Is Public Education Important to You?

"The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;"

.....general welfare of the United States....Doesn't the education of all of our citizens fall into the category of this phrase? Public education benefits ALL people living in our country and offers EQUAL access to developing the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that will maintain a democratic way of life.

We are hearing that President Trump's budget plan includes large increases in military and security spending, and preserves Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security, among other things. Without tax increases how will this budget plan be balanced/be achieved? Spending on domestic programs could be targets for reductions and those sums of money shifted to other areas of the budget. Some reductions, along with new policy initiatives, could very well lead to some programs' elimination.  It appears that President Trump has fulfilled the constitutional declaration....."provide for the common defense".... What may be in the future for other domestic programs that ...."provide for the general welfare of the United States"...?  One department that Republicans have been trying for years to dismantle is the Department of Education, maintaining that education does not fall within the responsibility of the federal government. With a weak leader who cannot even stand her ground with regard to preserving students' rights to using bathrooms, will DeVos capitulate to a decimation of her department? Or is this her philosophy and ultimate goal as well?  Time will tell.

Pass the buck to the individual states. People in society today are too mobile to have education systems that will inevitably be different both in philosophy and content. Having taught in a school in the 1980's where there was a considerable percentage of children from military families, I can attest to the fact that when children move in and out of different states their achievement is affected by the differences in their educational experiences. Many of these children were usually behind their peers when first arriving at our school. Just when they had made up some of their achievement gaps, new military orders arrived and their families shipped out to another state, another school, another set of academic expectations.

Some states support public education philosophically AND financially. Others do not. Where would you want your children to live? In states like Ohio, Indiana, or Louisiana that have instituted large scale voucher programs that have been found to NOT produce achievement gains, and some have even lead to achievement losses? Do you know which states have been chipping away at their public education systems in favor of private/charter schools and slowly eroding their quality?