Well that didn't take long.??Just a few weeks ago the conventional wisdom was that federal education spending would go up, up, up forever. (After all, it went up 50 percent in just one year.) Then Scott Brown won the Massachusetts Senate seat, giving us a glimpse of the new New Normal,??defined by a??big populist backlash to big government and big spending. And now* President Obama, reading the Tea Party leaves, is changing course and proposing a three-year discretionary spending freeze. It's not entirely clear yet whether education spending will be frozen too, but it certainly implies the end to astronomic increases.**
[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="240" caption="Frozen, like Obama's spending plan"]
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Eduwonk Andy bemoans this development, as he thinks it will make it that much harder to pass a strong??ESEA reauthorization bill, since education interest groups are used to being bribed in return for reform. Sure, it will complicate things on the Left; but Andy, remember, once upon a time??laws passed Congress with support from Democrats and Republicans; no doubt this will help on the Right. (Plus the education groups have already been bribed with the $110 billion education stimulus.)
But if federal education spending does plateau, it will mean that local school districts--facing huge shortfalls now that the housing bust is translating into lower property tax collections--need to face the music and figure out how to do more with less. Their leaders might want to give these papers and video--from our recent A Penny Saved conference--a good look.
* Though the timing of his proposal seems calculated to respond to the Brown upset, if this is the policy spelled out in his FY 2011 budget, it must have been decided long ago--by Thanksgiving at the latest--because it touches on the detailed budgets of almost every domestic agency, and that stuff takes months to develop.
** A reader pointed me to this Wall Street Journal article, which reports: "Administration officials said the cap won't be imposed across the board. Some areas would see cuts while others, including education and investments related to job creation, would realize increases." Still, I'll be surprised if there's room for BIG education increases when he's trying to hold the line on domestic spending overall.
UPDATE: Alyson Klein turns in a great overview of the news at Ed Week's Politics K12. As she points out, the President can propose a spending freeze but Congress doesn't have to go along with it.
(Photograph by Chewonki Semester School from Flickr)
-Mike Petrilli
