Squeezing the Schools

"Good morning, gentlemen. I'd like to get right to the point. The urban schools of this country are dying from financial strangulation." The speaker was Philadelphia's blunt superintendent of schools, Dr. Mark Shedd, and he was telling a Senate committee just what he saw as the nitty-gritty facts. His proposal: that the Federal Government nationalize the nation's 25 largest city systems, at a cost of $10 billion to $12 billion per year. Without "something more than pious pie-in-the-sky pronouncements," he said, "there won't be, in the words of one famous American, any urban public school systems left to kick around any more."

Shedd's drastic remedy reflected a problem that is already acute in big-city schools but increasingly serious in every U.S. village and town. Although the nation will spend a record $85 billion on its public and private schools this school year, the 9.7% increase from last year is barely enough to keep abreast of 1) inflation, 2) a 1% enrollment increase of 500,000 students, and 3) wage increases for teachers and other personnel that went into effect before the freeze. When the National Education Association made a telephone survey of 63 school systems in metropolitan areas last week, it found that all but 22 of them had made cuts in their programs. In Shedd's own Philadelphia, budget cuts this spring threatened to eliminate that most sacrosanct of activities, varsity football. The owner of the Philadelphia Eagles obligingly donated $79,000 to save the jocks, but this grandstanding gesture makes only a small dent in the overall deficit, which has forced the elimination of 600 teaching jobs, trimmed remedial reading, and axed all but five of 31 programs for adults.

To save money on teachers' salaries and maintenance costs, Chicago is now planning to send children home twelve days early for Christmas vacation; in a district near Waterville, Me., the school week now has four days. Zeon J. Sykuta, superintendent in the lower-middle-class Chicago suburb of Country Club Hills, observes that the recession has forced belt tightening "when there are no notches left."

In the past two years, economy measures have already cut down on daily sweeping of classrooms, increased the size of most classes, and multiplied split sessions. But the present cuts are reaching the curriculum itself, stripping it back toward the basic "three Rs" and halting or eliminating promising innovations and experiments.

Falling Behind. The year began in one New York City elementary school with an art teacher asking her sixth-graders, "How many of you can bring your own scissors, paints, glue and paper next time?" Her school has only $675 left to provide such materials to its 1,100 pupils. They are luckier than most: many districts are cutting out art and music programs altogether. In Los Angeles, the teachers' union claims that most instructors now spend about $300 each year from their own pockets to give students books and supplies that the board of education cannot provide. Thus finance problems are sharpening the battle between traditionalists, who say history, English, math and science are the crux of a good education, and reformers who contend that these are not enough to reach restless students or keep poor ones from falling behind.

The reformers are almost invariably the losers. First to go have been enlightened school programs for students who do not fit standard curriculums. New York City schools have had to eliminate some special classes for mildly disturbed children; Anchorage. Alaska, has had to forgo an expansion of a successful program for high school dropouts; Portland, Me., has had to cut back its drug-abuse program.

New training for teachers and new programs in integrated schools depend on approval of a proposed $1.5 billion special assistance bill now stuck in Congress. So-called "informal" education, which gives children substantial freedom to choose subjects that suit them and to work at their own pace, has suffered. School libraries, for instance, are essential for independent study projects, but they are having their hours cut back.

Sometimes the crunch is just physically painful. Many districts have found themselves unable to afford the required matching payments for the federal school lunch program even in areas where the school lunch is the only solid meal a child gets all day. In such circumstances, teachers find ironic the Department of Agriculture's newest radio pitch for the lunch program, which reminds citizens that "you can't teach a hungry child."

Two for One. Adversity has its mundane uses. Many districts are finding they can replace a retiring full-time teacher with two "paraprofessionals" or teacher aides. They can often take over routine duties and increase the number of adults a child can turn to at school. Once resentful to outsiders, some teachers now welcome help from volunteers: more than 2,000 housewives, businessmen and older students will be tutoring in Washington, D.C., public schools alone.

Cutbacks have pushed last year's teacher surplus into an outright glut. By N.E.A. estimates, 104,000 newly graduated teachers have been unable to find permanent classroom jobs, 25,000 more than last year. One California district received so many inquiries from job seekers that it has installed a phone recording to tell them it has no openings.

Forced Funding. Behind the financial squeeze is the end of the 1960s education boom, in which enthusiasm for education enabled the schools' income to rise faster than the G.N.P. Now citizens are no longer as willing to vote themselves increases in the already steep local property taxes that still pay for most schooling. Their reluctance is strengthening the case of educators who, like Philadelphia's Shedd, say the nation needs a new way to raise its school funds. The inequitable property tax, which yields the least resources for schools in urban poor areas that are stuck with the most complex social problems, recently was found unconstitutional by the California Supreme Court (TIME, Sept. 13). If the U.S. Supreme Court applies that decision nationwide, it could force more funding by states and the Federal Government.

Changing the source of the money, however, may not increase its amount. In Washington and among many educators, a go-slow mood has been given fresh rationale by academic research showing no automatic relationship between money spent on schools and students' performance on standard achievement tests. For the time being, a new emphasis on finding out what really works may be the only really beneficial byproduct of the squeeze.

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