UESF News |
|
UESF News
UESF Comments at Assembly
Hearing on Education Budget Cuts
August 4, 2009United Educators of San Francisco Executive Vice-President Linda Plack delivered the following comments about the impact of state education budget cuts on San Francisco schools on Tuesday, August 4th at a special hearing hosted by California Assembly members Tom Torlakson and Fiona Ma.
The Assembly Select Committee on Schools and Community hearing was titled "Cutting California's Future Short: California's Vision for Education and the Realities of State Budget Cuts.” A similar hearing was held August 5th in Los Angeles.
...Assemblyman Torlakson, Members of the Assembly, Ladies and Gentlemen,
My name is Linda Plack and I am the Executive Vice President of the United Educators of San Francisco. We represent over 6000 teachers and paraprofessionals in the San Francisco Unified School District as well as the sheriff’s 5Keys charter school.
I cannot say that I am happy to sit here and talk about the cuts that have been made to education. What has been done to our schools is without conscience and beyond reason.
I know many of you and I know that you are good people trying to perform a public service by serving in elective positions. But as legislators who participated in the creation of the state’s budget you have perpetuated a financial situation that was not created by the present economic crisis.
Although the recession and the national economic collapse that has gone on for less than a year, has brought us to the brink at this time, we have been heading in this direction for a long time. Before this budget cycle we had already stopped properly supporting our public schools. When I began my career, California was a model to the nation with excellent kindergarten through University pubic education. I would suggest to you that it was the engine that helped to create the economic strength and the wealth that we have enjoyed. But, somehow along the way we began to forget that the infrastructure of a strong public education system that produces an educated citizenry must be constantly nurtured and maintained.
Why couldn’t you hold your breath longer than the governor when he puffed out his cheeks and refused to reinstate the vehicle license fee? Why couldn’t you have spat back in the faces of legislators who said they would not raise taxes, then voted for substantial tax breaks to corporations, and told them that you would not make cuts to vital human services?
In San Francisco we have had 1046 lay off letters go out over the past two years. The fact that only two individuals have suffered lay off is no thanks to Sacramento. We have been saved by the people of San Francisco who put into practice Assemblyman Tom Ammiano’s legislation creating a Rainy Day fund that the school district could use when the state fails to allocate what we need.
Despite the saving of positions, the cuts to the district’s budget has meant that class sizes in elementary schools are already scheduled to go up by ten percent. In ninth grade math and English classes they will go up between 25 and 50% for next year.
Each increase means less time that an individual child can spend with his or her teacher. Each loss of individualization means that that there is a greater chance that a child will fail to understand, to learn, a key concept. Each time a key concept is missed, there is no building block for that child’s learning to advance. And when learning stagnates, children become frustrated. Frustrated children tend to act out and disrupt the class for the children who are still able to achieve and focus on their work. Each disruption of focus means it takes longer for the lessons to be absorbed and the child to move ahead.
When we do NOT meet the needs of our most vulnerable with hope and opportunity, we assure the continuous pipeline to our prisons, where I understand we spend more per year per prisoner than we do for our students.
When a problem, like a budget, is kicked down the road, or, as Darrell Steinberg put it, kicked down the alley, it means that it is not fixed and will persist. With education it is worse.
Children have developmental benchmarks that they pass as they mature. Teaching and learning are keyed to those benchmarks. If a student who is ready to grasp a concept fails to do so, “fixing” the budget, paying back the money, lowering the class size, bringing back the classroom aide, three years down the road does not help him or her. Getting the individualized instruction that is necessary to turn letters around must happen when its time has come, not three years later. Teachers know this. Parents know this.
Already this year we will feel it in a small way—ten percent here, fifty percent there—but the students will feel it and the effects will become the jackets that our children will wear all their lives. If you prevent them from learning now, many will ever make it up. Many will not be able to overcome the obstacles you can create.
San Francisco is not yet typical of the devastation that the current budget will wreak. We are not likely to feel the full brunt of that until next year. At that time, if the pattern is to continue, we will again see over 500 certificated lay-off notices and ten percent of that among our classified workers. We will have a few drops left in our rainy day barrel and some of those lay offs will be thwarted another year. But it is likely that a couple hundred teachers will lose jobs, class sizes will rocket up, services will come to a standstill or disappear, and people will start clawing and cannibalizing for money that they used to have.
That ten percent increased class size in elementary schools is likely to grow to 25%. Fewer kids will learn what they need to know when they need to know it. And three years from now, when education is supposed to be paid back the money we will have lost in the current budget, those kids will already have started down their stringent path through life, struggling against roots that buckle the smooth pavement they should have, catching their small feet in cracks that should never have been there, and fighting against brambles that cover their roadway and leave them bleeding from the thorns your budget will have set upon them.
Imagine if there was an “Education Cash For Clunkers” fund for teachers. How many outdated sets of textbooks would be traded in? How much antiquated science equipment, old computers, VCR’s, scratched blackboards, broken desks, broken playground equipment, would teachers give up for up-to-date tools to enhance their students’ learning?
Imagine if California lived up to democratic principles and allowed majority rule to raise taxes. Majority rule to pass a budget.
We must focus on alternative revenue sources and build around progressive taxation. We must reform the way that we budget for human services. We must focus on the 2/3 requirement for budget and taxation. We must revisit the restrictions on the taxation of commercial property in California. Thanks for coming.
Thanks for asking about the effects of what you have done. We need you to lead the efforts to reform the budget and for tax fairness.
