Presumptive Rep Pres Candidate Romney Unveils Ed Plans By: Jennifer Keyes-Maloney
When it comes to the No Child Left Behind Act, Romney would dismantle the accountability system at the heart of the law, and he calls for schools to create “report cards” with a variety of information about student progress. Schools would have report scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). There also would no longer be federal mandates for improving schools under his plans.
“No Child Left Behind helped our nation take a giant step forward in bridging [the] information gap,” Romney said. And he said he would do what President Barack Obama could not—get Congress to pass an overhaul of the law. “As president, I will break the political logjam that has prevented successful reform of the law. I will reduce federal micromanagement while redoubling efforts to ensure that schools are held responsible for results.”
So is Romney offering full financial flexibly without federal micromanagement and hold supplemental funding to a nationalized report card tied to NAEP? That’s how I would do it!
So give us the Common Core Standards aligning all schools in America and give us a nationalized standardized test. But get the hell out of the way and stop the agenda of privatizing public schools that shifts funding to more administration and Wall Street laced consultants. As far as more charter schools, let the parents be the driving force in converting existing district schools and those charter only serve students with that district. We don’t need to build charter schools to compete for students and undermine school districts. If Red Clay for an example was only permitted to serve Red Clay students at it’s chartered schools there would be more thought process going into expanding charter schools that would be a true service to “Red Clay students.”
Romney does need to wake-up and grasp the severity of how USDOE is going beyond it’s mandate of existence manipulating cash-strapped state into selling out local control. He would need to put USDOE back in its box at the same time giving control of local schools back to the communities. Any federal funding for charter schools must come with a stipulation charter schools must include all district students in the admission process without “specific interest” rules. Also. open full transparent lotteries.
One thing for sure, we need to get Wall Street and their local clones out of high-jacking local schools via help of those politicians they finance. Public schools belong to the people know as the public! Open the $$$ books, record the meetings and let the public be the watchdog!
Let’s take all the money being pissed away on feeding Wall Street ed corporations and use it to enhance local outreach to improve parental “engagement.” Lets make the most valuable tool in a teacher’s toolbox the parent! Lets build that so-called capacity by improving partnership of the most valuable stakeholders a student can have, parents and teachers!
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Or just abolish the US DOE as a free-standing entity, put it back under HHS, and separate its compliance responsibilities (Spec Ed, etc.) from its funding responsibilities, and then give the 6% of Delaware’s educational budget that the Feds provide directly to the school districts, or at least with a mandated cap of 10% on the pass-through expenses DE DOE can take out.
Do that and our local school boards and teachers and parents will give us good schools, even in high-pvoerty areas.
I wonder how much of the federal money is used in our schools compared to the amount used for district operation, state and federal DOE.
Difficult to tell, Jack. Leaving US DOE out of it (because they have all the Federal money at the source), a best guess is that of the 6.6% the Feds normally ship to Delaware about half makes it to the classroom. But that depends on the way you define classroom. Where do you count a “reading specialist”? Much of that money is Title I or Special Ed money which requires at least 10-15% to be siphoned off the top by DE DOE and then another 10-15% to go at the district level for compliance costs.
Thanks Steve, another example of limited transparency on how and where funds are used. The districts must submit grants with almost 200 pages of information to DOE, the financial reports showing funds received, encumbered and expended show only totals, this is troubling.
Once again, a general lack of transparency in funding operations between the federal and state agencies opens up huge doors to mis-allocation and graft. The requirements for grants layer in administrative redundancies and the needed funding is consumed in administrative gyrations rather than directly benefiting teachers and students. More road blocks, red tape and wasted resources. Get the federal government out of our schools. It has never worked and I suggest that it never will.
I support sending the money earned by the children directly to our schools, prohibiting the use of all local funds above the school level, and the state funding the operation above the school level to include administration of federal funds.
This would provide more authority to our principal’s, teachers, etc., parents on how and where funding earned by the children in each school is used, and more funding transparency.
The K-12 decisions makers above the school level have taken the position teachers, principals and parents are responsible/accountable for the education of our children, that being the case, what possible justification would these same individuals have for saying they are not capable of allocating the money earned by the children.