Keep Educating Others

Education funding will be a problem at both the state and national levels.  We've all heard the reports of the $14.5 billion shortfall in California. At the National level, the current budget proposal for 2009 is one billion dollars short of what we need it to be in order to fund federal programs at the current level. The President's proposed budget funds NCLB at its current level which behaves like a cut when one considers inflation. IDEA continues to be under-funded with a proposed budget that will only pay 17.2% of the costs of educating students with disabilities. In his final budget proposal, President Bush has proposed eliminating Carl Perkins funds, Safe and Drug Free Schools and a myriad of other programs. A $100 million cut from Teacher Quality State Grants would go to the "Teacher Incentive Fund", a merit pay proposal. At our February meeting, the members of the NEA Board lobbied against this budget proposal. We also lobbied for bills involving school repair grants and for support at the federal level for class size reduction, especially at the early elementary grades.

Although the NEA has a very competent and capable staff to help work these issues in Congress on a daily basis, the voice of practicing educators really helps our lawmakers see our reality. I met with a congressional policy advisor who was recently assigned to work on educational issues. He was shocked to learn that some children start school without knowing the alphabet or how to write the letters. He didn't know that private schools could reject a student, even if the parents of that student could afford to pay the tuition. He had no idea why vouchers were unacceptable to me or the other NEA Board member that visited him that day. As educators, we did our job and "schooled" him. That's what all of us do when we strike up conversations about our jobs. We educate others. This may take a long time but it's okay since, as public school employees, we embrace the needs of all learners.

While in Washington D.C., the Higher Education Act came out onto the floor of the House for debate and passage. Although there were 27 amendments scheduled to be introduced and debated, the NEA worked very hard with Education and Labor Committee Chair to help keep out any "Academic Bill of Rights" language. If you recall, just a very few months ago, all of us were asked to call, write or e-mail George Miller in response to his very onerous  draft of the reauthorization of ESEA, com-monly known as NCLB. That issue pitted CTA and NEA against the Congressman, but this time, we were on the same side. This is very important since the "Academic Bill of Rights" language would have opened the door for limiting the academic freedom at the college level and may have had a trickle downeffect on pre-K-12 education.

What's going on with NCLB? It looks like the House of Representatives side will be fairly quiet this year but the Senate side will be making noise. Senator Edward Kennedy chairs the committee and he has promised to bring his mark-up of the reauthorization forward in early spring. Whether he learned from George Miller's experience last fall remains to be seen. I may be asking you to jump into action.

The elimination of the social security offsets continues to be on the table. The good news is that we have 338 bipartisan cosponsors in the House and 36 in the Senate. The bad news is that these numbers aren't enough to override a presidential veto. In January, the Social Security Subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee held a hearing. The Californians who observed the hearing came away from the experience with great optimism.  I hope some of you got the information from your SDEA rep in time to send e-mail testimony to the committee. Are we likely to see a total repeal of the offsets in the next year or two? Probably not. The estimated cost of full repeal of the GPO and WEP is now at $80 billion!  That's too much to go after in one shot but NEA is now looking at staging the repeal over a number of years. There's more work to be done around this issue but there's also much to be hopeful for.

With half our work year left, keep doing all the good work you do.
Whether it's teaching in a classroom or supporting students in another way, keep educating others because it's what we do.

- Elizabeth Ahlgren