Sin of Omission
By Mitch Berg
The Strib can’t even hear the sound of a putatively conservative administration going out of its way to act like a DFL administration!
In this morning’s editorial, they arf and gargle about a federal education budget that differs from a liberal budget only in terms of the people on the “Sponsor” line:
To hear Bush administration officials tell it, their $56 billion proposed education budget for 2008 makes bold investments that “strategically” meet student needs.On what planet? Details of Bushs education package show that it takes baby steps forward while continuing a much larger slide in the other direction.
Where “forward” means “spending”, and where “slide” means…well, not exactly “not spending”, merely “not increasing the increase as fast as the other areas”.
Constructively, the president finally recognizes the need to increase funding for college Pell Grants, his signature No Child Left Behind NCLB and Title I programs for disadvantaged kids. But even those advances come at the cost of decreases in other areas.
Also, they are virtually worthless at the little business of educating children.
While Cherie Pierson Yecke was one of my favorite guests in the history of the NARN, and one of the sharpest people in the education bureaucracy, I’ll break with her and my fellow Republicans; No Child Left Behind is a joke, a farce, a disaster whose dimensions we can’t begin to imagine.
Not that the intentions – making schools more “Accountable” for the money we spend on them – aren’t honorable. But the educational-industrial complex is not honorable, it’s an organism programmed to survive and thrive at all costs. So the “Accountability” imperative has mutated, within the organism, into a focus on “teaching the test” that is leaving our kids as one of two things; kids adept at taking and scoring well on tests, who are well-drilled on the subjects of the tests and not much more (sort of like a circus trick dog who knows nothing about fetching birds or leading a blind person around), or kids shunted into “special ed” programs where those who don’t test well aren’t counted as heavily.
Pell Grants? Admirable in concept, dismal in execution. The presence of all that federal money has inflated the cost of a college education far out of reach (barring government aid, either in grants, loans or low-cost government institutions) of all but the wealthiest students. When my grandfather went to college in the thirties, a year at a four-year private school cost about a fifth of an average American’s annual income. When my father attended the same school twenty years later, it had inflated just a bit (as he related it to me, once upon a time), to about $500 a year, in an era when the average American made around $4-5000 a year. At the same college, 25 years later, I spent $4,000 a year (when the average income was in the low twenties). Today, when the average American earns in the low forties, a year at a public university is up around $10K, while most private schools are easily in the mid-teens.
This, as the value of that degree has plummeted.
