What makes the video above particularly poignant is the circumstance of its creation: everything from the acting to the music to the editing and production was done by students and school community members.
I came across this video entirely by chance, and was pleasantly surprised to discover that it had been created by the school district from which I had graduated, and that the music was all performed by the high school orchestra I had been a part of as a teenager.
Of course, the video lacks one key element: information about how the problem can be addressed.
I feel very fortunate to have grown up exactly when and where I did: as a child of the 1980s, my secondary education took place in the '90s, during a brief window of educational rebuilding bookended by years of cutbacks--the schools were recovering from the Reagan years, only to suffer even worse under the tyranny of the designed-to-fail No Child Left Behind program. I graduated high school with the class of 2001, or (as we would soon come to refer to it) "just in time." No Child Left Behind was implemented the next year, and due in part to its increasingly impossible goals and strict punishments, many of the programs that helped develop and shape my generation are either gone or threatened.
As a result of budget cuts last year, California began the process of gradually defunding its Gifted and Talented program, which helps fund everything from high school Honors and AP courses to elementary supplemental instruction and pull-out learning programs that help students reach their highest potential. The budgets for school libraries have been axed, and as an emergency measure, school districts have basically been told to re-appropriate their arts and other special funding to help fill the gaps in core programs left by general budget cuts.
So what can be done about this?
Santa Cruz, the city in which I have lived and worked for the past ten years, has been very generous in this regard. They have repeatedly passed a local parcel tax, which helps fund arts and libraries in our public schools. While these programs are not nearly as robust as we could hope, the fact that they still exist at all is due to the ability of our community to come together and recognize the importance of these opportunities in our children's development.
A well-organized drive of this sort has the potential of seeing success in many different areas. Has your community tried this approach? If not, perhaps you can be the one to get organized! As Arlo Guthrie is fond of saying, "even though there’s a lot wrong with the world today, we can all be glad that there’s never been a time when it’s so easy for one person to make a difference. It doesn’t take much." Each person, and every small action, can mean the world. All it takes is one person to get something started, and once it's started, others will join in.
However, that is just a local patch applied to a much larger problem. We have to organize and stand up against draconian austerity measures, both at the state and federal level. The first step for Californians, of course, is to support Gov. Jerry Brown in his drive to extend expiring state taxes. This extension has repeatedly been blocked by Republicans in the state legislature, who (of course) favor a cuts-only approach to filling the state budget gap.