Cliffhangers: D.C. talks about stimulus leave details dangling
Published: June 1, 2009
Federal economic stimulus funds, and the still-unknown strings attached to them, dominated this year’s CSBA Federal Issues Council trip to Washington, D.C., April 19-22. The multibillion-dollar windfall comes with paired yet not always complementary goals—to save jobs and boost student achievement—as well as lingering questions about what happens after the money’s gone.
In three days of meetings with officials and key staffers in the Obama administration, Congress and groups seeking to influence federal education policy, FIC members sought guidance on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, as the $787 billion stimulus package is formally known. One in every eight of those dollars—more than $100 billion—is specifically earmarked for education, and billions more will be available for innovative applications to use stimulus money for jobs, facilities, energy and other goals.
A discussion in the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Innovation and Improvement on the last day of the ambitious FIC meeting agenda echoed many of the previous days’ conversations.
“Our job is to advise [school districts and county offices of education] how to use ARRA,” CSBA President Paula S. Campbell told Jim Shelton, an assistant deputy secretary in the department, about the trip’s purpose.
ARRA should save jobs, and “it should accelerate further reforms,” Shelton replied. Conceding the one-time nature of the funding, he counseled local budget planners to design their plans from the perspective of three or four years in the future, working back from there “so you can actually sustain what you create. … Make sure you save the right jobs.”
Mike Smith, a senior counselor to U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, had made the point even more dramatically in the first meeting on FIC’s agenda, employing a visual comparison that would be repeated often in subsequent meetings.
“It does create a cliff” after the ARRA money is spent, Smith said, but federal and state officials “can’t tell you what to do.” Some may want to spend all the money quickly, hoping the stimulus revives the nation’s economy as intended and gives public programs an infusion of tax dollars in the future; others may choose to spread the money out, he said, pointing out that stimulus dollars for schools serving low-income students under Title I can be spread out over five years.
A conversation with Joseph Conaty, director of Academic Improvement and Teacher Quality Programs and a Department of Education staffer for more than 20 years, followed similar themes.
“We’re hearing on the one hand that we need to save or create jobs” and to reform our schools, Campbell said. “The next thing we need to think about is not falling off the cliff in two years.”
“There are mixed signals. I can’t deny that,” Conaty said. “But they need not be contradictory.”
He said investments to preserve jobs related to core academics and programs such as helping English language learners or providing reading coaches in the early grades could yield results that the government wants.
“It might change the nature of the jobs, but it does preserve the jobs,” Conaty said.
Congressional staffs weigh in
Clear answers proved to be as elusive on Capitol Hill as they had been in administration offices.
Regarding State Fiscal Stabilization Funds, which amount to nearly half of ARRA’s $100 billon for education nationally, “the explicit purpose of these is to backfill education … and save teacher jobs,” said Alice Johnson Cain, senior education policy adviser to U.S. Rep. George Miller, D-Concord, the influential chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee.
The $13 billion for Title I will greatly increase the ability to provide services, Cain suggested. She also said the $12.2 billion for the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, combined with regular federal outlays, will at last meet the federal goal to provide 40 percent of funding for IDEA—although she also acknowledged the one-time nature of all the stimulus money.
Additional dollars in discretionary “Race to the Top” and innovation funds will help to transform public schools, Cain said, and “We would argue that it should continue. There’s no better investment you could make in education.”
“If there are examples of success, and we hear from states loud and clear that this money is making a difference,” Cain added, “we’re willing to fight that fight.”
Cain’s counterpart on the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions staff acknowledged the different and competing goals for ARRA education money.
The Sentate staff member, who asked not to be identified, also pointed out, though, that the stimulus funds should help advance many longstanding federal policy goals, such as an equitable distribution of highly qualified teachers among schools serving affluent and lower-income populations, that schools should be pursuing anyway.
The staffer shared FIC members’ concern that accountability for the use of ARRA funds remains to be determined and, like Cain, stressed that saving and creating jobs was a clear intent of Congress in authorizing the money.
Virtually all officials contacted assured FIC members that guidance on how to use stimulus funding—and the results that are expected—will be forthcoming.