Teachers across the country are suffering, and the children they teach are seeing their futures limited, by the misuse of budget policy as a blunt instrument to roll back social spending on vital, community-building programs. In the case of Christine Simo, there is a clear correlation between misguided cut-first education budget policy and the real harm to the quality of education students can expect.
The argument is often made that investment in “intangibles”, like education, community-level quality of life, even programs for asset-building and public health, cannot be shown to have material benefit: this is wholly false, and anyone who cares about the quality of their children’s education, or the quality of life in their community, has personally observed evidence of that fact.