UCampus

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When government budgets are tight, education is often the first thing to be shaved down. It can feel like a relatively painless fix, because the full effects of cutting education funds only crystallize years later. But such cuts scrape away at that most iconic expression of American democracy and opportunity — the public schools. Because of an outdated tax-based funding model, scholars say, it’s the poorest regions that feel these cuts the hardest, making it even more difficult for America’s poor to attain a better quality of life.

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the effect of tight budgets on education spending

UCampus

Posted on 10/4/2012

Sad news on the state of education and education infrastructure around the US:

A total of 35 states spend less today on education than they did before the recession began in late 2008. This reduction comes despite the $98 billion in federal stimulus money allotted for education starting in 2009. States relied on this one-time cash injection to close one quarter of their budget gaps and to save 420,000 education jobs between 2009 and the 2010-11 school year.

But those federal dollars dried up at the end of last year, and employment numbers among teachers now work out to a net loss. Since June 2009, a recent White House report noted, more than 300,000 teachers have lost their jobs. In August 2012 alone, schools cut 7,000 educators from their payrolls. The result: an increase in the student-to-teacher ratio for the first time in a decade.

"U.S. schooling may be on a historic glide toward lower per-pupil resources and significant labor-force reductions," James Guthrie and Elizabeth Ettema, researchers at the conservative George W. Bush Institute, recently wrote in an article for the Harvard journal Education Next. "A new normal of public-sector fiscal austerity is emerging."