Stop Throwing the Babies in the River

By Jill Sunday Bartoli

Suddenly Mary jumps out of the water and starts walking along the river bank. John yells at her to come back and help rescue the babies that are floating down the river. But Mary says, "I'm going upstream to see who is throwing the babies in the river, and make them stop it."

With regard to the health, education and welfare of our children in Pennsylvania, we are still in the business of rescuing a few babies form the river rather than stopping the policies that throw far too many of them in.

Parents pull out a few children (5 to 10%) from public schools, many of which are doing a good job despite underfunding by the state, to put them in charter and cyber schools, with questionable results. This leaves behind vulnerable children from the poorest and most segregated schools, who need more, rather than less, support.

Even our higher property taxes cannot fill the hole created by poor state policy decisions. Meanwhile, funding charter and cyber school tuition from public school funds further depletes the educational possibilities for those left out and left behind.

Research tells us that one of the best ways to ensure a fair and equal education is to give all children access to the same quality of pre-school education. Those opportunities are only available to a small percent of Pennsylvania's children, giving them a successful start and a more secure graduation path. But what about all of the other babies, the majority of whom never enter school until kindergarten.

The majority of the people that I have met over my lifetime care deeply about their own children, but they also care about the children of their neighbors. They would not deliberately deny the possibility of a successful future to any child. But benign neglect and indifference are big problems, partly due to the intensity and fast pace of our lives, partly due to the uncertainties of our economy, and partly due to deceptive political messages and half-truths that bombard and confuse us.

So we need to step back, take a deep breath, and walk up along the river to see who is creating the policies in Pennsylvania that are throwing our babies into the river, and tell them to stop doing that.

Let me suggest a few problematic policy choices:

• Long term reduction of public school funding by the state legislature--from 55% in 1980 to 35% today.

• Rejection of Medicaid expansion funds that could support 400,000 parents and grandparents who care for our children, keeping them from drowning in sickness.

• Expanding privately held and very profitable cyber and charter schools funded with our tax money--tax dollars that should ensure equal educational opportunity for all of our children.

• Failure to support those who care for our children--their teachers, their mothers and fathers, all of whom need family sustaining jobs with good wages and benefits.

• Giving tax breaks to multinational corporations that do not need them instead of ensuring living wages to Pennsylvania's families.

I know that we are better than this, and I invite you to join together with those of us whose values match your own deeply held values. Together we can stand up for the values that unite us as caring, compassionate, moderate parents, grandparents, friends and neighbors in our great Commonwealth.