Just before Christmas, the New York Times went off on a tear about "pork on the hill," grousing over the omnibus 2004 federal appropriations bill (which the Senate must still vote on this month) because of its 7,000 "special interest provisions," a.k.a. pork-barrel projects, totaling some $23 billion, twice the figure five years earlier.
Just how acute is this problem - if it's a problem - considering that even this sizable figure is just 2.8 percent of total government spending and 7 percent of "discretionary" dollars? Moreover, since even the Times recognizes that this practice has been going on from time immemorial and now reaches into every state and nearly every Congressional district, one can plausibly view it as taxpayers getting back bits of the money they send to Washington and spending it upon projects that hold particular interest for individual communities, but are too specialized to make it into nationwide federal programs. Thus, reports Times writer Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Congress is paying for ventures as disparate as an indoor rain forest in Iowa, a traffic light installation in Briarcliff Manor, New York, and a bus terminal in Nevada. It's hard to picture a formula-grant program that would accommodate such diverse projects and there's no reason to think the executive branch is any wiser than the legislative in meting out discretionary dollars. (The article is available for a small fee from the New York Times' online archives, at http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F70710F63E5B0C738EDDAB0994DB404482.)
Yet executive-branch agencies must administer these dollars and the task is spread across the entire government. The Department of Education's list of "pork" projects in 2004 consumes some 24 PAGES of Congressional-report language. At about 20 projects per page, that's nearly 500 separate undertakings. Some are tiny: $25,000 to the Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet for an "arts in education" program, $30,000 to New Avenues for Youth (Portland, OR) for "educational services to homeless youth." A bunch are middle sized, such as $400,000 for an education center in Samoa "to support the use and application of basic English and math skills" and half a million to the Pinal County schools in Arizona for "teacher quality improvements." A handful are sizable: $2 million each to the Alaska Department of Education and the Atlanta Boys and Girls Clubs; $3.5 million to an education technology program in New Orleans; $4 million to the estimable KIPP charter-school organization; and a couple of twenty-million-dollar whoppers to expand Project GRAD and to underwrite sundry improvements in low-performing Pennsylvania schools.
Coming in third, at ten million in 2004, is a continuation grant to the Education Leaders Council's "Following the Leaders" project, now operating in eleven states and hundreds of schools. The Thomas B. Fordham Institute and Hoover's CREDO were once subcontractors to evaluate this project (that relationship has ended), so I can't plead totally innocent to the charge of having held a scrap of education pork in my hand. But it's a decent project that may do some kids and teachers some good. (Let's hope it gets a proper evaluation so this can one day be known for sure.) And that seems generally to be the case with these hundreds of "earmark" projects insofar as one knows about them or can infer their gist from the brief descriptions in the appropriations report. They may or may not "succeed" but their prospects cannot be dimmer than those of Title I and other "formula" programs that, as myriad evaluations have shown, shovel out billions every year with no discernible impact on student achievement. At least the "pork" is going to places that want it for activities that they're keen to undertake, rather than being sent unbidden from Washington according to arcane formulae and intricate regulations.
It's in that context that one must read the November screed from People for the American Way (PFAW), charging the Education Department with channeling "more than $75 million" over three years to "a handful of private, pro-voucher advocacy groups." (See "Funding a Movement" at http://www.pfaw.org/pfaw/dfiles/file_259.pdf.)
Even if that were true, at an average of $25 million per year spread across eight groups (using PFAW's dubious list), it's dwarfed by the hundreds of projects qualifying for Congressional earmarks. Within the $430 million appropriated to the "Fund for Improvement of Education" (once known as the "Secretary's Discretionary Fund"), by my rough calculation $245 million is intended for "authorized" programs (e.g. Star Schools, Parental Assistance Information Centers), leaving about $185 million for the education "pork" projects beloved of individual Congressmen and Senators.
Note that even the authorized programs contain such ideologically-freighted activities as WEEA ("Women's Educational Equity Act," $3 million) and such piggish, local-interest ventures as "exchanges with historic whaling and trading partners" ($8.5 million), which suddenly appeared in No Child Left Behind, evidently thanks to Senator Kennedy, and which purports to advance education exchange activities between Massachusetts and Alaska and Hawaii. (No doubt PFAW loves that one.)
PFAW's hit list includes the aforementioned Education Leaders Council project, which has absolutely nothing to do with vouchers. It includes the American Board for Certification of Teaching Excellence (on whose executive committee I serve), which is controversial in ed-school circles but, again, has absolutely nothing to do with vouchers - and is dwarfed by Congress's multi-year earmark for the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, now totaling some $140 million since 1991. (In 2004, NBPTS gets $10 million, ABCTE $7 million. Though based on very different philosophies, both seek to improve teacher quality and credentialing, which just about everyone recognizes as an urgent thing to do.)
Two grants on the PFAW list do involve school choice, but both are for minority organizations (Black Alliance for Educational Options, the Hispanic Council for Reform and Educational Options) to help carry out the public-school choice and supplemental services provisions of NCLB. In other words, these "discretionary" grants seek to promote a bipartisan Congressional policy that's about school choice but not vouchers. And two more grants, to nonprofit organizations that use the services of the online education company K12, chaired by Bill Bennett (and on whose board I serve), pay for after-school tutoring for minority kids in inner-city Philadelphia and for a "virtual" option for Arkansas students via a project run by that state's Department of Education.
In short, PFAW's "analysis" is ignorant muckraking and the New York Times version isn't much better. How do they think federal dollars OUGHT to be disbursed if by neither elected branch of government? More tax cuts, anyone?
