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Every American should be outraged about the impact of the education cuts currently proposed. Unless some determined opposition materializes, Federal support for education is in for a major setback. As this is being written, the House plans to cut $1.7 billion dollars from the current Federal education budget, passed by Congress last October to fund projects this year. Unfortunately, these cuts represent only the opening tactics in a long-term siege of education funding. The strategy is to set a lower base level for FY95 from which to cut further in the FY96 and subsequent budget negotiations.
It is hard to understand the logic of this attack on education, since increasing the skills and knowledge of our population is the only way the U.S. will stay competitive in the Information Age and the only way we can provide an equality of opportunity for all Americans.
Perhaps it is important to remind ourselves how crucial federal funding is to education. There are two main reasons to rely on Federal dollars in education: to redistribute educational funding and to support excellence in research and development.
By far the greatest share of Federal funding in education attempts to reverse the inherent inequality of the way we support schools from local taxes. As Jonathan Kozol so clearly documents in "Savage Inequalities," kids from poor districts don't have a chance because the inadequate local tax base can result in huge disparities in per-student expenditures. As he documents, even in districts like New York that supposedly equalize spending across all their schools, there are shocking inequities. The effort to redress this at the Federal level through programs that either distribute funds equally to all, or target poorer, more deserving schools is a necessity. Well-targeted Federal programs are giving essential assistance to poor schools by providing critical services and expertise, and leveraging resources from other institutions. The dollars spent represent a small fraction of the need; cutting these programs and assuming that the political process will equalize the resources at the state and local level will not work and will cripple a generation of students.
Excellent research and development (R&D) has always been a tiny part of the Federal education budget, but one with a huge potential payoff. The Internet, many of the best courses and most original labs, computer languages from BASIC to Logo, the new standards, the support for constructivism, important insights about learning, and much more have all come from Federal R&D funding. Many important research areas in education urgently need to be investigated, many highly creative ideas to be developed. An indication of how underfunded R&D has been is that education spends only 1% as much on R&D relative to its size as does industry. We urgently need a far clearer idea of how humans learn, there should be far better learning technology, there should be a much greater selection of curricula responsive to the new standards. R&D in these areas cost little and can benefit all.
High quality education R&D is the mission of a small number of independent organizations like TERC and some universities. These organizations have carefully assembled talented teams of researchers, scientists, artists, writers, and administrators dedicated to fundamental improvements of education. There is no question that the current funding cuts will disband many of these teams and decimate the ranks.
About twenty five years ago educational programs were dismantled as a result of the familiar, hollow claims that government was too large, Federal programs were wasteful, and educators had gone too far afield while ignoring the basics. Funding was cut, the NSF was pulled out of education, and promising programs were stopped in mid-stream. Then a crisis was discovered, marked by the publication of "A Nation at Risk" in 1983 and followed by a slow re-establishment of funding, organizations and materials.
We are now sowing the seeds for another educational crisis that is destined to be discovered around the turn of the century. The crisis will necessitate costly and large-scale corrective actions. Why repeat this wasteful cycle? The alternative is to galvanize ourselves and speak out now against irresponsibly dismantling effective Federal educational programs.
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