by Seyward Darby
Thanks to the hefty sum--roughly $140 billion--slated for education funding in the federal stimulus package, heated debate over education reform has hit the news yet again. Although they welcome the attention being paid to the nation's schools, many reformers, who favor hard-line measures like performance pay, high-stakes testing, and charter school funding, are rightly arguing that there should be more conditions encouraging broad, innovative changes attached to the stimulus funds.
The main goal of the education measures is to rescue state and local school budgets that are languishing in the bad economy. As the package stands now, upwards of $15 billion would go toward school improvement, namely construction and renovation; roughly $26 billion would assist poor and disabled students through Title I and IDEA programs; and several billion more would fund student financial assistance, namely Pell grants. But, of the $140 billion, the largest portion--$79 billion--would be part of a stabilization fund meant to prevent major education cuts and layoffs. "We want to save literally hundreds of thousands of teaching jobs," Secretary of Education Arne Duncan told CNN last week.
Some reformers, however, worry that the bill could buttress jobs for teachers who aren't performing, without demanding that they start doing so. "Some of the jobs might not be worth saving," Mike Petrilli of the Fordham Institute, a conservative education think tank, told me this morning. Similarly, in a Washington Post column on Tuesday, Richard Cohen asked, "How about doing something [in the stimulus] about the sad fact that teachers aren't what they used to be?"
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