According to the New York Daily News this morning, NY Chancellor Joel Klein is making some big cuts for next year--15,000 jobs, specifically, and most of them teachers. Class sizes will increase and some programs (no word on which ones) will get cut. "There's no way for me to sugarcoat the budget situation in??New York City," he explained.
We here at Fordham have been calling for some fat-trimming for some time now. Per that opinion, this decision is right on the money. (Eh! It's a pun!) I'm not going to rehash that argument. What I am curious about is the ratio of cuts to funds from, say, 2 or 3 years ago. Sure, no one wants to see art class and after school programs cut, but schools should be subject to the same rules as everyone else when it comes to the economy. This is the umpteenth time we've heard predictions of disaster due to budget cuts from teachers, unions, parents, legislators-you name it. But is it really disaster? Every year budgets go up for schools, at a much higher rate than inflation would deem necessary. Enrollment across the country is dropping (seriously, just Google "school enrollment"). So we cut back to the budgets of 2 or 3 years ago... that's still a whole lot of money. The moral of this story: schools are always and forever will be crying poverty. Just because everyone else is too doesn't mean we should pay them any more heed.
But there's something else going on here too--something I like to call Ostrich Syndrome. If we pretend we can keep operating at our current deficit indefinitely, then it must not exist! Hello? Didn't the risky investments of the last four years, the blossoming national debt, and the bottoming out housing market teach anybody anything? LAUSD recently decided to maintain its current staff and teacher numbers; it's a "calculated gamble," since next year's budget shortfall will be that much more astronomical. And that's the point: If we don't make some cuts now, we're only going to have to make bigger cuts later. What's easier to swallow? Increasing average class size now by 5 students or increasing it later by 10?
