A Teachable Moment

While the Boston School Department’s budget crisis ensured that some jobs would be cut, the numbers announced by Superintendent Carol Johnson last week are staggering. A full 900 positions will be eliminated, including 403 in teaching. This translates to a six-percent reduction in the city’s teaching staff and a corresponding increase in class sizes, just as City Hall was turning its focus to boosting school performance. The city cannot look to the state for help, as Governor Deval L. Patrick ’78 has promised to hold education spending constant, but not to increase it for struggling districts.

Therefore, the federal government is the only actor capable of offsetting the cuts. However, a vigorous push from Senate moderates Ben Nelson and Susan Collins may keep the feds from helping Boston schools by slashing $40 billion in state aid from the federal stimulus bill. Such Congressional politicking should not be allowed to damage our nation’s public schools. The stimulus package must include enough money to at least partially salvage these jobs and those in other struggling school districts. When state and municipal budgets cannot sustain our public-school system, it is the obligation of the president and Congress to step in and help, even if that requires President Obama and the Democratic leadership to defy Nelson and Collins’ pressure. The alternative is just too dire.

There are obvious reasons to sustain school districts. Obviously, no one wants to increase class sizes or the number of teachers on the unemployment rolls. But education cuts hurt society in subtler ways as well. They can undermine the long-term prosperity of the nation, denying the America of 10 or 20 years from now the well educated workforce it will need. Harvard economics professors Claudia Godin and Lawrence Katz have estimated that increasing education led to a 0.37-percent rise in productivity among American workers since 1915. Education cuts threaten to stifle this growth and jeopardize American productivity and long-run economic expansion. This effect could be particularly disastrous given that local political factors often prevent education cuts from being easily reversed. If shrinking budgets like those being implemented by the Boston School Department take effect during this recession and are not ended once it ends, the effect on productivity could be devastating.

Federal assistance will be critical in addressing shortfalls like these, but school districts should also find more creative ways to avoid deficits. The recession should provide an opportunity for administrators to go beyond the tried-and-true remedies of property-tax hikes and layoffs. New techniques, including efficiency analyses of individual schools, are needed. Moreover, the recession should spur those outside the public-school system to think of ways they can help. Students, at Harvard and elsewhere, should view the budget shortfalls as a call to serve their communities by volunteering at schools. Private foundations should also look inward and begin working to rebuild the American education system. It will take more than government to lift our schools out of this slump, and everyone must begin to do their share.