No, that's not a typo. According to this front-page Washington Post article from Saturday, that's what Ohio governor Ted Strickland is preparing to request, along with Democratic governors from Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Wisconsin, and Massachusetts.
Surely the group doesn't intend this to be??an annual??payment; the entire education system spends about $550 billion per year, so their proposal would amount to a 45% increase in per-pupil spending, overnight. They can't possibly be that crazy. But even if they mean this to be spread out over, say, five years, $50 billion per year would more than double what Uncle Sam contributes now. This is big, big money.
But it's not inconceivable. Some sort of "revenue sharing" for the states is practically a foregone conclusion (Paul Krugman argues that those cutting state spending now amount to "Fifty Herbert Hoovers," ), and admitting that most of that money will go to the schools (which suck up the majority of state funds) would be a bit of truth in advertising.
Writing yesterday in the New York Times , Matt Miller offers some ideas about the strings that should go along with said revenue . Mostly he wants to use the cash to equalize funding between rich and poor schools, but he'd push for various reforms too:
Federal cash could also be offered to lift teacher salaries for high-poverty schools. States or districts that accept the money would have to allow higher pay for the best teachers or those in scarce specialties like math and science, defer or eliminate tenure (or link it to student achievement gains), and make it easier to fire bad teachers. These districts could pay top teachers up to $150,000 a year, attracting a new generation of talent to America's toughest classrooms.
Eduwonk Andy riffs on Matt's piece to offer some strings of his own :
With the kind of money Matt is talking about Washington could exert even more leverage with an eye toward increasing productivity although perhaps in less sexy ways.??????For example, a serious effort to put the federal government on track to meet its financial obligations under the federal special education law - IDEA -could be coupled with requirements to curb the over-identification of students for special education.????????Federal aid could be tightly linked to even??more robust efforts around data systems than we're seeing today, especially in laggard states.?? Perhaps you could even try for the national standards moonshot via??more??interstate collaboration or some derivative of it around enhanced benchmarking and transparency around standards and assessments.
All this grandiose thinking must be giving George Will a heart attack. Just yesterday he wrote that "Today, there is more Johnsonian confidence in government's competence than at any time since Johnson's policies shattered such confidence. The resurgence of confidence began under today's Texan president." By which he??refers to...the No Child Left Behind??Act, with its "Great Society-style ambition and race-conscious rhetoric." (If that sounds??familiar, its because Will quoted our good friend Rick Hess .)
So there will be a federal bailout of the states, and it will come with strings attached. Pushing for greater equity in school finance systems wouldn't be the worst idea, particularly if done along the lines of weighted-student funding . Neither would Andy's suggestions.??But what's most likely is that Uncle Sam's intentions and his impact won't come any where near matching, as unintended consequences??creep in. You know, just like with the Great Society.
Picture from flickr user lincolnblues .
