Can This Marriage Be Saved?
The Hill’s Walter Alarkon reports today on the fight within the Democrat Party on education funding. The Obama administration’s Department of Education– in the person of Secretary Arne Duncan–is counting on the competitive grant program Race to the Top (RttT) to reform education. But not all the Dems in Congress are on board.
The intra-party fight over school reform has been going on since Obama took office. The $862 billion stimulus, which Democrats were crafting even before Obama’s inauguration, included $4.35 billion for Race to the Top, despite the program having no track record on the national level. That number would have been more if not for the protests of House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey (D-Wis.), a main architect of the stimulus who has questioned a program that benefits only a select number of states and gives the Education secretary wide discretion over how funds are disbursed.
That debate is now complicating passage of the supplemental spending bill that also includes $37 billion for the Afghanistan and Iraq wars and appropriations measures coming later this year.
Obey on Thursday took to the House floor to blast the administration for trying to protect specific education programs when schools across the country are facing up to 300,000 in education job layoffs. Only Tennessee and Delaware have been awarded Race to the Top funds so far, Obey’s staff has noted.
“More than half the country will never see a winning dime from that money,” Obey said, just hours after Obama issued his veto threat. “[There’s] nothing wrong with providing the secretary [of Education] a modest amount to promote it. To suggest we’re being unduly harsh is a joke.”
Others in Congress support the President’s plan:
A group of Senate Democrats has sided with Obama and will seek to find other offsets for the teacher fund.
“In short, the proposed Department of Education cuts are unacceptable,” wrote 12 Democrats and one Independent senator in a letter on Friday. “Using these programs as offsets for teacher jobs presents us with a false choice between supporting teachers or supporting these critical reform efforts.”
The group was led by Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.), who has been a strong backer of the administration’s reform efforts, and included Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.). The letter was addressed to Senate Appropriations Chairman Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii).
The teachers’ unions, as we’ve noted before, are no fans of RttT and the competition that is its cornerstone. As Alarkon reports:
The National Education Association (NEA), the country’s largest union, stayed out of the supplemental bill debate but will oppose Obama’s push for $1.35 billion more in Race to the Top funding in 2011, according to NEA Government Relations Director Kim Anderson.
“We fundamentally object to driving the majority of increases in education funding through a competitive model because it creates winners and losers,” Anderson said, noting that the rest of the federal education budget faces smaller increases or cuts. “For us, education funding should not be a jump-ball.”
There’s a conflict of visions here. The Obama administration’s Department of Education argues that competition for grant money will spur states to improve education and that federal funds should reward those who have good plans and policies in place. The unions (supporters of Democrat candidates) and some Democrat members of Congress argue that the money should go to all schools instead of singling out some.
This will be interesting to watch.
[...] We’ve discussed this conflict of visions before. [...]