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EDUCATION
Education secretary to focus on what works
Aid to poor and disabled children, support for low performing schools and reading are her priorities.
Tuesday, February 05, 2008
With the federal budget tightening, U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said Monday she wants to focus the dollars she has on strategies she knows work.
Dayton's deputy superintendent in charge of academics, Debra Brathwaite, believes Spellings has it right on some of the major spending initiatives aimed at helping poor children succeed.
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President Bush on Monday released a proposed federal budget that leaves education spending about the same at $60 billion, but within the plan there is more money for some of his favored ideas and some potentially painful cuts.
On the chopping block is $66 million for Even Start, a program that supports early literacy training for young pre-schoolers and $267 million in aid for state grants in career and technical education.
But the budget also boosts spending for Title I, a huge program that supports schools with many poor children, and for a program that supports special education for children with handicaps.
Spellings, speaking on a conference call, said spending is focused on programs that work – aid to poor and disabled children, support for low performing schools and a focus on reading.
"This is a budget that has a lot of what we know for sure," she said. "We know for sure that kids can't be successful in school if they don't know how to read and read well."
The budget revives the Reading First program, a Bush initiative that collapsed after charges that the funds for boosting reading were doled out to companies allied with the administration politically. But some states and school districts advocated for the program, saying it worked well.
In Dayton, Brathwaite said that Reading First paid for teacher training, a data expert that helped target gaps in student skills and after-school literacy programs.
"We saw improvement in reading and in teacher practice as a result for it," she said.
Bush also again will try to gain federal dollars to pay for student transfers out of perpetually low-performing schools and into private schools – a controversial proposal that has never won congressional approval.
Ohio already allows such transfers through its voucher program and Brathwaite said the money would be better used to diagnose the reasons why a school has underperformed consistently.
"Schools are underperforming for a lot of different reasons," she said. "You need to address those core issues before you close a school."
