Bushwhacked_ Life in George W. Bush's America Large Print - Molly Ivins [40]
“Kennedy had two goals,” said a Washington education lobbyist. “To keep vouchers [which move public tax dollars to private schools] out of the bill. And to get as much money as he could for the schools.”
Kennedy won the voucher fight. There’s no voucher provision in the law, but there is a mechanism that moves federal tax dollars out of public schools and into the hands of for-profit, nonprofit, and faith-based “supplemental-service providers.” It’s part of what Paul Houston of the American Association of School Administrators describes as one of many “twists” the federal law places on the Texas model. Principals in schools that qualify for Title I money and are classified as “in improvement” must inform parents that they are eligible for school money for private remedial services. “In improvement” means one group of students, whose scores have been disaggregated from other subgroups, failed to hit their marks on standardized tests. Title I money is federal dollars dedicated to economically disadvantaged students. If one disaggregated subgroup—African-American, Hispanic, economically disadvantaged—fails to show progress on standardized tests, the school is sanctioned and must start writing checks to parents to get outside help. The checks are drawn on the school’s Title I federal funds—up to $1,500 per child.
“Follow the money” as Deep Throat told Woodward and Bernstein when they were trying to fathom the Watergate scandal. Federal tax dollars go to the school, which cuts a check to the parent, who is required by law to turn it over to a supplemental-service provider. In California 113 providers were approved at the beginning of the 2002 school year—everything from the nonprofit A Thousand Points of Learning to the very-much-for-profit Sylvan Learning Center and Voyager Expanded Learning. That smells like the beginning of vouchers, on a small scale.
Identify schools as failures, order them to improve, then take away the money that will make improvement possible, said Houston of the American Association of School Administrators. It creates the potential for a public backlash against public education.*“What’s going to happen in two years from now when two thirds of our schools are declared as failing?” Houston asked. (Some educators predict 85 percent.) Houston sees two possible outcomes. Parents who know their school, their teachers, and their principal are going to say that, while not perfect, the school provides their children with a good education. Other parents are going to read the “report card” declaring their child’s school a failure and turn against it.
Bush’s failure to fund the law at the levels he agreed to when negotiating with Kennedy make the latter more likely. It was more federal money for schools that kept Kennedy in the deal when he was working with Bush to pass his education-reform bill. A year after the senator stood at Bush’s side and accepted his thanks for making education reform possible, Kennedy realized he’d been had.
The Bush budget for fiscal year 2004 (written in early 2003) provided two thirds of what Bush had promised a year earlier. It eliminated funding for rural education, gifted-and-talented programs, small schools, and technical education. After-school programs lost $400 million. Special education, the issue that drove Vermont senator Jim Jeffords out of the Republican Party, was funded at a rate that will get it to full funding in a mere thirty-three years from the date the No Child bill became law.
But the president’s budget does include money for two experimental voucher programs that will cost $5 billion, as taxpayer money is finally used to fund private schools. Outside the confines of the bill, Bush also drastically cut “impact funds” the federal government pays on a per-student basis to districts that educate children of Army, Navy, and