Amanda Seef needs a little over USD $600 for her final year at Brockport College, which is the approximate amount that her tuition is increasing due to the State University of New York’s (SUNY) 2009 14 percent tuition hike.

“Between the private credit crunch and the tuition increase, I was considering moving home and studying at a community college where the journalism program is in shambles,” Seef said.

What upsets Seef is that only $62 of her $620-increase will benefit SUNY. The remaining 90 percent of increased tuition will go to New York’s $1.6 billion Critical Deficit Reduction Legislation. In total, the tuition increase is expected to contribute $61million to the Critical Deficit Reduction Legislation.

Students across New York State are struggling to stay in college because of the tuition increase. Many have dropped out.

Barmak Nassirian, Associate Executive Director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admission Officers, explained that while 10 percent of increased tuition will not improve education, students could still experience financial pressure until the budget is balanced.

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Back when American conservatives took fiscal responsibility seriously (i.e., the early 1990s), they floated the idea of a constitutional amendment banning unfunded federal mandates.  How the tables have turned!  Today, the No Child Left Behind Act, which embodies the conservative approach to educational reform, is under legal attack for failing to provide any money for the requirements it imposes on states and school districts, at a time when local budgets are stretched to the breaking point.

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In an easily-overlooked, bureaucratic-sounding January 6, 2006, article, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported the following:

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Information literacy seems to be a phrase whose time has come. Last month, the Educational Testing Service announced that it had developed a test to measure students' ability to evaluate online material. That suggested an official recognition that the millions spent to wire schools and universities is of little use unless students know how to retrieve useful information from the oceans of sludge on the Web.

Clearly, "computer skills" are not enough. A teacher of Scandinavian literature at Berkeley recently described how students used the Web to research a paper on the Vikings: "They're Berkeley students, so, of course, they have the sense to restrict their searches to 'vikings NOT minnesota.' But they're perfectly willing to believe a Web site that describes early Viking settlements in Oklahoma."

That trusting nature is partly a legacy of the print age. If we tend to give the benefit of the doubt to the things we read in library books, it is because they have been screened twice: first by a publisher, who decided they were worth printing, and then by the librarian who acquired them or the professor who requested their purchase.

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Is American education devolving? Are our school districts regressing to an earlier form of intellectual life? Does the specter of William Jennings Bryan, prosecuting attorney in the 1925 Scopes trial, walk abroad at night?

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This ground-breaking Commonweal Institute report by David C. Johnson and Leonard M. Salle analyzes in depth the conservative movement’s multi-pronged attack as a long-term, strategic process aimed at privatizing education. The report provides a detailed plan for how public education advocates can work with their allies to form a network of organizations and individuals - an infrastructure - that will be able get their messages to the broad public and increase political support for public education.

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Perhaps the greatest legacy of the Western Enlightenment has been the elevation of individual reason and judgment over dogma and received wisdom. The celebration of independent thought -- not to mention independent thought itself -- has played a central role in the rise of both secular government and religious ecumenicalism; in the steady expansion of liberty and civil rights; in the major scientific and economic advances of the last 500 years; and in the philosophical underpinnings of all these achievements.

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This white paper is a Commonweal Institute study that shows how a short term effort to deal with the financial crisis in California, through legislation (AB 42) that would redefine classroom size reduction criteria, could have serious long-term consequence with regard to both quality of education and future costs.

Read the paper.