Sunday, March 20, 2011

Penny Wise and Pound Foolish

News bombards my brain from TV, radio, emails, tweets, Facebook, and yes, even from the newspaper. Money to state colleges in Pennsylvania, money to Medicaid recipients, money to public broadcasting, money to the National Writing Project, and money to hundreds of other basic programs, all now lie under a legislative axe.

The National Writing Project is one of the many cuts that made my stomach curdle. In America we give teachers too few tools, too few opportunities for genuine professional development, too few opportunities to be part of a meaningful collegial organization. The National Writing Project (NWP) has provided all of the above and more for thousands of teachers, yet in order to appear fiscally prudent, legislators have cut funding to this most valuable organization.

An old family expression, “That was penny wise and pound foolish,” can easily be applied to such an egregious action as cutting funding to NWP. Many of the projects teachers collaborate on through the NWP are volunteer projects. For a project to be accepted by NWP, a teacher must demonstrate the capacity of the project to provide benefit to a wide range of students. Therefore, many students nationwide benefit from teacher research and project development and collaborations of NWP teacher leaders for discount rates.

For over thirty years NWP’s cost-effective, wide range, productive investment in our education system was valued. Legislators, from Congress up to the President, need to ignore the “slash-the-budget-taxes-don’t-do-any-good” fad and find the courage to raise taxes for programs, like the National Writing Project, that work.

5 comments:

  1. It's not about budget slashing for economic reasons, they were trying to kill all such things during the economic bonanza and surplus. They want to kill these things both for the reasons the Church wanted to kill the telescope and because they see no value in anything but money. You can't eat literature or art and you don't want to tolerate any heresy either.

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  2. What you're talking about is not a fad. Anything-to-win Republicana see it as part of their ticket to capturing Congress and the White House in 2012. Plus, ideologically, they oppose any programs and policies that demonstrate government can contribute in positive, helpful, cost-effective ways to the common good, to people's daily lives.

    Republicans will keep this up until voters reject them at the polls for an extended period. They will never turn away from it on their own.

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  3. Blaming taxes and government for America's financial woes is a fad amongst a large segment of voters. Republicans may believe taxes and government are culpable, but their ax-cutting behavior results from riding on the crest of a wave created by uneducated popular sentiment against government. When the popular wave crashes, and the votes go away, the Republicans behavior will change.

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  4. I keep hoping that, once the cuts start cutting deeply into quality of life, the populace will take up the cause for tax increases on the wealthy and tax loophole closure for corporations.

    And it's possible that the populace can be beaten into submission for quite a long, long time.

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  5. Nance,

    I'm seeing just that with a lot of people who have been knee-jerk Republican supporters and are now trashing our new Republican governor, Rick Scott. Floridians don't like having their pensions taken away, jobs taken away, police protection taken away, their schools made worse and particularly by a billionaire ex-CEO of a health care company who defrauded the government.

    So far the only Job Rick Scott has created was a favor to a Wisconsin Republican State Senator whose mistress he hired.

    Sooner or later, these people overreach themselves and topple.

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