An Education Crisis

Pay Now or Pay Later…

            Throughout my time in the military I was fortunate to travel to other countries and experience new cultures, but of all the encounters with locals one saying stuck with me the most, “…if you speak three languages your educated, if you speak two your functioning, if you speak one your American.”  It was reactions like this that lead me to the realization that we, as a nation, are at an increasingly enormous disadvantage to the rest of the world both socially and economically.  For decades we have relished in our social isolation and until recently we also enjoyed the lead roll in the global economy, but as times change so to must we.  With the ever-continuing advancement of technology the world is becoming smaller than ever and our global market place is now more intertwined than ever before.  If we do not take immediate action to improve our public education system, not only with foreign languages but also in math and sciences, we will see our strength in this market continue to dwindle at an ever-increasing rate.

            My proposed legislation for this dilemma is an Education Reform Bill, one that, if enacted, would create the largest change to public education since de-segregation.  My Bill proposes that the Federal Government will, at a minimum, triple its current funding for public education of $46.7 billion to close to $150 billion.  With this increased funding states education boards will extend the school year by two weeks and extend each school day by one hour.  This extra time will be used to accommodate increased education in the fields of Science and Math, as well as Foreign Languages education beginning as early as the 1^st Grade.  Along with current language options it will also be mandatory for all schools to offer, at the least, a basic Mandarin-Chinese course.  Federal-Aid for Education Majors will also be doubled from $7 billion to $14 billion in order to help cope with the personnel shortages education advancements that will need to be addressed to fully implement this program.

            Funding for this endeavor will unfortunately have to come from tax increases, and while no two words in our society bring about as much anger or animosity, in this case they are very necessary.  If there is any doubt about that fact all you have to do is look at studies, published this year, showing that US students placed 21st and 25th respectively in the fields of science and math.  Also the fact that less than 9% of Americans are bi-lingual compared to the much higher international rate of 43%, while those numbers may not sound alarming to some it would be ignorant to assume that it will not have an enormous negative impact on future generations.  While I am as apprehensive as anyone about the idea of increasing taxes, rest assured that every dollar we skimp on now will cost us ten-fold in the decades to come.  So with this I will leave you with a question… Can we really afford to keep putting off the renovation of a clearly inadequate system? So what’s it going to be Pay Now or Pay Later?