Taxpayer Calculator<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n\u201cThis is a bipartisan issue — politics and ideology, around education, we have to put to the side,\u201d Duncan said during an appearance on \u201cFox and Friends\u201d on May 21.\u00a0 \u201cI’m very worried, very worried about anywhere between 100,000 and 300,000 teachers being laid off this year.\u00a0 We have school districts — due to the horrendous budget times, conditions they’re facing — looking to eliminate summer school this summer, eliminating after-school and extracurricular activities, going to four-day weeks, not five-day school weeks\u2026None of this is good for children.\u00a0 None of this is good for education.\u00a0 None of this is good for the economy.\u00a0 So we are urging Congress to move with a real sense of urgency to pass this legislation.”<\/p>\n
Many Republicans oppose the measure, citing previous federal outlays for education, the size of the federal deficit, and the fact that the bill forces no spending cuts elsewhere in order to pay for itself.<\/p>\n
\u201cFundamentally, what you’re seeing is the failure of the stimulus,\u201d Rep. Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI), chairman of the Republican House Policy Committee, told Fox News.\u00a0 \u201cWhat we’re looking at here in Michigan is 14 percent unemployment; nationally, we’re looking at 9.9 percent.\u00a0 We’ve seen a spike in jobless claims — all of which was supposed to have been prevented by the trillion dollars this administration already spent to \u2018create or save\u2019 jobs.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you look at the overall economy, that is really what undergirds the financing of education in the United States, both at the local level and at the state level.\u00a0 So as Washington continues to try to go toward emergency measures, three things become patently obvious: One, the stimulus has failed.\u00a0 Two, they’re delaying the real necessary restructuring of government that is required to have a sustainable tax base that is growing, for educators to be employed.\u00a0 And third,\u201d McCotter added with a flash of deadpan humor, \u201cgiven the Democrats\u2019 record number of deficits, debt and spending, there does auger an argument for more math teachers.\u201d<\/p>\n
Education analyst Lindsey Burke of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C., said roughly one-third of the $100 billion the Department of Education received in last year\u2019s stimulus bill remains unspent.\u00a0 She also questions the wisdom of funneling federal taxpayer funds, in any amount, to the public school system as it is presently structured.<\/p>\n
\u201cMore federal funding is not going to solve states’ fiscal problems and could in fact exacerbate those problems, by really preventing states from making the difficult budgetary decisions necessary to reduce costs and effect long-term systemic education reform,\u201d Burke told Fox News.\u00a0 \u201cThe real problem within the public education sector has been more and more non-teaching staff positions.\u00a0 These positions continue to grow and really put a strain on state budgets.\u00a0 Roughly half of those people employed by the public education sector are in non-teaching positions, and at the same time we see ever-decreasing class sizes.\u00a0 In the 1960s, class size was about 27:1 student-teacher ratios.\u00a0 Today those ratios are closer to 15:1\u2026.There are things that states could do to reduce costs, and they dont need another bailout from Washington for public education.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Keep Our Educators Working Act has garnered support from some predictable quarters \u2013 and opposition from some surprising ones.\u00a0 Interviewed in Minneapolis during a nationwide tour of beleaguered local school districts, many of which are already laying off teachers and closing down vital programs, Randi Weingarten, herself a former teacher and now president of the 1.4 million-member American Federation of Teachers, told Fox News the $23 billion is urgently needed to avert further \u201cdraconian\u201d measures.<\/p>\n
\u201cNobody is asking for it on an ongoing basis. \u00a0We’re asking for it because we see on the ground, in school after school, the consequences of devastating cuts,\u201d Weingarten told Fox News.\u00a0 \u201cIn the ’70s, I watched what happened in New York City when\u2026we lost a generation of kids\u2026.You don’t get to \u2018do it over\u2019 if you’re five years old.\u00a0 You’re only five once — and therefore, that’s part of the urgency here.\u201d<\/p>\n
Asked about the $34 million in stimulus funds that the Education Department has purportedly left unspent, Weingarten said that all of the funding that the stimulus intended for public school systems was, in fact, doled out \u2013 and done on an \u201cequity basis,\u201d with the most cash-starved school districts first to receive the funding.\u00a0 \u201cThe monies that actually went to avert the direct effects of the greatest recession since the Great Depression were about 50-some-odd billion, of which some went to also ensure that we hired and maintained cops and other civil servants,\u201d Weingarten said.\u00a0 \u201cThe money that was allocated last year was allocated on an equity basis to various different states.\u00a0 So ultimately we have encouraged states to spend those funds.\u00a0 But what I am talking about is that the states that have spent it do not have the funds this year to go forward.\u00a0 And we’re seeing that in state after state in their budget crises.\u201d<\/p>\n
But the Washington Post editorial board urged lawmakers to reject the measure.\u00a0 In an editorial published May 14 under the headline, \u201cRed Ink in the Classroom,\u201d the Post lamented that last year\u2019s stimulus bill had created among educators \u201can unfortunate expectation of yet more federal dollars to bail out the states.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cShould the federal government spend money it doesn’t have to let school systems operate beyond their means?\u201d the editorial asked.\u00a0 \u201cWe might have had a different view of this measure if its sponsors had figured out a way, as they promised with their adoption of pay-go guidelines, to pay for it rather than simply add to the nation’s fast-growing national debt.\u201d<\/p>\n
President Obama has already indicated his support for the Miller-Harkin measure.\u00a0 Addressing educators at the White House during the annual Teacher of the Year ceremony on April 29, the president claimed the stimulus bill had saved the jobs of 400,000 teachers \u2013 a figure higher than Weingarten used, in her interview with Fox News \u2013 and said: \u201cI believe these efforts must continue, as states face severe budget shortfalls that put hundreds of thousands of jobs at risk.\u00a0 We need, and our children need, our teachers in the classroom.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Education Secretary Arne Duncan is asking lawmakers to put aside \u201cpolitics and ideology\u201d as they consider a request for $23 billion in \u201cemergency\u201d funding for public schools \u2013 a measure Republicans reject as a massive federal bailout for the teachers\u2019 unions. The Obama administration is supporting the bill, formally titled the Keep Our Educators Working […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5950,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-576270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/576270","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5950"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=576270"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/576270\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=576270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=576270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=576270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}