DeVos Neglects to Help Public Schools Serve Neediest Students while She Pushes to Arm Teachers

Last week while Betsy DeVos stoked an uproar about possibly letting school districts use federal funding for guns to arm teachers, the Senate quietly passed its version of an appropriations bill for the Department of Education in Fiscal Year 2019. The House hasn’t yet passed any kind of education appropriations, and we’ll have to assume that a continuing resolution or a federal shutdown will follow on September 30—the date when next year’s FY19 budget is supposed to be finalized.

With all the sensational talk about teachers packing guns paid for with federal dollars, it is calming to read the rather routine details of the funding that the Senate just voted to appropriate. First off, Betsy DeVos had recommended that the Education Department’s budget be cut, but the Senate bill increases funding  by about $500 million, raising the overall departmental budget to $71.6 billion.  Under the Senate appropriations bill, Title I would get an additional $125 million; special education programs would be increased by the same amount, $125 million.  These are the Department of Education’s biggest K-12 programs. Title I enriches schools where poverty is concentrated and has always been underfunded, especially relative to the growing population of poor students in public schools  The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act pays a small fraction—never, until now, more than 19 percent of the cost of federally mandated special education programs—even though Congress promised to fund 40 percent of these costs when the law was passed in 1975.  What is clear is that although Congress is trying to do what’s right relative to proposed cuts by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, we aren’t talking about the kind of significant support public schools really need.

There are encouraging additional positive signs from the Senate, which does not—in its appropriations bill—enact the kind of program priorities Betsy DeVos has proposed.  The Senate appropriations bill does not fold together the education and labor departments. The bill does not eliminate Title II that assists public schools with professional development and salaries for teachers and principals. The bill adds $125 million for Title IV—Student Support and Academic Enrichment grants.  And it flat-funds the 21st Century Community Learning Centers, which DeVos has been trying to eliminate altogether; these are the large, collaborative after-school programs that are part of many Community Schools. And despite rumors that DeVos would cut funding for the Office of Civil Rights, the Senate bill adds $8 million.  The Senate appropriates nothing for any federal school voucher or tax credit or education savings account voucher plan, although the Federal Charter Schools Program would get an extra $45 million.

The hot issue of guns in school does not show up in the Senate’s appropriations bill, because the idea DeVos is considering would merely allow school districts to redirect funds out of an already established program for the purpose of buying guns for teachers or school security personnel. The money would come out of Title IV, established in the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), and dubbed “Student Support and Enrichment.” The NY Times‘ Erica Green explains: “The $1 billion student support program is intended for the country’s poorest schools and calls for school districts to use the money toward three goals: providing a well-rounded education, improving school conditions for learning, and improving the use of technology for digital literacy.”  Lots of people have pointed out that, even though DeVos says school safety is part of improving conditions for learning, the spending of federal money to buy guns to arm teachers who would supposedly protect students doesn’t really seem to qualify.

Green adds that the idea of using federal funds to arm teachers breaks a federal precedent: “Department officials acknowledged that carrying out the proposal would be the first time that a federal agency has authorized the purchase of weapons without a congressional mandate.”  Green continues: “Such a move appears to be unprecedented, reversing a longstanding position taken by the federal government that it should not pay to outfit schools with weapons. And it would also undermine efforts by Congress to restrict the use of federal funding on guns. As recently as March, Congress passed a school safety bill that allocated $50 million a year to local school districts, but expressly prohibited the use of the money for firearms..” When Congress crafted ESSA in 2015, there was pressure to lessen federal intrusion into the educational policy of the states. Congress designed Title IV to free school districts to choose how they would use the federal enrichment dollars and, unlike other federal education laws, did not specifically prohibit the use of the federal dollars to purchase weapons.

Press reports indicate that not much of anybody thinks arming teachers would make public schools safer. The teachers unions oppose it. Democrats and key Republicans in Congress oppose it. Parents worry about what it would do to classrooms, and teachers enumerate the reasons why the practice wouldn’t work if somebody were to come into their school with an automatic rifle.

Education law professor Derek Black ponders the broader meaning of Betsy DeVos’s attention to this matter: “Hats off to Erica Green at the New York Times for a detailed explanation of how federal education dollars can and can’t be spent and the focus of a relatively obscure piece of the federal education funding pie. She interestingly points out something I did not know—that most federal education grants specifically prohibit schools from spending them on guns… That is what makes DeVos’s musings so remarkable… She could be working on finding solutions to things that students in poor schools really need, but instead she is devising strategies to get around Congressional restrictions so she can reallocate federal dollars in ways that no serious and substantial constituency cares about.”

Black continues: “From what I know of the poor schools that receive these federal dollars that she would free up, they need new books, more teachers, better qualified teachers, more well-maintained facilities and technology.  It is hard for me to imagine that more than an insignificant spattering of them will say, ‘You know, we were going to hire a part-time reading specialist this year or our first new computers in eight years, but now that Betsy DeVos has freed us, let’s buy guns instead.’  And the fact that this is what DeVos is spending her time on shows just how small and insignificant this administration is to the quality of educational opportunity in the country.”

Congress Deletes ‘Race to the Top’ Competition

As you know, over last weekend Congress passed an omnibus appropriations bill to get us through the fiscal year to the end of next September.  This was all very theatrical as the ideologues postured and threatened to stop the government.  Despite the atmosphere of crisis, however, a bill was passed, and if you look at how the money was appropriated in particular areas, it is possible to observe some trends.  Let’s look at the federal appropriations for public education as an example.

Remember that the federal investment in education is relatively small at $70.5 billion.  While federal policy affects what happens in public schools across the states, the federal government isn’t really a big financial player in education. According to the New America Foundation, “States and local governments typically provide about 44 percent each of all elementary and secondary education funding. The federal government contributes about 12 percent of all direct expenditures.”

But spending trends in federal policy set an important direction, and in its spending bill for Fiscal Year 2015 (October 2014–end of September 2015) Congress did not appropriate any money for the competitive Race to the Top program.  Another competitive grant program, Investing in Innovation, was cut by $21.6 million. School Improvement Grants, the other big competition for money for so called “failing” schools did survive, though the entire program is flat-funded at $506 million.

By eliminating funding for Race to the Top and adding a little bit of extra funding to each of the huge civil rights formula programs, Title I and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), Congress made a statement, though its action is symbolic rather than substantive.  Title I is the $14.4 billion program that provides extra funding for public schools that serve a large number or a high percentage of children in poverty. It is the signature program of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, passed in 1965 as part of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty.  The $11.5 billion IDEA, originally passed in 1975, pays a small percentage of the costs of federally mandated services for children with special needs (with local school districts making up the rest).  Both of these critically important formula programs got an added $25 million, an incremental increase. If you remember that public schools across the United States serve roughly 50 million children and adolescents, you can see that these increases are merely symbolic.

Why do these almost pitiful increases matter?  Because they seem to indicate that Congress is turning away from Arne Duncan’s competitive grants and toward the time-honored formula programs designed to assist public school with their core educational function. Race to the Top and Innovations money almost never hired teachers to reduce class size; school districts most often used the money for one-time investments like technology or staff development. After all, a time-limited grant should not be used to cover ongoing operations.

Also the U.S. Department of Education conditioned these grant programs on getting states to adopt what have been very controversial priorities of Arne Duncan’s Department of Education.  To qualify, states had to promise to evaluate teachers based on students’ test scores and agree to controversial turnaround plans that included school closure and privatization.  And states had to agree they would adopt “college- and career-ready” standards, which in practice meant they were agreeing to adopt the Common Core and accompanying tests designed by the big publishing companies who will consequently reap enormous profits.  The Common Core has become extremely controversial.

The Obama administration has modeled its trademark education programs on the way philanthropic foundations award funds: through competition. A serious problem is that races with winners always create losers.  As the Department of Education diverted some Title I funds into competitive programs rather than simply awarding them through the formula, federal support for expanded access to education increasingly became a right only for poor children in winning states and school districts.  Late in 2012, for example, a round of Race to the Top chose 16 school districts from among 372 applicants to share $400 million.  These were relatively small school districts, together serving only 21,000 students.  My favorite comment from the Rev. Jesse Jackson describes the moral dilemma: “There are those who would make the case for a Race to the Top for those who can run (or in the case of the federal grants, for those whose school districts can hire the best grant-proposal writers).  Instead ‘lift from the bottom’ is the moral imperative because it includes everybody.”

The federal government’s role in public education has historically been to ensure that public schools are better equipped to serve everybody by making up at least to some degree for the incapacity or unwillingness of particular states to ensure equity.  Through formula programs like Title I for schools in impoverished communities, the IDEA for the education of students with special needs, and funding for the education of English language learners—the relatively small financial role of the federal government in education has been leveraged to ensure that public schools across the states can meet the needs and secure the rights of all children.  In its 2015 appropriations bill, with a small nod to the formula programs and away from competitive programs, Congress seems to be moving in the right direction.