BC March
29, 2012 By Carl Bloice
On the same day a national task force warned that the country’s
security and economic prosperity are at risk if America’s schools don’t
improve, California State University system said it would shut out thousands of
mid-year applicants for spring terms starting in January.
According to the Oakland Tribune, only eight of the system’s
23 campuses will accept transfer students for the spring 2013 term, and none
will accept new freshmen. “The decision will leave thousands of community-college
students with an unenviable choice:
Spend the time and money taking unnecessary community-college
classes for an extra semester or drop out and try to make ends meet until Cal
State reopens its doors,” wrote Matt Krupnick.
“The dominant power of the 21st century will
depend on human capital,” the 30-member task force, led by former Secretary of
State Condoleezza Rice and Joel Klein, the former chancellor of New York City’s
school, declared this week. “The failure to produce that capital will undermine
American security.” This statement came shortly after U. S. Secretary of
Education Arne Duncan told a Howard University gathering, “President Obama has
challenged all of us to lead the world with college graduates by 2020. But we
cannot reach that goal unless educational opportunities are extended to
everyone fairly and accurately.”
Regrettably, the contrast between what is being said about
education in our country, and what is actually happening on the ground, serves
to illustrate the galling amount of flim-flam and hypocrisy that characterizes
today’s public discussion of the nation’s schools from kindergarten to the
university level.
Since Duncan took up his post, somewhere in the vicinity
of 270,000 teachers and other public school employees have lost their jobs
because state and local education budgets have been slashed. “The teachers who have
not been laid off have also been deeply affected by the economic downturn:
class sizes are larger, after-school and arts enrichment programs have been cut,
and an increasing number of their students are relying on safety net sources
for health services and other basic needs,” observed the New York Times March 7.
In California alone, the number of full-time teachers has
decreased by 32,000 statewide over the past four years.
