This is the Courant story, and this is the situation:
Hartford has under-performing, low-resource schools already. What do you think the elimination of so many positions will accomplish? Forty-seven of those eliminations come from consolidating four schools, but the rest?
I’ve been in Connecticut for 30 years now, and I wonder: How many generations of Hartford students need to bear the brunt of this kind of thing before we figure it out.
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“… the state and the city has flat-funded the school system’s general operating budget for eight straight years…”
There’s your problem.
It doesn’t help that over the past five years Congress has cut K-12 education funding to the States by about 20%. And Connecticut lost millions when Obama signed The Every Child Succeeds Act. (Apparently Connecticut schools have yet to achieve “rock bottom” status.) Things could be worse for Connecticut. The funding caps, (that are essentially funding cuts), in that Act cost New York $60.9 million. Michigan and Pennsylvania are losing $24 million.
The doom and gloom of deficit hucksters…“we must act now to save our children’s futures”…are, in fact, contributing in a significant way to the destruction of those futures.
Right? And always, always, always we choose to act in the short term and not think long. So we’re going to launch another generation of kids out into the world without properly funding their public education. Bless our hearts.
Caught up with some Dean Baker yesterday, who put his talent for clear and concise analysis to work on the issue:
Baker says we shouldn’t be paying any attention to the deficit hawks. Unfortunately, we don’t have much say in the matter.