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What to cut in public education when the stimulus money runs out
Michael L. Hays
Public education as an election-year issue
According to the conventional wisdom, one of the big divides between Democrats and Republicans, or liberals and conservatives, is the willingness to spend money on public programs. However, when it comes to public education, we seem to have no such divide between New Mexico’s gubernatorial candidates, Democrat Diane Denish and Republican Susana Martinez.
Although their performance in the first debate did not promise an outbreak of bipartisanship, both candidates agreed in separate declarations that they will not cut one cent from the education budget. (Susana wants to earmark some of the education budget for vouchers, but the voucher issue is not my issue here.)
Of course, it is an election year, each candidate wants votes, and neither wants to offend any constituency (much less rouse it to support her opponent). Both indulge the time-honored traditions of sticking to talking points, promising everything to everyone, and pledging gain without pain. In the ritual of campaign dodge or deception, both candidates pretend to prove their commitment to public education with claims that they will not do what the state must do if it is to fulfill its constitutional mandate to balance its budget.
Post-election budget as the ultimate truth serum
One fact faces the new governor, as well as state senators and representatives: The flow of funds from the federal government’s economic recovery stimulus program will cease. Even with those funds, the state had to cut the public education budget this year; without them, the state will have to cut it next year. Elected officials will have to make choices that will offend or outrage most or all constituencies because they will have to examine all line items and spread the discomfort of cuts to many of them. Their mission to protect personal or political favorites or keep campaign promises will be difficult, if not impossible.
The education budget will be no exception.
In a tough economy, the state must make a special effort to allocate diminished resources according to the worthiness and effectiveness of supported functions or programs. Those failing to provide reasonable bang-for-the-buck benefits should face reductions or termination of funding, operations and staff.
Targets of opportunity abound, because good times always lead to an expansion or proliferation of programs and an upsurge in personnel. Such targets are particularly abundant in public education because its programs, once established, and its personnel, once employed, abide in the absence of informed and regular scrutiny. The result is too often the waste, fraud and abuse by constituencies that perform poorly and serve mainly their special interests.
Three programs as candidates for education budget cuts
I name three such workfare programs that have conspicuously failed to make a measurable, meaningful or lasting contribution commensurate with their costs.
Early childhood education programs. Like Head Start, these programs produce only short-term improvements in academic performance. Within a few grades, educational differences between students who have participated in them and those who have not are virtually non-existent. What students have not learned at home by the time they reach kindergarten should be taught in kindergarten.
Dual-language programs. These programs have demonstrated no enduring benefit in terms of lasting academic improvement. Worse, they provide sub-standard instruction that latter handicaps previously enrolled students when they enter regular classes. Language segregation and instruction do not work as well or as quickly as immersion.
Reading specialists. These employees are a failed “solution” to the “problem” that emerged as elementary school teachers proved unable to teach reading as previous elementary school teachers had been able to do, and did. The “solution” has been an expensive failure: Despite additional staff and their salaries, about half of all students fail to achieve reading proficiency before fifth and ninth grade. The time is now to cut this staff (except for the few able and needed to help students with independently identified reading disorders like dyslexia) and save money. The “new solution” is the “old” one: proper training of prospective elementary school teachers to teach reading.
One no- or low-cost proposal for reform as a substitute for all three
The proposed cuts or reductions in these three areas will arouse powerful resistance from their entrenched constituencies, perhaps the most powerful resistance from schools of education. Their main interest is training large numbers of students. To sustain or swell their enrollments, they train more students badly than train fewer students well. Thus, they train elementary school teachers to teach reading not at all or so badly that schools hire reading specialists to make up for their inadequacies; but, despite their training, they cannot teach reading either.
But if schools of education effectively trained elementary school teachers to teach reading, as they once did, they would need to train fewer reading specialists, offer fewer courses, and have fewer professors of education.
The greater problem is that schools of education have little regard for what K-5 teachers can or cannot teach once they graduate. Whatever the reason, they do not train them, or train them well enough, to teach the curriculums implicit in state benchmarks and standards of public education. (Some say that the reason is that they care more about the politics of equality than the quality of education, which they regard as elitist.)
The proof is the persistent, long-term mediocrity of fourth- and eighth-grade proficiency in reading and math. Otherwise, schools of education would long ago have aligned their programs to those curriculums. (Meanwhile, the state is focusing on the alignment of high school instruction with college courses, teaching to the transcript, or coaching to the college course catalogue.)
A no- or low-cost reform in public education would require schools of education to align the training of future public school teachers with the curriculums which they are expected to teach, especially in the elementary grades.
Michael L. Hays (Ph.D., English) is a retired consultant in defense, energy and environment; former high school and college teacher; and continuing civic activist. His bi-monthly Saturday column appears in the Las Cruces Sun-News; his bi-monthly blog, First Impressions & Second Thoughts, appears on the intervening Saturdays at firstimpressionssecondthoughts.blogspot.com.
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grantataylor, there you go! Ask and ye shall receive.
grantataylor, good question. I was a responder before I became an occasional contributor and set up my account with my earlier, but since abandoned, alias. I shall let this response prompt Heath to tell me how to change my account name to my column/real name. Thanks for asking.
Penpal (what’s wrong with having your real name as your username?), it seems out of place on a news outlet as esteemed as NMPolitics.net to so vigorously and verbosely – if not viciously – defend a column.
Think, I think that you were right to realize that you “shouldn’t.” I am going to respond to you for the last time, for you do not strike me as a straight-up interlocutor. In particular, you emphatically claimed that all three areas which I recommended cutting are federally “REQUIRED” (all capitals yours). I denied your claim, though I cannot, of course, prove a negative. You do not prove me wrong or you right by citing the laws on this critical point. So, as it stands now, it looks as if you lied in your first response and elide your lie in your second one–hardly the basis for your credibility or uprightness in this discussion.
I have not worked with your children or their schools; that fact counts for very little, and I resent its ad hominem character. If book knowledge does not count for something, then education does not count for much.
I just do not know why you insist on your misreadings. I claim that “Like Head Start,” early childhood education gets only short-term educational results. Because I am talking about state programs, I am not trying to argue against Head Start. In a different context, I might.
You, not I, raised the issue of trained personnel and want to retain them. If their efforts do not produce results, they should not be retained. If they produced results, proficiency scores would be better than they are. If you think that any of these three programs are effective, you need to show them to be so. Right now, low reading and math proficiency scores over many years are prima facie evidence against you.
The federal government requires special assistance to the disabled; it then lets others define the word “disabled.” Over time, that definition has grown to increase the number of disabled and increase the number of teachers to deal with them. (See NY Senator Patrick Moynahan’s article on defining deviancy downward, for example.) Frankly, as in other areas of health or social or educational services, the definition of the malady, disorder, or deficiency expands to accommodate more people and builds a constituency. Sorry, but the definitions by specials interests or their collaborators are self-serving.
You are pretending that I agree with you about improving rather than eliminating dual-language instruction; I do not. I believe that non-English speakers are no less capable of mastering grade-appropriate subject matter than English speakers, even if they must also work harder to learn English at the same time. I vehemently resent your insulting insinuation that I want to go back to abusive practices. Turn-around is fair play: fine- tuning the ineffective abuses children and is a waste this state especially cannot afford.
Public education exists for the benefit to students and, eventually, the society of which they will become a part. It is not about teachers or their best intentions or their high motives or even their hard work. No one pays them to be nice people or good people or hard workers. They get paid to do a job for the taxpayers’ money. If you had read more of my columns, you would know that I do not “solely blame teachers.” In fact, if you had read to the end of this blog, you would know that I blame schools of education for taking public money and providing no public service.
Oh, I shouldn’t but I must.
Pen Pal, I respect that you may have a Master’s Degree in Education, but my sense is that you have not had the opportunity to work in one of my children’s schools in the past 10 years, otherwise you would have more accurate information regarding what our teachers do, what Federal mandates these programs fulfill, and how successful they are. To say I “falsely claimed” things that are clearly stated in your premise– is puzzling.
For example: “I name three such workfare programs that have conspicuously failed to make a measurable, meaningful or lasting contribution commensurate with their costs. Early childhood education programs. Like Head Start”: sounds like you want to get rid of early childhood programs like Head Start.
In these and later remarks you imply that a program is justified by the fact that its personnel have education [even advanced degrees], expertise, or experience. I do not believe that public education is or should be an entitlement program for educators, not even for those with such qualifications.
First of all, how does having advanced skills in special education diagnosis and intervention amount to an “entitlement work program”? We can’t afford to train every classroom teacher in those skills–they’d never graduate from college, for one and who’d pay for it in the first place? That’s like saying that if your General Practitioner isn’t trained to diagnose rare heart disorders, Cardiac Specialists are somehow superfluous luxuries, employed by entitlement programs. Makes absolutely no sense. We use teaching specialists because–like medical specialists– they cut to the chase and intervene fast. Precious developmental time is not lost for a child simply because his brain needs extra help to read.
Special education IS a federal requirement in that states must provide instruction to children with disabilities–it’s the law. A child who needs special reading teachers due to a disability is by definition a disabled student and as such is entitled to that extra assistance which cannot be provided by a regular classroom setting. We can’t and shouldn’t eliminate Reading Teachers.
As far as increasing class size by eliminating these programs, I don’t think I stated that at all. I do assert that our children’s class sizes are ALREADY maxed because of budget cuts, which makes the idea that a single classroom teacher can fulfill the roles of special education and dual language teacher in addition to all the other responsibilities she has.
Yes, I agree with you that there are many innovations we can and should make in dual language learning that would speed up their attainment of fluency. Helping non-English speakers learn the language while also maintaining grade level achievement in math, technology, science, history, and literature is an big expectation, but we do not have the time to waste with these children by allowing them to languish in confusion in the back of the classroom until they fail. And this is not the 19th or early 20th century, where a large majority of those immigrants to which you refer ended up performing labor and manufacturing jobs that did not require advanced educations. I did study history, and I really don’t want to go back to an era where immigrants are seen as less than, where children are punished for speaking their native language, where children with disabilities are labeled “morons’ or “retarded” just because they need extra help with reading. We certainly don’t need to go in reverse, just fine tune how we do things now.
And to solely blame teachers for these problems is just pointless–they usually are doing the best they can to deal with the parameters they are given on a daily basis. Anti-teacher rhetoric is all about politics, not problem solving. Teachers, contrary to popular wishes, are not Gods or Supernatural Beings able to contort themselves into pretzels or work 24 hours a day or make children of parents who suck not suck. They have to do the best they can.
Thinker, your response resorts to misrepresentation of my views to knock down straw men or to justify personal attacks on my ignorance, callousness, etc.
One, you falsely claim that I call for the elimination of Head Start. In fact, I write that it has produced only short-term—the key word is “short-term”—academic results. The paragraph heading clearly indicates that I am calling for the elimination of early childhood education. The best that can be said of any longer-term benefits of Head
Start is that participation correlates with a reduced likelihood of criminal difficulties.
Two, you falsely imply that eliminating these three programs would increase class size. Students from dual-language programs would become part of the regular student body, with dual-language instructors retained or replaced to teach regular classes of the same size. Students assisted by special reading instructors are part of regular classes.
(In these and later remarks you imply that a program is justified by the fact that its personnel have education [even advanced degrees], expertise, or experience. I do not believe that public education is or should be an entitlement program for educators, not even for those with such qualifications.)
Three, you falsely claim that I believe that these programs are funded by federal stimulus funds. I neither write nor imply anything of the kind. I write that, when federal stimulus funds, some of which go to education, cease, the state will have to make cuts is education, of which these are candidates.
Four, you falsely claim that these three programs (I exclude Head Start, which you insert) are “REQUIRED” be federal law. In fact, all are programs established by state laws and thus subject to the discretion of the governor and the legislature. If, as you write, federal law required early childhood education, Denish would not be campaigning for it.
Five, you falsely imply that I do not know that dual-language programs are temporary. In fact, I write about the students having difficulty when they enter regular classes.
Six, you falsely argue that students need dual-language programs because they cannot learn “content” and English at the same time. Your argument was successfully rebutted years ago. In the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century, millions and millions of immigrants learned content and English in the earliest grades without the aid of dual-language instruction (and without reading specialists or early childhood education). Only out of ignorance about the history of public education or a special interest in increasing educational employment, would you urge this program to do what the public schools did well without it and on a large scale a century ago.
Seventh, and last, you falsely insinuate that I favor the education of only English-speaking students. Elsewhere and, by implication in my comments about the badness of dual-language education, I express great concerned about the education of all children and about the failure of public education to do a better job of educating non-English-speaking students. The idea that only programs dedicated to minorities can provide them with a good education is belied by the facts. And the idea that these programs are doing much good is refuted by mediocre proficiency reading and math scores for many years.
Finally, I did no research for this column because, in addition to getting a masters degree in education, teaching, or being a civic activist in education for nearly half a century, I have read in this field and talked with educators throughout that period. Special-interest literature in defense of these programs abounds, and any special-interest advocate of them can cite them. Independent studies, including government studies, some on the Internet, others tucked away in college and university libraries, tell a different story.
Cut early childhood education? Dr. Hays, what recent research can you cite that demonstrates early childhood education “programs produce only short-term improvements in academic performance”? With all due respect, your three suggestions, especially with regard to early childhood development, are dramatic changes in policy that should be supported by more than what appears to be off-the-cuff commentary.
The next bubble to burst is the bond market. Harrisburg, PA (the capitol) just defaulted on its municipal bonds.
The problem of figuring out revenue allocation for education in New Mexico is going to be solved for us by the exogenous forces of the economy and the bond market. Soon, it will be revealed, that this is a macro problem not endemic to NM.
The real problem with giving water to a dehydrated man is that it is like giving drugs to an addict. The guy thinks that water is something he just has to have, that he should be able to get as much as he thinks he needs to quench his thirst, given how it flowed from his tap freely forever until he got lost in the desert. Now WE are supposed to support his bloated demands for water? Where does it end? Quite frankly, it’s just knee jerk liberalism if we keep giving him water. Let him crawl out of the desert and pull himself up by the bootstraps to find his own water.
Wow. This has to be satire, akin to Jon Swift’s “A Modest Proposal’.
Eliminate Head Start (which by the way is not a state program, but a federally funded one), Dual Language and Reading Specialists? And then dump all the expertise held in those areas on a regular classroom teacher who already has 25-30 children in her classroom (another cost cutting measure). And, why? Because you have come to some kind of armchair authority’s conclusion that they “conspicuously failed to make a measurable, meaningful or lasting contribution commensurate with their costs.”?
You simply don’t know what you’re talking about. First of all, none of these programs are newly funded by the “Stimulus” and will continue to be funded through the Federal government because they are REQUIRED. Reading Specialists are Special Education teachers who make a huge difference in the lives of children with reading disbilities–they’re not just “doing what the regular classroom teacher should be doing”-it’s a Master’s level specialty. Dual language programs are transitional programs, not permanent ones, and until we change the constitutionally protected imperative to educate all children, not just English-speaking ones, we will have to deal with helping kids learn the language at the same time they learn content. And sorry, but Head Start (or it’s clones in early childhood education) is here to stay, based on decades of solid research that they are VERY effective. To get rid of these programs would be to go backwards, not forwards.
If I had wanted to hear an uninformed opinion from someone who apparently has no real connection to public education, i could have just asked that homeless guy at the bustop thing morning.
Remember that the budget for public education was already cut the previous year. Time to stop the cutting and find more revenue. Repeal the 2003 income and capital gains taxes for the wealthy. Any REAL patriot would be glad to pitch in and help at this time to support our state and our country.
The basic problems with the government employee stimulus recently passed by Congress is that it is like giving more drugs to an addicted person to tide them over until they can get clean. It just doesn’t work long term, the withdrawal (or death/bankruptcy) will happen sooner or later unless you raise taxes to continue to support the bloated level of government in place today around the country. State budgets have ballooned over the last decade, government employee pension plans have created huge future liabilities the current tax base cannot sustain without increasing taxes. To continue to keep the high level of governmnt employees in place by debt financing on all of us (read federal tax increases sooner or later) is the ultimate in stupidity. The states need to bite the bullet and either permanently reduce the size of government and their future liabilities, or increase taxes. Waiting around for some miracle economic growth spurt is ridiculous, especially with Obama (Mr. anti-business) and Pelosi/Reid in charge of the economy.