School districts around the country, forced to resort to drastic money-saving measures, are warning hundreds of thousands of teachers that their jobs may be eliminated in June.
The districts have no choice, they say, because their usual sources of revenue ”” state money and local property taxes ”” have been hit hard by the recession. In addition, federal stimulus money earmarked for education has been mostly used up this year.
As a result, the 2010-11 school term is shaping up as one of the most austere in the last half century. In addition to teacher layoffs, districts are planning to close schools, cut programs, enlarge class sizes and shorten the school day, week or year to save money.
“We are doing things and considering options I never thought I’d have to consider,” said Peter C. Gorman, superintendent of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools in North Carolina, who expects to cut 600 of the district’s 9,400 teachers this year, after laying off 120 last year. “This may be our new economic reality.”
I’m feeling cranky this morning and reports like this don’t help. Fire administrators instead – cut back on mandatory reports by teachers and allow them to teach.
I’d love to have myself, or any other regular voter, get a crack at these budgets. What I see a lot of where I live are palaces for schools, with Olympic-size swimming pools, sports facilities that would make a small college blush, extravagant information technology investment and a lot of time teaching lurid topics and sociopolitical theories in which the government schools have no business dealing. And again, perhaps some have noted the scandal in the Lower Merion School Dstrict on Philadelphia’s Main Line, in which the school took illicit snapshots of students from their school-provided laptops. While that’s certainly scandal 1a, 1b is that the laptops were MacBooks – the most expensive laptop you can buy. And then, these people cry poverty and structure the cuts to punish the students and taxpayers as much as possible, almost in a fit of pique.
I believe successful teaching happens on an interpersonal level, even defined as the teacher interacting with the class as a whole, that is, it is a person-to-person exercise. Above some basic level, it’s not helped, and may be harmed, by CEO-office-style facilities and 24-inch flat panel LCD displays tuned to Facebook.
Phil,
Those school districts aren’t the ones suffering. The ones suffering are the ones with textbooks 20 years old, rent a pool at the dilapidated YMCA, have weeds in the high school football fields, and have classes of 30 share 5 computers each 5 years old. You crack the budgets of wealthy districts and they get all defensive, even though they generally have far more reserves.
As noted in scripture, our miserliness usually means we punish the poor. The wealthy know how to game the system.