California dreaming of school funds

Last Wednesday, thousands of trade union members and concerned parents walked through downtown Sacramento to California's state capitol building , joining six marchers on the last leg of their 365-mile, 48-day, protest walk up California's Central Valley to highlight the impact of education cuts in California. It was an event full of theatrics – a flag-flying flatbed truck at the head of the march blared the song California Dreaming from its speaker system; and on the Capitol's grounds a face-painted street theatre troupe from San Francisco did agitprop from the stage. But, beyond the spectacle, the walkers were highlighting an extremely important recalibration of state-resident relations in recent years: as local and state governments have haemorrhaged cash, so education spending – which eats up the bulk of local budgets – has been mauled. The estimates vary, but teachers' groups calculate that somewhere in the region of $18bn has vanished from school districts', colleges', and universities' budgets in California over the past several budget cycles. In the latest round of cuts, well over 20,000 teachers received pink slips, informing them they might not have jobs after schools open again following the summer break. While California is an extreme case, the numbers nationally are also pretty dismal. Somewhere between 150,000 and 300,000 teachers and school staff are likely to lose their jobs in the coming year as state and local budgets continue to implode and federal stimulus funds run out. Schools that have already pared arts, physical education, music instruction and other non-core requirement classes to the bone in recent years are now ending such programs entirely. Hawaii's schools are already operating on a four-day school week and other school districts are thinking of following suit. Class sizes are also increasing by leaps and bounds. So dire is the situation that Arne Duncan, Obama's education secretary, recently declared that America was facing an education emergency and urged Congress to find tens of billions of dollars to shore up the country's schools during the long, slow road back to economic health. But Congress, in an election year in which voters are concerned about the nation's spiralling budget deficit and the possibility of tax increases, and in the wake of the huge amount of political energy expended to pass healthcare reform, is unlikely to respond with much enthusiasm. After all, historically education has been seen as the purview of the states rather than the federal government. In the current post-financial-collapse era, however, localities and states have time and again been unwilling or unable to respond to the vast needs of the moment. Unable to run ongoing deficits, they have resorted to slash-and-burn spending cuts rather than trying to float their economies through counter-cyclical expenditures. Unwilling to take on a potent anti-tax movement – the movement that has fuelled the growth of the Tea Parties recently – many state legislators have instead signed onto a rigid No New Taxes pledge that all-but-guarantees an collapse of vital public sector services. Which brings us to the crux of the issue. What we are seeing today, not only as regards the provision of education, but in a host of other arena – mental health services, community medical clinics, homeless shelters and the like – represents a crisis of federalism, a moment at which the junior partners in the state-federal relationship are losing their will and their ability to fund basic daily operations. And, more intangibly, it represents a crisis of community. California and the other states' dysfunction presents a huge challenge to the federal government. Should Congress turn a blind eye and let the states sink or should it step up to the plate with a necessary, but unpopular, rescue package? Slowly, but inevitably, the feds are being drawn into the mix here. After all, if California, the most populous, most affluent, state in the union can't produce well-rounded, well-educated high school graduates, down the road that will have huge economic implications for the country as a whole. If a host of locales around the country opt for a four-day school week, that poses a tremendous risk to the country's long-term well-being. In an era in which high-paying jobs, investment, prestige and ultimately power gravitate to the countries that best educate their future workforces, America would be playing with fire were it to allow state and local education systems to implode. My guess is that Congress will resort to half-measures here. Unwilling to countenance the scale of educational disasters currently unfolding, it will send some more money states' ways; as a result, come September not all of the teachers currently pink-slipped will ultimately be without work, but it won't send enough money to ward off all the pain. Over the coming years, for the pain to end state economies have to rebound, and, at the same time, the anti-tax brigades will have to be challenged by courageous state and local politicians: quite simply, without an adequate, and fair, tax base, community services will continue to disintegrate and schools will continue to have to scrimp to provide things as basic as paper and pens to their students.