Jeff Chan

The Herd of Sheep

On my last post, I shared some pictures showing student protests against the proposed 10% budget cut to education. I never shared my thoughts on this subject though.

Some background information before I start rambling. Back in January in face of a 17 billion deficit, California Governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, proposed a 10% budget cut all across the board, including education. In California, K-14 public education is completely free, so 39% of the state budget goes into education, with a law that requires additional money to go into education every year.

I’m not sure why, but only until March did this start to become an issue in our school. Suddenly one day, all the teachers are panicking and brainwashing us that there will be a terrible budget cut and we’ll have less teachers, less staff, no athletics, no fun events, blah blah blah. Obviously, their jobs were at risk. The school staff started to tell students to write letters to the Governor. Heck, they even organized a protest that didn’t happen.

When I first heard of this issue, I already knew what these teachers were up to. Our teachers are hiding the facts from us. All they care about is their job, which is understandably fine. But as teachers, they should be informing us both sides to the issue. People thought that it was all “Arnold’s fault.” Clearly they were misinformed.

If anyone recalls, back in around 2001-2003, because of the dot-com bubble burst, California’s economy went into a short recession. The Governor at that time, Gray David, was recalled in 2003 because people were dissatisfied the way he managed the budget. That was the issue of the recall election, when Schwarzenegger was elected. California spends its money like how most Americans spend their money. If California makes $100,000 this year, it’ll spend $100,000 this year. For most occasions, it has been fine because California is growing at a rapid pace. But when you go into a recession, you have a huge problem because it’s not that easy to cut your budget once you already expand it. So in 2003, Schwarzenegger promised budget reform.

Ironically, his budget reforms never passed the legislature and here again he is faced with the same issue. Students don’t know that California’s budget system is fubar. We have no emergency funds that we can draw from when we have a budget crisis. We look at our budget on a year-to-year basis which obviously tells us that our state legislators are idiots!

So here we are five months later, the Governor is smart. He proposes a revised budget plan that gives NO cuts to education and actually gives additional funding, on the SAME day, my teachers were protesting against the cut. I still can’t stop laughing…

What’s even more pathetic is that NO ONE were informed about the revise the next day. I don’t even know if the teachers themselves know about this. A Facebook group that was protesting against the cut has no updated news about the revise.

What do we have left? Bunch of teachers who are happy they can keep their jobs and a bunch of students who are left believing “everything is Arnold’s fault.” Isn’t the whole purpose of school to teach people independent thinking?

P.S. Three political posts in a row? Something must be wrong with me.. At least the quality is getting better