OUR GREATEST SHAME

I nodded my head in agreement with Nicholas Kristof as I read his piece in the NY Times today (February 16th 2009): He states in the first paragraph:“I thought health care is this country’s greatest shame". Yes! I agreed. I'm well aware of the fact that the US health care system is ranked at the top in glitzy technology, but down at the bottom among its peer nations for over-all results and delivery of care as measured by health and longevity of its citizens. It is a staggering fact that too many of us do not realize. Kristof went on to note that “although we spend twice as much on medical care as many European Nations , yet American children are twice as likely to die before age 5 as Czech children. And American women are 11 times as likely to die in childbirth than Irish women.” See: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/opinion/15kristof.html?

Right on! I agreed. But from there Mr. Kristof proceeded to focus not on the health care system but the educational system. He concludes that although the health care shame is bad, an even more egregious failure is the education system, where he estimates that more than half a million teaching positions may be lost due to the recession. My eyes scanned over the number and passed on. With so many huge numbers in the press and media these days a five followed by only five zeros after it didn’t seem so impressive.

That us until I read a piece in a local paper. I read with dismay a short AP piece run in the St. Augustine Record (February 15, 2009) noting that the Ocala School District in near-by Marion County, in Florida, reported it is sending out letters of dismissal to 522 teachers. See: http://www.news4jax.com/mostpopular/18714039/detail.html.

Now that was a number I could clearly envision. Over five hundred letters! That’s twelve thousand students who would find a classroom with no teacher next semester. They would be crammed into other probably already crowded classrooms. Their educational needs and myriad questions would go unanswered and their educations suffer at the most critical time in their lives. Then too there would be more than 500 heads of households or families, perhaps more than 2000 individuals, facing unemployment and severe or catastrophic reduction in their family income. One could easily envision how that could have an economic impact--the ripple effect--on the local community.

But taking this to the national scale the numbers (as Kristof underscores) become staggering. Yes Mr. Kristof the impact to our educational system may be our greatest shame as a nation! Yet it is something we could have so easily avoided. We could have easily afforded to be the best in the world in education. Our future could have been assured. However education was not a priority or even a blip in past government spending plans. Even now President Obama’s stimulus package will allocate only 100 billion dollars to education. To some on the right even that number is too much! But no one from that side complained while we spend 12 billion dollars a month to prosecute a war in Iraq for reasons no one in government could then or now adequately explain. A war that looks like it will cost well over a trillion dollars (that's a thousand times a billion) when we finally close the books on it. Looking back to those expenditures and others in our past national budgets, these educational investments seem a bargain. But as Kristof characterizes them they are welcomed but are "only a wobbly step" toward improvement.