Education Law

Show me the money

News-watchers today got a reading treasure in this morning’s The Washington Post.  The first part of a three part series titled, “Top Secret America” looks closely at the employees, employers, the government, and the amount of money being spent in the intelligence community.  While it isn’t education related, the amount of money that is being discussed (taxpayer money, we’d like to point out) is baffling. 

BoardBuzz couldn’t help thinking, “what if this money, or even half, were being spent on education?”

The article comes on the heels of the discussion/debate about stimulus funding, the education jobs bill, Race to the Top (round 2), and other attempts to save some money for public schools and maintaining teacher jobs. 

Keep in mind, this also comes after last week’s breaking news about New Jersey’s governor suggesting a salary cap for superintendents in his state.  Yes, the suggestion is that school boards can only spend up to a certain amount for their district’s leader, and the governor is setting the cap as he tries to get control of some of the spending in his state. 

And while we’re on the issue of government spending,  Representative David Obey D-Wis., the Democratic chairman of the House Appropriations Committee spoke to the Fiscal Times last week about  last year’s spending in the ED.  Here’s one quote:

We were giving them over $10 billion in money to help keep teachers on the job, plus another $5 billion for Pell, so he was getting $15 billion for the programs he says he cares about, and it was costing him $500 million [in reductions to the Race to the Top program]. Now that?s a pretty damn good deal…
…So as far as I?m concerned, the secretary of Education should have been happy as hell. He should have taken that deal and smiled like a Cheshire cat. He?s got more walking around money than every other cabinet secretary put together.

But we’ll end the way we began.  The Post’s article today outlines the top-secret world that is protecting us, but there is a lot of redundancy and waste in the network of 1,271 governmental entities and 1,931 private corporations that exist in that world.  And the authors point out that it is ”so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, [or] how many people it employs.”  It’s fascinating to us that somewhere in America this summer, teachers are dipping into their own pockets to pay for school supplies for their classrooms as they prepare for the 2010-2011 school year while this is going on…

Full post as published by BoardBuzz: NSBA's Daily Weblog on July 19, 2010 (boomark / email).