By OcJim

Who are the people responsible for the starvation of education in America and the heartless treatment of the vulnerable? We all have a role in this disgrace, but the biggest role can be laid at the feet of the rich — most notably, Wall Street marauders, conservative Democrats, and over-privileged Republicans.

If you want to know the seemingly heartless ideologues in our history who led us down this path of human investment decline, it started with the Reagan administration. The decline was temporarily halted by the Clinton administration, but the “compassionate conservative” administration of George W. Bush resumed evisceration of the young body and mind requiring nurture.

Compared to the Great Society of LBJ, the current crop of Democrats have been lukewarm, but Republicans have made it a crusade to cut egalitarian funding at the knees, this while sending the disenfranchised off to fight unnecessary wars on credit.

How was it before the relentless Republican attack on human resource investment?

Due to the programs and policies of LBJ’s war on poverty and the Great Society, in the middle 60s, poverty was dramatically reduced, employment was increased, depressed communities rebuilt and grand investments in preschool, K-12 education, college, and teacher training revolutionized the concept of human investment up through the 1980s.

In addition, the black-white reading gap shrank by two-thirds for 17-year-olds, black high school and college graduation rates more than doubled and by the mid-70s rates of college attendance among whites, blacks and Latinos reached parity, this for the first and only time before or since.

Almost all programs of the Great Society were dismantled by the so-called Reagan revolution in the 1980s. Included were federal supports for urban and rural development, housing, social services and education. Poverty and homelessness increased sharply. The federal education budget was cut in half overall: funding support was killed for schools; desegregation aid, erased; and teaching supports, ripped out. This all led to growing shortages of teachers and a lowering of American standards that other high-achieving nations enjoyed.

In today’s scene, abandonment of low-achieving schools to failure seems to be the goal set by the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) that the Senate is set to pass in the current session. The bottom 5 percent, in terms of standardized tests, will be required to close, turn into charters, be reconstituted (fire half the staff), or “transformed.” All options will most likely worsen their performance and drive out good teachers and failing students.

Among the many disgraces of current education policy is the lack of major investment in preschool, a known equalizer for the disadvantaged. Also, the many needs of children, including healthcare, extended learning time, or social services are subjects of severe cuts. Preschool spending is $700 per student less than in 2001 and state cuts are more, almost $11 billion by the states in the last 2 years.

All the recent cuts have come on the cusp of Wall Street raids on America’s wealth and income and the great recession it caused.

In effect, ESEA forces out low-scoring students from public schools, which get scores up, but expands the school-to-prison pipeline, quadrupling prison costs over the last 30 years, funds that could be better spent, for example, for the mostly functionally illiterate inmates before they are incarcerated. The public spends $50,000 a year to imprison young men and women instead of $10,000 a year to educate them. It isn’t a smart trade.

Republicans always campaign on law and order. Perhaps imprisoning the poor, especially blacks, is their solution for poverty. Their policies – and too many Democrats – have given us a much higher black inmate population over the thirty years from 1970 to 2000, seven times higher than 1970 at 1,830 per 100,000. In addition, the general incarceration rate is higher than even the Chinese at 506 per 100,000 in 2007. This compares to Germany at 74 and France at 72 per 100,000.

How dense do you have to be to think human investment means imprisoning rather than providing opportunity?

It’s like casting a curse rather than a care to deal with America’s disadvantaged.