President George W. Bush has been adept at convincing Americans he is acting to improve public schools—when in fact he won't even support full funding for his own education law. On September 22, Americans are taking the deplorable state of public schools into their own hands. More than 4,000 groups across the country are hosting house parties to discuss education. Borosage offers some ideas for what should be on their agenda.
Robert L. Borosage is co-director of the Campaign for America's Future, which has joined with MoveOn.org, the National Education Association, the NAACP Voter Fund, the Hispanic Institute and ACORN to organize the September 22 mobilization on education.
When the presidential campaign focuses more on Swift boat lies about the past than hard truths about the future, the American people pay the price. Amid the exchange of poisonous darts and hostile fire, neither candidate has much hope of calling attention to an issue and gaining a mandate to act.
Consider the challenge of educating the next generation of children. Everyone understands that providing a quality public education is vital—to our democracy, to our prosperity, to preparing children to be good neighbors and good citizens.
Yet, today our schools are battered by what might be considered a perfect storm of tumultuous changes that are simply ignored in the national debate.
A Report Card On America's Schools
More kids than ever will flood into our public schools over the next decade. More than one in five will grow up in poverty. An increasing number won’t speak English in their homes. We know that adequate nutrition, health care and preschool are essential for children to come to school ready to learn. Yet quality preschool for 3- and 4-year-olds is hard for most families to locate and afford; Head Start doesn’t even reach 40 precent of those eligible.
That flood of children will pour into schools that are already overcrowded and in need of repair. One in three schools now use trailers or portable classes of some sort. The poorest children suffer the worst facilities, most crowded classrooms, most outmoded equipment, and, too often, the least-skilled teachers.
We’re facing the largest wave of retirements of experienced teachers ever. Meanwhile, young teachers are leaving at alarming rates. As the Economic Policy Institute reports, teachers' pay simply is not keeping pace with other occupations that require similar credentials.
Fourteen million kids go home alone after school—making after-school programs a necessary service. Plus, after-school programs yield better classroom performance and less crime. Yet these programs were among the first to be cut in the recent budget crunch.
In a globally competitive economy, college education is increasingly essential. But tuitions and other costs are soaring, and neither family income nor grant and loan programs are keeping up. Most states are failing to keep college affordable, according to the recent study by the nonpartisan National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education.
Time For National Leadership
Will this country step up to meet the challenge of providing the next generation with a quality education? This should be a centerpiece of the presidential campaign, but goes virtually unheard. President Bush blithely promotes his education reforms as he does the war in Iraq, painting a fantasy world where everything is improving and on track. All that’s needed, he suggests, is a little more high-stakes testing for preschoolers and high schoolers, and a bit more money for community colleges.
In reality, No Child Left Behind reforms are condemning schools as failures but denying them the resources needed to fix the problems. And while testing the progress of children is a good idea—it is simply cruel to require kids to jump the same hurdles while ignoring that some come to school in Nikes ready to soar and others come shackled from the start.
John Kerry has a more ambitious program for the schools—offering incentives for those who will teach in tough schools, promising significant help in making college affordable, adding more resources to health care and preschool. But here as elsewhere, he’s simply been unable to get heard over the crossfire of negative charges.
Washington's Broken Promises
Meanwhile—in Washington—President Bush and Republicans in control of the Congress continue to break their own promises. The current education bill shortchanges the promise on funding No Child Left Behind by more than $9 billion. It stiffs the congressional promise on special education by more than $10 billion. It freezes the size of Pell grants, losing ground to tuition increases. And worse—the president’s budget calls for cuts across the board in education starting next year, right after the election.
Can citizens rouse the country when their leaders fail to? On September 22, teachers, parents and citizens will join in a remarkable mobilization on public education—organizing more than 4,000 meetings in homes, schools and church basements. They’ll discuss the scope of the challenge, petition Congress and the president to keep their promises, and follow up with a call-in day to make their voices heard.
It is simply bizarre that the presidential campaign has focused more on what happened in Vietnam 35 years ago than on the pressing needs our children’s schools face over the next few years. But with the president’s campaign going down and dirty from the start and the Kerry campaign unable to rise above the muck, America’s future has been lost in the din.
