Last year, when I dropped my son off at school, my first question to the staff was “What’s changed?”
After the cuts came down, students felt a palpable loss across the board. We can enumerate the problems with leaving any school budget thousands of dollars short: less teachers per class, tired adults carrying more of the load, less electives, desolate classrooms and hallways, less people for communities to turn to, less resources, less … of everything really. I and hundreds of others spent the summer advocating to stave off disastrous budget cuts to our schools, including a rumored $500K to my son’s school. I spent time in dozens of classrooms across the city and, while everyone generally seemed like they were doing what they could with what they had, there was also a sense that they could do much better if they had more.
And that’s the thing with these millions and billions of dollars in budget cuts. Politician math is when they demand that schools run the same activities for less.
The slide towards corrosive school funding has been lubricated for decades now. Researchers often point to the A Nation at Risk report from the early 1980s as an inflection point for American schools. The commission that authored this report used the “failing schools” narrative as a rallying cry to shift the purpose to accountability and austerity. Rather than advocate for holistic learning experiences that create a well-educated citizenry, these initiatives insisted that schools need mainly to focus on achievement, particularly in core content areas. By the time the No Child Left Behind Act came around, these ideas took hold as a bipartisan impetus. 20 years later, and phrases like “back to basics,” “classic liberalism,” and “phonics” have become boons for politicians looking to strip schools from much needed resources.
At some point, society must ask itself, “if your budget reflects your values, then why do you not value education?”
We also spent the last half-century pulling together the social safety net into our schools. Now, our poorly funded institutions are also child care centers, health care centers, community centers, food centers, emergency shelters, and so much more. In New York City, this also doesn’t bode well with the multiple crises happening here and beyond. In a city with 430,000 millionaires (the most of any city in the world), the current mayor has asserted that New York will be destroyed by the migrant crisis with little evidence other than poor management and lack of wealth distribution. If the city and state taxed the millionaires equitably for the resources they use up from the city, we’d make a serious dent in whatever deficits the city faces. Also, since the city has lost about 10% of its population since 2020, then it stands to reason that we have more than enough housing to bring in asylum seekers and alleviate the pre-existing housing crisis for the rest of us.
Meanwhile, half-empty condominiums continue to pop up along main streets, blocking views we came to recognize. They obstruct our views and our ability to sustain the city as they won’t pay their fair share.
NYC deserves much better. Rather than the deficit narrative embraced across the political system, we need values that point to getting a plethora of resources for everyone. We need schools that can do more with more. If we have less students, it should mean that NYC public schools can do more with less students. When we think beyond our individual children and the advantages we’re trying to secure for just them, we’ll see a wide array of children who deserve their gifts to be augmented, cared for, and seen. If our society had even half the resilience and sense of justice that many of our children do, we’d be way better off.
However, I don’t wish to wait until the youth take charge of society. Adulting has a way of dampening the dreams of many. Mass cuts to social services are fodder for the abdication of society’s responsibility to the public good, however complicated. I don’t blame the whole administration, either, just the folks who think stripping schools of much-needed funds is a good idea. Of course, I’m fortunate to be part of a collective that has a plan for reimagining NYC’s work (in case someone tells you we never fought back). But we’re not fighting for frivolous reasons. We’re demanding great schools for everyone, because of the crises we see. Pundits say schools should fall by the wayside so we can keep funding for departments that keep us safe, neglecting the fact that schools are one of the few institutions that proactively keep us safe.
I’m ever hopeful that the next time I visit a school and ask “what’s changed?” the staff would say “everything” in the best ways possible. That’s math I can get behind.
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