On its way out the door, the Obama Education Department quietly released the results of its $7 billion investment in the School Improvement Grants program, “the largest federal investment ever targeted to failing schools,” according to the Washington Post. Education Secretary Arne Duncan had promised the program would turn around 5,000 failing schools.
The results are nothing short of a colossal failure. Test scores, graduation rates, and college enrollment were no different in schools that received School Improvement Grants than schools that did not. Via the Post, here’s a rough idea of how the program was supposed to work:
In theory, some of those aren’t terrible reform ideas, but anyone who’s ever spent any time around public education bureaucracy could have told you the transformational strategy option would be terrible in practice.
Then there’s this choice bit of the Washington Post report that goes a long way toward explaining the failures: “The Education Department did not track how the money was spent, other than to note which of the four strategies schools chose.” This is the real problem with America’s schools. The system is awash in cash, but totally lacking accountability.
Even worse, “this outcome was absolutely, positively, unavoidably predictable,” notes American Enterprise Institute education policy expert Andy Smarick. Smarick was especially critical of the “turnaround” strategies that the grants were pegged to. In May of 2009,
Samrick wrote, “If the [Education Department] team believes that we just need to build a better turnaround mousetrap, I’m concerned that we’re about to waste several billion dollars.” In 2014, Smarick wrote the program was already “the greatest failure in the U.S. Department of Education’s 30-plus year history, and we saw it coming.” In fact, Smarick regularly sounded the alarm about the School Improvement Grants program for nearly eight years.
Smarick deserves a lot of credit for his foresight here, and he’s an excellent education policy analyst who thoroughly detailed the many reasons why the program would fail. But you don’t have to be Nostradamus to predict failure when the government hands out billions of dollars and doesn’t track how the money is spent.
Regardless, the ongoing and total educational failure of America’s poorest and most vulnerable students ought to be a national outrage.
