Dems' Public School Bailout Gets An "F"
Apparently Washington didn’t learn anything from the New Jersey taxpayer revolt last week. Rather than allow local schools to make austere but necessary cuts to their budgets, Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) has proposed a $23 billion bailout for public schools across the nation. Democrats seem to favor the idea, and even conservative Republicans like Senator Shelby (R-Alabama) are considering supporting the bill.
We’ve seen this movie before. Last year’s stimulus bill provided over $100 billion in aid to local school districts. All that the aid did was prevent districts from having to make cuts that were necessary to balance their budgets. With stimulus money running out this year, districts have had to begin making cuts. In my district on Long Island, that meant the teacher’s union agreeing to a temporary freeze in pay increases as well as elimination of several staff members including the $47,000 position for the district’s “transportation consultant” (why a small district with only several thousand students needed a transportation consultant remains to be seen).
Districts across the nation, from Texas to California, have had to layoff teachers and make cuts to funding. As painful as they have been, cuts are critical to rebalancing school district’s budgets so that they will be sustainable in the years ahead. When times were good, districts ignored fiscal responsibility, hiring more teachers than were necessary and giving more in the way of pay hikes than could be afforded. Such is the case with New York City. Mayor Bloomberg wanted to impress voters by creating low class sizes, some with under 20 students. He then wooed the teacher’s union by increasing teacher salaries 50% since he took office. Now that is proving to be unsustainable. New York City will have to make layoffs, and freeze salary increases.
All that a public school bailout will do is delay the inevitable at a cost of $23 billion. It won’t just be used to stop layoffs or cuts to school programs. Teachers’ unions will insist that the money be used to unfreeze their pay hikes (they did with the stimulus last year). Costs will continue to rise. Next year at this time, the money from Harkin’s proposed bailout will run out and school districts will be looking to finally enact the cuts that they were going to make this year. Perhaps another bailout will be proposed. After a while, such federal money will become routine and local school districts will be addicted to federal aid just as they have become addicted to state aid.
Public education is the lifeblood of America, and every student deserves a great education. But public education must be delivered at a sustainable cost. Continuous bailouts will only saddle our children with an even larger federal debt: darkening their future far more than a district’s proposed cuts will.