Views » November 25, 2005

The War on our Children

By Rep. Pete Stark (D-Calif.)

Funding a war in Iraq and providing tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans does more damage than Republicans in Congress care to admit. As they clamor on about patriotism, their funding priorities are costing America its future.

The Republican Congress is placing hurdles in front of our children that are nearly impossible to clear. At every turn, from age zero to 18, roadblocks have been erected that block them from reaching their potential.

Since 2002, Republican budgets have cut nearly 7,000 slots for children in low-income families to receive Head Start services. These cuts were made despite studies demonstrating that Head Start children are more likely to graduate from high school and are less likely to repeat a grade. Head Start students are also less likely to commit a crime than low-income children who do not attend Head Start. But such empirical findings mean little to a party that prefers its policies based on faith.

After slashing Head Start budgets, it seems only logical for Republicans to next target poor mothers with children under 6 years old. A recent Republican budget proposal would require these mothers to double their weekly work hours from 20 to 40 in order to remain eligible for job training and vocational education. Yet that plan fails to provide $10.5 billion for childcare funding that the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimated would be needed for mothers to afford to work the longer hours and maintain their benefits. The blatant hypocrisy would be comical if it weren’t true.

As our children—unprepared for the challenges they’ll face—reach public schools, they will get less help than ever before. After taking credit for “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB), President Bush and his Republican allies wasted no time in underfunding the Act, thereby ensuring schools could not meet new, stricter achievement standards. As of June 2005, the House Republicans have shortchanged public schools by $40 billion since the passage of the much-lauded NCLB law. At the same time, yearly progress tests created by NCLB to determine if individual students are improving in math and reading show almost a quarter of schools failing to show improvement on state student tests.

If those weren’t enough obstacles to place in front of our children, the Republicans want to force the average student borrower to pay an additional $5,800 for college. The single most effective springboard to a well-paying job is a college degree. So, this year the Republicans are proposing $14.3 billion in cuts to federal student aid programs.

At every turn, our future is threatened—not by mythical weapons of mass destruction or by the lack of prayer in the classroom—but by policies that continually rob our children of the skills they need to compete. The results of such policies speak for themselves. Since President Bush took office, 1.7 million more Americans live in poverty and the average median income has declined $2,710. Meanwhile, the federal minimum wage, $5.15 an hour, has not been increased since 1997, and has its lowest purchasing power since 1990.

Recently, the impact of cutting our children out of America’s future became abundantly clear when a new Wal-Mart opened in my home community of Oakland, California. Some 11,000 people applied for 400 jobs that pay less than $20,000 a year and offer few benefits. It was a microcosm of the fate of working families everywhere, forced to get by with far too little.

Working together, America can do better. We can improve the economic outlook for our children by investing in their education. We can add funding for student loans and grants. We can provide vocational education and job training.

We must stop accepting that low-wage, low-benefit part-time jobs are the best our children can do. And for all workers, we need to ensure a livable wage and provide for paid family and medical leave.

Not surprisingly, two bills to do just that have been introduced by Democrats and were quickly buried by Republicans. In May, Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) introduced The Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2005, which would have raised the minimum wage to $7.25 an hour over two years. In June, I introduced the Paid Family and Medical Leave Act, which would build on the highly successful Family and Medical Leave Act by providing up to 12 weeks of paid benefits to workers who take time off for reasons allowed under the new Act. Both bills would easily improve the lives of working families, but the priorities of this Republican-controlled Congress are focused in other areas.

If the United States can find $250 billion for a failed war in Iraq and give American millionaires an average tax break of $41,574 apiece in 2006, then the most affluent country in the world can find the funds to improve its schools and workplaces. Our future depends on it.

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• Reader Comments

  People unknowingly voted against their self interests last year…thinking their interests were about abortion gays and guns.
  Little did they know they were voting against their real interests (their children’s future).
  I can only hope we can turn the tide soon, or this country will fall further into the arms of despair.

  Posted by robin on Nov 26, 2005 at 4:50 PM

  No surprise that they (we) vote against our own interests. We are the least educated and least informed population in the free world. Our once independant media now keep us distracted with runaway wives, missing beauty queens, car chases and “reality” TV, our educational system is underfunded and under attack by fundamentalists who see education as a threat to religion.
  Even so, Bush lost the last two elections, first put into office by a supreme court decision that itself violated the law, after “winning” Florida through purging voter lists and intimidating vote counters with shipped in protesters, and four years later with the help of computerized paperless voting machines, throwing out 90,000 absentee ballots, throwing out 100,000 thousand registrations printed on the wrong card stock, holding back voting machines in democratic districts to supress the vote, and many other illegal and immoral tactics, all documented and testified to in hearings chaired by congressman John Conyers and available to all who care to read them.

  Posted by Kenneth D. Brown on Nov 30, 2005 at 4:52 AM

  HURRAY for you, Pete Stark.

  Of course, you are completely correct here.  The state of the American educational system, its endemic inequality in particular, is threatening our future.

  Jan VanDenBerg

  Posted by janvdb on Nov 30, 2005 at 5:00 PM

  Dear Pete
    Who can argue with your case? The policies of the U.S. in the Middle East continue to be calamitous for most of the region and for world harmony. Their toll on America’s already unjust and dysfunctional schools for the poor prolongs the division of this society into corrupted advantaged classes and a hopeless enslaved class.
    It has been a long time since anybody outside the Unions can believe that our Democrats promise more justice than the Republicans.
    But Pete, what is the case for your religious bigotry? My experience in establishing Head Start and other pre-schools has been that the founders were almost invariably communities of Faith. The best Migrant Head Start network on the East Coast was built by a couple of nuns headquartered in Arlington.
    The associations building low-income housing that I have worked with over a lifetime have emerged from Faith communities.
    It has not been any derivative of Marxism but a vision of theological Hope that motivated the vast majority of the activists whose initiatives have given schooling, health care and housing to the marginated.
    Where I live, the vigorous opposition to the attacks on Iraq has been almost entirely a religious movement.
    By what right do you continue the disastrous strategy of impugning their activism and dismissing these people from the ranks of the Democratic Party.
    Bush’s theology, like everything else about him, is bush, self-centered, ignorant and disparages the history of Faith. Listen for any memory of Isaiah, Jeremiah, the 9th century prophets, James, Augustine, John of the Cross, Dostoevsky or the rest. Despise his ignorance and indifference. Recoil from his claims to moral acuity. But remember that most of America hears the cry of the poor in religious language and will be enlisted in your war for the children as were the earlier forces against slavery, racial discrimination and labor abuses in formulations sprung from Faith.

  Frank

  Posted by franko on Nov 30, 2005 at 7:43 PM

  Perhaps the Reps don’t consider an investment in education, whether public or college, to be good business.

  We invest in enterprises that we think are a) likely to bring us a profit, and b) judged to be acceptable risks.

  If the agenda is to elevate the average level of education in the country, the strategy of cutting funding makes no sense. Let me differentiate, by the way, between funding that would go to teachers’ salaries as opposed to money for textbooks and other educational materiel. Paying teachers more, per se, won’t increase the attainments of the youth, and I say that as a teacher myself.

  Having said that, if a teacher has to take a second job to make ends meet, it will obviously distract him or her from doing the best job.

  Back to strategy. If we didn’t want a highly educated public, because having might actually diminish our potential profitability or lower the market value of our own degrees and qualifications, then cutting funding makes perfect sense.

  The question to ask is, who benefits most from these policy decisions? Who is better off in a society where fewer people are critical thinkers or easy learners from text sources? Whose interests are served by making a college education tougher to get? What might those people’s agenda be; their stated agenda but mostly their unstated one.

  You invest in the enterprises that you think are in your interest to take a gamble on. Those enterprises that are somehow counter to your interests, you withhold from.

  Simple economics. Of course, more than half of economics is psychology, so you can take it from there.

  Posted by Kuya on Dec 2, 2005 at 9:25 AM

• extended discussion >>>Continued...

  Discussions with more than 5 comments are continued on our special discussion page to encourage continuity and ease of use. There are currently 13 posts.

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