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The
public schools of New York City are losing funding at rate
not seen since the 1970s.
Budget cuts are leading to Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s
to plan to fire about 1,900 teachers and Governor George
Pataki slashed the education aide by over a billion dollars
during the 2003-2004 school year. This will not only make
classes larger than they already are, but there will be
even less money to renovate schools, pay for books, computers,
etcetera. This is not fair for the millions of New York
City students that will suffer because of this and the teachers
who are already stuck with overcrowded classes.
Not only is it a problem that schools are not getting enough
funding, but many students are failing state exams and their
classes. Crime in some schools is as bad as it is on the
streets. This is a very important reason to not cut school
funding. By firing teachers, there will be more children
bunched into classrooms, thus causing more problems. If
the government was really for improving safety in schools
it would not make cuts like these. It is sad that there
are children with no new books in their schools, while selfishly
the mayor is planning to build a stadium in lower Manhattan.
The officials running for government should set there priorities
straight and focus more on helping others rather than doing
things for their personal pleasure. If this had been their
intentions before, there would have fewer problems than
there are now.
We constantly hear about the government making plans for
improving education like the No Child Left Behind Act proposed
by President Bush, but there is no progress seen. Mayor
Michael Bloomberg even opened up alternative high schools
saying that trouble students will go here as there last
chance. But how can that be if students must stay in school
until they are eighteen according to New York City law.
There would be nowhere else for them to go so saying that
this was there last chance is no help at all.
For some students if they have uncontrollable behavior they
are sent to the special education program. Yet up until
a while ago students were socially promoted. By sending
mentally capable students into special programs and then
promoted them, not much learning was accomplished. Now they
have stopped social promotion so now students who never
learned the material in previous grades have educational
knowledge that is under there grade level. Now some high
school students cannot read since the basics that they needed
were never learned because they were promoted to the next
grade without knowing the previous material.
Another troublesome thing that has been done is making it
so that elementary students who do poorly on the tests are
left back. This can be a problem especially for children
who know the material in school but don’t know what
is covered on the test. It was even said on the news that
when more fourth graders passed the state reading test than
was expected, they were forced to take it over because “a
mistake must have been made”. The irony to this is
that while officials constantly claim that they want the
students to do well. When improvement is seen something
is done to mess the students progress up.
When interviewing high school students and recent graduates,
I found they had different experiences with the cuts in
education but all felt the same way when it came to the
fact that schools need more, not less, funding. For me personally
my school, Brooklyn Technical High School may not have loss
as much funding as others but they did have a lack of tutoring
for certain classes and up until later in the school year,
some of the bathroom stalls had broken locks or no doors
at all. One student who attends Urban Academy and is about
to be promoted to the eleventh grade, said that her school
was losing classes and teachers and that there is not even
enough money for teams to have jerseys and equipment.
A student from Martin Luther King High School said that
all of the extracurricular activities that were promised
to them were never made because of loss of funding. Someone
from George W. Wingate said that since the school is considered
an especially bad one, no funding is given that all of the
books are old, the gym is never clean and they have tried
numerous times to close down the school. Art and Design
according to one student is losing its art classes! This
is especially bad for a school that is founded on teaching
its students a variety of different creative works. No matter
what their experiences were, all of the teens I interviewed
felt that it wasn’t right for the government to stop
funding education, which is a very important of life. Politicians
should care more for the welfare of future generations than
for petty things such as rebuilding downtown Manhattan.
IA few days later, I conducted an interview with a teacher.
She said that certain individuals will be affected the most
by the loss of funding in education, so hopefully no more
cuts will be made. When asked what she thought should be
the solution her response was, “The state should give
more money to the city to close the resource gap.”
I later interviewed politician Bill Perkins. When asked
how he felt about the cuts his response was, “The
cuts are bad because money should be added and not subtracted
from education. What the governor and mayor are doing is
shameful.” He said that the Board of Education should
have the parents involved in more ways and that in order
to fight the cuts people should register to vote, send letters
to the mayor and governor, and also write to council members.
When questioned about what effect giving more funding to
schools may have on taxes, he said that taxes will increase
for a short time since a deficit of billions of dollars
is in the school budget, but will then go back to as they
were previously,..
The Board of Education and government officials say they
want to improve education, yet they try to spend money carelessly,
make things harder in the schools than they already are,
and then come up with statistics to make it seem as if much
progress is being made. But instead students are in threat
of doing even worst especially with the tests given to the
fourth graders, the future increase of the number of students
per class and teachers being laid off. Some more responsible
individuals need to take charge of the education system.
If not then millions of children of this generation and
younger will have it rough both in school and at the work
place.
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