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Tuesday, November 13, 2012

NYC Public School Parents: What should be done instead of pushing our kids off the "fiscal cliff"

NYC Public School Parents: What should be done instead of pushing our kids off the "fiscal cliff":


What should be done instead of pushing our kids off the "fiscal cliff"



I know; the words “fiscal cliff” probably fills you with the same mixture of dread and ennui as it does me.  But let’s take a moment and focus on the decisions the President and Congress have to make in the next few weeks to address the yawning deficit. Unless they make the right choices by January 2, huge across-the-board cuts to education and other critical domestic programs will be automatically triggered, causing irreversible harm to our nation’s children, and putting our slowly recovering economy into a massive tailspin.
What would these automatic cuts mean for our public schools?  $5 billion would be slashed from the federal education budget; which would plunge to pre-2003 levels, despite the fact that there are now 5.4 million more public school students.   This would lead to sharply