“Money can’t buy happiness,” goes the old saying. Now we have proof that it can’t buy better education in failing schools either. Just 48 hours before leaving town, President Obama’s Education Department admitted as much.
Around the time the Center for Education Reform released our First 100 Days recommendations to the new administration, calling for an immediate look at “how every federal dollar can better meet the needs of schools and students,” the Education Department posted a devastating new study demonstrating how urgent such a review really is.
The School Improvement Grants program dates back to President George W. Bush’s administration, but Obama placed a very heavy bet on it, spending $7 billion on the program between 2010 and 2015. The money was spent on the poorest-performing schools, which were required only to adopt one of four Obama-approved approaches.
Two of the four options were either to close entirely or convert to charter schools, and only 4 percent of the schools chose one of those paths. Most chose the “transformation” path, adopting new instructional strategies, a new principal, new teachers and the like.
Former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said that his goal was to “turn around” 1,000 of the worst performing schools in the nation each year.
The tragic bottom line: The program had no effect at all. None. Seven billion dollars down the drain, producing absolutely nothing of value. An eight-year cohort of students that are most desperately in need of decent schools now join too many other generations of children before them in a world where a quality education is the difference between a dead-end and a life of opportunities and rewards.
The reason for that failure, and the solution to it, are both so very simple: To ensure the best innovations in teaching and learning, schools must have the freedom, and incentive, to adopt new approaches, new programs, new materials. That requires school-based control over funds, and it requires there not be iron-clad, archaic institutional rules and regulations governing everything that happens every day in the classroom!
The amount of money spent on failing schools in this very expensive experiment didn’t matter because it’s how education funds are spent that makes all the difference in the world. In this case, it was spent to save certain failing schools, rather than save the children locked in those schools.
Only when educational choice gives parents the right to choose the schools or the courses that best serve their children’s needs will they have the options their more well-off counterparts living in wealthier zip codes already enjoy. Only then will their children have an opportunity for the better life they deserve.
I can only begin to imagine what impact that wasted $7 billion might have had if it were used instead to incentivize the delivery of education to the most rural communities, and the technological bandwidth for such communities to access exceptional lessons online, to fund the development of more charter schools, or to give families Opportunity Scholarships of the sort now in wide use in the District of Columbia and elsewhere.
Every challenge is an opportunity to act differently. The new administration enjoys an opportunity to refocus federal spending priorities. Redirecting what Washington expects from states can carve out a new direction for American education, one that is more likely to reward and incentivize innovative leaders and schools.
Let’s get started.
Jeanne Allen (@JeanneAllen) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is CEO and founder of the Center for Education Reform. “The First 100 Days: The Path to Going Bold on Education Innovation & Opportunity” can be seen here.Thinking of submitting an op-ed to the Washington Examiner? Be sure to read our guidelines on submissions.
