One of the keys to beating the house in blackjack is knowing when to double down. In their vote for the (so-called) Stimulus Package, our Congresspeople have doubled down on education*; Arne Duncan gets to try to beat the house (For Education Chief, Stimulus Means Power, Money and Risk, NYTimes, 2/17/09).
Mr. Duncan must develop procedures on the fly for disbursing a budget that has, overnight, more than doubled, and communicate the rules quickly to all 50 states and the nation’s 14,000 school districts. And he faces thousands of tricky decisions about how much money to give to whom and for what.
“It’ll be wonderful fun for a time for his team — it’ll be like Christmas,” said Chester Finn, a former Department of Education official who has watched education secretaries or commissioners come and go here since the mid-1960s. “But the thing about discretionary spending is that it makes more people angry than it makes happy.”
The bill, which President Obama is expected to sign on Tuesday, doubles federal spending on disadvantaged and disabled children, includes hefty increases in the main federal college scholarship program and for Head Start, and, for the first time, makes billions in federal dollars available for school renovation.
There are a million ways to misplay this hand.
Let’s start with some basics. In the Times article it’s pretty explicit that states whose students achieve will be rewarded, those who don’t will not. This implies of course that money is not what creates achievement. After all, those states that do poorly are expected to raise their level of achievment without that extra federal money!
But here’s how it will really work:
To receive a share of the $54 billion stabilization fund, governors must make several “assurances” to Mr. Duncan, intended to drive school reforms: that they are developing statewide data systems that can allow schools to track individual students’ academic progress, that they are assigning experienced teachers fairly to rich and poor schools alike, and so on. Mr. Duncan has the ticklish job of ruling on whether the governors’ assurances are convincing.
And Congress has given him a $5 billion incentive fund that he can use to reward states that are raising student achievement and withhold money from states that are not. “We have states that tell the public that 90 percent of kids are meeting state standards,” Mr. Duncan said, “but when we look at how they’re doing on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, it’s nowhere close. I’m not going to reward that. I want to be transparent about the good, bad and the ugly.”
In other words, in the main there will be rewards for everything but actual achievements!
Oops! Almost forgot … Did we mention that the house always wins?
*This is really quite extraordinary, unprecedented, as the Times article makes clear. We wonder if our public servants remember what the moptops used to sing?
Can’t buy me love, love
Can’t buy me love
I’ll buy you a diamond ring my friend if it makes you feel alright
I’ll get you anything my friend if it makes you feel alright
‘Cause I don’t care too much for money, money can’t buy me love
I’ll give you all I got to give if you say you love me too
I may not have a lot to give but what I got I’ll give to you
I don’t care too much for money, money can’t buy me love
Can’t buy me love, everybody tells me so
Can’t buy me love, no no no, no
Say you don’t need no diamond ring and I’ll be satisfied
Tell me that you want the kind of thing that money just can’t buy
I don’t care too much for money, money can’t buy me love
- Can’t Buy Me Love, Beatles, 1964