Our View Arkansas’ impoverished youth

Our View

Arkansas’ impoverished youth

You know, with nearly 300,000 of the three million Arkansans dependent on some form of government subsidy just why should anyone be surprised to learn that for the second consecutive year the state ranked 44th in the nation on child welfare.

And, it shouldn’t also come as a shock to be told Arkansas for years has languished in the bottom tier of the ranking. Bear in mind folks, the largest and most expensive tax supported agency in the state is the Department of Human Services, DHS, which provides services to more than one million Arkansans for one reason or another. DHS requires over 7,000 state paid employees to meet the ever growing demands and yet, about 184,000 Arkansas children – more than one in four lived in poverty in 2014.

Also among the most expensive public services in Arkansas is public education, where able bodied Arkansas taxpayers pay billions of dollars into an education system that produces just one-third of the state’s fourth-graders to be proficient in reading.

And, only one-quarter of the state’s eight-graders are proficient in math, as defined by the federal National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Tax paid bureaucrats try to convince lawmakers that the solution to the poverty and boosting those figures is to increase funding for pre-kindergarten and after-school programs.

The executive director of Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families pointed out that instead of elected lawmakers addressing the problems by simply dumping more millions and billions of tax dollars all they want to do is cut taxes instead of increasing them.

Let us make it clear, as Sen. Jane English R-North Little Rock, so wisely pointed out that it’s misleading to focus on tax cuts as the problem, because the state’s school funding formula insulates students and teachers from budget shortfalls.

Shoving more tax dollars down this black hole and demanding more taxes from the shrinking number of taxpayers has proven, time and time again, that these liberal tactics can’t and won’t make these children more smarter nor pull them out of poverty.

Sen. Uvalde Lindsey, D-Fayetteville, who is vice chairman of the Education Committee, has a less expensive – and less popular – education-funding option.

Lindsey suggests linking teachers’ and administrators’ salaries and bonuses to student performance.

But, even Lindsey is very well aware of the tack that the teachers union will strongly oppose such a think because it would single out a few educators ax exemplary while the rest would seem deficient.

Lindsey says the results will clearly show that there are more losers than winners, so in a vote-getting process there are few battles to win by making the majority upset.

This argument as to how Arkansas deals with poverty and education deficiencies certainly isn’t new, and it has shown over the years that simply throwing more tax dollars at the problems isn’t effective.