There’s an appalling article in today’s New York Times about forced shortening of the school year, firing of key personnel, and other severe cutbacks in some American school districts.

Does it seem counterintuitive that Americans, who regularly tell pollsters that education is their number one political priority, would allow such things to happen? Not really. Americans “know” that school districts don’t really need the funding for which they regularly beg -- they “know” because for more than a generation, at least since the days of Proposition 13 in California, conservatives have been telling them so.

Modern conservatism has poisoned American life in a lot of ways, but one of its most destructive toxins is the notion that all government social programs are so riddled with waste that any call for additional funding is an immoral picking of taxpayers’ pockets. In the case of school funding, this might not be utterly unconscionable if conservatives offered a way out -- if they regularly demonstrated specific ways that school districts claiming to be cash-strapped could finance necessary programs within existing budgets. Conservatives don’t do that. Conservatives merely spread the absolutist notion that no government social program has ever been run well, then sit back and watch schools suffer for lack of funding.

There is no excuse for this: Even if it is true that there is an excess of waste in the typical school district, the conservative message never helps to root it out. In district after district, schools beg for money, and citizens, having heard decades of right-wing propaganda about excessive taxation and government waste, refuse to pony up. If this mysterious waste is actually there, it’s never eliminated. Instead, even in good times, as in the boom years of the 1990s, school budget force parents to hold bake sales if they want arts programs funded, and require teachers to dig into their own pockets for school supplies; in recessions like the current one, school districts eliminate courses, reduce building maintenance, cancel some extracurricular activities. In the case of schools, the government-bashing of conservatives is entirely destructive.

Oh, yes, I know -- conservatives do have a way out: vouchers. Conservatives believe we will save the schools by doing to education what California did to electricity. The vast majority of all new businesses fail, yet conservatives believe the key to improving education is entrepreneurialism. OK, fine. But the idea of “deregulating” schools would be absurd in the typical American suburb -- how would a town in which one high school is sufficient be served by a wide-open free market? Conservatives know that most Americans don’t want vouchers, know that vouchers will never come to the vast majority of the country -- yet they have no other answers.

Are conservatives secretly pleased when public schools decline? You have to wonder. In any event, it’s undeniable that conservative rhetoric does immense damage to American schools.