide on renewals of 23 charter schools with less than a week’s notice?

“The district’s budget shows that it will spend $894 million — about one-third of the budget — on charters next year. Shouldn’t the SRC allow enough time for those paying the tab to read the reports? They may want to ask why schools that have met none of the standards are being recommended for renewal.

“Should the SRC publicly deliberate before voting on significant financial, academic and policy resolutions?

“The SRC approved contracts totaling $149.2 million at its February meeting; it spent $173.1 million in March. Resolutions are voted on in batches of 10 or 15, with little explanation of why.

“How do we reform the School Reform Commission? By abolishing it. Philadelphians have the right, as all other Pennsylvanians do, to decide who will represent them on an elected school board.”

Categories Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Democracy, Education Industry, Funding, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia

Valerie Strauss Recaps Betsy DeVos’s Testimony about the Budget and Civil Rights

By dianeravitch
June 7, 2017 //
17

I confess. I didn’t watch Betsy DeVos testify. I didn’t want to. No one pays me to blog every day, so I have some discretion in how I use my time. What I did instead, which was very taxing, was to watch preview DVDs on the PBS special “School Inc.,” because I have been invited to tape a response for Channel 13, New York City’s PBS station. It is worse than anything you anticipated in terms of distortion, inaccuracies, slander of public schools, and adulation of the free market. Maybe I should have watched DeVos.

Valerie Strauss did watch DeVos. Here is her report.

She made clear that she would not put any limits on for-profit education companies. She recommended virtual charters to an Alabama senator, although even the charter industry has called out online schools for their poor academic results.

And here is a key quote:

“She was asked repeatedly whether private schools that would be part of the administration’s proposed program to fund and study a new voucher program would be subject to federal discrimination and special education laws, and she repeatedly said, “Schools that receive federal funds must follow federal law.””

As our reader Laura Chapman pointed out in a comment, voucher funds are always defended by the assertion that the public money goes to the family, not the school. Tax credits for vouchers go to corporations who pay for vouchers. Every voucher program operates under the fiction that the public money does not go to the school.

The money is laundered through the family or third parties.

So DeVos is cleverly masking the fact that federal law will not apply to schools that receive federal funds.

It is a three-card Monte game.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Fraud, Funding, Hoax, Privatization, Vouchers

Jan Resseger: Meet the National Lobbyists Who Have Pushed a Far-Right Wing Agenda into the States

By dianeravitch
June 6, 2017 //
30

Jan Resseger read Gordon Lafer’s new book, “The One Percent Solution: How Corporations Are Remaking America One State at a Time,” and she understood the pattern on the rug.

“Gordon Lafer explains that in the November 2010 election, “Eleven state governments switched from Democratic or divided control to unified Republican control of the governorship and both houses of the legislature. Since these lawmakers took office in early 2011, the United States has seen an unprecedented wave of legislation aimed at lowering labor standards and slashing public services.” (p. 2) “In January 2011, legislatures across the country took office under a unique set of circumstances. In many states, new majorities rode to power on the energy of the Tea Party ‘wave’ election and the corporate-backed RedMap campaign… (T)his was the first class of legislators elected under post-Citizens United campaign finance rules, and the sudden influence of unlimited money in politics was felt across the country. Finally, the 2011 legislative sessions opened in the midst of record budget deficits (from the Great Recession), creating an atmosphere of fiscal crisis that made it politically feasible to undertake more dramatic legislation than might otherwise have been possible… For the corporate lobbies and their legislative allies, the 2010 elections created a strategic opportunity to restructure labor relations, political power, and the size of government.” (p 44)…

“Lafer continues: “Political science traditionally views policy initiatives as emerging from either reasoned evaluation of what has worked to address a given social problem, or a strategic response to public opinion. But the corporate agenda for education reform is neither. Its initiatives are not the product of education scholars and often have little or no evidentiary basis to support them. They are also broadly unpopular… In this sense, education policy… provides an instructive window into the ability of corporate lobbies to move an extremely broad and ambitious agenda that is supported neither by social scientific evidence nor by the popular will.” (p. 130)

“Who are the corporate lobbies crafting and pushing the anti-tax, union-bashing, anti-public education agenda? “Almost all of these initiatives reflect ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council) model legislation, and have been championed by the Chamber of Commerce, Americans for Prosperity, and a wide range of allied corporate lobbies.” (p. 130) “Furthermore, the corporate agenda is carried out through an integrated network that operates on multiple channels at once: funding ALEC to write bills, craft legislative talking points, and provide a meeting place for legislators and lobbyists to build relationships; supporting local think tanks in the ALEC-affiliated State Policy Network to produce white papers, legislative testimony, opinion columns, and media experts; contributing to candidate campaigns and party committees; making independent expenditures on behalf of lawmakers or issues; and deploying field organizers to key legislative districts.” (p. 39)

“A primary strategy is tax cutting: “‘The best way to stimulate the economy,’ insisted a senior fellow at the Koch-funded Cato Institute, is ‘to shrink government… lower marginal tax rates, and streamline regulations.’ The corporate right’s exhortations for an unprecedented policy of cutting taxes and services in the midst of recession was not an evidence-based policy and indeed did not yield the economic growth its proponents forecast… There was no reason to believe that tax cuts were the key to economic recovery. However continuing tax cuts achieved something else; they dramatically—and perhaps permanently—shrank the size of government.” (p. 65)

“How has all this affected public education? “(B)udget cuts were particularly widespread—and particularly devastating—in the country’s school systems. In 2010-11, 70 percent of all U.S. school districts made cuts to essential services. Despite widespread evidence of the academic and economic value of preschool education, twelve states cut pre-K funding that year, including Arizona, which eliminated it completely. Ohio repealed full-day kindergarten and cut its preschool program to the point that it served 75 percent fewer four-year-olds than it had a decade earlier. Pennsylvania also cut back from full-day to half-day kindergarten in many districts—including Philadelphia, which also eliminated 40 percent of its teaching staff…. More than half the nation’s school districts changed their thermostat settings…. Research shows that the availability of trained librarians makes a significant improvement in student reading and writing skills, yet by 2014, one-third of public schools in the country lacked a full-time certified librarian.” (p. 69)

Conspiracy theory? No, a well-planned, carefully executed plan to cut taxes, kill unions, privatize education.

Categories ALEC, Budget Cuts, Corporate Reform, Privatization, School Choice, Unions
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