The Dallas Morning News reports that Texas Comptroller Susan Combs has a plan to cut $558 million from the education budget by eliminating the 22 pupil class size limit in elementary schools. 12,000 teaching jobs would be lost. According to the Texas Education Agency's 2009 Snapshot, there are nearly 328,000 teachers in Texas, so 12,000 represents 3.7% of the total. My guess it that these job cuts would be met mostly by attrition. Parents won't be happy with the larger class size in elementary classrooms, but this change has been predictable since the Republican controlled Texas Legislature created the structural deficit in the budget in 2006.
The $558 million in savings wouldn't be nearly enough to contribute to fixing the budget deficit, so the education budget would have to be trimmed in other ways:
- larger high school classes
- less administrative support to schools
- student support programs cut (health, social and academic)
- athletics
- fine arts
- less testing
More details will emerge soon, as the Lege gets back in session in January. I'll look at some of the other solutions in future blog posts. Maybe the severity of the cuts will finally get the attention of teachers and parents, and they will vote for pro-education candidates, rather than tax cut happy Republicans.
1 comments:
Cuts of this magnitude are severely going to damage our education system here in Texas.
Little kids need the close attention they get in smaller class rooms. There is a reason daycare centers have specific teacher/student ratios they have to abide by, it's for the kids' safety. However, it looks like they are pushing schools so far beyond the similar limits that bad things could happen and teachers will get blamed when they are doing all they can with the limited resources they have.
The public wonders why so many families homeschool and it's cuts like these that help lead to such decisions.
So, since we have to cut taxes to the point that we can't pay for education, we're going to punish children by forcing them in larger classes where they'll get lost in the system, cut athletics so they have no way to let off steam and energy and really discourage them by removing the arts programs that are lifesavers for many students.
Education should be a priority to keep as it produces the next generation work force. Instead, we are discouraging kids to the point that it's going to harm us even more in the future when they are undereducated and looking for a job.
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