Growing up, my parents would forever question the need to go out to dinner on Friday nights, or to buy that brand-new 60-inch HDTV. However, they never compromised on my educational expenses. They impressed upon me the idea that education is invaluable.
If only the Texas legislature felt the same way.
As the budget crisis looms over the state, Gov. Perry and House lawmakers have proposed a plan to partly address the $27 billion shortfall by cutting $10 billion from state education spending. This, quite frankly, is unacceptable.
Is there a degree of fat — Perry’s so-called “non-teaching corps” — that can be trimmed from state educators’ budgets? Certainly. But when the cost-cutting gets to the point where, as HISD official Jason Spencer put it, “we could eliminate our entire central administration and non-classroom spending and it still wouldn’t bridge the gap that we’re expecting based on the House budget bill,” this notion of citing bureaucratic bloat to justify (as Gov. Perry has) a slash-and-burn approach borders on absurdity.
I should know — I am a product of this “bloated” system. A native Houstonian, I was a part of the public school system here for the better part of 18 years. And let me be the first to say, money matters.
The reason, in my experience, is that the basic economic concept of the “money multiplier effect” carries over to education. For the unacquainted, this is the idea that every spent dollar you spend gives someone else a little more income that they then go out to spend, which gives someone else a bit more income, and so on. This same principle can be observed in education. Consider teachers: Fewer teachers means larger class sizes; which makes strong, individualized teaching less likely; which renders one less prepared for, say, the Advanced Placement exams; which leaves it all the more difficult to be admitted to a good college; which has tremendous implications for one’s career earnings in the long term. This, in turn, affects family stability, crime rates and a host of other factors. If this sounds hyperbolic, it shouldn’t — this is very much the reality of the importance of education.
In fact, the implications of cost cutting extend beyond the classroom. Because of my particular high school’s strong (and well-funded) programs in the arts (although due in no small part to his prodigious talent), a friend of mine was named one of the top violinists of his age in the world. In parallel, my school’s generous support for math and science competitions also nurtured my own interest in scientific research and prepared me to present my engineering research work at national conferences as a college sophomore. The fact is, every dollar cut from education makes it less likely that we produce the next violin virtuoso or scientific superstar. If that’s something that we, as a society, accept, then we’re in for a dismal — and distinctly mediocre — future.
Furthermore, one thing that is often understated in this state’s educational debates is the fact that Texas students, on average, lag significantly behind their Northern counterparts in academics. In Texas, you are considered to be among the upper echelon of math students statewide — a small and well-qualified minority — if you study calculus at any level by the end of high school. In stark contrast, many of my friends from the Northeast have studied multivariable calculus — the equivalent of a third-semester calculus course in college — by the time they graduate high school. This renders Texas students behind on day one of their college coursework — an academic gap that is hardly easy to make up over time.
If investing in education is “winning the future,” then cutting school funding is almost certainly losing it, amounting to little more than an unabashed cannibalization of future generations of Texans in an ill-thought-out effort to meet the needs of the present. And it doesn’t take having a great education to figure that out — here, common sense will do just fine.
Rahul Rekhi, a sophomore at Rice University, is an ambassador for the Baker Institute Student Forum. He is majoring in bioengineering and economics. Originally from Katy, Texas, Rekhi was the valedictorian of his high school class.