President Obama accused Republicans of wanting to “gut investments in education” as he unveiled plans in battleground Pennsylvania Tuesday to make funding for early education programs more competitive.
Speaking before a friendly crowd in suburban Philadelphia, Obama said underperforming Head Start programs would compete for federal dollars rather than continue automatically receiving funding for the preschool centers.
The announcement was the next step in Obama’s national tour to showcase actions he’s taking on his own through executive orders to get around what he characterizes as a gridlocked Congress.
“After trying for months to work with Congress on education reform, we decided to take it into our own hands,” Obama said at a Head Start facility in Yeadon, Pa.
The administration’s latest proposal would require local Head Start programs that don’t meet federal standards to compete with other programs for their funding. Head Start now provides a preschool education to 900,000 low-income students nationwide.
Obama turned to early-childhood education on Tuesday after taking executive action on housing, college loans and veterans in recent days. By introducing a competitive element to Head Start funding, the White House is banking that congressional Republicans will support the measure.
The changes to the Head Start program mirror Obama’s Race to the Top competition, which will award $500 million in federal education grants to states based on their performance. And Republicans have traditionally favored refining standards for Head Start.
However, some Democrats say the changes would risk low-income students missing out on vital preparation and instruction.
While the president has taken to the road in recent weeks to pressure lawmakers to approve his $450 billion jobs package, Tuesday’s event was focused on demonstrating his discipline in spending tax dollars.
“We’re not just going to put money into programs that don’t work,” Obama said. “We know that raising the bar isn’t always an easy thing to do, but it’s the right thing to do.”
Obama has assailed Republicans for blocking funds for Head Start, Pell grants for college and a $35 billion portion of his jobs bill he said would pay for 400,000 teachers and first responders. Conservatives balked over Obama’s insistence that the jobs package be paid for with higher taxes on millionaires.
“Their argument is that we don’t have the money,” Obama said. “But we can ask those who make more than $1 million a year to pay a little more in taxes — not right now, but starting in 2013.”
The Obama administration has increasingly focused on education in recent months as part of a broader effort to tie such spending to job creation. In September, the president said he would grant waivers to states on No Child Left Behind, President George W. Bush’s signature education achievement.
Under the new Head Start standards, poorly performing schools would compete for funding if they failed on-site reviews or didn’t demonstrate effective classroom evaluations and goals.
Like much of his recent rhetoric, though, the president’s trek to Pennsylvania was as much about deriding an obstructionist Congress as trumpeting his own proposals.
“If Congress continues only to stand for dysfunction and delay,” Obama said, “then I’m going to move ahead without them.”
