Anyone who thinks education is the “civil rights issue of our time”  needs to look at what’s going on in Chicago.

In three days of protests over the weekend and lapping into Monday, people who look like they would be involved in a civil rights cause – mostly African-American and Latino/a teachers, parents, and students, many living in low-income communities – were protesting against the city’s decision to close their neighborhood schools.

City officials have claimed that the closures are for the sake of “reforming” the city’s schools, but people who the schools actually serve aren’t buying it.

Similar protests are happening in Philadelphia where communities of black and brown citizens are openly defying civic leaders’ decisions to cut education spending and close neighborhood schools, again, in the name of “reforming” them.

Also from the heartland last week, in Indiana, a parent-led rebellion against policies mandating that schools adopt new curriculum standards known as the Common Core resulted in government officials delaying implementation of the standards that have been cast as necessary “reforms” to the system.

Similar rebellions are occurring in Alabama, Georgia, and Pennsylvania.

Moving west to Seattle, teachers boycotting standardized tests that state leaders mandated in a “reform” effort got what they wanted last week when the school administration gave into the teachers’ demands that the tests not be made mandatory for high schools.

A similar resistance has been happening across the state of Texas where a coalition of educators, parents, and state policy leaders are calling for a “counterattack” against standardized testing. This time, instead of teachers leading the rebellion, the salient force are parents who have, according to a reporter for the Austin American-Statesman, “overwhelmed the powerful business and political forces that made Texas the capital of high-stakes testing.”

These events, and others, reveal an emerging American movement unifying diverse factions across the nation in efforts to reverse education policy mandates and bolster public schools instead of punishing them and closing them down.

There is little doubt now that a counterargument to the education policies championed by the likes of Michelle Rhee and Education Secretary Arne Duncan is now slipping into the mainstream of American opinion.

Even the editorial board of The New York Times is calling for a change in how that city has been administering its public schools. In an editorial this week, the newspaper, which had been a cheerleader for Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s education mandates, now states, “The school system has indeed gone overboard in relying on standardized testing. Tests need to be a means to the end of better instruction, not the pedagogical obsession they have become.”

What’s generally not understood is that these flashpoints of resistance around the country are driven by common core grievances – a grassroots “common core” if you will – that is shaping the rapidly evolving education debate.

Behind nearly every protest to the status quo policies meted out to the nation’s public education system are common grievances about resource deprivation, inequity, public disempowerment and the widespread perception that governing policies are driven by corruption.

The situation in Chicago is a microcosm of how these four grievances are converging.

Resource Deprivation

What’s not widely acknowledged is that there is a systemic and deliberate agenda across America to starve public schools of funding. This is especially true in Chicago and especially true for the schools that are scheduled for closing.

A recent report from the Chicago Teachers Union looked at schools that were closed and revealed the district’s intentional policy to starve the targeted schools of necessary funds. As local blogger and activist Kenzo Shibata recently observed at The Huffington Post, “The school closings wave is at the crescendo of years of slow and steady sabotage by the Chicago Board of Education.”

Shibata quoted a Chicago Public Schools Official who readily admitted that “If we think there’s a chance that a building is going to be closed in the next five to 10 years, if we think it’s unlikely it’s going to continue to be a school, we’re not going to invest in that building.”

Shibata correctly observed, “The very schools that needed the most support – libraries, small class sizes, and wraparound services – were starved.”

Inequity

Not only is there a nationwide effort to disinvest from public schools, there is a systemic policy in America to ensure schools that need funding the most are targeted for deeper cuts or lower funding.

This is especially true in Chicago where the schools being closed are predominantly in parts of the city that are populated with lower-income African American and Latino families.

Writing at the website Alternet, Samantha Winslow reported, ” Almost all of the 54 schools targeted for closing serve primarily black and Latino students. All are in poor neighborhoods.”

Reporter James Patrick at Substance News observed,

“Since 2001, 98 of the 100 schools being closed or phased out in Chicago have been located in predominantly African-American and Latino communities. School closures directly correspond to the locations of troubled mortgages, foreclosures, and population loss.”

Public Disempowerment

Behind nearly every protest against the nation’s education metric-driven agenda is the complaint from teachers, parents, and school children that they are being disempowered.

Whether the voices of dissent are coming from teachers objecting to unfair evaluations, parents objecting to having no voice in creating and implementing new standards, or students complaining of unjust discipline measures, the prevailing narrative is that Americans of all persuasions increasingly believe they have diminishing control over their education destinies.

Policy decisions affecting education are increasingly promulgated from governing bodies that are not elected and serve at the whim of powerful mayors and governors who take power away from locally-elected bodies and hand it over to hand-picked “managers” and committees filled with their close associates and campaign funders.

Education policies are increasingly the product of Washington-based technocrats who have little or no contact with the schools and communities whose schools are being affected by their plans.

Even charter schools – often promoted as a authentic “choice” for parents who want to escape “government monopoly schools” – are increasingly operated by distant executives and appointed boards with little accountability to local constituents.

This sense of disempowerment is an especially prevalent force behind the Chicago protests. Bloggers and activists have recorded countless stories of parents who have done everything they can to provide their children access to good schools only to see their efforts undone by the city’s action.

One account, appearing in the local independent newspaper Catalyst, told how parents have seen these Chicago neighborhoods completely transformed by forces out of their ability to address. In one neighborhood, “Over the past decade, three of the schools that served the area’s children have been closed and reopened – one as a charter school, one as a selective enrollment school and the third as a lease by a private Catholic school that costs about $8,000 a year.”

In other words, the option to choose a school that accepts all children is no longer available.

This is not an isolated example, noted reporter Sarah Karp. “The end result of the school [administration's] actions is that traditional, district-run neighborhood schools will become scarcer. Schools to which students have to apply and those run by private organizations will continue to take over, casting an ever-bigger shadow over the district.”

Widespread Perceptions Of Corruption

Prominent news stories about charter school profiteering, massive cheating on standardized tests, and the heavy involvement of Wall Street investment firms and the publishing industry behind the scenes are creating widespread perceptions that education policy is driven by corruption.

People to the right of the political spectrum accuse efforts to align all state curricula to Common Core standards of being driven by a federal government intent on spreading “propaganda” and invading our privacy.

Those who tend to lean left see corporations as the primary benefactors of education policies like the Common Core and charter school proliferation.

Either way, the core grievance is that education policies are being sold to the American people with very deceptive language and with occasionally ulterior motives.

These perceptions are not confined to the extremes of the spectrum. Recently at The New Republic, Nicholas Lehmann wrote that education reform poster-person Michelle Rhee has “misled” education advocates who favor current policies.

“Rhee simply isn’t interested in reasoning forward from evidence to conclusions: conclusions are where she starts,” Lehmann observed. “She gives us little or no discussion of pedagogical technique, a hot research topic these days, or of curriculum, another hot topic owing to the advent of the Common Core standards, or of funding levels, or class size, or teacher training, or surrounding schools with social services.”

Lehmann concluded that Rhee’s leadership in “the education-reform movement” has had the damaging effect of making the whole enterprise take on “a narrow and melodramatic frame” that remains so influential mostly because “it depends so heavily on the largesse of people who are used to getting their way.”

Certainly the people of Chicago know what it’s like to be misled by influential and local officials threatening their schools. A local radio station, WBEZ, took the time to fact check what school district officials have been reporting and found lots of gaps in the truth.

For instance, Chicago Public Schools says “30,000 children will be impacted by school closings. But the district’s plan actually will touch more than 46,000 children.”

Although school and city officials have “claimed a loss of 145,000 students, between 2000 and 2013, actual enrollment in Chicago Public Schools has not decreased dramatically.” And, “since 2000, the proportion of Chicago kids attending public schools has actually increased.”

Also, “Mayor Rahm Emanuel has said the key reason to close schools is about getting children ‘trapped’ in low performing schools to a better place.” But the reporters found that in previous closings, “most students whose schools were closed by the district re-enrolled in schools that were academically weak.”

School and city officials have stated the school closures are scheduled to save $43 million and help close $1 billion shortfall in the district’s operating budget. But again, the facts show “all cost savings, plus tens of millions of additional dollars (for a total of $233 million), will be put into receiving schools.” And “the district is borrowing $329 million to pay for improvements to receiving schools,” which “will cost $25 million in debt service every year for 30 years.”

The New Bipartisanship On Education?

The common core grievances driving the backlash to education mandates are not going to go away any time soon. Despite how the particulars of the debate pivot to issues about content standards, to assessment results, to school choice, etc. widespread feelings of resource deprivation, inequity, public disempowerment, and overwhelming corruption are not only going to remain – they are likely to grow. Any lurch from crisis to crisis – no matter how well orchestrated – will likely further intensify a popular sense of a system out of control.

The only remaining question is, now that it’s becoming more acceptable to say that education mandates have “gone too far,” how much longer will it take for those same opinion outlets to admit the mandates were mistaken to begin with?

As part of their latest effort to rebrand the GOP as a more caring party, House Republicans are scheduled this week to put forward a student lending bill called the “Smarter Solutions for Students Act.” But the label is misleading. A more appropriate name would be the “Making College More Expensive Act.” (Indeed, that’s what House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer calls it.)

The bill changes the way interest rates are set, making the rate on every loan vary each year—similar to credit card rates and the flawed variable-rate mortgages that played a role in the 2008 Wall Street crash that sparked the recession. Although touted as a lifeline that would keep student interest rates from doubling from 3.4 percent come July 1, the bill would still leave students paying a much higher rate of interest than they are paying now.

Interest rates for Stafford Loans would be set by adding 2.5 percentage points to the rate of high-yield 10-year Treasury notes, with a cap of 8.5 percent. At 1 p.m. Tuesday, that rate was 1.94 percent. The annual interest rate on Direct PLUS loans would be 4.5 percentage points above the rate on high-yield 10-year Treasury notes, with a cap of 10.5 percent.

“In seven out of the next 10 years, interest rates under the House Republican proposal would be higher than the status quo, meaning it would simply trade lower interest rates today for higher rates and more debt down the road,” said Rory O’Sullivan, policy director for Young Invincibles, a youth advocacy organization. “Moreover, interest rates on some loans could still reach double digits, and the proposal sets rates in a way that makes more money off students and puts it toward deficit reduction.”

Already debt-ridden families and jobless graduates would be forced to pay down our government’s debt while fat cats get away scot-free. The CBO predicts the bill will save the government an estimated $3.7 billion over 10 years, but at a staggering cost to the struggling middle class. “In the first 10 years alone, students would be expected to pay $3.7 billion more to borrow for college than under current law,” said The Institute for College Access and Success.

Putting the fate of our students into the hands of market rate forces is the wrong policy prescription to heal our economy and accelerate our recovery.

We need common sense legislation that supports students and families over businesses and banks like Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s alternative. Under the “Bank On Students Loan Fairness Act,” students would be able to pay back their loans at the same rock-bottom interest rates banks receive, currently 0.75 percent.

The “Smarter Solutions for Students Act” is neither smart nor a solution for 99 percent of this country. It’s time to stand up for our students and put America back to work.

Thursday on Bloomberg Television, Robert Borosage made the case for Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s Bank On Student Loan Fairness Act, which would set student loan interest rates at the same rate banks get from the Federal Reserve discount window:

“There is a universal consensus that we have to educate the next generation. And now college is getting priced out the reach of more and more students who have earned their way into it. What Elizabeth Warren is saying is, look, we shouldn’t be subsidizing the banks and not subsidizing the children that are our future.”

You can help press the Senate to pass the Warren bill by signing this Campaign for America’s Future/Daily Kos petition.

“It’s always hard to tell for sure exactly when a revolution starts,” wrote John Tierny in The Atlantic recently. “I’m not an expert on revolutions,” he continued, “but even I can see that a new one is taking shape in American K-12 public education.”

Tierney pointed to a number of signs of the coming “revolution:”

• Teachers refusing to give standardized tests, parents opting their kids out of tests, and students boycotting tests.
• Legislators reconsidering testing and expressing concerns about corruption in the testing industry.
• Voucher and other “choice” proposals being strongly contested and voted down in states that had been friendly to them.

Tierney linked to a blog post by yours truly, “The Inconvenient Truth of Education Reform,” explaining how the movement known as “education reform” has committed severe harm to the populations it professes to serve while spreading corruption and enriching businesses and political figures.

Echoing Tierney, on the pages of Slate, The Nation, and elsewhere, David Kirp, education professor and author of a popular new book casting doubt on competitive driven, market-based school reform, declared that cheating scandals and parent rebellions over high stakes standardized testing were proof that much ballyhooed reform policies championed by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Education Secretary Arne Duncan are not “a proven – or even a promising – way to make schools better.”

Kirp declared that mounting evidence from school reform efforts in major U.S. metropolitan areas reveals “it’s a terrible time for advocates of market-driven reform in public education. For more than a decade, their strategy – which makes teachers’ careers turn on student gains in reading and math tests, and promotes competition through charter schools and vouchers – has been the dominant policy mantra. But now the cracks are showing.”

In a legislative view, the Progressive State Network, which supports left-leaning state legislators and monitors legislative policy in state houses, noticed “a backlash is brewing in many states as more and more parents and legislators alike start asking questions about corporate education reform.” The post on PSN’s website referenced Tierney’s article and highlighted a Minnesota bill that eliminates testing requirements for graduation and several states that are embroiled in battles to defeat measures known as the “parent trigger,” which enables private takeovers of public schools.

These observations are not alarmist chatter but well-reasoned, valid conclusions that anti-government collectivist actions related to public school policy are scaling up from isolated protests to a nationwide movement of unified resistance.

The movement is widespread among teachers, students, and parents. It is grassroots driven and way out in front of most journalists and political leaders. And it’s scaling up in intensity.

A Teacher-Student-Parent Movement

For quite some time now, education historian and reform opponent Diane Ravitch has written about the ever expanding discontent among teachers over the emphasis on standardized testing and test-based teacher evaluation and school rating systems.

As proof of this discontent, Ravitch has closely followed and commented on a boycott against standardized testing among teachers in Seattle, an ongoing protest among principals in New York state against new teacher evaluations, and objections to the “testing beast” among educators and parents in Texas.

In ever-greater numbers, however, students are also leading the resistance. A recent article in The Nation reported on the growing student resistance movement driven by grievances over austerity budgets and systemic racism.

From all corners of the country – North Carolina to Philadelphia to Louisiana to Chicago – students as young as eight years old are organizing and taking part in a variety of actions including zombie protests, school walkouts and sit-ins, and acts of defiance like the recent rant by a high school student in Texas that went viral over the Internet when he castigated a seemingly indifferent teacher for dispensing education in “packets” rather than engaging the class in meaningful, relevant learning.

In Chicago, youth voice is forming in grassroots groups like CSOSOS (Chicago Students Organizing To Save Our Schools) and VOYCE (Voices of Youth in Chicago Education) that have led prominent, headline-earning protests to school closures, teacher firings, and over emphasis on high-stakes testing.

In Philadelphia, a handful of students used their social media and organizing skills to whip up student resentment and send hundreds of students into the streets to protest budget cuts to their favorite education programs.

In Denver, high schoolers have formed Students4OurSchools and staged walkouts protesting the over-emphasis on standardized testing.

Students in Philadelphia, Providence, Rhode Island, Portland, Oregon, and elsewhere have formed student unions that have developed attention-getting tactics, which have spread to a national scale. These student organizations’ Facebook pages speak in unison against school closures and cutbacks, widespread teacher firings, and top-down implementations of mandated standards and high-stakes testing.

In many places, teachers and parents are supporting rebellious students and even joining in the protests. Grassroots parent groups, in fact, have been the driving force behind efforts to beat back school voucher proposals in Tennessee and parent trigger legislation in Florida.

Resistance is particularly vehement in low-income communities of color in large urban school districts where reform measures have lead to widespread teacher firings and school closings. In Chicago, Philadelphia, New York City, Cleveland, and Detroit, vocal protestors have been organizing in their own communities but also uniting in national campaigns, such as this year’s Journey for Justice effort that brought hundreds of activists in allied grassroots organizations to the White House to protest school closings.

Unlike school reform proponents who benefit from massive donations from rich foundations and politically connected funders, grassroots groups leading the resistance – like the Alliance for Educational Justice and Alliance for Quality Education – have far humbler means and few connections to the political class and deep pocketed philanthropists like Bill Gates.

Nevertheless, these groups have generated strong outpourings of popular dissent and produced important analyses of the duplicity of the reform agenda.

A Movement Getting More Recognition

Mostly, grassroots-led protests against education mandates have gotten little attention from even the few media outlets and reporters focused on education.

That changed, however, when the head of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, called for a moratorium on the consequences of high-stakes testing related to the Common Core.

All of a sudden, when there was a crack in the conventional wisdom that education policy was a centrist agreement between teachers’ unions and conservative belief tanks, many education bloggers and journalists decided the school accountability movement had reached a surprising new level of intensity.

Long-time education journalist Dana Goldstein speculated on her blog that Weingarten’s moratorium call is proof that education matters that were once considered products of a “coalition” of centrist-minded – although mostly conservative – wonks and Beltway operatives are now points of strong contention.

Her conclusion was that these differences represent a “deep divide” among the political class about whether it’s a good idea to “scare us into meaningful school reform.”

Another experienced education journalist, Sam Chaltain also reflected on his blog on calls for a testing moratorium. He recalled that after Barak Obama was elected, Obama proceeded with “a series of education policies that further entrenched America’s reliance on reading and math scores as a proxy for whole-school evaluation.”

Critics of those policies “vented,” Chaltain explained, but “policymakers nodded. And absent any real noise, the tests continued.” But with this more recent backlash to education mandates, Chaltain observed, “policymakers have been unable to ignore a groundswell of noise and resistance.”

Chaltain concluded that conflicts over school policy had “reached a tipping point.”

Similarly, veteran education reporter at Education Week Michelle McNeil observed, “Not since the battles over school desegregation has the debate about public education been so intense and polarized.”

McNeil sourced the polarity to the conventional wisdom that public education is “an institution that historically is slow to change,” and now it’s being “forced to deal with so much change at once.” And she asserts that the controversy over change is mostly “about centralization or decentralization” of specific “reform” efforts.

But what Goldstein, McNeil, and others on the sidelines fail to grasp is that the pushback against the nation’s education policy is not new. The “polarization” is not “obscuring” the issues – as McNeil contends – it’s clarifying them. And the “debate” over education has broken free from being an issue confined to “fringes” and “policy elites” to take its rightful place at the center of “a growing, broader backlash.”

Indeed, just like the fight to integrate public schools was connected to the larger struggle for civil rights, fights to preserve and strengthen public schools – whether they take the form of students walking out of class to protest education cuts, parents fighting against deceptively named “empowerment” policies, or teachers boycotting standardized tests – are connected to much larger struggles over what kind of nation America is becoming.

A Leadership Out Of Touch

The growing rebellion to education mandates has been driven mostly by grassroots groups formed first among low-income communities of color, but now the movement is extending to people of greater means and social-political capacity like parent groups that worked an inside game with state legislators to thwart implementation of the Common Core standards in Indiana, block parent trigger bills in Florida, and curb the emphasis on high stakes testing in Texas.

This unification of the grassroots with the “grass tops” in education is not well understood in the media or among policy elites.

In fact, people in charge of education governance appear to be more clueless than ever about what they are intent on accomplishing and legislating.

Witness the recent confession from one of the movement’s most influential leaders, Bridgeport, Conn., school chief Paul Vallas. As Valerie Struass reported at her blog on The Washington Post, Vallas has led reform efforts in Chicago, Philadelphia, and New Orleans that have become blueprints for education policy ideas across the country. Yet he admitted that the policies he has championed are resulting in a “nightmare” of complexity.

Reportedly, he characterized his efforts to enact test-based teacher evaluations as a feature of a “testing industrial complex” and “a system where you literally have binders on individual teachers with rubrics that are so complicated … that they’ll just make you suicidal.”

Vallas’ newfound doubts over what he has created reflected other confusing comments from education policy leaders. Most notable was the commentary by Bill Gates, widely acknowledged as a leader in the movement to base teacher evaluations and school ratings on student test scores, warning against the “rush to implement new teacher development and evaluation systems” based on test scores.

Even more perplexing was Secretary Duncan’s recent inability to deliver a straight answer about parent trigger bills. As Beltway gadfly Alexander Russo recently reported, “Duncan described the trigger as ‘an important tool’ for parent involvement -– but not the only or even the most important one” – whatever that means.

Compared to authentic grassroots outpourings for resources, equity, and real democracy, these equivocations from education policy leaders are puny and venal to say the least.

Intensity Is Building

“Scared” or not, recalling Goldstein’s comment, activists driving protests against the nation’s prevailing education policies are ratcheting the fight to unprecedented intensity that will likely become even more forceful in future efforts.

Later this month, for instance, teachers in Chicago are planning a citywide three-day march to protest impending school closures. Education related bills in state legislatures in California, Texas, New York, North Carolina, and elsewhere will be highly visible points of contention. And actions to protest the imminent doubling of college loan debt interest rates – certainly an issue related to public education – are generating a unified response from hundreds of thousands of Americans.

Clearly, the resistance to top-down education mandates is building. The movement is propelled by forces far greater than what education journalists and policy leaders understand – widespread grievances about inequity, unfairness, and public disempowerment.

The revolt is happening. The revolt is now.

Do you think that student loan debt is only a problem for college students and perhaps their parents? Think again.

The escalation of student loan debt in the past decade is a millstone around the neck of the entire economy, and you are touched by its effects. Especially if you or someone you know has had a hard time finding a job or selling a home, part of what you are experiencing is the effect that escalating college costs, combined with the weak employment and income prospects of college graduates, is having on the economy.

This is a key reason why it is important to support Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s legislation to lower student interest rates to 0.75 percent, the same rate that the nation’s largest banks and private lenders pay to borrow money from the government. Simply put, the economy will continue to stumble as long as college students are carrying a student-loan debt burden that does not allow them to invest in their futures and choose to start a family.

During 2012, the amount of outstanding student loan debt in the country topped $1 trillion threshold, exceeding all types of consumer debt but housing. Just since 2003, the percentage of 25-year-olds and over with student loan debt increased from 25 percent to 43 percent, and the average loan balances have increased by more than 90 percent in that time, to $20,326.

Two government reports in the past month have raised the alarm about what that student-loan debt burden is doing to the economy as a whole.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York released a report that included some stunning details. One of the most startling: Home-ownership rates among 30-year-olds with college debt dropped twice as fast during the Great Recession and afterward as did those without student loans. As a consequence, today 30-year-olds without a student loan, including those who have not attended college, for the first time in at least a decade are more likely to have a mortgage than those who are carrying a student loan. The trend lines are similar for car buyers.

A Consumer Financial Protection Bureau report released last week highlighted similar findings. “Generally, high student debt burdens limit borrowers’ ability to take on new financial obligations,” the report said. “Younger consumers have increasingly shied away from forming new households,” are finding themselves hindered in starting up new businesses, and are choosing to avoid such professions as teaching or primary care medicine, where pay is not high enough to enable them to pay down their loans.

This rising student loan debt is directly related to sharp increases in college tuition well in excess of inflation and a 25-year-low in state and local spending on college education. Robert Reich, former secretary of labor during the Clinton administration, recently compared student loan debt to the housing crisis, predicting that it is a bubble that will soon burst.

Similarly, economist Joseph E. Stiglitz described college debt as “a crisis that is about to break out” in a column in The New York Times posted Sunday night. “Like the housing crisis that preceded it, this crisis is intimately connected to America’s soaring inequality, and how, as Americans on the bottom rungs of the ladder strive to climb up, they are inevitably pulled down — some to a point even lower than where they began,” he wrote.

College debt is the insult that adds to the injury that this economy is doing to people under 30. For 53 straight months the unemployment rate for 18-29 year olds has remained above 10 percent. Debt-ridden and either jobless or underemployed, too many of America’s youth are delaying once routine rites of passage: becoming first-time home buyers, getting married, saving for retirement and purchasing a car. In an economy where no one is spending, businesses have no incentive to invest and grow, reinforcing the downward cycle. It has prompted talk that for many people college no longer provides a positive return on investment. The only people profiting in the end are the lenders themselves, having used their political muscle to keep these loans from being refinanced or forgiven under certain circumstances.

Stiglitz points out that “America is distinctive among advanced industrialized countries in the burden it places on students and their parents for financing higher education.” And he warns that the price the country will pay for not emulating countries that consider higher education a national investment rather than a personal privilege.

Without more help from the government, students and the economy will continue to flounder in the face of bleak opportunity. Warren’s bill to lock in the same rock-bottom interest rates – 0.75 percent – for students that big banks receive is only one slice of what has to be a comprehensive plan to rebuild the economy so that it works for all of the young people trying to grab onto and climb the economic ladder. But it is an eminently reasonable key step. Sign here to support her bill and lift this millstone that is burdening the economy.

I had the privilege of hearing Dean Baker and Mark Weisbrot speak about austerity the other night and it was as fascinating as you might imagine. I think most people who read this blog wouldn’t be surprised by what they said, but I think many in the audience were people who may be depending upon more mainstream sources and were very surprised — and alarmed — by what they heard. It’s hard to wrap your mind around.

The CEPR does yoeman’s work in providing the data and analysis that informs all of us and I’m very grateful for them.  And Chris Hayes is also doing something on his show that’s very important — telling stories about how austerity affects real people.

I thought this segment was quite brilliant — and horribly depressing. We’re losing at least one generation’s hopes and dreams with our elite’s obscene obsession with strangling the common good:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

By now it’s become clear to anyone willing to pay attention that our nation’s obsession over education standards and testing has gotten out of hand.

Ratcheting education standards ever higher at the same time we cut supports that schools and students need to reach those standards never made any sense to begin with. And the value placed on testing isn’t yielding the return promised in terms of significantly better results for children and improved evaluations of teachers and schools.

Nevertheless, new tests with even higher stakes are being rolled out across the country. The tests are purported to align to new curriculum standards called the Common Core that are strongly backed by the Obama administration and many education advocates from across the political spectrum.

But curriculum materials aligned to the new tests are generally not available for teachers, and educators complain they’ve not been trained in how to teach to the new standards.

In a moment of sanity last week, a leading proponent of the new standards-aligned tests, Randi Weingarten, leader of the American Federation of Teachers, defected from the run-up to implementation and called for a moratorium on the high stakes associated with the Common Core and its new tests.

“We aren’t saying students shouldn’t be assessed,” Weingarten declared. “We aren’t saying teachers shouldn’t be evaluated. We’re not saying that there shouldn’t be standardized tests. We’re talking about a moratorium on consequences in these transitional years.”

She called for an “implementation plan” with more time and input from frontline teachers and “field testing” of the new tests to gather data on the results without punitive “high-stakes” consequences attached.

AFT’s stand quickly got the approval of The Nation’s Katrina vanden Huevel who wrote for The Washington Post, “In today’s high-stakes climate, families have come to dread the endless parade of bubble sheets that now dominate their kids’ lives. Many feel that the emphasis on standardized tests has focused instruction on how to answer multiple-choice questions instead of how to reason and think critically.”

Of course, we all remember taking tests during our school years. And education standards for public schools are nothing new – most states have had them for years.

But testing today is different. Teachers’ and principals’ jobs – indeed the entire existence of the school – can hinge on the results, creating a super-charged atmosphere for the students that stresses them and robs them of valuable instructional time.

Testing and standards have their place for sure, but current education policies have crossed a line and given standards and testing more emphasis than they deserve at the expense of other important initiatives.

Test Obsession Runs Wild

If you hadn’t noticed that America’s obsession with testing students has gotten out of hand, maybe this will get your attention.

Last week, a CBS outlet in upstate New York reported that a “4th grader, hooked to medical machines and IV’s, undergoing pre-brain surgery screening was asked to take a New York State test from his hospital bed.”

The boy has “life-threatening epilepsy” and, according to his mom, was “hooked up to an EEG . . . an IV in his hand and he’s wearing a pulse oximeter in case something happens with his oxygen levels.” Nevertheless, a teacher was dispatched by the state to administer the test.

New York State’s test obsession was perhaps an attempt to outdo Florida where, last month, a local reporter in that state noticed that the state was determined to get a test score from a 9-year-old boy who “has never attended school . . . . was born premature at four pounds with only a brain stem and can’t speak or see.”

In an update of this story, Valerie Strauss reported from her blog at The Washington Post that the boy indeed was made to complete the test, “meaning that a state employee sat down and read it to him, as if he could actually understand it.”

If these stories seem to be just extreme examples, not at all representative of what states are doing to emphasize the tests, then why does at least one state have a protocol for what to do when students vomit on the test? Astonishingly, should the student be judged capable of resuming the test, the procedure is to “give their testing materials back to them to continue testing” – and if not, “secure the testing materials in a plastic bag.”

Elementary school teacher Dan Brown reported at The Huffington Post that test-security procedures at his school caused a student to wet himself during the test. “Several students in my class, as well as others around the school, vomited on the day of the test. One boy, Dennis, could not stop shaking,” Brown wrote.

A running commentary from New York teachers who recently administered the new English Language Arts tests has been posted online, which conveys a consensus view that the exams were too long, students didn’t have enough time, students were visibly stressed during the tests, and test questions did not reflect what teachers had taught.

As students stress out about the emphasis placed on the tests, they’re also being robbed of valuable instructional time. In addition to the hours and hours of test prep teachers increasingly conduct, schools also devote more time to motivating students to do well on the tests. In Washington, D.C., “school staff stage academic pep rallies, produce rap videos and raffle off prizes,” The Washington Post reported.

The same sorts of elaborate motivational strategies to psych students up for tests have been reported in Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Texas and Florida.

Now, connecting these tests to new nationwide standards has the potential to make the stakes even higher.

Does Common Core Make Things Worse?

The fact that the new tests are aligned to the Common Core has gotten many people particularly riled. As The Wall Street Journal recently reported, “the Common Core effort is under attack” from political factions of all kinds – especially conservative Republicans.

Journal reporter Stephanie Bachero noted, “Indiana’s Republican-controlled legislature . . . legislatures in Michigan, Alabama and several other states . . . and the Republican National Committee” have all sought measures to curb funding and implementation of the new standards.

The supposed advantages of the standards were summed up by a reporter in The Washington Post, who wrote, “The standards are designed to ensure that, for the first time, third-graders in Maine will acquire the same knowledge and skills as their peers in Hawaii. Once states begin testing against the new standards, it will be possible for the first time to compare test scores across communities and states.”

But the transition from “theory to reality,” the Post reporter noted, is what’s bringing out the “critics.”

At FairTest.org, the website for The National Center for Fair and Open Testing, there is an ongoing tallynews of “Testing Resistance & Reform News” related to the tests, including parents opting out their students from the tests, teachers refusing to give the tests, students walking out of school in protest of the tests, and pundits and leaders of all stripes raising objections.

The fact that some of the voices protesting Common Core and its related testing can at times sound extremist – that the standards teach “communism is good,” for instance – should not be a rationale to dismiss reasonable objections to the standards and the tests.

Education journalist Sam Chaltain observed that there is a “growing willingness to publicly acknowledge . . . that tests do not align well with the latest research into how people learn; that they prevent adults from measuring higher-level thinking in children; and, most importantly, that there are better ways to evaluate student learning and growth.”

Chaltain singled out “mini-rebellions” against testing around the country including a Montgomery County Maryland superintendent who has called teacher evaluations based on test scores “insanity,” teachers in Seattle who have boycotted the tests, and legislation in Texas to reduce testing.

Chaltain looked at “specific and realistic alternatives” to the current thinking, but these alternatives simply won’t do for those bent on “education reform.”

The Status Quo Objects

Many who were quickest to object to AFT’s moratorium resorted to conventional wisdom that has ruled education policy for nearly 20 years.

These views tend to be grounded in deep suspicion that teachers will only do the “hard work” when they are “held accountable.” What the status quo crowd wants for teachers to be “accountable” to, of course, is test scores – the very thing being over-emphasized by the current policies.

An even stranger argument is to object to the AFT moratorium based on the timeline benchmark used to implement failed NCLB policies – hardly a yardstick worth measuring up to – and the fact that a lot of time and money has already been invested in these Common Core tests, which is again, not a persuasive call for more time and money.

However, the real danger to the standards and testing regime is not that they “won’t work.” As the Shanker Institute’s Matt DiCarlo recently observed, a far more dangerous outcome is that they will.

“We most certainly should hold schools accountable for their results, and there are, at least at the moment, relatively few feasible alternatives to standardized tests,” DiCarlo wrote.

But, Di Carlo cautioned, “Educational outcomes, such as graduation and test scores, are signals of or proxies for the traits that lead to success in life, not the cause of that success.” (emphasis original)

What our current emphasis on standards and testing is doing is to “mold policy such that livelihoods depend on increasing scores” rather than molding it to what really matters: the teaching and learning of “skills – including the critical non-cognitive sort –” that are critical to success in work and in life. (again, emphasis original)

“I’m troubled,” DiCarlo concluded, “by the possibility that, if we don’t pull back the reins, this research may eventually show that we pushed the pendulum to its ultimate breaking point and structured a huge portion of our education system around measures that were only useful in the first place because we didn’t use them so much.”

That outcome would be terrible for education and the wellbeing of children. But it’s what’s becoming the norm in education policy today.

Time For A Pause

What should be noted is that most teachers actually see some reason to proceed with implementing of the Common Core, according to a survey of the AFT membership.

Indeed, in a recent editorial in the education trade newspaper Education Week, a classroom teacher defended the standards, saying, “The common core can be an opportunity to shift the work of learning from our own backs onto the shoulders of our students, where it belongs – and that’s the heart of progressive education.”

But at a time when our education system is being so starved of the resources it needs, should we be funneling ever more cash toward a “pig in a poke” like standards-based testing while research-proven remedies such as early childhood education continue to go unfunded?

Even the most ardent devotees to the standards and testing regime should be convinced of the need to pause and reflect on what kind of results this “movement” has wrought, consider why no other country in the world is hurtling down this path, examine the evidence with the skepticism it deserves, and, yes, support a moratorium.

By now, there have been plenty of negative reactions to last week’s defeat of sensible gun regulation in the U.S. Senate due to the power of the gun lobby to have more sway with senators than popular opinion has.

In his Rose Garden address, President Obama was incredulous that legislation favored by 90 percent of Americans couldn’t get 60 votes in the Senate.

News stories about the bill’s defeat invariably referenced the origin of the bill in the “tragedy” of the horrific shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

Even former U.S. House Representative Gabrielle Giffords – an ardent backer of the bill and a victim of gun violence herself – castigated the senators’ fear of the gun lobby as a shameful contrast to “the fear the first graders in Sandy Hook Elementary School felt as their lives ended by a hail of bullets.”

The quick take on this might lead you to believe that the massacre of innocent school children in Newtown has had little to no effect on how Americans have dealt with school safety and gun proliferation.

You would be mistaken.

Legacy Of The Sandy Hook Shootings

Although connecting the Sandy Hook shootings to high-profile legislation in D.C. seemed to impart little power to passing the bill, the aura of that tragedy has quietly been at work producing all kinds of other actions around the country

While federal lawmakers hesitated and then faltered to take action on restricting gun commerce, policy makers elsewhere in America have had no problem using the Sandy Hook shootings to rationalize new ways to turn school buildings into harsher, more punitive environments for the students who populate them.

The result is likely to be more students – particularly students of color – having disciplinary issues that result in suspensions, expulsions, arrests, and referrals to the criminal justice system, and what has become known as America’s “school-to-prison pipeline” will quite probably grow ever larger unless this wave of nonsense stops.

More Guns And Guards In Schools

Following the Sandy Hook shootings, there were widespread reports of school districts adding more police presence, in the form of “campus resource officers,” to their campuses.

As this article in The Atlantic  reported, following the killings, there was “a spate of new bills proposed at the state level – including in Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Virginia – to either allow educators to carry weapons or to add armed guards to public schools.”

Altogether, The Sunlight Foundation, found that, post-Sandy Hook, 36 states were considering legislation related to guns on school grounds with “the vast majority of these bills” making it “easier for school personnel, guards, and volunteers to carry guns on campus.”

As the Politics K-12 blog at Education Week observed, the Obama administration helped move this effort along by providing “incentives for schools to hire resource officers . . . by giving priority to applicants who plan to use the U.S. Department of Justice’s COPs grants.”

The National Parent Teachers Association noted the White House’s move to encourage more guns and guards in schools and declared that action a “disappointment.”

What’s wrong with heightened “school security?”

What More Guns And Guards Do To Schools

As the above-mentioned article in The Atlantic noted, “about a third of states already allow school personnel to carry concealed weapons on campus,” so there is a long and well-researched track record for what happens when school and government officials respond to violent incidents by stocking schools with more guns and guards. That track record is not good.

As a recent op-ed in the Raleigh News and Observer noted, “on the heels of the Columbine High School massacre,” schools “rapidly increased deployment of law enforcement officers.” This resulted in “soaring rates of suspension, dropouts and school-based arrests and court referrals” that pushed students committing school infraction into the juvenile and criminal systems.

A recent article in The New York Times also looked at the track record for adding more guns and guards in schools and found “the most striking impact of school police officers so far, critics say, has been a surge in arrests or misdemeanor charges for essentially nonviolent behavior – including scuffles, truancy and cursing at teachers – that sends children into the criminal courts.”

“Nationwide,” the report continued, “hundreds of thousands of students are arrested or given criminal citations at schools each year” with Texas setting the worst example, “where police officers based in schools write more than 100,000 misdemeanor tickets each year.”

“A large share are sent to court for relatively minor offenses, with black and Hispanic students and those with disabilities disproportionately affected,” the report found.

When a Washington, D.C.-based civil rights group studied the results of increased police presence in schools, their investigation found that officers were so rarely called upon to address real emergencies that they found “something else to do” and became “the de facto disciplinary arm of the school.”

As reported by USA Today’s Greg Toppo, increased police presence in schools resulted in a spike in students being arrested in school “for things like disorderly conduct” that previously would not involve the criminal justice system.

One of the researchers, testifying before Congress just three days before the Newtown shooting, explained that school discipline is “increasingly handled by law enforcement, and today, students are more likely to be arrested for minor in-school offenses.”

According to Toppo, her testimony included the statistic that harsher, more punitive security measures in schools have resulted in over 3 million students being suspended and over 100,000 students being expelled nationwide, each year.

There’s Money For Guns And Guards

At a time when most states are cutting education budgets, and depressed property taxes are reducing local revenues for schools, lawmakers are having no problem finding cash to spend on guns and guards in schools.

According to The Center for Public Integrity, post-Sandy Hook, a state legislative delegation in Florida approved a proposal to increase property taxes to pay for more school police, “at an annual cost of up to $130,000 per officer.”

A bill in Mississippi “set up a $7.5 million school-security fund.” Alabama legislators proposed “a lottery to pay for a $20 million plan to put police officers in every school.” And Indiana lawmakers weighed a measure to “set aside $10 million to offer grants to schools to hire local police to post in schools.”

Minority Students Hit Hardest

The increased rates of suspensions and expulsions that result from more police presence in schools are particularly devastating for students of color.

According to a report in The Christian Science Monitor, the number of school suspensions nationwide has grown dramatically in recent decades, from nearly 1.8 million students – 4 percent of all public-school students – in 1976, to, by 2006, 3.3 million – 7 percent of all students. “In addition to the suspensions, 102,000 students were expelled – removed from school for the remainder of the year or longer – in 2006.”

Suspensions and expulsions for certain groups – “particularly African-Americans, Hispanics, and those with disabilities” – are disproportionally high,” the report found, with African-Americans making up 18 percent of the students but “accounting for 46 percent of students suspended more than once, 39 percent of students expelled, and 36 percent of students arrested on campus.”

An even more recent report, this one from The Center for Civil Rights Remedies at the University of California, Los Angeles Civil Rights Project, found “an increasing gap between suspension rates of black and white students,” with “24 percent of black students” getting the brunt of harsh discipline measures while only “7.1 percent of white students” experienced the same treatment.

According to a write-up of the report in The Huffington Post, “Most of the suspensions came not in response to violent behavior, but for minor infractions such as dress code violations or lateness. The research also found that suspensions increase the likelihood kids will drop out of school and commit crimes.”

Some Say “Enough!”

The strong correlation of guns and guards in schools to increasing rates of school suspensions, expulsions, and arrests has not gone unnoticed, and a growing number of educators and lawmakers have expressed concern that society will pay down the road for more jobless and incarcerated young people.

In fact, a different article about the study from the UCLA Project, quoted one of the report’s authors who noted, “The likelihood of dropping out from school can rise to 32 percent for a ninth-grader who’s been suspended just once.”

The civil rights coalition that produced the research from The Advancement Project, cited above, took action to preempt more guns and guards in schools with a “Gun Free Way to School Safety” recommending schools “focus on prevention of crisis situations through creation of a positive school culture,” enact “appropriate security measures” that don’t involve law enforcement personnel, and develop a “school crisis plan.”

Recently, the National School Boards Association released a report declaring that the use of out-of-school suspensions had reached a “crisis” level. The report, released in conjunction with the National Opportunity to Learn campaign (a funder of the Education Opportunity Network), included new policy guidelines for “discipline policies aimed at ending excessive and discriminatory out-of-school suspensions.”

Education Week reported that NSBA declared “School board members should lead the charge to reduce, if not eliminate, the practice of out-of-school suspensions and instead push comprehensive strategies for preventing the removal of students from school for disciplinary reasons.”

Students have spoken out as well, organizing in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and elsewhere in separate yet connected efforts to promote a process called “restorative justice.”

These and other recent actions got the attention of the editorial board of The New York Times, who last week expressed concern about “a larger police presence in schools” that can “create a repressive environment in which children are arrested or issued summonses for minor misdeeds — like cutting class or talking back — that once would have been dealt with by the principal.”

The editors called for “greater transparency in the reporting process to make the police even more forthcoming” and more efforts “to dismantle . . . the school-to-prison pipeline.”

Their recommendation: “Districts that have gotten along without police officers should think twice before deploying them in school buildings.”

Truly, isn’t this the least we can do?

If the horrendous crime that took place at Sandy Hook Elementary can’t provide the impetus for positive action on gun control, let’s make sure it doesn’t provide the rationale for turning schools into extensions of a brutal, uncaring culture we want our children to abhor.

Now that every major media outlet has weighed in on the budget that President Obama introduced last week, the conventional wisdom is that Obama has proposed a “balance” of new revenues and spending cuts with an emphasis on sacrificing “entitlements” enjoyed by old people in order to increase “investments” in children.

This sensibility was most obvious in a quote in The New York Times from Virginia Senator Mark Warner who talked about “the math on entitlements” causing the federal government to “squeeze early-childhood programs … Head Start,” and “education.”

Warner continued, “There’s nothing progressive about a business or any other enterprise to invest less than 5 percent of its revenues on the education of its work force … and that’s what we’re doing.”

The “rift” the Times article refers to over the Obama administration’s budget became even more obvious when a broad coalition of progressive groups took to the streets in immediate opposition to Social Security cuts – known as “Chained CPI” – while the Center for American Progress hailed the budget’s proposals for early childhood education as “historic,” and Democrats for Education Reform gave the it “high praise” for it education measures.

The narrative that there’s a sort of generational warfare breaking out in the Democratic Party is remarkably false, though. Because Social Security spending is completely independent from the budget, it in no way puts a “squeeze” on how much the federal government spends on education and children.

Further, Democrats who fear opposition to Social Security cuts included in the Obama budget runs the risk of scuttling worthwhile spending on the younger generation should rest assured their fears are unwarranted.

What the Obama administration is proposing for education is in no way worth the sacrifice being demanded from the elderly, disabled, and poor.

What’s Being Praised

For sure, education items in the Obama administration’s proposed budget seem attractive at first glance.

As Education Week’s Alyson Klein observed, the proposed new outlays would increase the U.S. Department of Education’s spending “to $71.2 billion for fiscal year 2014″ – a “4.6 increase” over what the DOE was spending before the automatic sequester cuts took effect.

“This would constitute the largest expansion of educational opportunity in the 21st century,” the article quoted Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.

What’s most often praised in the budget plan is the new money allotted for a big expansion of prekindergarten programs. The Center for American Progress, in the article cited above, labeled the program a “bold new $75 billion investment in preschool over 10 years,” claiming the investment “would significantly shrink the preschool-access gap by helping states establish and expand high-quality programs.”

Other big-ticket items in the budget proposal were to boost the federal government’s spending on competitive grant programs, including

• $300 million for a “competitive-grant program aimed at helping high schools better prepare students for post-secondary education and the workplace and focus on science, math, engineering, and technology.”
• $1 billion more for a new Race to the Top competition focused on higher education.
• A big increase for the School Improvement Grant program, including $125 million for “school turnarounds.”

So, what could be wrong with these?

What’s Problematic

Despite the near-universal praise for the Obama budget’s support for early childhood education, more critical takes on the proposal have turned up some serious problems.

As The Huffington Post’s Joy Resmovits pointed out, the proposal does not “require states to actually expand preschool offerings. Rather, it would give incentives for them to do so.”

Paraphrasing early education expert Sara Mead, Resmovits noted, “The federal government can’t mandate that states expand preschool,” so many states that have been unwilling to expand these services will quite probably continue to do so.

Resmovits likened the proposal to the Affordable Care Act, with its optional health insurance exchanges that have been rejected by 21 states.

“But the preschool incentive may be even less compelling to states than Obamacare,” Resmovits wrote, “since Preschool for All doesn’t help governors fulfill a federal mandate.”

Raising further complications, Sara Meade, who Resmovits cited, had more to say about the Obama preschool proposal at the blog site Education Sector.

Meade wondered about other impediments to implementing the pre-K program, such as whether “quality requirements” would “make states hesitant to take the funds.”

She also noted that at the 10-year target range for new federal outlays, as a percent of funding for early childhood education, would actually be “lower than the current federal share of all government spending on early childhood education (where federal funds account for the majority of public dollars).”

How does this “incentivize” states?

The increases to competitive grant programs in the proposed budget pose complications as well. There is emerging evidence that requirements for federal education grants often result in new costs to school districts that exceed the money rewarded in the grant.

Many school districts across the state of New York, an RTTT winner, have come to the realization that “no one did the math,” as one school superintendent put it, to see whether the federal grant would cover the costs of the very heavy strings attached.

School officials, according to this account, “are finding they will have to spend significantly more – perhaps 50 to 100 times as much, in some cases – to meet Race to the Top’s demanding requirements.”

Yet, many of the districts either got no federal money or “received grants of less than $50,000.”

Similarly, in Ohio, which was awarded its RTTT grant in 2010, “about 80 districts and charter schools across the state” recently backed out of participating in the program because “school officials realized that grants weren’t enough to cover the requirements attached to them.”

What’s Missing

While backers of the Obama budget like to recite the big numbers associated with the proposal’s preschool and competitive grants, what they often fail to mention is that the budget areas where the federal government has traditionally had the most effect on education – Title I grants for disadvantaged students and special education funds stemming from the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act – have been completely level-funded.

This is especially problematic at a time when the nation is experiencing sharp increases in child poverty; now 23 percent of all children live in poverty.

Further, the federal government’s obligation to cough up its share of spending on special education students is long overdue. As this blog post recently pointed out, the original legislation establishing IDEA obligated the federal government to pay up to “40 percent of the average per-pupil expenditure.”

But federal expenditure levels are currently nowhere near 40 percent, making special education, essentially, “an unfunded mandate.”

These are indeed glaring omissions in what the administration is proposing.

Educators Voice Concerns

It’s telling that even a constituency normally reflexively supportive of increased education spending – the nation’s teachers’ unions – is none too pleased with the president’s proposals.

One communiqué from the National Education Association called the budget proposal “a mixed bag for those who care about students, schools and working families” acknowledging that the budget proposal cuts the “social safety net.”

In a more formal statement, NEA president Dennis Van Roekel repeated this concern, stating the budget failed at being “balanced and fair by demanding more of the wealthiest and corporations while staying true to our nation’s commitment to seniors and those most in need.”

Van Roekel also lamented that spending increases are in the form of competitive grants that states have to apply for. “This is disappointing,” he said, “because competitive grants leave too many students behind.”

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, also voiced “serious concerns” about the budget’s cuts to Social Security and Medicare that “are irresponsible and untimely.”

What Just Happened?

In the conventional wisdom of how Washington is supposed to work, things aren’t going to plan.

Those aligning with the “special interests” devoted to education funding should have been bought off by the carrot dangled before them rather than joining the resistance defending what heretofore have been “old people’s issues” – Social Security and Medicare.

Things may yet work out as the David Brookses of the world would have it, where Democrats “get a lot of the good ideas” the pundit class has allotted to them – such as, um, making more men “marriageable” (?) – while Republicans get to “restructure” America to benefit their corporate benefactors rather than ordinary Americans.

But what seems equally, if not more so, likely is that progressive Democrats have rallied around a unifying principle to defend the common good.

What has become the galvanizing issue today – defending Social Security – will perhaps set a precedent for resistance in the future from a coalition that unites the “special interests” of young and old.

Everyone at all familiar with the Judgment of Solomon has to be aghast as political leaders reverse that Biblical wisdom and proceed to “split the difference” over who gets whose way on matters affecting children.

Instead of putting the interests of children first, there’s a prevailing wisdom among political centrists inside the Beltway that “compromising” with radical conservatives is the only serious approach to governance and policy-making. So when “hard fought” compromises are reached in the back corridors of the nation’s capital, centrists hold self-congratulatory press conferences, but the lives of children are cleaved in two. We see this in deals made over sequestration, in the new budget being proposed by the Obama administration, and regarding school security measures.

The Centrist Rejection Of Solomon’s Wisdom

Recall that when King Solomon was confronted by two interested parties vying over the well-being of a child, he threatened to serve both parties involved by hacking the kid in two.

This caused one party to stubbornly press its case and say, “Go ahead,” while the other party abandoned its own personal interests for what was in the best interest of the child in the long term. Solomon – understanding the long-term best interests of the child, and not the needs of the vying parties, was central to the matter – was able to rule justly and correctly. That’s called wisdom.

But in today’s political climate, the “centrist Solomons” in charge begin with the belief that compromise must rule the day and let the sword fly. This is called realistic.

Solomon Says: “Sequestration”

If you question at all how political centrism has damaged the lives of children, consider the recently enacted financial sequester. This sterling example of bipartisan legislation is now rolling out its appalling effects on the most vulnerable children.

As Sam Stein and Amanda Terkel report at Huffington Post, among the first and most affected by sequestration are “hundreds of lower-income parents forced to game out major life adjustments to accommodate cuts to Head Start” – the federal preschool program delivering educational, health and nutritional services to disadvantaged young children age 3 to 5.

“Across the country,” they report, “drastic measures to meet the 5-percent cut, as mandated under the sequester,” are resulting in reduced access to programs, early closures, and curtailed services. “In Wisconsin, 700 families could end up losing Head Start access. In Cincinnati, nearly 200 children are at risk. In Oklahoma City, that number is 100.”

A report by the National Education Association found two Head Start programs in Indiana that “removed three dozen students by random drawing in order to offset the coming budget slashing.”

Beyond the negative impact to Head Start, the sequester also harms children attending schools in rural and military and Native American communities.

According to a blog post in Education Week, provisions of the sequester are forcing “rural communities nationwide must repay $17.9 million” in funds used primarily for education services.

CBS News recently told about the sequester’s effects on Impact Aid that provides “$1.2 billion annually to 1,400 school districts nationwide near military bases and Indian reservations.”

The sequester cuts $60 million of that funding. The report quoted a school administrator whose district is affected by the cuts, “You should have excellent schools for our military that has done so much for us, and to cut them is just callous.”

A Budget Compromise On Kids

In striving for a Grand Bargain in his new budget, President Obama also mostly abandons the interests of children for the sake of a compromised deal.

In what The Washington Post describes as a “break with the president’s tradition of providing a sweeping vision of his ideal spending priorities, untethered from political realities,” the budget deal, according to a Bloomberg report, doesn’t include any stimulus spending related to the interests of children.

Although, according to Education Week’s Politics K-12 blog, money in the budget is allocated to a new effort to expand access to pre-K education, those funds are provided by a back door method – “raising federal taxes on cigarettes and other tobacco products” – rather than a straightforward new revenue stream investing in the nation’s children.

Like the proposed cuts to Medicare and Social Security that are built into the president’s budget, according to The New York Times, the Obama administration’s shortcoming on child-centered spending is due to “his willingness to compromise with Republicans.”

If budgets are supposed to reflect values, then what we are seeing again is the interests of Beltway bipartisanship winning out instead of the interests of children.

Where Spending Continues Unabated

While centrist Solomons search for the place where they’ll cut the kids, at least one party to the deal is continuing to pursue its own self-interests unabated.

While cuts roll out of D.C., conservative Republicans across the country are demanding that state and local lawmakers go on a spending spree on arming schools with more guards, guns, and security paraphernalia.

Accompanying the National Rifle Association’s push to get more guns in schools, lawmakers in 36 states have introduced legislation to put more guns in schools, according to a report by the Sunlight Foundation.

“The vast majority of these bills would make it easier for school personnel, guards, and volunteers to carry guns on campus.”

The report notes that the NRA and its backers have, “played tough on this issue,” taking every opportunity – even after the horrendous killing of school children in Newtown, Conn. – to press its case, not compromise.

The negative effects on children of ratcheting up these security measures on schools are multifaceted. Studies conducted where there already is widespread presence of armed guards and strict security in schools have generally found that these measures tend to lead to more students being pushed out of school and into the criminal justice system.

Writing at The Huffington Post, the president of the Children’s Defense Fund, Marian Wright Edelman, recently wrote

There is no evidence that armed guards or police officers in schools make children safer. An armed guard at Columbine High School in 1999 and a full campus police force at Virginia Tech in 2007 were unable to stop the massacres that occurred at both schools. A 2010 review of existing research found no evidence that the use of police to handle school disorders reduces the occurrence of problem behavior in schools but there is evidence that over-policing leads to a new set of problems. (emphasis original)

Instead of arming schools, Edelman recommends “better ways for providing an effective model school safety plan, that an include an emphasis on relationship building . . . consistent reinforcement of positive norms . . . and individualized approaches to student discipline and intervention that seek to address root causes of misbehavior rather than to punish indiscriminately.”

Effort to put more weaponry in schools are not only damaging to children, they are expensive.

As the recent post at the blog for the National School Board Association noted, “Public schools spend billions each year on school resource officers, according to a report on NPR’s Marketplace Morning Report. One officer could cost between $50,000 and $80,000 per year, depending on the district.”

A recent report in the local newspaper in Charlotte, N.C. found that that the school district was struggling to come up with “an added $800,000 required by a change in the city formula for paying school resource officers.”

So while political leaders in D.C. make the federal deficit the defining interest of the nation, elsewhere, conservatives are promoting huge new expenditures for their constituents, and the interests of children get completely lost in the deal-making.

That any Democratic administration would find the interests of the National Rifle Association as a place to compromise on the well-being of children is appalling.

“Splitting The Baby” Not An Option

The way that the Wisdom of Solomon has been interpreted by America’s leaders today resembles the cruder version, reflected, according in the Wikipedia article cited above, in the legal profession, where attorneys propose a simple compromise they call “splitting the baby.”

But that’s not how Solomon’s judgement became “an example of profound wisdom” and not what we need for the well-being of our youngest citizens.

This article originally appeared on the Education Opportunity Network, a project of the Institute for America’s Future and the Opportunity to Learn. Visit the home page to subscribe to a weekly email of education news and views.