This Just In: Education Plays Key Role in Stimulus Package

“If this functions correctly as it’s supposed to, your son or daughter will not see any difference in their class this year. It will be the same class, same textbooks, with the same computers. But if this didn’t happen they’d be in larger classrooms, with older books,” Griffith says.

Opponents of the bill say they prefer outdated textbooks to more debt. Rick Hess, director of education policy studies for the American Enterprise Institute, a nonprofit and nonpartisan research group, points out the government doesn’t actually have this money to spend. “It’s money we will continue to borrow against our kids,” he says.

Hess says instead of focusing on spending, schools should be paying closer attention to tighter accountability measures, teacher compensation, and professional development. “Just like an economy that's built on borrowing, we have a public education sector built on spending money to staff our schools without much attention to whether they can do their work,” he says.

According to Hess, the package demonstrates America’s continued unwillingness to face hard choices, such as laying-off teachers, in the face of an unstable economy: “This is a fork in the road for school reform, and we are going to take the course of minimizing short term pain, and putting off important decisions.”

Education analysts in support of the package say the money, albeit borrowed, is necessary and well accounted for. “It’s not a block grant where they give each state a blank check,” says John Laughner, legislative manager for the Committee for Education Funding, a nonpartisan and nonprofit education coalition.

The bill would be dished out in various grants. Some of the money, such as that set aside for special education, will use the same Title I formulas currently in place as part of the No Child Left Behind Act, where funding is decided based on the number of students eligible for a free lunch program. Other moneys would be given based on a cocktail of different population metrics, including the number of people in the state aged 5 to 24-year-olds and the state’s total population.

Still, some in Washington say the bill isn’t all that they’d hoped. “In the end it doesn’t feel like [the money] is really being allocated in ways that are benefiting states and districts,” says Jennifer Cohen, a policy analyst with the New American Foundation, a nonpartisan, nonprofit public policy think tank.

The criticism lies in the way the funds are distributed. The New America Foundation estimates that of all the recipients, Washington D.C. would get the most stimulus money in 2009 at $1,289 per student, followed by Puerto Rico at $927 per student, Louisiana at $785 per student, New York at $760, and Vermont at $679. Mississippi, the nation’s poorest state, comes in eighth at $657—a ranking which shows the age-old formulas are flawed, Cohen says.

Friends to the bill or foe, all experts agree that it represents a big change in national policy.

It’s not just the amount of money that makes this bill historic, it also symbolizes a shift in the government’s role in education. Traditionally, the feds have been a minority partner in education, providing about 7 percent of total funding for education, usually in the form of aid to at-risk and special education students. With this bill’s passage, they’d be funding about 20 percent of education, including help for building construction and teacher pay.

Griffith says education analysts see it as a changing of the guards. Once states and districts start taking federal money, “Who’s going to be calling the shots?” he says. “The debate for several decades has been state vs. local. States have slowly taken over control, but the feds have been on the side-lines. Now it’s a three-way debate: state, local, or federal.”

The U.S. Senate Committee on Appropriations issued a statement that Congress needs a bold plan to “lay the foundation for American's economic competitiveness in the 21^st century,” and based on how the money is divvied up, it's clear they see educating the future workforce as playing a key role in that endeavor.

In terms of immediate stimulus, Education Secretary Arne Duncan says the package will prevent “literally hundreds of thousands of teacher layoffs.” And, more than just preventing layoffs, Duncan says the money set aside to fix America's deteriorating schools will create many new construction jobs.

Skeptics project that only a small number of new jobs will be created, and that the plan will, instead, diminish fiscal discipline among school officials. “I would argue that when it’s free money coming from Washington there’s less incentive for local people to worry about how it’s being spent,” Hess says. And since the money has an expiration date of two years, experts worry what will happen once 2011 rolls around.

For right now, school officials, in the throws of budget season, are chomping at the bit to find out how much they’ll receive. “The longer it takes to get clear details of this, the greater the problems,” Griffith says. If the bill stalls, districts will have to put their budgets on hold, and that presents myriad challenge; schools can’t make purchase decisions and teachers will be in limbo about their employment status.

Regardless of where the package goes from here, it shows a clear message that the federal government wants to give more money—and place a greater stake—in the education of American school children.