Making American Schools Less Great Again A Lesson in Educational Nihilism on a Grand Scale

April 18, 2019
Tomgram: Belle Chesler, Defunding Children, A National Crisis of the Soul

Who even remembers? After all, it happened in ancient times. November 9, 2016, to be exact, at newly elected president Donald Trump’s victory rally, when he so memorably said, “We are going to fix our inner cities and rebuild our highways, bridges, tunnels, airports. We’re going to rebuild our infrastructure, which will become, by the way, second to none.” During that campaign he had similarly sworn that he would deliver a trillion dollars in infrastructure spending over the decade to come. And when he finally unveiled his vaunted plan, in February 2018, for no less than $1.5 trillion dollars, it promptly disappeared without a trace in a Congress his party still controlled. In its wake, the only infrastructure left obsessively on the president’s mind or on anybody’s table was that “great, great wall” of his (which won’t get built either).

In this, the president is following in a distinctly twenty-first-century tradition of disinvestment, one that would have been a mystery to my parents and other members of that World War II and Cold War generation. They would have thought it un-American that, in 2017, the American Society of Civil Engineers, issuing its latest “report card,” gave the country’s infrastructure -- from roads to dams, levees to bridges, rail lines to drinking water -- an overall grade of D+. Among the categories that received its own special D+ were America’s schools: “the nation continues to underinvest in school facilities, leaving an estimated $38 billion annual gap. As a result, 24% of public school buildings were rated as being in fair or poor condition.” And the literal state of those buildings is, as TomDispatch regular Belle Chesler makes clear today, just one facet of the underinvestment in and deteriorating conditions of the American public school system, itself part of the deteriorating infrastructure of American democracy. And when it comes to those public schools, Donald Trump and crew aren’t even pretending that they might ever have a plan to invest in or rebuild them. Tom

Making American Schools Less Great Again
A Lesson in Educational Nihilism on a Grand Scale
By Belle Chesler
Three weeks ago, I sat in a cramped conference room in the large public high school where I teach in Beaverton, Oregon. I was listening to the principal deliver a scripted PowerPoint presentation on the $35-million-dollar budget deficit our district faces in the upcoming school year.
Teachers and staff members slumped in chairs. A thick funk of disappointment, resignation, hopelessness, and simmering anger clung to us. After all, we’ve been here before. We know the drill: expect layoffs, ballooning class sizes, diminished instructional time, and not enough resources. Accept that the teacher-student relationship -- one that has the potential to be productive and sometimes even transformative -- will become, at best, transactional. Bodies will be crammed into too-small spaces, resources will dwindle, and learning will suffer. These budgetary crises are by now cyclical and completely familiar. Yet the thought of weathering another of them is devastating.
Click here to read more of this dispatch.http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176553/tomgram%3A_belle_chesler%2C_defunding_children%2C_a_national_crisis_of_the_soul/#more