“I don’t look at what people say. I look at their actions, their policies. I look at their budgets. Our values don’t reflect that we care about education or we care about teachers or that we truly care about keeping our children safe and free of fear,” Duncan said.
Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education during the Obama administration, is making the talk show rounds promoting a soon-to-be-released book (How Schools Work). I think the core sentiment of the book is likely captured in the quote I have attached above. We talk a good game when it comes to education, but talk and nice words are cheap.
I have long thought this was the way it worked in North Dakota. I don’t know about K12 support, but I know a little about higher education. I spent most of my career working at the University of North Dakota and had some experiences with budget issues and hiring as the chair of the Psychology Department. Working in North Dakota was a challenge. ND is a very small state and mostly Republican so taxes tend to be low.
One of the challenges you face under such circumstances is that university budgets don’t scale very well. Let me explain based on my own circumstances. To be what I consider a legitimate university (even though the name is applied now by about every college), you need to meet certain basic requirements. These requirements don’t change because you are working at a modest-sized institution in a small state. I made the move to North Dakota because I wanted to work at an institution with PhD programs. As my career unfolded, I became administratively responsible for keeping this mission alive. Our department had several different PhD options, but the most popular and the most needed in North Dakota was our program in clinical psychology. Mental health is a great national need and this has also always been the case in North Dakota. We trained a high proportion of the clinical psychologists working in the state. Evidently, North Dakota is not a desired destination for this competitive profession so relying on graduates of Minnesota or elsewhere never really met the need.
The American Psychological Association (APA) has expectations you must satisfy if you want your graduates to qualify for internships and to sit for the licensing examination allowing candidates to practice. APA allows you to accept one graduate student into a clinical graduate program for each clinical faculty member you have on staff. Hiring the academic PhD clinical psychologists was always a challenge and particularly in some of the areas in highest demand (child clinical). Like most of us, clinicians go where the jobs are and in a tight market where the jobs are and where the salaries are good. You can’t make this work on the cheap
This was my reality and I assume others with other areas of responsibility faced similar challenges. Education is an easy target especially those programs that are public institutions. The notion of public is not well understood without a little thought. The % of funding for higher ed state institutions is much smaller than most people probably realize and in some locations such as North Dakota, this proportion has declined substantially in recent funding cycles. I mean not in adjusted dollars or anything like that, I mean declines of 20% or so in unadjusted dollars. Citizens and students complain mightily about the rising cost of tuition which does not come close to making up the difference (at least in North Dakota).
So this is the reality. There are many factors and some of them perhaps the fault of higher ed – e.g., too many administrators. There are also issues that raise costs in what students expect outside of the classroom – fancy health clubs, buffet meal plans to rival the best we might visit for a meal. However, all of this stuff amounts to only a small part of the funding challenge. Folks like to focus on such matters and perhaps they need to be addressed, but the real issue always comes back to what Duncan noted. Education cannot be something we like to talk about, but not fund. This just does not work and the quality of the product is slipping when this reality is not being addressed.