The furlough days in California, the shortened school year in Hawaii, minimum required hours in West Virginia fill K-12 teachers and administrators with gloom. Editorial after opinion piece describing the poor high school graduation statistics and increasing middle school drop-out rates lead to hand-wringing.
California middle school
And this week in California Jack Scott, community college chancellor, and Charles Reed, state universities chancellor, have chastised the state legislature and Congress for looking away when students pay $10 more per unit in community college fees and CSU student yearly fees have risen 19%–AND students still can’t get into classes needed for timely graduation.
Surely everyone knows the government’s problem: an inability to raise revenue, not only by cutting unnecessary spending but raising revenue from taxes. How is the country going to hire job seekers with the abilities needed for work in the U.S. economy without a strong education component?
One of the few areas where jobs were lost but soon recovered after 2009 is Silicon Valley. Those workers DID NOT finish their education with a high school diploma!
People still think manufacturing jobs will return. They think health and service jobs will be enough to put us back into the middle-class. It’s not going to happen. The only private industry that needs lots of brawn and a few college-grad engineer brains is the oil industry. The country better get used to the idea of education, both K-12 and college, and the funds needed to make public universities accessible to Americans.
In California, one conservative assemblyman, Tim Donnelly (San Bernardino) offered that “they’re whining about…more taxes to chase more business out of the state. You can’t have a high level of investment when you’ve killed off the golden egg.” This legislator thinks professors should be paid less and labor unions and trial lawyers reined in. See the San Francisco Chronicle “Chancellors blame campus woes on GOP” by Nanette Asimov, August 23, 2011.
There was no evidence in the quotation to support his positions and in fact California’s business relocations have been minimal. Joseph Vranich’s June 2011 blog post had counted 129 businesses relocating out of 3.2 million small businesses in the state in 2011. That hardly seems like the golden goose has flown away. We’re not talking corporations in this post for which no statistics were found in the search.
However, Jack Scott and Charles Reed are adamant about the difficulty of keeping faculty courted by other universities. Lower salaries are going to help retain faculty to teach the students who need to graduate?
One can read reports from both liberal and conservative education foundations and institutes galore to see improvement to K-12 academic growth. The uniform graduation rate that requires all states to report the number of students who graduate in four years with a standard high school diploma; the U.S. Department of Education agreement to give waivers to improve the process to close the gap between poor and well-off students; and schools that have managed to set in place extended days instead of furloughs and still keep the budget under control. Not many: 1000 of the 300,000 schools in the country, but a start.
If only the minority of legislators that look at the budget or debt-reduction plan in their hands could see the consequences of shortchanging students, K-12 and college, both immediately and long term.