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Obama pledges job training, lower college costs

January 25, 2012 By

Community colleges will become “community career centers” working with employers to train 2 million Americans for skilled jobs, said President Obama in the State of the Union speech, which also promised to make college affordable for middle-class families.

States cut funding for colleges and universities by 7.6 percent in 2011-12, a new study finds. The federal stimulus money ran out and state budgets couldn’t make up the difference.

Also: More on free and cheap online college courses’ challenge to traditional higher education. It’s all about the credentials.

Filed Under: Careers, College, Online Learning Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

States link $ to college performance

September 15, 2011 By

States are linking dollars to college performance. In most states, not much money is involved, but Tennessee plans to base 90 percent of funding on students’ outcomes.

Also on Community College Spotlight: Hit with funding cuts, community colleges are getting creative to raise money and cut spending.

That $5 billion to repair community college buildings should be spent to forgive the interest on student loans, a dean writes.

Filed Under: College Tagged With: , , , , ,

High dropout rate has high costs

September 14, 2011 By

Low educational attainment has a high cost, writes RiShawn Biddle on Dropout Nation. According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s latest report, the median annual income for a high school dropout is $10,996. That’s 60 percent less than workers with some college education and 74 percent less than bachelor’s degree grads.

Young men lag in nearly every educational indicator except math, he adds.

In the Dropout Nation podcast, Biddle argues that President Obama’s $450 billion stimulus plan, which includes $60 billion for “allegedly avoiding teacher layoffs and fixing up school buildings,” will do little for poorly educated jobless Americans.

Filed Under: Careers, Education Tagged With: , , , ,

The return of edujobs

August 5, 2010 By

Edujobs — $10 billion to prevent teacher layoffs — has passed the Senate; the House will return from recess to vote on it.

The bill is financed, in part, by cutting food stamps for poor families by $516 a year  per family, notes Flypaper. (Food stamp funding, expanded as part of the stimulus, will be cut in 2014 instead of 2015.)

Hiring people with one-time funds is now defined as “courage” by the Education Department, writes Rick Hess. During a June webinar, Maura Policelli, ED’s senior advisor for external affairs, told listeners to spend stimulus funds to keep teachers on the payroll. She said, “And that does require some courage because it does involve the possible risk of investing in staff that you may not be able to retain in the 2011-12 school year.”  Hess writes:

I used to think that courageous leaders made tough decisions to identify waste, streamline budgets, and plan ahead.

What happens next year?

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , ,

Stimulus doubles teacher pay

July 16, 2009 By

Fayetteville, Arkansas is using stimulus dollars to double the pay of teachers in a summer reading program, reports the Northwest Arkansas Times.

Teachers in this program that targets at-risk students who have completed kindergarten through second grades will bank $8,000 for 12 days of classroom instruction and three days of preparation at the school.

The money won’t save teacher jobs or offer a new program, points out Jay P. Greene.

The money is simply being used to pay teachers more for the same thing that they would have been doing anyway. The only thing that is “racing to the top” about this use of funds is teacher pay.

. . . that works out to paying Fayetteville teachers $76 per hour of scheduled work (excluding benefits) to do something that teachers in neighboring Springdale are doing for $25 per hour. And it is apparently double what the same Fayetteville teachers are normally paid.

Why not pay teachers more to offer more days of instruction?

Update: Most stimulus money is going to protect existing jobs and programs, writes Andy Smarick.  That’s no surprise.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , ,

Stimulating discussion

June 30, 2009 By

National Journal’s new Education Experts Blog asks the experts: What’s the best use of stimulus money?

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: ,

More info, same results

May 15, 2009 By

What are we going to get for $100 billion in education stimulus money? More data on how students are doing. But that’s not enough, writes Andrew Rotherham in U.S. News.


The recent economic stimulus bill contains more than $100 billon in education spending, a historic investment equal to about 16 percent of the nation’s annual expenditures on public elementary and secondary schools. In exchange, states are required to report more information about student performance and make “assurances” that they will work to improve schools. However, the law requires little in the way of actual changes.

Transparency isn’t the same as accountability, he writes.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , ,

More data, same results

April 5, 2009 By

Reason blogger Lisa Snell mocks the idea that stimulus cash will buy useful education data.

From NCLB data reporting requirements, we learned that thousand of schools are low-performing and that low-income and minority student have low levels of proficiency in reading and math.

Yet, these same states that report that “transparent” data under NCLB continue to get billions in federal aid.

NCLB’s data reporting requirements have pushed many schools to focus time and resources on teaching low-achieving students.  There have been successes. But spotlighting failure doesn’t necessarily lead to success.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , ,

Stimulating learning

March 5, 2009 By

Stimulus funding will “help retool education,” not just fund more of the same, Education Secretary Arne Duncan tells the Washington Post.

To help struggling schools, the federal government will use stimulus funding to encourage states to expand school days, reward good teachers, fire bad ones and measure how students perform compared with peers in India and China, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said yesterday.

History has shown that money alone does not drive school improvement, Duncan said, pointing to the District of Columbia, where public school students consistently score near the bottom on national reading and math tests even though the school system spends more per pupil than its suburban counterparts do.

“D.C. has had more money than God for a long time, but the outcomes are still disastrous,” Duncan said in an interview with Washington Post editors and reporters.

The huge increase in federal education spending will “target states, local school systems and nonprofit organizations willing to adopt policies that have been proven to work,” Duncan said. And he’ll be able to identify reform agents in 30 to 45 days?

On The Quick and the Ed, Robert Mainwaring looks at the challenge of spending one-time funds intelligently.  Districts that use stimulus money to fund new programs risk “falling off a cliff” when the money dries up.

NPR’s On Point interviewed Duncan today.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , ,

More money for more of the same

March 4, 2009 By

If the feds spend more than $100 billion on the same old education policies, don’t expect anything to change, write Eric Hanushek and Alfred Lindseth on Princeton University Press blog.

While over $100 billion is being doled out for education purposes, most of it is unlikely to improve student achievement and may even impede progress toward that critical goal.  The driving force behind the stimulus package seems to be to spend the money quickly, meaning that past spending priorities and patterns will be largely replicated, rather than spending it effectively to meet our educational goals.

. . .  Over the past 40 years, we have almost quadrupled our per pupil spending (adjusted for inflation), but student performance remains essentially at the same level as it was in 1970.  We have poured money into compensatory programs for disadvantaged students, into lowering class sizes, and into introducing new programs and technologies.  These enormous expenditures have barely raised a ripple in student achievement according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, commonly referred to as the “Nation’s Report Card.”

Less than two percent of funding is directed at “innovation and improvement.” In addition, the education secretary will get $5 billion in discretionary funds, which could be used to encourage ideas that challenge the status quo. Or not.

Hanushek and Lindseth’s forthcoming book is Schoolhouses, Courthouses, and Statehouses: Solving the Funding-Achievement Puzzle in America’s  Public Schools.

Show us (how) the money will be spent, demands the Christian Science Monitor. There are lots of ways for the stimulus money to go astray.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , , ,
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