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One step forward and two steps back. If you're a school leader who has made real progress against tough odds in the past few years, then brace yourself for those two steps back. Budget cuts and layoffs may threaten much of what you've done. And to add insult to injury, some people will read you sermons on efficiency as you dismantle much of what you and your staff have worked for.

A piece in today's San Francisco Chronicle tells the heart-breaking story of a Blue Ribbon school that has to undo many of its reforms as it cuts staff. "Stability drove the success of Dold's school," authors W. Norton Grubb and Lynda Tredway write:

"I have an incredible staff," Dold says. "My teachers don't leave, unless they retire or move." On her watch, E.R. Taylor Elementary became a National Blue Ribbon School, one of just 25 in California, and one of 300 in the United States. How? Dold led her entire faculty to collaborate to catch struggling readers early. Three reading-recovery specialists ran 120 intense, daily half-hour lessons for every struggling first-grade reader.

"Six years ago," Dold recalls, "just 17 percent of our Latino students were proficient readers. Now 50 percent are."

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Their reward for such inspiring results? The last bilingual paraprofessional? Gone. After-school staff? Cut. A popular upper-grade teacher with a pink slip says, "I can't wait any longer. I need to pay my mortgage." This year's cuts could top the past nine.

Some commentators have portrayed budget cuts as a threat to the status quo rather than a threat to reform. But that sort of thinking betrays a narrow conception of reform. If reform is purely structural--pay teachers differently, hire and fire them differently, or open the doors to more charter schools--then the impact of big budget cuts on reform may seem less dire. (Even this is debatable.)

But reforms that really improve how schools teach also rise or fall on relationships between people, relationships that take time to nourish. They often rely on resource staff who become expendable at the first whiff of economic trouble. And many depend on out-of-school programs whose staff can probably expect pink slips this year.

Budget cuts and layoffs can quickly tear this complex and delicate fabric to shreds. That's what might happen to Taylor Elementary.

Without a doubt, there is waste in school systems. (Though I've spent enough time outside of the education world to know that schools have no monopoly on waste.) But it's just naive to think, as some people do, that deep budget cuts will promote reform and efficiency.

We need the Education Jobs Fund to protect Taylor Elementary and so many other schools like it.