5/23/08: Spend all we have for an educated society

Town councils throughout central Connecticut are hard at work, proposing and taking votes on municipal budgets. Many towns have rejected proposed budgets at least once, and most residents, given the opportunity, have cited the cost in taxes as “too high,” suggesting that councils cut programs and services rather than passing the budgets. A large portion of municipal budgets goes to public education.

Boards of education and public schools in general have been targeted in much of the criticism leveled against budget proposals. Letters to the editor, calls to Sound Off and word on the street show that some people feel too much is being made of education spending.

I agree.

But where they want to cut immediate personal expenses, I want to increase them — increasing, in turn, our common investment in our schools and students and our ability to look to the future with hope rather than fear.

Cutting education budgets now will widen the income gap between the haves and have-nots a generation from now. It will encourage Americans’ ignorance of world affairs in a time when none of us can afford ignorance. We will become stupider.

We shouldn’t “budget” education. There’s no maximum amount of energy or effort we should spend in educating our students, and there’s no maximum amount of money we should spend.

There is a point after which more money won’t help students to learn better or teachers to teach better, but up until this point, I say we should spend all we have in the pursuit of creating an educated society. Everything else follows from this.

I’ve heard complaints from taxpayers who insist that if they don’t have children, they shouldn’t have to pay for public schools.

This argument sounds reasonable. It might actually be reasonable — if each taxpaying family lived in a self-contained biosphere.

In a world in which we interact with each other on a daily basis, however, and especially in a country as diverse in ethnic and social background, household income and opinion as America, we have to invest in each other in order to secure our personal futures. We can’t go it alone. It’s not only ill-advised, self-aggrandizing and miserly: It’s impossible.

It’s impossible for us to live together domestically — in our homes and America — without depending on one another, and it’s become just as impossible to isolate ourselves from the rest of the world, as well. We need education to be competitive in a global market — but more than that, as educated citizens, we are more prepared to encounter those from other cultures with a priority on understanding, communication and cooperation rather than on one-upmanship, fear or automatic aggression.

Left without the benefits of truly great public schools, students from lower-income areas don’t just disappear. They operate within our society just as the privileged do. If we want to cultivate a society we can be proud of, we need to attend to these members as well.

There are ways to invest in public education without breaking into our personal piggy banks. Teach for America, a nonprofit organization that places high-achieving college graduates in underserved communities across the nation, has recently been shown to have a greater positive impact than expected, considering that Teach for America teachers are novices and usually only spend two years in their assigned locations. The organization’s success is admirable.

But Teach for America teachers are volunteers, and though we can rely on them to teach our children well, they can’t bear the responsibility of an entire country. They can supplement our efforts, but they can’t replace them.