How small government and local control is sometimes very inconvenient

There's a very good reason why I think no one should be setting education policy until they've spent a few years actually teaching in a public school classroom.

You may have heard about Race to the Top recently in the president's State of the Union speech and the many faux-power-to-the-people speeches Obama subsequently gave. For those that don't know, Race to the Top is a large chunk of funds given to districts through the Department of Education to encourage and fund educational reform. It's a laudable program, and public school educators were over the moon about it. The initial batch of money was given out with no strings attached, but it was requested that the districts use it for educational reform programs.

Here's the problem.
Districts have been struggling under the expensive unfunded mandates of No Child Left Behind for quite some time, and the economic crash - dare I say “depression”? - threw them into a major budget crisis. Districts everywhere have been twisting and turning to find ways to retain teachers for their classrooms, keep buildings in decent shape, and stock materials like textbooks and markerboards. I've taught in classrooms with a computer older than my high school students and textbooks ten years out of date, which makes a bit of a difference when teaching US history. (Unless you are one of those only-teach-to-Vietnam-War history teachers. Stubborn troglodyte curmudgeons, I salute you.) So predictably districts ended up spending most of the DoE money on the basics – teachers, textbooks, infras
tructure. It's a bit like when your mom tells you, “You desperately need some new clothes. Here's $200 for your birthday. Go shopping.” Except your car broke down this month, and your rent is due. Now, Mom told you to buy clothes, but would that really be the responsible thing to do? Instead, you end up paying your bills and rent with the money. Well, you should, anyway. Your nice clothes will just be ruined if you're forced to live under Wacker Drive in a sheet tent.


But this absolutely horrified Andy Smarick, an education policy wonk that of course would never have dirtied himself standing in front of a public school class. Writing for EducationNext, a “journal” (tip: you don't get to call yourself a journal when your articles aren't peer-reviewed) out of the Hoover Institute at Stanford, he blasted these selfish and narrow-minded districts for “protecting the status quo.” He practically froths at the mouth at their defiance of reform and choosing to actually save jobs. No, really. Here's what he says:

The single-minded focus on jobs and the status quo was confirmed by hard numbers. In September, the U.S. economy lost 190,000 jobs, but the education sector gained nearly 11,000 jobs. In October, the Obama administration announced that more than half of the 640,000 jobs created or saved across the entire economy by the ARRA were in education. In November, after studying states’ quarterly stimulus reports, Education Week found that 96 percent of the ARRA education funds spent to that point had been “focused on creating and saving jobs.”

Of course, September is the beginning of the school year, and with increases each year in the number of students served, 11,000 actually isn't that many jobs. In fact, many districts faced layoffs for any school personnel not in the classroom, including school counselors and social workers. Some also had to lay off teachers and make classes bigger, which I can tell you from experience is never a good thing. But why listen to the experience of actual teachers, when you can listen to Smarick rage against the districts for choosing to have teachers in their schools? Prats, the lot of them!

I would like to know what good educational reform would be without having teachers in the classroom to implement it or having unsafe buildings to teach in, but I guess that's asking too much.

He goes on...and on...and on about the schools and how they don't care anything about real reform, and how he would fix the whole shebang. The gist of it is that we should all be totally suspicious of the efforts of the districts, even if they offer reform plans, because they're probably just trying to get money. Indeed. He suggests that the DoE closely question all districts with proposals and treat them with the utmost skepticism. I'm betting he also wants to bring them in for questioning under a hot light and maybe try a little waterboarding. At the very least, we should require them to pass purity tests. Those wily educators with their reading and writing and math just can't be trusted to know what to do with education funds.

“Much will be learned from these experiences in the years ahead, but for the time being one immediate takeaway merits repeating: Local policy prerogatives and dire financial conditions trumped federal pleas for reform and led to the spending of massive amounts of aid on preserving the status quo and protecting existing jobs and programs.” Well, I suppose that's one way of looking at it. And here I was thinking that districts were broke and desperately trying to provide their students with the basic educational tools necessary and choosing to wait on the shiny new toys. Oh, and also that Smarick is a tool.