Washington Examiner - The Problem With "Competitive" Grants

Op-Ed

By Jack Kingston

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is coming to Capitol Hill today to justify the President's 2015 budget request before my committee. In addition to the usual overspending and generally wasteful nature of the federal involvement in our local schools, the Obama Administration's penchant for "competitive grants" truly undermines local decision-making in your child's classroom.

Much of the $45.8 billion in discretionary spending proposed by the Department of Education is spent on Title I programs to help low-income and disabled children -- the most needy among our nation's children and the ones who can truly benefit from a hand-up. This spending has received bipartisan support for years and can be effective, though it certainly deserves the skeptical oversight each and every government program should receive.

Instead of focusing on these core programs and making them work well, Secretary Duncan and President Obama are more interested in telling states and local school boards how they should teach your kids by increasing spending on "competitive grant" programs.

A competitive grant from Washington means that states get to compete for their own tax dollars by kow-towing to Obama, Duncan, and their teachers' union overseers. The Department of Education, by carrot and stick, can enforce their vision of schooling on classrooms throughout the country, all the while hiding behind it being "optional."

The most notorious competitive grant is the Race to the Top program, the vessel through which the Common Core national education standards were coerced upon 45 states and the District of Columbia. By giving out waivers to the No Child Left Behind mandates and some Race to the Top dollars in exchange for Common Core compliance, The White House got its "Obamacare for education" imposed on states while claiming the initiative was voluntary, state-driven, and competitive.

The President's 2015 budget doubles down on this strategy by proposing to spend taxpayer dollars on unauthorized and unproven competitive grant programs for the benefit of a handful of favored schools and teaching styles.

For example, the Race to the Top program has a similar mission to Title I funding ("identify and close longstanding educational opportunity and achievement gaps" and "closing the achievement gap between high- and low-performing children", respectively) but is funded "competitively" instead of by formula. Formulaic grants are based on statistics and data, not the political decision of bureaucrats who claim to know the best way to raise your child.

Likewise, IDEA formulaic grants (named for the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act), dispensed to ensure children with special needs are able to receive an education, are duplicated in the Obama budget, except now as part of an expanded Race to the Top 2.0 competitive grant. Instead of working to improve IDEA grants, the progressives of the Obama Administration set up a new program to explicitly give them more control in the classroom.

These competitive grants reduce flexibility for parents and teachers while saddling a school with burdensome reporting requirements. Once a school "wins" a grant, it agrees to install Secretary Duncan as puppet master and remove parents' voices from the classroom.

These grants do not come cheap to you, the taxpayer, either. The schools must comply with the grueling paperwork requirements attached to all government programs. This takes teachers out of the classroom and traps them in the break room as they report to Washington, DC on how they are fulfilling the demands of federal bureaucrats.

For half a century, Congress has redistributed trillions thinking it knows how to educate your child better than you. In their belief that just a few billion more taxpayer dollars can solve every problem, the Department of Education has asked for more control over your kids through "competitive grants" that let them pull the strings on your local school board. These new and expanded programs must be rejected and existing ones dismantled so that parents, with their child's teachers, can again make their own choices.

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