Tag Archives: budgets

Project 2025, Public Education And The Public Good

Today’s post is a bit longer than usual, so consider yourself forewarned.

As we’ve learned more about the various elements of “Plan 2025,” it looks increasingly like an all-out attack on the America most of us believe in. There’s the assault on women (the effort to take us back to what those nice White “Christian” men consider our proper role as breeders and housemaids); the fight to remove any and all elements of a social safety net (who needs health insurance or Social Security?); the multiple provisions favoring the wealthy over the middle-class; and a full-scale attack on public education.

Time Magazine, among others, has reported on the education portion of the White Nationalists’ plan.

Project 2025, the policy agenda for Former President Trump’s potential first year back in the White House published by the far right conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, has been making waves recently. Some of the many destructive proposals within the agenda include the elimination of the U.S. Department of Education—along with federal education funding and any civil rights protections—and the diversion of public money to private school voucher programs instead.

Make no mistake: The goal is to end public education. 

As the article goes on to detail, the measures in Project 2025 are a continuation of the same efforts we’ve seen the past several decades– efforts to turn education into a consumer good available to those who can afford such luxuries. 

We are on the brink of a new wave of public school closures, another step in the decades-long project to divest and dismantle the institution of public school. Disguised as “school choice,” federal, state, local, and private actors have prioritized paying for  private and charter schools, hoarding educational resources for the haves and depleting resources for the have-nots.

The policies that Project 2025 plans to prioritize—government payments to families sending their children to private school and creation of new charter schools that are run like businesses—have expanded in the last few years, starving public school districts that serve all students of already insufficient resources. In the 2023-24 school year, at least 70 school districts, including in San Antonio, Texas, Jackson, Mississippi, and Wichita, Kansas, announced permanent closures of public schools, impacting millions of students. These districts are resorting to the harmful, discriminatory, and ineffective so-called ‘solution’ of closing schools in Black and Latine communities, stripping those communities of their local public schools.

The schools already being closed are (not so coincidentally) those in the poorer areas of cities–the schools that serve low-income and minority students, and that have historically been underfunded– depriving the communities around them of “community resources like adult education, polling locations, a place to hold community meetings, and access to democratic community control through school board elections.”

Despite the original rhetoric about opening access to “better” schools for underprivileged kids, voucher programs now primarily benefit upper-middle class parents, many of whom were previously paying to send their children to private and parochial schools.

What is ironic about this effort to deny educational opportunities to those with the fewest resources is how costly it is.

Pro Publica reports that the voucher program in Arizona has “blown a hole” in that state’s budget.

Arizona, the model for voucher programs across the country, has spent so much money paying private schoolers’ tuition that it’s now facing hundreds of millions in budget cuts to critical state programs and projects.

Two years ago, Arizona passed the largest school voucher program in the history of education. The program was generous: “any parent in the state, no matter how affluent, could get a taxpayer-funded voucher worth up to tens of thousands of dollars to spend on private school tuition, extracurricular programs or homeschooling supplies.”

In just the past two years, nearly a dozen states have enacted sweeping voucher programs similar to Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account system, with many using it as a model.

Indiana was one of those states.

Yet in a lesson for these other states, Arizona’s voucher experiment has since precipitated a budget meltdown. The state this year faced a $1.4 billion budget shortfall, much of which was a result of the new voucher spending, according to the Grand Canyon Institute, a local nonpartisan fiscal and economic policy think tank. Last fiscal year alone, the price tag of universal vouchers in Arizona skyrocketed from an original official estimate of just under $65 million to roughly $332 million.

As a result, Arizona has cut $333 million out of water infrastructure projects (as the article pointed out, this in a state where water scarcity is a huge issue). It cut tens of millions of dollars for highway repairs, and $54 million from Arizona’s community colleges, among other cuts.

In Indiana, voucher program costs have ballooned to $439 million, some 40 percent higher than in 2022–2023.

Despite the enormous costs– vouchers haven’t improved educational outcomes. 

In the Public Interest recently noted that the assault on public education is part of a larger attack on the very notion of a “public good.”

We define public goods as the things we all need to survive and thrive–the big things: public health, mobility, knowledge, democracy, shelter, clean air and water, the ability to communicate with each other (including, lately, broadband access). Public goods include things we need everyone to have. Those are things that we can only do if we do them together. It is part of our responsibility to each other, and it forms the basis of our society. And for a very long time in the United States, there was a consensus that we need every child, not just one’s own children, to get a high-quality education.

It seems beyond the imagination of many conservatives that people might—or should—care about and feel any responsibility regarding the plight of someone who is not within their own personal sphere or realm of identity. (It also seems of a piece with the way former Ohio Senator Rob Portman became receptive to gay rights only after his own son came out to him.)

Margaret Thatcher once said of society “There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families.”

Such a narrow and individual approach to public policy is at the root of the notion of “school choice,” a catchy name for programs like vouchers that essentially move public money from public schools to private schools. It holds that K-12 education is best offered as a function of the marketplace, something with which only school age children and their parents should be concerned. It doesn’t view education as the necessary component of a functioning democracy, nor does it value the social cohesion that universal public education can foster…

The reality of “school choice individualism” is that schools that receive public money that comes from all of us via vouchers want to be able to exclude some of us.  They don’t have to follow the rules of public schools—they can pick and choose students, and they can–and do–discriminate against anyone they choose: those with disabilities, families who are part of the LGBTQ community, and religious affiliations they deem unacceptable.

The article concluded with a dig at JD Vance’s oft-expressed disdain for public goods and “childless cat ladies.”

While many conservatives don’t seem to regard public education as a public good but rather as an expression of a shopping preference for families, the vast majority of Americans do see education as a public good. And that includes those who have school-age children, those with children who are now adults, those who have never had children, and even, we’re sure, quite a few cat ladies.

Meow…

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The Flim-Flam Party

David Leonhardt had an interesting column on fiscal responsibility recently in the  New York Times.

“Fiscal responsibility” is one of those terms the applicability of which depends upon its definition. (I define “fiscally responsible’ as paying as you go, so putting a new government program or a war on the national credit card in order to keep current tax rates low wouldn’t qualify.) Conventional wisdom is that Republican administrations have been more fiscally-responsible than Democratic ones. Leonhardt questions–and debunks–that belief.

By now, nobody should be surprised when the Republican Party violates its claims of fiscal rectitude. Increasing the deficit — through big tax cuts, mostly for the rich — has been the defining feature of the party’s economic policy for decades. When Paul Ryan and other Republicans call themselves fiscal conservatives, they’re basically doing a version of the old Marx Brothers bit: “Who ya gonna believe, me or your own eyes?”

Ever so slowly, conventional wisdom has started to recognize this reality. After Ryan’s retirement announcement last week, only a few headlines called him a deficit hawk. People are catching on to the con.

But there is still a major way that the conventional wisdom is wrong: It doesn’t give the Democratic Party enough credit for its actual fiscal conservatism.

Aided by charts illustrating his thesis, Leonhardt points out that, at least for the last several decades, Democratic administrations have reduced the deficit, while Republican administrations have grown them. Democrats have done that by raising taxes, by cutting military spending and by reducing corporate welfare.

Some of them have even tried to hold down the cost of cherished social programs. Obamacare, for example, included enough cost controls and tax increases that it’s cut the deficit on net….Get this: Since 1977, the three presidential administrations that have overseen the deficit increases are the three Republican ones. President Trump’s tax cut is virtually assured to make him the fourth of four. And the three administrations that have overseen deficit reductions are the three Democratic ones, including a small decline under Barack Obama. If you want to know whether a post-1976 president increased or reduced the deficit, the only thing you need to know is his party.

So why is it that the “conventional wisdom” does not reflect this reality? Leonhardt faults  journalists’ devotion to the idea of “balance,” and their ingrained belief in (false) equivalence. There is a hard-to-dislodge conviction that–whatever the misbehavior–both parties must be equally guilty.

I’ve spent 25 years as a journalist and have repeatedly seen the discomfort that journalists feel about proclaiming one political party to be more successful than the other on virtually any substantive issue. We journalists are much more comfortable holding up the imperfections of each and casting ourselves as the sophisticated skeptic.

As he concludes,

The caveat, of course, is that presidents must work with Congress. Some of the most important deficit-reduction packages have been bipartisan. The elder George Bush, in particular, deserves credit for his courage to raise taxes. Some of the biggest deficit-ballooning laws, like George W. Bush’s Medicare expansion, have also been bipartisan. In fact, the Democrats’ biggest recent deficit sins have come when they are in the minority, and have enough power only to make an already expensive Republican bill more so. The budget Trump signed last month is the latest example.

So it would certainly be false to claim that Democrats are perfect fiscal stewards and that Republicans are all profligates. Yet it’s just as false to claim that the parties aren’t fundamentally different. One party has now spent almost 40 years cutting taxes and expanding government programs without paying for them. The other party has raised taxes and usually been careful to pay for its new programs.

It’s a fascinating story — all the more so because it does not fit preconceptions. I understand why the story makes many people uncomfortable. It makes me a little uncomfortable. But it’s the truth.

Truth, of course, hasn’t been faring so well in our post-fact, “fake news” world….

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Did Not! Did So!

Ah, budget battles.

This morning’s Star detailed the back and forth political arguments about whether the Ballard Administration actually made the budget cuts the mayor promised during his campaign. Their independent analysis amounted to: who knows? That’s not a criticism of the reporters–it’s a reflection of the games public managers play.

This actually began back during the Goldsmith Administration. In fact, it could argued that the City’s dicey finances actually began there; I know Ballard blamed Peterson because he inherited significant budget problems, but Peterson himself inherited a true “smoke and mirrors” budget from Goldsmith. (That doesn’t mean he shouldn’t have done more to fix it.)

Goldsmith’s clever game was to change the way in which the budget was reported from the relatively straightforward system employed during the Hudnut Administration. When you change budget categories, it becomes virtually impossible to compare apples to apples. (He also touted savings from his own exaggerated “estimated growth” figures–as in “we project that expenditures would have reached X if we hadn’t done Y. What good managers we are!)

In this case, Ballard’s folks excluded federal and other grants and some debt service from the budget calculation, and “voila”–they saved money.

I know I’m talking crazy, but what if we focused less on the relative amounts we spend, and more on what we get for our money? What if we focused less on the tax levy (the total amount raised) and more on how fairly we assess property and set rates? What if we rewarded good management rather than providing incentives to cut corners and push higher maintenance costs to the next guy?

What a dreamer I am…..

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