by Karla Alwes, Distinguished Teaching Professor, English Department –
Because there are so many protests to be made against the Trump administration, we may be forgiven not to have noticed a current trend in education funding that needs to be included in the growing slate of protests. Since the shockingly farcical idea to decimate funding for Special Olympics in 2018, proposed by either Education Secretary Betsy Devos or US President Donald Trump, neither of whom would own up to suggesting it, DeVos and Trump have gotten together to conspire against education altogether.
While teachers nationwide are striking for better working conditions, the cuts to federal education budgets continue to grow. According to the Center for American Progress, New York’s cut in funds for state grants in 2020 is $148,594,992. Nationally the budget cuts for state grants in education for all states have grown to $2,055,830,000. (In 2019, total cuts in education funding, the Center for American Progress advises, reached $8.5 billion [americanprogress.org/issues/education]).
Our students who aspire to teach, and who have always been told that to be a teacher is a noble and worthy profession, may be shocked to discover otherwise. Or, they may already understand the divide that exists, the one between the idea of public education for all, that the federal Secretary of the Education Department personally and publicly eschews for that other idea—private institutions of education that don’t need the government’s money because they have their own, a “sordid boon,” as the poet William Wordsworth may call it, because so much of it comes from the continuous tax cuts to the wealthy, paid for by the others.
For decades, public school teachers have had to pay for their own pencils, crayons, glue, gold stars, and whatever other paraphernalia help make up the classroom that invites children and students beyond childhood to experience the joys of learning. It seems that now those same teachers will have to pay for their own dignity as a public teacher, as we all struggle to restore what has become, through the back channels of Washington, the battered nobility and worth of our profession.
