Tag Archive for 'stimulus package'

Saving Catholic Schools

Published by Robert Pondiscio on April 21, 2009 in Educational Policy. 3 Comments

The disappearance of Catholic schools from America’s inner cities is ”a national education crisis that needs a national response,” argue Checker Finn and Andy Smarick in a Washington Post op-ed.  To their credit, Finn’s Fordham Foundation has been a long-time, loud and too often lonely voice urging action to save Catholic schools.  They write:

Most urban Catholic schools were originally built to educate the children of European immigrants; today, they mostly serve poor African American and Latino students. With their long track record of successfully educating ill-served populations, these schools can play a central role in the nation’s effort to expand educational opportunity and reduce the achievement gap. But not if they disappear.

Reformers love scale, so try this comparison:  KIPP runs 66 public schools in 19 states and the District of Columbia serving just over 16,000 students.   Catholic schools serving 25 times that number of  children closed down from 2000 to 2006–nearly 1,200 faith-based urban schools closed, serving 425,000 students.  And these are schools that produce results.  Diane Ravitch recently noted that in New York City, the four-year graduation rate at Catholic high schools is 99.5%, with 98% of high school graduates enrolling in college.  Finn and Smarick want the Obama administration to “help turn this fatal tide” of Catholic school closings.

Stimulus funds could be used to shore up schools on the brink, provide assistance to their teachers and administrators, or expand and replicate promising local strategies. The president could support education tax credits or scholarships, which would help needy students and stabilize school enrollments. By simply underscoring his support and concern for these schools, he would indicate the bipartisan nature of this issue, thereby providing cover to others eager to act but wary of the political implications.

It’s fashionable (and facile) for antagonists in ed policy debates to frame arguments in terms of who’s on the side of children vs. who’s concerned about adults.  Here are schools successfully serving two million kids.  Who’s on their side?  And before one argues that there are church/state issues here, and that public dollars must not go to religious schools, remember that’s exactly what happens every time a Pell Grant pays a student’s tuition at Georgetown, BC, or Notre Dame.

This just in:  Eduwonk likes Catholic schools “but remains unpersuaded on the need for a public bailout of Catholic schools absent a lot of reciprocal accountability and transparency.”

“The Most Powerful Ed Secretary Ever”

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 18, 2009 in Education News. 1 Comment

The ed world continues its efforts to simply wrap its collective mind around the just-passed stimulus bill and the gaudy sums it contains for education.  “Public schools will get an unprecedented amount of money,” the AP notes, double the education budget under George W. Bush.  “With those dollars, Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan want schools to do better.”  The stimulus bill contains $5 billion to reward states, districts and schools for setting high standards and narrowing the achievement gap.   

With a wave of President Obama’s pen, Arne Duncan becomes the most powerful education secretary in history. The New York Times focuses on the power and unprecedented latitude given to Duncan: 

“There’s going to be this extraordinary influx of resources,” he said in an interview. “So people say, ‘You’re going to be the most powerful secretary ever,’ but I have no interest in that. Power has never motivated me. What I love is opportunity, and this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do something special, to drive change, to make our schools better.”

Mr. Duncan intends to reward school districts, charter schools and nonprofit organizations that had demonstrated success at raising student achievement, notes the Times.  “Programs that tie teacher pay to classroom performance will most likely receive money, as will other approaches intended to raise teacher quality, including training efforts that pair novice instructors with veteran mentors, and afterschool and weekend tutoring programs.”

Sara Mead has an analysis of what the bill means to early childhood ed.  Meanwhile the American Library Association has put up this site to help libraries learn more about the stimulus package.

Update:  At EdWeek’s Politics K-12 blog, the dynamic duo, Michele McNeil and Alyson Klein, are compiling a list of Frequently Asked Questions about the stimulus and promising to get answers to all, bless them.  Links to their email addresses are under their pictures on their blog.

Stringulus Package

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 10, 2009 in Education News. 0 Comments

You had to wait until the very last seconds of President Obama’s news conference to get to his most substantial comments on education spending.  When he got there, in response to Mara Liasson’s question about the difficulties of forging a bipartisan compromise, Obama made it clear he favors using the stimulus package to create incentives for reform and used education as an example of one area where both Republicans and Democrats need to change their approach. 

Both Democrats and Republicans are going to have to think differently in order to come together and solve that problem. I think there are areas like education where some in my party have been too resistant to reform, and have argued only money makes a difference.   And there have been others on the Republican side or the conservative side who said no matter how much money you spend, nothing makes a difference, so let’s just blow up the public school systems. And I think that both sides are going to have to acknowledge we’re going to need more money for new science labs, to pay teachers more effectively, but we’re also going to need more reform, which means that we’ve got to train teachers more effectively, bad teachers need to be fired after being given the opportunity to train effectively, that we should experiment with things like charter schools that are innovating in the classroom, that we should have high standards.

“It does seem to signal that the president isn’t planning to boost education spending without asking for something in return from the nation’s school system,” Alyson Klein of Politics K-12 sums up.  The full transcript of the press conference is here.