Anyway, before the guy left he fell into conversation with me. We talked about how all the towns were going to go into debt over their snow removal budgets, and somehow or other that evolved into a conversation about the education budget. It may have had something to do with the fact that the younger guy accompanying him mentioned that he had attended the school down the street where my son goes.
Without getting into all the details, soon I was trying to play tactful diplomat as these two guys went on and on about the lower income people in town (the older of the two men kept referring to them as lower class and then correcting himself). Essentially, they blamed the mostly poor, Spanish-speaking members of the town for all its financial woes. The older of the two also made sure to take a few shots at one of one former first selectmen for having worked with the state to bring various social service agencies to the town.
I had a reaction similar to those I have when I read the local paper blaming teachers on its editorial page. Teachers and the poor are just such easy targets, and scapegoating them avoids dealing with the many complex issues which are much greater than most of us (any of us?) can fully comprehend. The use of local property taxes as the principal means of funding local education is the issue that bothers me the most. But that’s a difficult issue to deal with, and one that has no easy alternatives. It’s so much easier to say that we should fire the teachers and replace them with good ones, or send the poor somewhere else. Are we going to find better teachers somewhere who will be able (and willing) to solve all the myriad problems of educational and financial poverty, and do it for some of the lowest pay in the state? And the poor that this guy would have us expel, where would we send them? Don’t they just become someone else’s problem?
I got a letter in response to my recent article in UConn Magazine about the effect of cuts to education in Windham. In it, the man wrote that he had heard somewhere that in Los Angeles they had put all the good teachers in the bad students’ classes and all the bad teachers in the good students’ classes, and that the good students did just as well and the bad students just as poorly. Now I don’t know where he heard such a story, or why he believed it, but I think his conclusion was that we don’t need to spend lots of money on education or teacher pelatihan because the quality of the teachers or the teaching doesn’t matter, and so-called good and bad students are determined (biologically, genetically, socially?) to be the way they are, no matter what. Well then if that’s the case, I guess we just spend the money on snow removal, or whatever the equivalent would be in Los Angeles.
One of the things the snow removal guy blamed the poor and the Spanish-speaking for was the death of the retail shops in downtown Willimantic. I pointed out that the north end of Main Street was actually thriving with businesses, low-end though they might be, and ugly as a result of bad zoning, and that most of the shops on Main Street were actually in business and being run by members of the Spanish American Merchants Association. The Spanish-speaking community was actually keeping downtown in business after so many of the older, more established places had long since either gone out of business or moved out of town. I also pointed out that any further development, meaning a more gentrified type of development with high-end anchor stores, would require that we build parking garages and bring all those nineteenth-century buildings up to code. Both of which would be huge expenditures for some investor, and still there would be the issue of low square footage in all those old buildings.
Those points were brushed off. Zoning and parking and fire codes and square footage are dull subjects, and complicated ones, and not very impassioned. It’s so much more fun to just blame the poor and the recent immigrants. If they just went away, all would be as it was—say in 1960 or 1940 or 1880. But that’s just it. Economic revitalization—of any kind—will take a tremendous financial investment. The same goes for education. You can’t replace the students with better ones any more than you can replace the consumers with better ones; and you can’t replace the teachers with better ones any more than you can replace the business people with better ones.
Sorry, but there’s no way out of either predicament that will come cheap, and honestly, the two problems are intertwined. We can’t expect a Superman, neither Bill Gates nor Barack Obama, to do it all, and no, money in and of itself does not solve problems. But some well made business loans and a few educational grants, whether from public or private sources, would go a long way toward helping to rectify these problems. Blaming the teachers, firing the teachers, blaming the poor and the bilingual, chasing the poor and bilingual to another town, these things only vilify people at the expense of resolution.
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