The big squeeze
Bush administration policies are threatening the nation's economic future. For schools, the pain keeps growing

by Mike Rose

Many eyes were on the U.S. Department of Labor in early January for the latest reading on jobs and the economy. There was a lot riding on the December employment numbers—the Bush administration had pushed through a massive $750 billion tax cut bill in 2003, largely on White House promises that the cuts would add more than a half-million jobs by year’s end (510,000 jobs, to be exact) and another 1.4 million jobs by the end of 2004. The Labor Department’s year-end figures provided a benchmark (call it AYP for the economy) for gauging how well the administration’s promises lived up to the lobbying hype behind yet another massive tax cut.

The good news was that the Labor Department was able to report job gains in December: an anemic jump of 1,000 jobs nationwide. The bad news was that the administration’s 2003 job-growth-through-tax-cuts projections came up short—306,000 jobs short.

Job growth has never reached even a third of the promised rate, the Economic Policy Institute reports. And if you took the administration’s promise as meaning there would be more jobs at year’s end than when the tax cut bill was pushed through in July 2003, then we’re more than 1.8 million jobs off the mark set by the White House, EPI observes.

“The grim facts of the economic recovery—continued joblessness and rising healthcare costs in particular—cast a long shadow,” notes the new AFT report Another Long Winter: The State Fiscal Crisis in Its Third Year. “They mean that demand for public services will continue to rise, and states will have diminished resources to meet them. Moreover, the Bush administration’s inefficient efforts to stimulate the economy, by borrowing in order to fund tax breaks for the wealthiest among us, threaten both our fiscal and economic future.

“The likely result is further pain for state and local government.”

The report’s conclusion comes as no shock to Meryl Johnson, an English teacher at Charles Eliot Middle School in Cleveland. In the wake of school cuts, average class size at Johnson’s school soared from 24 students to 33 students this year. “It makes it that much more difficult to do the one-on-one work with students who are struggling,” says the Cleveland Teachers Union member and activist.

Test scores at Eliot and in Cleveland public schools have been on the upswing recently, but that could all be jeopardized by round after round of reductions that cut deep into key school services, Johnson says, pointing to what’s happening with the Cleveland summer school program.

The district had made tremendous strides in offering summer school to students in recent years, but sagging property tax receipts and reduced state aid have made summer school all but a memory. “In past years, we had been able to offer summer school to 8,000 to 10,000 students,” says Alan Seifullah, who coordinates the program for the district. “Last year, we eliminated everything with the exception of summer school for seniors,” says Seifullah, who reports that fewer than 700 students attended summer school in 2003. This year anyone who expects a big improvement is going to be disappointed.” Summer school works, but the money simply isn’t there, he explains.

Johnson ticks off other cuts that are compromising teachers’ ability to do their jobs effectively: Teachers are being pulled out of prep periods to cover for sick colleagues because money for substitutes isn’t there, she says, and after-school enrichment activities also have been cut.

“Instead of more structure and extra help, you’ve got kids just playing video games and watching TV all afternoon,” she says. In such an environment, with standards rising and supports falling, “at some point, there’s almost a feeling of hopelessness.”
 

PUSHING ON A STRING

Trying to spark an economic recovery through tax cuts is a little like shoveling with a rake or pushing on a string. It’s a lot of effort with very little return. Undoubtedly, tax cuts can fatten the bottom lines of corporations—in the past quarter, many companies reported record profit growth even though they did virtually nothing to ramp up business and hire new workers. (In fact, January brought another new round of massive layoff announcements from such major employers as Kraft Foods and Eastman Kodak.) And tax cuts also can be a tremendous windfall for people who really didn’t need the extra cash in the first place and have no intention of using it to buy more goods and services.

“A lot of the tax cuts for the wealthiest just went to overseas investments and vacations in Bimini. And some of it is under the mattress, doing nothing to boost the recovery,” explains Ed Muir of the AFT research and information services department. “Money that would otherwise be spent on improving schools, building roads or other investments that give a big bang for the buck when it comes to jump-starting the economy is sitting in a bank. Or the pickup is very narrow,” explains Muir, an author of Another Long Winter . “A telling sign is that Christmas sales at Tiffany’s were up but at stores like Sears, where most of us shop, they were down. We needed a stimulus for all Americans.”

That doesn’t mean that tax cuts don’t matter—quite the contrary. As Another Long Winter illustrates, this massive transfer of wealth has a direct impact on the ability of government at all levels to do its job. “Policies set in Washington, D.C., have hindered overall economic recovery, hamstrung states’ abilities to collect adequate revenue, jeopardized federal support for state services, and placed additional burdens on state and local government.

“In every part of the fiscal crisis examined [in the report], there is either something the federal government has done to exacerbate the situation, or something it has failed to do to ameliorate it.”

Massachusetts provides a good illustration. The state has struggled to meet a rising demand for healthcare, economic assistance and public services in a punk economy, while at the same time meeting new mandates out of Washington, such as homeland security and provisions in the No Child Left Behind Act. And federal tax changes have meant a potential revenue loss of $846 million for the state.

These budget pressures prompted Gov. Mitt Romney in late 2002 to cut $12 million from an early literacy program, $10 million in school readiness funding and $3 million in school breakfast programs. And for the 2004 fiscal year, $150 million was cut in basic state aid to school districts, along with funding for nutrition, early literacy and kindergarten.

Another casualty was a program to help struggling students pass the state’s high school exam, which suffered a $40 million cut in the fiscal 2004 year—a major hit to a program that has helped boost exam pass rates as well as helping 23 percent more Massachusetts students meet proficient or advanced standards in English since 1998.

“Cutting the programs that helped obtain these results when the federal government is increasing the stakes and the scrutiny for school performance seems self-defeating,” Another Long Winter observes.

And teachers like Kristen Pinto see the effects of these debilitating cuts every day. Umana Barnes Middle School, the Boston public school where Pinto teaches reading to students who are struggling, lost four teaching positions in November and is braced for additional staff reductions in the next school year. “Children who really need language support are now in regular classes,” Pinto says. “And there is no money from the state or the city to do after-school tutoring.”

Umana Barnes is the rule, rather than the exception. The school lost more than 200 teaching positions this year because of funding shortfalls. Bigger classes, less individual instruction and support, and fewer enrichment opportunities are common to many schools, reports Boston Teachers Union president Richard Stutman. And those are precisely the types of cuts that almost guarantee that student gains in achievement will either be blunted or short-circuited, he says.

It’s a concern that shadows teachers almost every day. Last year, Umana Barnes Middle School made adequate yearly progress under the No Child Left Behind Act, Pinto notes. But teachers now feel like they’re trying to swim up a fire hose: Each year the standards keep going up and the supports keep going down. “We made AYP last year. This year and next, we’ll do our best and just hope.”

Another Long Winter: The State Fiscal Crisis in Its Third Year  is available as a PDF file online at www.aft.org/reports/download/AnotherLongWinter.pdf.

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