I'd be hard pressed to top Mike Antonucci's beautifully apt blog post title ?Cannibals,? but mine is a little more explanatory. In another bit of excellent sleuthing over at Politics K-12 by Alyson Klein, we learn that Rep. Obey, Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, has really outdone himself. In order to fund the now scaled back (to $10 bil from $23 bil) edujobs bill, he proposes to cut $800 mil from Education Department discretionary spending:
- $500 mil would come out of Race To The Top;
- $200 mil would come out of the Teacher Incentive Fund;
- $100 mil would come out of ED's Office of Innovation and Improvement budget, maybe from its work with charter schools;
So your first question should probably be about the faulty math: $800 million to fund a $10 billion bill? You're right, but don't let your outrage die there. Though I (and my Fordham colleagues) have been critical at various points of both RTTT's and TIF's effectiveness, Obey's amendment really goes beyond the pale. He wants reroute dollars away from programs that are (at least partially) effective to the very thing that has not: Maintaining the status quo. Yes, yes, the key word there is ?partially,? so maybe the real tragedy here is that our least worst option now looks a whole lot rosier. But still, really?!
Now you're probably thinking to yourself, ?Good God, why didn't that edujobs bill die weeks ago when the White House was waffling on it?? That was back when we learned that while Duncan was on the speakers circuit at the unions' behest in support of the bill, the White House hadn't formally come out in support of it. (In other words, the WH hadn't formally asked Congress for the edujobs money, a procedural formality that actually holds a lot of weight in terms of political signalling.)
The bill is technically an amendment, and it's attached to a piece of legislation that would increase funding for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, so the situation is a political minefield. No one really wanted to slow down the military funding by supporting a contentious teacher jobs addition. First Senator Harkin backed off supporting the Senate version; then Obey appeared to follow suit on the House version. Turns out Obey was just biding his time. But apparently for naught, because this ?compromise??reduced funding and offsets from other education programs?is particularly poorly-thought out from the perspective of getting WH or keeping ED support. ED spokesperson Peter Cunningham put it this way: ?If Congress is determined to find offsets, we will help them do that, but these are not the right ones,? he told Klein. Sounds like Obey has signed the death warrant on his own amendment. We can only hope.
?Stafford Palmieri
