Education is the Ultimate Tax-Cutting Solution

The Gatsas-Lopez budget this year has again challenged the school administration to tighten their belts like everyone else in town. They fired teachers, specialists, and vice principals. How much will this savings cost us?

One of the most visible impacts of firing teachers is bigger class sizes. Both Ted Gatsas and Mike Lopez will tell you that when they were kids class sizes where over thirty and they still seemed to get a good education, so why spend for the luxury of 22-kid classes?

A few things have changed since you or Mike or Ted were in school. It's easy to point to how our affordable housing has attracted so many families as Massachusetts tightened its welfare policies. Or how our status as an refugee relocation destination has stretched our ESL budget. But the real reason is that the mills don't make cloth anymore.

That's right - there are few employment options today for kids who drop out or who are thrown out of school. When one of Mike's school chum's got bored with school he could join the Navy, learn a trade, and eventually get a job. Those in Ted's graduating class that didn't go to UNH found a job at one of the mill-yard factories. What are those kids going to do today?

Has anyone noticed that we are no longer a manufacturing economy? There is a reason that “No Child Left Behind” is called “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB) - so that we don't create socially dependent citizens as we shift from a labor to a service economy. It is cheaper to educate kids than it is to support them on welfare or lock them up in prisons.

So how does this relate to class sizes? A NCLB teacher must ensure that every child in class achieve clear and testable curriculum objectives. They do this by differentiating the lessons to each child. A trained, qualified teacher can do this with a class size of about twenty, but efficiency and effectiveness drop dramatically beyond that. With elementary class sizes under 20 kids, a single disruptive child can be managed, but at 30 kids, the entire lesson can be lost. That brings us to our second level of budget cuts: assistant principals and specialists.

The role of the assistant principal is discipline. This provides an outlet for the classroom teacher, and plays a critical role in establishing a safe and bully-free schoolyard. The specialist floats between classrooms providing targeted help to those kids who are struggling. The combination and orchestration of these three elements: classroom teacher, floating specialist, and assistant principal, creates the synergy that NCLB is predicated on. This system is what keeps kids from falling between the cracks, and minimizes the number of kids who are directed to special education - where the per-pupil costs can greatly exceed the mainstream costs.

NCLB works because it is a synergy of small classes, floating specialists, and vice principals. Recognizing how this system works and making it successful has taken years. The loss today of any element will break the system, loose the synergy, and start dropping kids through the cracks.

These really are the issues that we are faced with. A drop in education commitment today will cost us more tomorrow. It is not scare tactics or over-reaching. It's cheaper to educate kids for successful careers than it is to to let them atrophy into social dependents.

School Committeemen Author Beaudry and Bob O'Sullivan have a plan to use $1.9M of the existing $2.4M building impact-fee funds, and save $1.7M in city services charge-back fees, then use this money to restore the teachers. Its not clear that they will succeed, or that this money can be legally used for its intended purpose. Mayoral Candidate Ted Gatsas says he supports it, and Alderman Lopez says it can be done but has risks.

In my view the solution is to make education the ultimate tax-cutting solution. But despite the scrambling, the budget is fixed and we will simply have to cross our fingers and wait to see what classrooms look like in September.

Joe Briggs is the co-host of 2 Joes Live seen each Wednesday 7-10PM on MCAM-TV23. Please email your comments to joebriggs@comcast.net.