Letter to the Editor: Editorial written with faulty logic

The editorial published on March 7, 2011 was riddled with troubling assumptions, vague platitudes and errors in reasoning.

The author(s) confuse revenue cuts with spending cuts and shift the blame for our state’s sub-standard education system to teacher pay with little to no justification.  The education cuts are embraced by The Beacon because they would supposedly promote efficiency and even “improve the system.”

As to how $709 million in education cuts would make our schools more efficient? “It is time to think of innovative ways” to do this, the author concludes.

What these innovative ways are, aside from putting “more of an emphasis on… excellent teaching” is not mentioned. The editorial seems to suggest that, some way, somehow, students and their underpaid educators will come up with something to make up for the cuts. Unfortunately, “somehow” is not a solution, and the assurance that “we’ll think of something” does not, sadly, ensure that we will.

In fact, such faulty logic, that government programs will somehow run better with less money, could be used to justify cuts to anything, from federally funded programs like Medicare, to student funded programs like SPC, CSO, and The Beacon itself. If they faced similarly draconian ten percent reductions in funding, I doubt “somehow” would cut it.

The only solution offered by the editorial board, with no supporting details whatsoever, is putting “more emphasis on rewarding excellent teaching…and less emphasis on paying teachers based on seniority.” Presumably, this means tying teacher pay to test scores, as has been suggested by Governor Scott and fellow Republicans. Yet a study performed by the University of Florida released last year found that the best predictor of student success on standardized tests was where they lived: children from poor neighborhoods usually do far worse on standardized tests.

Consequently, tying pay to test scores would discourage teachers from working in schools that serve poor students.  Sadly, the editorial completely ignores this fact.

Perhaps the biggest mistake made in the editorial was in confusing spending cuts with tax cuts. When attempting to point to the shared sacrifice supposedly evident in the budget, the editorial mentions “tax cuts worth $4 billion.”

Tax cuts, and it’s sad that I even have to point this out, are not the same as cuts to spending. They lead to a decrease in state revenue, you know, the money needed to fund education. “Taxes” are not a program, so lumping tax cuts together with education cuts makes absolutely no sense.

If anything, these tax cuts undermine the point of the editorial, since they create an even greater need for either program cuts or tax increases. They are not, to borrow a phrase from the editorial, “fiscally responsible.”

The Beacon has a long tradition of excellent reporting and editorial writing. I hope that in the future they live up to that standard, and be more careful before endorsing proposals that would cost thousands of jobs amid “tough economic times.”

-Chris Cabral
senior, political science