Silver lining for that economic cloud?
The roller coaster ride of the financial markets and the anxiety it’s causing average Americans has been very troubling. Couple that with the economic funk Michigan has been in for years and you have a situation crying for a solution.
As Congress has wrestled with this and as news outlets have speculated on the costs various solutions might mean to individual Americans, it also begs the question of the impact on what discretionary spending there actually is in the federal budget.
As educators, we have known how woefully under funded federal programs have been – things like No Child Left Behind and IDEA. But another area of school funding that’s gone wanting is school modernization and repair. It’s something that absolutely impacts student achievement, yet something that gets little, if any, notice. Politicians are often too busy criticizing public schools to notice that some are literally crumbling.
But why care about it? Several studies document the link between school building conditions and student learning. Academic achievement differences have been found between students in substandard classrooms and similar kids in top-flight learning environments. Additionally inadequate infrastructure limits access to classroom technology. The list goes on.
But we can’t let this get lost in the shuffle of the current economic crisis. Besides the impact on kids’ ability to learn, the deferred modernization and repair also turns a blind eye to a potential boost for the economy. In fact, it's estimated that every $1 billion spent on school construction creates 23,765 jobs. So, subsidizing $25 billion of school construction bonds would generate almost 600,000 jobs.
NEA has backed legislation in the past that would fund federal tax credits for $25 billion of school modernization bonds. Those tax credits offer an efficient, cost-effective method for providing federal assistance without creating any bureaucracy or interfering with local school modernization decisions.
Sounds like a winner to me.
Tricia Bosak, NEA staff working in Michigan