Goodbye, education

Let us put ourselves in the shoes of Arnold Schwarzenegger, the governor who inherited a tremendous deficit in California’s budget and has already had to give unpaid leave to government employees. There is, of course, no easy answer to the problem of the deficit, but Schwarzenegger has made a terrible mistake.

In the midst of his budget cuts, he has, in his infinite wisdom, cut $6 billion from the K-14 education funding. The California education system is not healthy to begin with, and as an education major I am infuriated by this.

I understand that all public industries have to accept cutbacks in a recession, and education is not exempt. But funding for education took far too deep a cut.

The rationale is that education is the least necessary program when compared to health care and welfare. Once again, education is viewed as the poor man’s piece of public funding. But politicians continue to ignore the long-term effects of poor education.

To show these effects, it is necessary to develop a scenario. With the school year approaching and the budget cuts in full effect, several programs will obviously be scrapped. Los Angeles Unified School District has already cut summer school. So kids who need extra attention, to keep them from being “left behind,” have been partly given up on.

But what else will come? What if technical classes, like machine shop, are cut?
Students who may not be suited for higher education are now left in the dark. Without practical, technical or vocational education, there will be higher dropout rates and more students being held back. So what happens to these students?

The answer is simple. These people will inevitably be thrown into the welfare system. Without any of these skills and no high school equivalency, they have no other option. So they become a bigger strain on the public budget.

Another way to look at the issue is to think about how much money the state spends to educate students through high school, compared to welfare. Usually public education consists of a little more than a decade of funding. The goal is that after the students graduate high school, they will have the means to provide for themselves, or continue with their education.

By cutting the budget by such a large margin, and, therefore, cutting these marginal programs, the chances these students will be able to provide for themselves is slim. So instead of providing for a decade of education funding, the state could potentially end up writing welfare checks for the rest of these citizens’ lives. It is just another example of the old adage “Give a man a fish, and he will eat for a day. Teach that man to fish, and he will eat for a lifetime.”

As a nation we have to stop downplaying the importance of education for all of our country’s citizens. It is important to sustain our funding for education. Otherwise, we’ll end up creating a dangerously under-educated populace without the skills to stay ahead in the future global economic climate.