Christmas in January
The House Democrats released an outline of their stimulus package a few hours ago. The big items for education: $13 billion more for Title I (doubling the appropriation for that program); $13 billion more for IDEA (more than doubling that one); $14 billion for k-12 school construction (plus $25 million for charters); $1 billion for technology; $250 million for state data systems; and $200 million more for the Teacher Incentive Fund (to support pay-for-performance programs). And then the REALLY big item: a $79 billion state bailout fund, of which $39 billion must go to education (k-12 and higher ed), though much of the rest could go to the schools, too, at the discretion of the states.
That puts you in the neighborhood of $80 billion for k-12 education, as rumored yesterday (and as Checker, Rick Hess, and I speculated last week).
It’s not clear to me whether these amounts are all to be appropriated immediately, or would be spread out over several years. But keep in mind: Uncle Sam currently spends about $40 billion a year on the schools, so the House is talking about tripling that sum (the regular $40 billion plus this new $80 billion). Wow!
So what to think about this? In our NRO piece, Checker and Rick and I laid out three principles for any stimulus spending. It should:
1. Provide targeted aid to taxpayers and families in the short term;
2. Make a tangible difference in student learning; and
3. Avoid imposing long-term cost burdens that will tie reformers’ hands down the road.
Clearly the House Dems weren’t paying us any attention, because most of their proposals fail all three tests. The worst offender is the Title I boost. Under current statute, these dollars must “supplement, not supplant” state and local dollars, meaning districts can’t use Uncle Sam’s dough to plug holes in their budget. So how on Earth will districts spend this money? (They already tend to have a hard time spending current allocations on time.) Will they hire new staff? Talk about burdening reformers down the line. Go on a spending spree for curricular materials? That wouldn’t be so bad if they choose well, but what’s the chance of that? Offer more professional development, even though we already know most PD does very little good?
The increase for IDEA actually makes a lot more sense. As the Dems said in their release, this will “increase the federal share of special education costs and prevent these mandatory costs from forcing states to cut other areas of education.” In other words, local districts were already paying out of pocket to support federal mandates around special education. Getting more federal funds for this purpose will allow them to shift local special ed dollars to their general account, mitigating the effects of budget cuts. The only downside: these dollars aren’t as targeted to poor communities as the Title I formula is.
And how about school construction? Well, it won’t do much to boost student learning, but it probably won’t do too much harm. More money for merit pay is great, but talk about a non-shovel-ready-project! But building state data systems is actually a fantastic idea, and not just because we mentioned it in our NRO article. It’s an important one-time investment that could yield great benefits down the line.
This proposal is going to be the subject of much conversation and debate in coming weeks. Let me make a proposal: Let’s avoid calling it a “stimulus” and instead call it what it is: a spending package meant to hold schools harmless from impending budget cuts. It won’t juice the economy, but it will make the education blob’s January very, very bright.
Photograph by yomanimus on Flickr
Related posts:
- A Christmas bonus for Arne
- Don’t count your stimulus chickens…
- The largest education slush fund in history
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January 15th, 2009 at 5:26 pm
Wow, $25 whole million for charter construction? That’s a whopping 0.2% of the $14 billion construction money for traditional public schools.
Let’s see. There are 94,000 traditional public schools and 4,500 charter schools. So charters — the only type of public school which does NOT get handed facilities in the first place, and have desperate facility needs — have 5% of the K-12 properties but get 0.2% of the funds. An underweighting by a factor of 25x.
Dave Obey, evidently NOT a charter fan….hey Howard Fuller, can you have a word with the guy?
January 16th, 2009 at 7:58 am
I’d rather it had been $0 for charter construction from the federal government. The last thing charters need is to be pulled into the federal orbit.
If being part of an itty-bitty government entity like a school district is a bad idea, and it clearly is, then how’s being part of the federal government a good idea?
January 16th, 2009 at 11:21 am
Charters are already part of federal orbit.
Get Title 1 and other federal funds – in urban areas, comprise about 10% of total per student funding in charters. And there are already federal monies for charter start-up.
Also, charters are already to the exact same federal mandates as traditional public schools, from special ed to NCLB.
I suppose we could argue if best case is freedom from all federal mandates in exchange for zero federal dollars.
But the current deal is charters must comply with all federal mandates but get much less of the federal $. Worst possible deal.
January 17th, 2009 at 1:01 pm
Oh, I understand about the reality of public education. I was just expressing the thought that the receipt of public funds carries a price tag with it which is destructive of the mission of the organization. That’s a thought I don’t often see expressed.
Mostly the focus is on getting the bucks and that’s as far as most people are willing to consider. Trouble is, that’s not as far as the repercussions of public funding extend and you can see those repercussions starting to take hold in charters.
The danger to any institution that receives government funding is that the pursuit of funding becomes the de facto reason for the existence of the organization.
That effect’s most clearly visible in big, urban school districts which are inevitably saddled with both unjustifiable administrative overhead as well as legions of non-teaching professionals. Success at achieving funding increases means something has to be done with the money hence headcount whose contribution to the education of kids is, at best, a dubious proposition.
That’s why, contrary to reasonable expectations, funding increases don’t satisfy requirements, they increase requirements. That’s why “fully funding” public education’s a mantra and not a definable financial target which is achievable. It’s also why expectations for public education are so low – there’s no reward for achieving high performance but there is a reward for maintaining low performance. Low performance is a good rationale for funding increases. Not that I’m saying that the avoidance of high performance is purposeful, just that there’s little reason to make the hard decisions and hard choices that attend the achievement of high performance if it’s low performance that yields the rewards.
I see charters heading in the direction of the pursuit of funding as an end and while I find that troubling I also know that there’s not much point in complaining about it. Charter schools and charter school advocates will complain about the funding inequities. Charter schools will pursue every funding opportunity even if it gets in the way of educating kids; that’s an expression of human nature.
It’s the choice that parents have that’ll be the determinant of individual charter school survival not the successful pursuit of every available funding dollar. That’s the crucial difference between charter schools and district schools. Parents are interested in their kid getting a good education, not in attending an educational Taj Mahal that leaves the kid illiterate. To the extent parents are empowered education occurs, to the extent that parents can be safely ignored, education loses importance.
January 19th, 2009 at 9:45 am
Wake-up. They don’t want Charter Schools to succeed. And to hope or think otherwise is foolish. The public education “industry (and it is an industry)” and their supporters created this mutant form of private education only to handicap it enough to barely survive. They can then point to it as “proof” that private education just doesn’t work. It is like the prisoner of war. The captors don’t want to kill it; otherwise they’d loose their leverage. They only want to beat it, kick it around every once in a while and drag out it’s emaciated body for the cameras.