Sweet Programs, Sour Times: Rendell puts his Schools of Excellence on the chopping block

Governor Rendell's proposed PA budget is 100 or so line items leaner in an effort to close a $2.3 billion budget gap. Desperate times, desperate measures and all that, but (putting on my unapologetic 'Not In My BackYard' hat of naked self interest), you can't axe the Governor's Schools of Excellence! It's a body of programs that are just too special, successful, too damned eponymously excellent. In my six years as director of the PA Governor's School for Information Technology I saw firsthand how the program can touch the lives of its participants, to hasten and strengthen the emergence of their will to lead and to transform.

Admittedly, the students who pass through the programs' doors were already advantaged by their academic and intellectual skills. They don't typically need a leg up in any traditional sense (troublingly, the students' ranks were, at the time of my departure at least, growing ever richer, whiter and more uniformly suburban, in spite of our best effort to the contrary). They need, however, at least as much help realizing their potential, though. Enabling people to become a more perfect version of themselves is a pretty compelling goal for education generally. Far be it from me to get all Randian (Atlas Shrugged was easily the most leaden, tritest, most sophomoric, uppity-preachy and unoriginal tripe I've ever had the misfortune to read) but those most rife with potential are also those for whom that process of enabling is both most difficult and most critical for our collective prosperity and wellbeing.

Further, to the extent that PGSE students stay in the Commonwealth (an empirical question, but one I have no sense of) programs like PGSE can make very sound policy sense in the medium and long term. I can't help but suspect (again, data-lessly) that PGSE alum disproportionately return to PA. PA needs to stem its brain drain. Study, excel, graduate, depart, repeat as needed is not a recipe for success. We need our most capable and driven to be all they can and to stick around to do so here in PA. PGSE makes a huge contribution to this end. Check out the outpouring on the Save the Govies Facebook group if you need convincing.

At the same time, it's increasingly clear that an inability to recognize that challenging times require genuine sacrifice threatens to mire us longer and more painfully in the economic muck in which we currently find ourselves. For example, I love libraries as much as anyone this side of the profession of librarianship, and my family rarely has fewer than ten books check out from our Walnut Street West branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia (heck, I even dragged infant David and toddler Max to the beautiful but harrowingly located Kingsessing branch, although in retrospect I question my own judgment there). As a kid I went straight from my junior high school right to the public library and if I hadn't I'd have gotten into much more trouble and learned much less.

At the same time, when fire and police are being curtailed, when weekly trash collection is on the chopping block, it's perfectly reasonable for library cutbacks to be on the table as well. The needed cuts are going to hurt - valuable, sensible services are going to fall by the wayside. It's a shame, certainly, but the bigger shame is to pretend as though it 'tweren't so only to be faced with fewer options and direr circumstances down the line.

Yes, we rightminded folks know libraries are valuable, that their absence may leave already disadvantaged children optionless and at risk. But forgoing weekly trash pickups would be a rat bonanza - a far bigger issue for those already living in poverty as well. Let's stop stamping our feet for pet causes and self interest and realize that no cut can be dismissed out of hand. Let's do as we were asked and set aside childish things and seek rational dialogue in the name of making the cuts we need while minimizing the pain we must endure.

Tough times shorten our time horizon. There is nothing wrong with that. Indeed, thank goodness that they might, and that recessions historically come in under the two year mark. In the short term it's just impossible to deny, however reluctantly, that Governor's Schools' and public libraries have a rightful place on the chopping block short list. The far more legitimate concern is that while the recession will be temporary, the cuts are sure to be permanent. Entirely legitimate it is to be cranked up by that.

(P.S. In spite of the above, can you do me a solid Governor Rendell and please don't eliminate PGSE? What will I have to look forward to this summer if there is no PGSIST? Whose skills and knoweldge will I marvel at if not those of the PGSIST kids? Where will I find my fun? At the Jersey Shore?)