<p><strong>New America Media</strong></p>
<p> During his State of the State address, Jerry Brown alluded to the deep spending cuts ahead as he tries to eliminate Californiaās $25 billion budget deficit. He also made it clear that the cuts will be much, much worse if voters donāt approve (or arenāt even allowed to vote on) a $12 billion tax extension to fund public schools.</p>
<p> As a high school teacher in a low-income school, I know what the best-case scenario means: more cuts to education that we can ill afford. As for the worst-scenario, state Treasurer Bill Lockyer laid that out in a recent speech in Berkeley: without the tax extension Brown is seeking, the school year might have to be cut by six weeks.</p>
<p> Californians invariably put public schools at the top of their list of things we need to improve. Yet with every doomsday budget passed, education is among the first areas to be slashed. Cutting education further would be like kicking a dead horseāa horse that died decades ago, and all thatās left to boot around are the bones.</p>
<p> Let me tell you how it looks to educators down here in the bone yard as we contemplate the possibility of an even shorter academic year.</p>
<p> Because of how education is run in this country, and because social services are sorely lacking in our low-income communities, every year our students come to school further and further behind. We scramble to teach more than a yearās worth of material in nine months. Sometimes, we succeed. But then the kids have summer break, and during those three months, they forget the concepts weāve worked hard to teach them.</p>
<p> So we spend much of the next school year catching them from what they forgot during the summer, only to have them forget it again. The problem is worse, of course, for students who donāt speak English at home.</p>
<p> Equally challenging are the behavioral problems that result from students having so much time off during the summer. The biggest difficulty inner-city teachers face is classroom management. Getting kids to sit quietly in their seats to read, and to treat each other with respect, is not easy. Thus, the hardest period of the school year is September and October, when students are still hyped up over whatever they did on the concrete streets all summer. It takes weeks to get them to calm down and focus.</p>
<p> For these reasons, the latest movement in education is toward year-round schooling. Just last week, for example, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles proposed adding another 20 days to the parochial school calendar, giving the cityās Catholic schools one of the longest academic years in the country.</p>
<p> The idea of cutting six weeks from a school year that needs to be extended isnāt a move backwards; itās falling back dead.</p>
<p> Itās worth remembering that when rankings come out highlighting the superior education systems in nations like South Korea, oftentimes these countries have year-round schools. In addition, teachers in these countries are considered to be among the most important professionals in society, and they are compensated accordingly.</p>
<p> In his State of the Union address, President Obama acknowledged this global reality, saying, āIn South Korea, teachers are known as āNation Builders.ā Here in America, itās time we treated the people who educate our children with the same level of respect.ā Though itās nice to hear proclamations like Obamaās, frankly, every president in my lifetime has said something along these lines.</p>
<p> If we want our teachers to be āNation Builders,ā we have to make teaching a lucrative career. The president called upon young people to become teachers, but the sad reality of our broken education system today is that he might as well been asking them to take on a career of scrubbing toilets.</p>
<p> When I ask my 150 high school students, āWho wants to be a teacher,ā guess how many raise their hands? None. They see the rundown cars in the staff parking lot; Americaās youth arenāt interested in a job where all you can afford to drive is a used 2000 Saturn SC-1. You canāt build a nation with pity, and unfortunately, thatās how most peopleāeven young peopleāview public school teachers. Upon learning Iām a high school teacher, I canāt tell you how many people have responded, āOh, Iām sorry.ā</p>
<p> At the federal and state level, if we are serious about improving education, we should be adding days to the school year. And we should be turning teaching into a profession people respect. In our society, that means money. Yet a shorter school year means a further shrinking of our already humble paychecks.</p>
<p> We must put a halt to chopping up the corpse that is public education. Thereās nothing left as it is.</p>
<p></p>
Category