Archive: Opinions

After attending the Lansing schools budget meeting on March 29, 2010, I walked away feeling a profound sense of sadness and shame.

I heard a parade of teachers and university professors, most no doubt tenured, with good salaries and full health insurance; clean, comfortable working environments and excellent, not to mention, comparatively early retirement benefits awaiting them, talking about the terrible sacrifice that budget constraints will have on the teachers and students. The sacrifices they referenced were startling--an increase in the average class size from 17 to 20 students and the elimination of classes--not special education classes--of less than 10 students.  How horrible!  One teacher complained that students would no longer be able to seek assistance in writing their college admissions essays without an appointment.  Imagine that!  And of course, never, in all of the expressions of concern, was some form of teacher wage concession ever mentioned as a possible solution or even partial solution.

Having grown up in New York City at the height of the baby boom, I was accustomed to class sizes in the high 30 to 40 students.  Yet I consider the education I received to be at least as good as Lansing’s, with teachers and students alike striving to achieve.  My wife attended some of the most exclusive and expensive private New York City schools in her checkered past.  In all of that expensive schooling, she doesn’t remember a class with less than 20 students.

That brings me to the source of my profound sense of shame.  It was the wave of students standing up and protesting the contemplated changes, goaded on by Lansing teachers who proclaimed it an exercise in "civic duty."  These children are obliviously unaware of the sacrifices made by Lansing salt mine workers, retail clerks, small farmers and factory workers.  These are the people who created the foundation of the school system these children now enjoy--and the people who are suffering the most in the current economy.

Lansing students appear oblivious to the fact that fully 50% of Lansing’s population does not enjoy the salaries, benefits and job security enjoyed by most of Lansing's teachers--the price of 30 years of bad national economic policy and corrupt politics.  If Lansing teachers want to instill a sense of civic duty in their students, let them lead protests in front of Michael “blue dog” Arcuri’s local headquarters.

Unfortunately, it appears that no one at Lansing schools teaches John Kenneth Galbraith's "The Other America" any longer.  Perhaps, like Texas, they are teaching the writings of Newt Gingrich and Phyllis Schlafly, at the expense of Thomas Jefferson.  The Wisconsin legislature recently passed a law mandating that the history of the labor movement be taught in grades 9 through 12.  Lansing would do well to follow the example, or face the creeping threat of further middle class deterioration that is starting to attack the other 50% of our population, the part that’s still prospering, at least for the moment.  Lansing students may live to see their parents’ lives, as well as their own, negatively affected.  They have no grasp of how quickly it can happen.

Instead of teaching students how to work with what appears to be reasonable administrators and school board members, who are attempting to strike a balance in the interest of the entire community, they are teaching the students how to bleed the last few dollars out of an economically comatose population, in pursuit of a misdirected goal.  If they all work a little harder and a little smarter, they will do just fine in a class of 20.  If extras like a pool seem important to some, let those who can afford to pay, do so.  There are ways of working it out, if all choose to cooperate.

I hadn’t intended to join the public debate, but watching the spectacle of the board meeting finally compelled me to speak.   When I finished and returned to my seat, a voice of one Lansing parent whispered a thank you to me, for speaking the words that the parent said they dare not speak for fear of retribution by Lansing teachers on their children.  Taxpaying parents, struggling to make ends meet, fearful of the wrath of the teachers they employ!  How sad.

That is what ultimately left me with my sense of shame--that and the nagging feeling that my words will not register with the students and faculty of Lansing schools.  Shame is, after all, out of fashion in the brave new world of Lansing and America.

David Dubin
Lansing, NY 14882