Yesterday, National Public Radio (NPR) reported that around 60,000 teachers got a pink slip this week in the United States. We can debate the reasons for the layoffs but, in the final analysis, in the race to balance federal, state and local budgets these teachers were expendable. As my readers probably already know, I am an engineer in a sea of teachers in my family. I know some of the personal costs involved in a number like 60,000. Let’s for a moment however, forget things like good teachers seeing layoffs like this one and deciding to work for Wal-Mart or laid off kindergarten teachers selling a lifetime of personal teaching items to pay the mortgage. Let’s talk about the impact of losing that many teachers.

Conservatives would tell us school districts bring it on themselves. They say, given the opportunity, districts could just fire dead-beat teachers instead of the good ones. If they are part of the 60,000, then good riddance they would say. For a minute I would like you to consider the impact on a school no matter the quality of the teacher let go. If you take the example of your average school system and elementary school which laid off five of fifty teachers, what would be the impact (a real district close to me)? Not much?

Let’s say two of the teachers were first grade. So the class size of ten classes was increased by three students per class. At this point we already exceed the maximum allowable students per adult in a day care setting. Yes, a day care environment, where your primary job is to make sure the kids don’t kill each other, is imposed on the learning environment. How much learning can go on do you think? Can the teacher whose primary job now is to herd cats all day be really expected to teach the top and bottom of the intelligence scale?

Let us now consider the top of the intelligence scale. These three to five kids per classroom were destined to be nuclear physicists and help solve things like cold fusion and make America the king of the technology road, again. Now, with the cumulative effect of being behind, they settle. The become hedge fund traders or worse, if there is worse. See, these formative years are crucial. Being a half year behind your world peers in the first grade accumulates making it impossible to solve the most difficult problems in this world.

As we consider the risks at the bottom of the intelligence scale, we enter territory where the tax payer actually loses money. These two or three children get so far behind the cumulative result is being a high school drop out. The deck is already stacked against these kids. They will probably become a ward of the state in some form or fashion. It is pretty likely; they will actually multiply our losses because they will help enable drug abuse or worse. Their learning deficit will become a cancer spread throughout our society. These leaches on society can often be turned around in their formative years but, when we lay off 60,000 teachers, we doom ourselves to support them and pay for the damage they will do for the rest of their lives.

Granted, this is a fictional allegory but, how many times will this happen in real life? By making these cuts, I submit, we are dooming the classes of 2021, 2022 and 2023 at a minimum. If we keep it up, we may doom a whole generation. Some argue we already have. Those who believe in American exceptionalism should be appalled. If we believe there are inefficiencies, we should cure those before we give up on the kids. Don’t just pull the rug, or their teachers, out from under them. There are all kinds of deficits we leave our kids. There are monetary, infrastructure, and education deficits just to name a few. I believe going after the monetary deficit before the education deficit dooms our country to be second class world citizens. So much for “American Exceptionalism.”