The Reasonable Doubter on Pennsylvania's Education Funding Cuts

The family that I know the most about — mine — had two parents who didn’t finish grade school, let alone high school or college. They were an immigrant and the child of immigrants and they recognized from their own lack that education was the key to advancement, accomplishment and public service.

The two generations that follow them will have earned nine college degrees, 10 graduate degrees and six terminal degrees. They will include four teachers and professors, two lawyers, three scientists, three successful business owners and a newspaper publisher. They have created jobs, searched for disease cures, served their communities, educated the next generation, explored the secrets of human nature and American history and worked for justice.
This is not offered as a testimonial to my family history, though I am, of course, hugely proud of it. The most remarkable thing about my family’s story is that in America it is not remarkable at all. This country and this state are full of hardworking and inspired parents who sacrifice and strive for their children’s opportunity to learn all that they can learn, succeed in their own lives and then give back to society. Some of these parents can pay the bill for that education. But with tuition, expenses and fees at prestigious colleges amounting to $60,000 per year, most of them can’t.
Those families need, as mine needed, the help of scholarships and college loans to get the job done. Well-funded public schools and universities are indispensable parts of this equation. And yet the state’s proposed 2011 budget would cut $550 million from basic education funding, $271 million from the State System of Higher Education, and reduce funding to Penn State, the University of Pittsburgh, and Temple and Lincoln universities by half.
It is impossible to calculate — yet — how many worthwhile programs will be eliminated, how many deserving students will be denied basic or advanced educations and how much social justice will be eliminated.
President Obama has rightly bemoaned the fact that in a single generation America has fallen from first to ninth place in the proportion of young people with college degrees. In terms of high school graduation rates, we’re ranked 18th out of 24 industrialized nations. As recently as 2008, a study published by McKinsey & Company, a global management consulting firm, found that the achievement gap between American students and their peers in other countries costs our national economy as much as $2.3 trillion.
On a more concrete level, consider this: The burglar whom you fear might invade your home at night and the mugger whose footsteps behind you on a darkened street make you walk a little faster are probably not highly trained craftsmen or Ph.D. scholars. Education might not be the only cure for poverty, and poverty might not be the only cause of crime, but the correlations cannot be disputed.
A Northwestern University study has found that one in 10 male high school dropouts is in jail or juvenile detention. The societal costs for each high school dropout are estimated at $292,000.

Gov. Corbett’s budget proposal recognizes this connection with an unfortunate linkage — while education funding decreases, prison funding increases. The budget for the Department of Corrections would go up $12 million, and the funding for prison expansions includes $68.5 million to add another 1,260 beds to the state prison system. Local and county prisons are not part of these statistics.
The futures of this commonwealth and of America have always been painted with the brushstrokes that illustrate the futures of our children. George Washington became the first president of a country whose Congress had already recognized that education was critical to our civic and economic life by funding public schools with the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. Two hundred and twenty-one years later, Washington’s 43rd successor reached the White House with a scholarship-funded education.
This is not, as many have framed it, a big government versus small government issue. This is about big futures versus diminished futures. Education is not an entitlement to be doled out as a privilege to a select few. Rather, as G.K. Chesterton observed, it is the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.