“Since the end of the recession in June 2009, the economy lost over 300,000 local education jobs. The loss of education jobs stands in stark contrast to every other recovery in recent years, under Republican and Democratic administrations.”
For a time, the loss of teaching jobs was held in abeyance by the so-called stimulus, enacted by a strictly Democratic vote in 2009. As federal funds ran out and the Republicans who controlled the House in the wake of the 2010 elections put efforts to curb the debt atop of their own recovery agenda, the recovery has slowed and job increases have been paltry and confined to the private sector.
Meanwhile, China and India continue to pour resources into education, far outpacing in the US in producing college graduates with training in Science, Technology, and Math (STEM) degrees. Charles Blow's column proceeds to point out the consequences of these divergent paths for the next generation of Americans. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that these consequences are hardly hearty or worthy of national pride.
In 1957, I was a fourth grade student when the USSR launched Sputnik, the ICBM capable of carrying nuclear warheads from one side of the world to the other (in addition to winning the race for space). The US response included passage of the National Defense Education Act, a program that was in place nine years later when I borrowed money from the early student loan program to pay for what my (athletic) scholarship didn't cover at Whittier College. The interest on NDEA loans was 3%; the terms of repayment were such that if I chose to enter the education field, 10% of what I owed would be canceled from the total I borrowed up to five years or half of the value of the loan.
This is worth mentioning because hundreds of thousands of Baby Boomers like me benefited from this federal program. That this program was part of national security seems, in retrospect, to make good sense (though at the time it struck me as odd to couple defense-spending with subsidies to college students). The contrast today could not be more stark. As college has become far more necessary for economic survival for today's high school graduates, and the costs of attendance have escalated at a rate the rivals only the growth in health-care spending relative to the cost of living, the attitude of lawmakers toward education at all levels has undergone a dramatic transformation.
Under the terms of the Budget Control Act of 2011, passed in an eleventh-hour compromise after House Republicans threatened to allow the debt limit to expire for the first time in history, federal educational spending, already diminished on a per capita basis relative to my generation, becomes expendable -- literally. Since the Super Committee created by the debt deal failed, as expected, to agree to an additional trillion dollars in savings over a ten-year period, the default option in that event that was part of the BCA goes into effect on January 1, 2013. "Sequestration" -- automatic across the board cuts in spending programs in defense and domestic discretionary programs -- takes effect unless action is taken beforehand to "kick the can down the road" until the 213th Congress is in power.
Partisanship aside, this is no way for the world's oldest constitutional republic to run things. And so it will remain until sufficient numbers of the masses most directly affected by these priorities make it plain to office-holders that this is unacceptable. Or, at the very least, that this is an issue demanding debate in the presidential election. The ball, as the saying goes, is in our court.
DT
