I was busy finishing the first draft of my book (whew!) when the President's 2011 budget came out, so all of the budget publicity and punditry passed me by. I've finally had a chance to give all of the documents a read, so at the risk of being late and repetitive, here are my 8 big takeaways.
- Competitive Grants: ED was true to its word about trying to increase the amount of funding distributed through competitive grant programs. Good move.
- Classic Washington Accretion: But rather than cutting and fundamentally changing its huge old programs, ED is just adding new competitive programs on top. This is why ED got such a huge budget increase; if you want to change the percentage going toward your priorities while not reducing the baseline, you have to add, add, add. And this is why federal budgets always grow. For example, Title I gets $14.5 billion, the same amount as last year, and IDEA gets almost $13 billion (2 percent increase).
- Hope Before Evidence: Even though not a penny has been spent from the Race to the Top or Investing in Innovation funds, thereby providing us no evidence of their ability to improve student learning, ED is asking for nearly $2 billion in additional funding for the two. IES is undertaking a major study of RTT to find out if it will work. Prudence and humility suggest we wait for those results before doubling down. (Yes, I agree that RTT has led states to change some important policies, but there's a huge difference between a change in policy and a change in practice.)
- Upside of Program Consolidation I: Like so many before it, this administration wants to consolidate a number of programs, in other words jam a bunch of disparate funds and activities into a smaller number of new, bigger, more flexible programs with fancier names, such as "Effective teaching and learning for a well-rounded education"??(for examples, see page 3 here). If they succeed, they will have greater control over how federal funds are spent and enable applicants to propose activities more closely aligned with their actual needs instead of tight, old program specifications.
- Upside of Program Consolidation II: Though the new, bigger programs are yet to be defined (they'd require new legislation), it appears that the administration is interested in funding important things, like a fund for new pathways into the teaching profession and a program for innovations in educator compensation.
- The Downside of Program Consolidation I: Every new administration sees the opportunity to consolidate programs because previous administrations have tried and failed. But there's a reason for those failures. Yes, it might make sense to combine a group of literacy programs, but each individual program has a constituency, both outside the Beltway and inside Congress. They don't like to see their pet programs get lumped in with others. The chances of ED getting its full way on this are infinitesimal.
- The Downside of Program Consolidation II: Sometimes consolidation is unwise, as in the case of the administration's proposed "Expanding Educational Options" program, which would blend several charter school programs with other non-charter programs. Based on the description, it would fund charters and an array of decidedly weaker options that states and districts create so as to protect the status quo (the wide array of "faux charters"). The beauty of a narrow, dedicated charter school start-up fund was that it couldn't be co-opted by the establishment. This program? Not so much, as NAPCS alludes to here. ??Side note: in the RTT application, states without charter laws can still get points for charter-lite "autonomous schools." This budget conflates charters with these far weaker alternatives. I'm seriously beginning to wonder if ED appreciates what makes charters special.
- The Turnaround Fallacy: Despite my best efforts and decades of contrary evidence, the administration is determined to spend as much money as possible on school "turnarounds." There's nearly a billion new dollars in the 2011 request, which is on top of the $3 billion in school improvement grants under the ARRA and a large portion of the $4.35 billion from the RTT. At least with RTT, IES is planning a major evaluation. It appears all of these funds will be spent without a close, analytical eye. My gloomy but firm prediction is that almost all of this money will be spent in the same ways as previous billions dedicated to fixing the nation's lowest-performing schools. Those dollars will lead to virtually no meaningful improvement. The funds that are spent differently (and more "rigorously" as turnaround proponents like to say) will only be marginally more successful.
--Andy Smarick