Bruce Fuller, professor of education and public policy at UC Berkeley, hammers Obama’s education spending plan in this San Francisco Chronicle piece.
Take Washington’s biggest schools effort: the $14 billion compensatory education program, known as Title I, supporting classroom aides and reading tutors for children falling behind. A 1999 federal evaluation showed tepid results at best, largely because local programs fail to alter core classroom practices or sprout innovative ways of engaging weaker students.
President Bush, pushed by congressional Democrats, expanded Title I school aid by 50 percent as he implemented No Child Left Behind. The result: achievement gaps have barely budged, even as the education attainment of young Latino and African American parents has inched upward.
So, under Obama’s scientific principles this moribund program should be cut, right? Well, the president’s new budget actually expands Title I by half again, with spending rising more than $20 billion a year. Ditto for special education funding, upped by $6 billion in the president’s new budget, a heartfelt effort that’s shown a modicum of success in boosting reading skills for millions of children.
