Guest Column: TARP Funds for School Districts?
Saturday, May 1st, 2010An article in the New York Times last Sunday discussed the high stakes battle shaping up between some schools and teachers’ unions across the country over seniority rules that have been in place for decades.
The rules require that the most recently hired teachers be the first to lose their jobs. In New York, school leaders say the rules are anachronistic and in an era of accountability, they say, the rules will upend their efforts of the last few years to recruit new teachers, improve teacher performance and reward those who do best. The full article is HERE
We think it isn’t that black and white. There is a lot to be said about having teachers with many years under their belts.
In another article about teacher layoffs in the Times, Morris Goodman, a Dearborn attorney, past president of the Dearborn Democratic Club, a longtime political activist and observer and regular reader of Deepsaidwhat.com, asks why schools can’t be given TARP money to make sure “our future doesn’t tank.” It’s an interesting idea given all of the bailout money our government has paid to other companies.
Goodman’s column begins below:
Morris Goodman
On Tuesday April 20, the New York Times had a front-page article about the tens of thousands of teachers about to be laid off throughout the nation- 2000 in Detroit alone. On Wednesday the 21st General Motors sent the US Treasury $4.7 billion ($1.1 billion to Canada) to pay off its post-bankruptcy federal loan 5 years early. Goldman Sachs and many other bailed out banks reported record first quarter profits. What’s wrong with this picture? If GM and our nation’s major banks are taking in huge revenues because of the action of our government in the fall of 2008 and spring of 2009, shouldn’t some of their money be used to shore up our beleaguered schools.
As the stock market has risen to its highest point since before the financial and mortgage foreclosure meltdown in the fall of 2008 (11,200+ Dow), unemployment has hovered at 9.7% nationally and over 14% in Michigan. Without getting into the argument as to whether the $787 billion February 2009 Stimulus package has done all that it was supposed to, it is clear that in the 2009-2010 school year states and localities used a great deal of their Stimulus money to keep teachers employed and other government services intact.
Without a continuation of federal support, Michigan and most other states (Alaska, North Dakota, and a few other oil and natural gas producing states being the exceptions) are being forced to make significant cuts in their school budgets, not seen since the 1930s. Is that good for this country?