Following comments to yesterday’s post on proposed cuts to the UW System schools (Caution arrives late, doesn’t recognize its surroundings), here are nine quick comments about education.
1. Act 10 as a budgetary tool. This centrally-planned idea didn’t work. Reductions in public-union bargaining powers in exchange for the ‘tools’ to balance school and other public budgets hasn’t brought balance. If it had, districts across the state wouldn’t have felt the need to go to referendum so often (or so easily).
2. Act 10 as a matter of labor policy. Here’s one libertarian, from an old, movement family, who will always believe that any worker, peacefully and conveniently, should have the right to assemble, associate with others, and bargain collectively against the government. Collective bargaining rights should be – but sadly aren’t recognized properly – as rights of association.
There are those who don’t believe that public workers should be able to bargain collectively against government. They’re not libertarians; they have different names. They’re called conservatives, Republicans, etc.
3. How WEDC spending matters within a given budget. It’s true that within any given budget, if one municipality doesn’t take white-collar welfare, another may. Practically, this means that funds appropriated within a given year will probably be scarfed by one glutton or another. Stopping what’s been authorized and appropriated immediately is hard.
4. How WEDC spending over time affects budgeting. Use of these funds for insiders’ programs signals demand for insiders’ programs. The problem of the WEDC is that bad spending after bad spending compounds a distorted, government-driven incentive to fund undeserving cronies and projects.
The Innovation Center predated the WEDC; Whitewater’s eagerly lapped two rounds of WEDC funding, and wants a third. Most – but not all of it – has gone to white-collar projects undeserving of the cash.
5. What officials’ commitment to WEDC spending (for example) says about education. It says they’ve substituted a true learning in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences for a hyper-politicization of the academy.
Government support for business insiders is a distortion of properly functioning markets, a perversion of a sound teaching in markets and economics. (That’s why I’ve described corporatism as a gutter ideology – it’s like a junk science.)
It’s repulsive because it doesn’t work as advertised, and advocacy of it rests on dishonesty that’s inimical to a genuine commitment to the truth.
One might look upon some of this this as finger-pointing, but I’ll always believe that the embrace especially of these software-startup-whatever projects is simply alchemy, not legitimate science, so to speak. In these eyes, it’s a significant degradation of education and university life.
I don’t think it’s high and sophisticated; I think it’s low and base.
6. On state budget cuts generally, for the last two budgets and the next. I would have spent and would spend (or borrow) nothing on road construction (just the least possible repairs), nothing on the WEDC or its proposed successor agency, and would have frozen overall state spending in Gov. Waker’s first term (it’s been rising). This would have meant state employee layoffs, but it would have preserved (as much as possible) spending on the poor and for education.
A spending freeze produces a smaller government.
7. State university or K-12 education cuts, specifically, would never have been to my thinking. An overall freeze may act as a cut, of course, but even so one much smaller for education than anything we’ve seen or likely will see.
Billions might have been and yet could be saved apart from education.
8. Autonomy for the UW System. The System would benefit from strong autonomy; the farther it’s away from politics, the better.
9. Legislatively-imposed tuition freezes. I’d let universities decide what to do about tuition; competitive (not regulatory) pressures should influence their choices.
There is a love of education, a true one, that rejects both how state officials and local university administrators have managed these last few years. That’s the place in which I and others of like views find ourselves.