School Beat: How much will federal education dollars cost us?

09-02-2010

Opinion by Lisa Schiff/Beyond Chron Lisa Schiff is the parent of two children in the San Francisco Unified School District and is a member of Parents for Public Schools of San Francisco and the PTA and is a board member at the national level of Parents for Public Schools.

Since he took office, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has had a lot of cash to give out. Starting with the first American Recovery and Reconstruction Act (ARRA) funding, an unprecedented amount of money has come from Washington to schools across the country. Those dollars though, even at their current scale, haven’t been enough to stave off layoffs, bring required levels of staff back into classrooms, pay for new playgrounds and PE teachers, refurbish libraries, ensure sufficient and high quality materials at all schools, and more. The unending recession is certainly a major culprit in this, but so is the general disinterest on the part of leadership in states like Mississippi and California to adequately invest in our schools. This weak financial foundation makes schools and their supporters endlessly hungry for resources wherever they can find them. That in turn means that after Secretary Duncan delivered dollars to stop the total shutdown of our nation’s schools, he was at liberty to exponentially develop and deploy his free-market approach to education support and funding. (more…)

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