Tag Archives: teaching workforce

If Barack Obama and the Democrats really are going to pull $122 billion off the magical money tree and send it to fund education programs in the states, could we at least hope the dollars are spent sensibly on effective reforms? For example, will the feds dump freshly-printed greenbacks into traditional, union-controlled teacher licensure programs that do nothing for the bottom line of education? Or might they consider using the cash to improve the quality of the teaching workforce – you know, boost effective performance pay so we can reward good teachers, and repeal harmful tenure laws so we can get rid of bad teachers? Surely some reasonable share of the $122 billion could be used to make a real positive difference. Right? I’ve already been told my problem is that I’m not old enough yet to be properly cynical about all this. I’m not ready to admit that, but I have been trying to find the seeds to plant a magical money tree in our backyard. That way, I can have my own bazillion-dollar weekly allowance without hitting up my parents or the federal government.

Let’s admit it. None of us likes to take the blame, including the things we really are responsible for. And many times there are easy targets for those of us who like blame-shifting. One of my favorite education policy people, Dr. Jay Greene, put up a great post a couple days ago that is really worthwhile reading, titled “Blaming Special Ed”. In the post, he deconstructs the widely-held myth that special education is to blame for the lion’s share of increasing K-12 costs in recent decades: Blaming special ed is easy. Most attempts to blame special ed don’t even bother presenting data or make the most crude use of data to support their claims. Reporters simply accept assertions from school and state officials without question. Folks accept the blame-special-ed-story so easily because — well, to put it bluntly – it is a a widely held but unstated prejudice. People quietly resent special education because they fear that it is short-changing their regular education students. They assume that money spent on disabled kids is necessarily money taken away from general education. They can’t imagine that resources for general education have also increased at a very rapid clip even as special ed […]