Monday, September 01, 2008
A Great School Depression?
Not to be insensitive (okay, maybe a little), but color me skeptical of Sam Dillon's new piece in the New York Times, "Hard Times Hitting Students and Schools," which stitches together a variety of anecdotes and data points related to mortgage foreclosures, rising food and fuel prices and state budget shortfalls into a picture of school fiscal distress that's almost surely overblown. And in some cases, misses the point entirely:
Responding to a cut of $43 million by the state in education spending and to higher energy and other costs, school officials in Jefferson County [Kentucky] have raised lunch prices, eliminated 17 buses by reorganizing routes, ordered drivers to turn off vehicles rather than letting them idle and increased property taxes.
and:
West Virginia officials issued a memorandum recently to local districts titled “Tips to Deal With the Skyrocketing Cost of Fuel.” Last week, David Pauley, the transportation supervisor for the Kanawha County school system, based in Charleston, met with drivers of the district’s 196 buses to outline those policies. Mr. Pauley told them to stay 5 miles per hour below the limit, to check the tire pressure every day and to avoid jackrabbit starts.
As others have noted, school transportation is notoriously inefficient, wasteful and polluting. Rather than characterizing the above as evidence of a terrible financial crisis, it would make a lot more sense to call it what it is: a case of rising fuel prices causing schools to implement common-sense fuel efficiency measures that should have been in place a long time ago, and we're all better off as a result.
Also:
In interviews, educators in many states said they were seeing more needy families than at any time in memory.
The national poverty rate didn't change in 2007 and while the economy seems to have deteriorated since then, I doubt poverty has suddenly yanked back up to where it was in the early 1990s. The article also cites an increase in the number of students applying for free- and reduced-price lunch. It's worth noting that those numbers held steady and in some cases rose all the way through the late 1990s, even as poverty fell to historic lows in 2000, so that measure doesn't have a great track record in terms of sensitivity to changing poverty conditions.
The point being, we (a) live in a big, diverse country, and (b) have not vanquished the business cycle, so there will inevitably be places and times when the fiscal fortunes of schools and students take a turn for the worse. But if you simply pick and choose the most alarming numbers and quotes, you're almost surely going to portray things as worse in the aggregate than they really are.
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