There’s a move afoot in Congress to cut one of President Obama’s most creative and cost-effective reforms – the Education Department’s $4.3 billion Race to the Top fund. Which GOP troglodyte is behind it? Actually, it’s a prominent liberal: Rep. David Obey (D-WI).
Obey, chairman of the mighty House Appropriations Committee, introduced a bill this week to cut $500 million from the fund. He also wants to skim $200 million from the Teacher Incentive Fund, which helps districts set up pay-for-performance systems to reward excellent teachers, and to take $100 million from a pot of money set up to help finance charter schools.
These raids on signature Obama school improvement initiatives are intended to raise $10 billion to help fund the Keep Our Educators Working Act, otherwise known as the “edujobs” bill. It would send federal dollars to the states to prevent teacher layoffs. Pitting jobs against efforts to improve America’s lowest-performing schools is a profoundly bad idea.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan has used the Race to the Top Fund brilliantly to leverage overdue changes in state laws that inhibit innovation in underperforming school districts. To compete for federal grants, states must remove arbitrary caps on charter schools, track students’ educational growth year by year, and include that information in teacher evaluation. The other funds operate on the same principle that the federal government should play a strategic role in education, using small investments to stimulate state and local innovations in teacher compensation and public school choice.
No one wants to see teachers lose their jobs in today’s dicey economy. But no one wants to see firefighters or police or, for that matter, construction workers, sales reps or bank tellers lose their jobs either. With unemployment stuck near 10 percent, Congress has a clear moral responsibility to extend unemployment and transitional health care benefits. But what’s the rationale for singling out teachers for a special measure of job protection?
What’s more, Obey and his liberal allies have not tied the extra money to changes in the way school districts conduct reductions in force. Most districts use the last-in-first-out (LIFO) method, in which teachers with the least seniority and lowest salaries are dismissed first. LIFO thus reinforces a tenure system that ties compensation to years on the job irrespective of job performance, and that deters more talented people from becoming teachers. It also means that the cost of overall spending on teacher salaries will rise faster than if reductions in force had been made across the experience spectrum.
If edujobs is bad policy, it’s worse politics. It practically begs conservatives to charge that Democrats put the interests of the adults in public education over the interests of the kids.
It happens, however, that that’s not true. Obey’s proposal has sparked strenuous objections both from the Education Department and from progressive school reformers in Congress. “If we are to meet the President’s goal of becoming global leaders in college graduates by 2020, we must rethink and reinvent our approach to education by moving forward with bold reforms,” Rep. Jared Polis (D-CO) wrote in a letter to his colleagues. “Unfortunately, the proposed cuts represent a major step backward.”
Obey is a liberal lion who is retiring after a long career in Congress at the end of this term. Polis is only a freshman, but he’s right, and progressives ought to rally behind the president’s efforts to fix America’s broken schools.
Photo credit: House Committee on Education and Labor’s Photostream
