Wrecking Ball or Dynamite?

Seven years ago, George Bush's Department of Education drew up the demolition plans for our schools with "No Child Left Behind."  The crane with the wrecking ball in now in place, but now there is a race between Bush's "slow-death-by-testing" and Governor Schwarzenegger's dynamite, the proposed 11% across-the-board budget cut to our schools.

This month, teachers at my school sat through a briefing where got a doomsday glimpse of how Schwarenegger's budget mandates would tear our school apart, should the state legislature allow him.  In general, 80% of the cost of a school is paying for the people who work there.  An 11% cut would be almost entirely realized by eliminating the jobs of the people who work directly with our kids, especially teachers and support providers.

I teach in one of the most diverse communities in the nation.  The demographics span the American experience.  The income disparity runs from quite wealthy to very poor.  Along racial lines, we have roughly equal numbers of Latino, African-American, Asian and White students.  There are nearly 20 different primary languages spoken by students who attend our school.

Our principal was instructed to present the budget news to us as a menu of potential cuts.  We were asked, what programs could we live without?  For instance, we could cut library services.  (Libraries are so old-fashioned, anyways) or counseling services (middle school kids will just have to learn maturity on their own).  We could cut educational aides.  These are the people who give one-on-one support to English Language Learners (25% of our school population)  and kids with learning disabilities (5% of our population).

We could choose to live without campus security.  After all, by middle school, a thousand kids eating lunch with each other really should know how to be nice to each other.  Never mind that our campus security folks also serve as tutors, backup counselors, big-brother or big-sister, and sometimes provide the first smile of the day.

I suppose if we wanted to, we could increase class sizes a little more (35 teenagers in one classroom isn't already enough), or reduce prep periods for teachers.  The test-performance mandates which threaten to have our school taken over haven't been amended, but nobody's telling us that we get a free pass on that.

All I know is this.  The politicians love blaming the failure of our schools on teachers.  They love writing "accountability" measures into the law.  But where is the accountability for the politicians who would force our schools to even consider such institutional devastation?

Wrecking Ball or Dynamite?  Make way for the strip mall.