This post was the first of six posts that I did about the public education. This should show how passionate I am about public education and, seeing as I came from a public school, I feel this passion adds to the post by making it a little more meaningful. I hope you enjoy.
CI #1 – The Politics Behind Public School BudgetsPosted on February 4, 2013 by ahj5042
This is a topic that has certainly puzzled me for a long time and I’m sure it has stumped many of you out there. Politicians seem to see the public school budget as an ideal place to cut funds. Whether it is because they see it as a lesser public service or can’t do math very well and see the budget as bloated and over funded I don’t know. However, I aim to find out.
The above chart is a breakdown of the funding for my high school’s district. As you can see, there was a major cut around $2,000,000 after the 2010-2011 school year. This massive cut affects four high schools, four middle schools, and ten, count them, ten elementary schools. Eight of these schools have sports programs and arts programs. These extra curricular activities would quickly disappear or suffer major cut backs in the range of activities they can offer. As a student who was heavily involved in his school’s arts programs, I can say first-hand that these are some of the most important things a school can offer. I’ll go deeper into extra-curricular programs in another blog, though.
Why did this massive cut occur? Well, Governor Corbett believed that the public education budget was over funded and decided that it needed to be trimmed a bit. His idea of trimming the budget was to “eliminate nearly $550 million in basic education funding”. He also asked for a “one-year salary freeze for all public school employees.” Governor Corbett also cut $650 million in education costs for universities. He also slashed funding for “state and state-related schools…in half.” These cuts took place in 2011. He also called for a $100 million cut in addition to the other cuts but the legislature voted this cut down.
Governor Corbett claimed that these cuts were “unavoidable due to the tough economy and the decline in state tax revenues.” However, Corbett’s 2011 budget included up to $1 billion dollars worth of tax cuts for major corporations. He also shunned the excess profits of large energy corporations and lost out on hundreds if millions of dollars. The Governor missed several opportunities to raise revenue instead of placing severe cuts on Public Education. However, in his latest budget proposal, he intends to call for more funding to be given to the public school budget. This could be due to two possibilities, the first of which being that he realized what he was doing to the education system of Pennsylvania or he felt the massive political pressure that stemmed from the gigantic amount of angry Pennsylvanians who saw his cuts as highly unreasonable and unacceptable.
Here are the sources that I used in this blog post. Feel free to read them and develop your own ideas regarding these cuts.
http://www.psea.org/apps/budget/budgetimpact.aspx
http://www.pennlive.com/editorials/index.ssf/2012/04/corbett_cuts_school_districts.html
http://www.aolnews.com/2011/03/08/tom-corbett-budget-5-painful-cuts-in-pennsylvania/
http://www.educationvoterspa.org/index.php/site/issues/governor-corbetts-budget-cuts-over-11-billion-in-education/
http://www.pennlive.com/midstate/index.ssf/2013/02/what_we_know_about_gov_tom_cor.html
CI #1 – The Politics Behind Public School BudgetsPosted on February 4, 2013 by ahj5042
This is a topic that has certainly puzzled me for a long time and I’m sure it has stumped many of you out there. Politicians seem to see the public school budget as an ideal place to cut funds. Whether it is because they see it as a lesser public service or can’t do math very well and see the budget as bloated and over funded I don’t know. However, I aim to find out.
The above chart is a breakdown of the funding for my high school’s district. As you can see, there was a major cut around $2,000,000 after the 2010-2011 school year. This massive cut affects four high schools, four middle schools, and ten, count them, ten elementary schools. Eight of these schools have sports programs and arts programs. These extra curricular activities would quickly disappear or suffer major cut backs in the range of activities they can offer. As a student who was heavily involved in his school’s arts programs, I can say first-hand that these are some of the most important things a school can offer. I’ll go deeper into extra-curricular programs in another blog, though.
Why did this massive cut occur? Well, Governor Corbett believed that the public education budget was over funded and decided that it needed to be trimmed a bit. His idea of trimming the budget was to “eliminate nearly $550 million in basic education funding”. He also asked for a “one-year salary freeze for all public school employees.” Governor Corbett also cut $650 million in education costs for universities. He also slashed funding for “state and state-related schools…in half.” These cuts took place in 2011. He also called for a $100 million cut in addition to the other cuts but the legislature voted this cut down.
Governor Corbett claimed that these cuts were “unavoidable due to the tough economy and the decline in state tax revenues.” However, Corbett’s 2011 budget included up to $1 billion dollars worth of tax cuts for major corporations. He also shunned the excess profits of large energy corporations and lost out on hundreds if millions of dollars. The Governor missed several opportunities to raise revenue instead of placing severe cuts on Public Education. However, in his latest budget proposal, he intends to call for more funding to be given to the public school budget. This could be due to two possibilities, the first of which being that he realized what he was doing to the education system of Pennsylvania or he felt the massive political pressure that stemmed from the gigantic amount of angry Pennsylvanians who saw his cuts as highly unreasonable and unacceptable.
Here are the sources that I used in this blog post. Feel free to read them and develop your own ideas regarding these cuts.
http://www.psea.org/apps/budget/budgetimpact.aspx
http://www.pennlive.com/editorials/index.ssf/2012/04/corbett_cuts_school_districts.html
http://www.aolnews.com/2011/03/08/tom-corbett-budget-5-painful-cuts-in-pennsylvania/
http://www.educationvoterspa.org/index.php/site/issues/governor-corbetts-budget-cuts-over-11-billion-in-education/
http://www.pennlive.com/midstate/index.ssf/2013/02/what_we_know_about_gov_tom_cor.html
RSS Feed