Feds must prioritize K-12 school funding

Teacher strikes and walkouts across the nation, from West Virginia to Oakland, declare America has a problem that transcends a red-state-blue-state divide. Public school educators are demanding living wages, and these strikes are only the first symptom of justified frustration. A full-scale public education system shutdown and litigation over compensation may be on the horizon. If education, the pillar of democracy, crumbles, so does society.

The solution, however, is not renewed pressure on school districts to magically free up funds and reach temporary compromise. Rather, it is time the federal government pay its fair share into the nation’s education system.

American public schools are almost entirely funded by local and state taxes; the federal government contributes less than 8 percent of the overall education budget annually. The issue is not about raising taxes but rather re-prioritizing our spending. Of the $1 trillion a year in federal discretionary spending, over half is spent on the military while less than $70 billion is allocated to education. A society that spends more on defense is not one likely to endure.

The average K-12 teacher in America makes around $50,000 per year, a figure that has declined over the past 20 years. Yet the expectation society places on teachers has only grown. We ask our teachers to shape our young into our future hope — to polish them for over a decade until they can then be passed off to colleges and universities, where they are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars; and after that to industry and government with lifetime value into the millions of dollars to our nation’s economy. They are like diamond miners paid paltry wages for doing all the heavy labor in uncovering these shiny gems, only to have others reap all the profits.

Teachers deserve pay commensurate with the value of service they provide. They deserve a salary that enables them to live in the communities in which they teach.

Figuring out how and howmuch to pay public-school teachers a deserved wage has always been one of America’s Gordian knots. Yet the solution need not be as complicated as the ill-conceived partisan rhetoric about pay-for-performance programs or increasing vouchers and privatization of education. What America needs is federal-level commitment to public K-12 educators through re-prioritization of national values.

Reducing military spending and increasing education spending just makes good economic sense, if not virtuous sense — studies have calculated $1 spent on childhood education yields a $6 payback to society.

It is often said that schools are the backbone of a nation. And if this is the case, then teachers are the nerve cells, receiving, processing and transmitting information into all facets of current and future society through our children. Demanding that our federal government raise educators to the same status as other public servants ought to be a cultural imperative, as everything in society ultimately falls on the shoulders of teachers.

Ralph Waldo Emerson summed it up this way, “We shall one day learn to supersede politics by education. What we call our root-and-branch reforms of slavery, war, gambling, intemperance, is only medicating the symptoms. We must begin higher up, namely, in education.”