Making the Most of the Federal Dollar

Jack Jennings, the "father" of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, recently was overheard speculating that Title 1 funds might be consolidated into block grants for education. Certainly anyone following the "government is bad" movement currently in vogue might speculate the same thing.

The federal government is almost certain to remove at least some of the controls and restrictions on federal funds and give more discretion to states, local school districts, individual schools, and even to teachers.

I do not disagree with the basic assumptions that every federal bureaucrat is judgment-impaired and that every federal regulation is flawed. I've been on the receiving end of ESEA grants (as well as the old Education Professions Development Act, National Science Foundation, and others), and I can attest to the fact that inefficiency and silliness accompanied each grant. I became a fan of anarchy while a local ESEA coordinator, long before Bill Clinton or Newt Gingrich jumped on the bandwagon.

With the passage of years, however, my insight has become clouded with doubt. I recall the superintendent who directed me to rewrite a grant application to increase district overhead to compensate for other fiscal pressures. I also recall a board of education directing me to "do whatever it takes" to get a new building with federal money. I read in the newspaper that a local government in California was so incompetent in fiscal management that its schools are laying off employees.

I actually have begun to doubt whether every local official is indeed morally and intellectually superior to every federal official. I have even begun to wonder whether it may not be more efficient to have one set of rules rather than 15,000 or 100,000 sets.

Block grants, if not controlled centrally, will be subject to all political forces. In education, that means that virtually all funds will be spent on people. Not uncommonly, school districts spend more than 90 percent of all available dollars on salaries.

Nor is it rare for school districts to spend less than 5 percent of all available funds on instructional resources, including technology. These districts put teachers in front of classrooms with one box of chalk, send the students to a computer lab for one hour of keyboarding a week, and call it education for the 21st century. Certainly the kids are not getting much of an education, but kids don't vote, strike, or run for the school board, so we don't budget for kids.

Now that our leaders have decided to endorse the beliefs I held so dear in the 1970s, I've decided to strike out as an iconoclast once more and go on record as favoring more federal control. In fact, I propose that any school district accepting federal funds be required to spend at least 10 percent of all instructional funds for technology.

I would further require that the technology budget include hardware, software, and communications, and that 90 percent of these expenditures, or 9 percent of the total, directly serve students.

Requiring that 9 percent of all instructional funds be spent on technology for students will not revolutionize education. It might, however, set a precedent. It might lead to a situation where school districts when establishing budgets could consider the real needs of students. It might even lead to federal guidelines that could serve as models for local guidelines rather than burdens for administrators.

I am not so naive as to think that any new guidelines will actually be established. No right-thinking politician or bureaucrat would even suggest such a thing in the current climate.

Those at the federal level have had their chance to improve education through the use of government funds, but they failed. Now it's our turn.

COPYRIGHT 1995 American Association of School Administrators
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group