Gerald Herbert/AP Photo
Andriel Waters waves after receiving her diploma from the New Orleans Charter Science and Math High School, May 27, 2020. The New Orleans public-school system was largely converted to charters in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Public education was pummeled during the last recession, and never bounced back. States cut budgets for public schools drastically, and they never recovered. Even ten years after the worst of the financial crisis, state spending on public colleges and universities and even K-12 schools remained well below historic levels. And when the economy finally recovered, what we got instead of expanded budgets was the explosion of student debt in the college and university system and the rise of cost-saving charter schools in primary education.
As we stare down another major recession, which by many accounts will be far worse than the last one, we’re headed that way again. For a number of states, one- and two-year budgets are due to be finalized by July 1, the beginning of the new fiscal year. Among them: Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Vermont, and Wisconsin. California, staring down a $54 billion budget gap, has a June 15 deadline. Congress has yet to approve more than token aid for states; those budget cuts are going to be treacherous.
Broadly speaking, states spend money on two things: health care and education. And while there have been some cuts to health care, as in the case of Andrew Cuomo’s Medicaid cuts in New York, the pandemic necessitates a certain level of commitment there. So, by process of elimination, it’s again education that is primed to take the brunt of it.
This public-education teardown sounds like a Republican austerity agenda, but it’s not: Democrats control both houses of the New York State Legislature and the governor’s mansion.
Inexplicably, both red and blue states are already doing it preemptively. In New York, perhaps the most flagrant example of this, Gov. Cuomo has been signaling massive cuts to education for weeks. Brooklyn College, part of the public City University of New York system, recently announced that anticipation of the coming budget crisis alone would require academic departments to reduce their course offerings by 25 percent. That will mean firing large numbers of professors, many of whom are already notoriously underpaid adjuncts, and swelling class sizes dramatically. Mass firings have already taken place at other campuses: At CUNY’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, there have already been over 400 layoffs.
Meanwhile, Cuomo recently signed over a “reimagining” of the state’s public-education system to the Gates Foundation, a longtime champion of charterization and technologization of the classroom, with a robust record of failures when it comes to education reform. Cuomo also tapped Eric Schimdt, former CEO of Google, to head up a blue-ribbon commission for reimagining of social services, including public education. Schmidt is a business executive with training in computer science and no meaningful education background. It’s easy to forget that these same Silicon Valley luminaries championed charter schools, online education, and “massive open online courses” (remember MOOCs?) as a cost-saving measure after the last recession. Those all failed, but it’s the thought of privatization that counts.
This public-education teardown sounds like a Republican austerity agenda, but it’s not: Democrats control both houses of the New York State Legislature and the governor’s mansion. And New York City is the financial epicenter of the entire planet, with exceptional real estate wealth to boot. There’s an astonishing amount of money available and ample public support for taxing the rich to fund public education. Still, this all-Democratic leadership regime says there’s no alternative but to bulldoze education. “Any additional money we spend increases the cuts to school aid, local government and hospitals. It’s a zero sum game,” said Cuomo, falsely, this week.
Red states have their own indefensible cuts in the works. In Ohio, resistance hero Republican Mike DeWine, the state’s governor, recently announced hundreds of millions of dollars in education cuts, including $300 million to K-12, and another $110 million to colleges and universities (the state Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, presiding over some of the biggest COVID-19 outbreaks in the nation, will escape cuts, however). Meanwhile, DeWine is sitting on a rainy day fund of $2.7 billion that could cover those education cuts almost seven times over, which he hasn’t even touched. What day is rainier than a global pandemic that has killed more Americans than any single event since World War II?
It’s a similar story elsewhere: In New Mexico, they’re cutting K-5 funding. In Colorado, lawmakers cut public-college funding by 58 percent.
Pay close attention to what gets zeroed out to balance the books. You’ll hear little about cutting the lacrosse team or the football program or the renovations to the 100,000-seat stadium. Rather, it’s the history department and the arts curriculum. In New Jersey, where the state has dished out 50 percent cuts to certain colleges, Kean University responded with the elimination of degree programs in music, sustainability sciences, theater, and economics. Missouri has pledged to withhold at least tens of millions from its public-university system; at Missouri Western State University, they cut their history, political science, sociology, economics, and music departments.
McConnell has expressed a preference for widespread state bankruptcy over the possibility of sending them the same federal monies that went to large corporations without quibble.
Those decisions at the college and university level owe a debt of gratitude to George W. Bush. When he signed the No Child Left Behind Act for K-12 schools in early 2002, he emphasized the primacy of the high-stakes standardized test. That law, written without the input of public schoolteachers, was sold as insurance that marginalized communities were not being ignored. But it predictably did nothing to address the fundamental inequity issues due to simple lack of funding. Schools concentrated their scant resources on math and English to get their students above highly punitive testing thresholds, and eliminated history, art, music, phys ed, and other subjects. Remember, too, it was the Bush administration that encouraged Louisiana to use Hurricane Katrina to overhaul the New Orleans public-school system and convert it to all charters, which they happily obliged.
Where Bush left off, Obama picked up. Many public-education advocates had hoped the new president would address the fundamental inequities of funding K-12 education and end the ineffective testing obsession. Instead, on the heels of the last economic crisis, his administration made test scores even more punitive, pushing states to evaluate teachers via their students’ results and to tie funding to those assessments. Arne Duncan, Obama’s education secretary, became a face of the charter school movement.
While that emphasis on charterization and testing in K-12 changed the contour of public primary schooling, the subsequent higher-education policy delivered us the student loan debt crisis, all $1.7 trillion of it and counting. With diminished funding, tuition soared and for-profit colleges multiplied, ballooning individual student debt loads. The previous recession enfeebled our public-education sector dramatically; now, with Republicans at the helm in the Senate, they’re taking up the mantle one more time.
Part of this explains why Mitch McConnell and friends are so hesitant to sign a bill giving aid to states. McConnell has expressed a preference for widespread state bankruptcy over the possibility of sending them the same federal monies that went to large corporations without quibble. Observers have pointed out that that neglect would hurt red states as much as blue states. But McConnell would be perfectly happy to see public education founder no matter where it is. It’s long been understood that the latter-day Republican Party is basically opposed to public education insofar as it exists as a public good. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos represents the most aggressive version of this, a public-education secretary who is quite clearly an enemy of the form.
Of course, it’s indefensible for McConnell to withhold money to states, and it is necessary that aid be passed urgently before the country plunges into a depression. It’s indefensible, too, for Cuomo and his Democratic majority to not raise money for education independently via new taxes or bond rounds, to circumvent deep and lasting cuts. And if state-level Democrats or a Republican-controlled Senate won’t deliver, it becomes vital that the next Democratic president does. Expanding public education massively, from funding for schools to teacher pay to student loan forgiveness, was an essential component of the Sanders presidential platform. The coronavirus crisis has shown that to be a needed plank for Democrats going forward, one that Joe Biden should adopt. Without it, public schooling, already limping into the 2020s, may not be recognizable in the post-corona era.
