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Wednesday, January 31, 2007
The politics of education
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
This year may produce the state’s boldest education reforms in decades. On the floor of the State Senate today, debate begins on a scholarship program proposed by State Sen. Eric Johnson (R-Savannah) that would allow the parents of special needs children to buy the services they want from the private sector or from another public school system.
On Tuesday, the Senate education and youth committee passed legislation being pushed by Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle of Gainesville to allow entire school districts to free themselves from an array of regulations, including hiring and firing of teachers, school hours and class size, in return for a commitment to deliver results.
As U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings noted in a speech Tuesday to the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think-tank in Atlanta, the top-performing school in the Atlanta Public Schools system is a charter school, Tech High.
The Cagle proposal (SB 39) would permit up to five systems to become charter districts initially, and each would get a state grant of $125,000 for implementation. “We expect a very high demands for these five slots,” said State Sen. Dan Weber (R-Dunwoody) who introduced the bill for Cagle. The lieutenant governor presides over the Senate, but cannot introduce legislation. The Senate panel also passed a bill to create five career academies, a form of charter school, where students would be taught job skills. Five of those would be eligible for $1 million each, with additional funds available for construction.
After her speech Tuesday, I asked Secretary Spellings about the politics of education reform. In calling for renewal of No Child Left Behind, the President included Promise Scholarships, a form of vouchers, for parents of children in chronically non-performing schools. The scholarships would allow parents to move their children — and the federal money spent for their education — to private schools or to out-of-district public schools.
The unions and many of the Democratic constituencies oppose this provision. As the Wall Street Journal noted editorially Tuesday, the President proposed this initially, “only to throw NCLB’s choice provisions over the side to cut a bipartisan deal with Senator Ted Kennedy and Representative George Miller.” Said the WSJ: “Let’s hope Mr. Bush isn’t merely using ‘choice’ again as a negotiating ploy to be tossed out once talks on Capitol Hill get going.”
Spellings sees the world differently. “The President is very much paying attention to this and understands the policy implications” of the new Democratic majority in Congress, she said. “I also want to give credit where credit is due and that is that Ted Kennedy and George Miller have been stalwarts for the accountability provisions and for the supplemental services, tutoring and so forth, that are the choice aspects of this law. And they have had every opportunity to retreat…and they have not.”
I’m not convinced. NCLB’s choice and accountability were the provisions that made further federal intrusion into a responsibility of state and local government palatable. My fear is that with reauthorization we get more federal money and more of a federal presence without greater accountability or more choice. This has always been the concern about NCLB. We knew at the start that it could become just another empty Big Government spending program or something that could potentially revolutionize public education.
