Senate Cutting Charter and Merit Pay Funding from Ed Stimulus?

[Update: Per EdWeek a few hours later:

[T]hose ed-reformy programmatic choices—including a $200 million boost for the Teacher Incentive Fund, which doles out grants for performance pay, $250 million for state data systems, and a $25 million fund for charter school facilities—were sought by the Obama administration. . . .

"These are the priorities of President Obama," [House EdLabor Committee Chair] Rep. Miller said. "I believe they'll make it through and I hope they'll make it through."

So so much for any notion of the Overton Window moving left, it seems.]

Breaking news rumor (source, Mr. Petrilli?) on how the Senate is allegedly changing the House Dem's stimulus plan outlays for education. If the rumor is true, the Senate version axes the following from the House plan:

1. The Teacher Incentive Fund, a merit-pay scheme for teachers whose students score well on achievement tests. Petrilli decries this, but I'd argue we need to improve our assessments and our definitions of "achievement" first. Why pay teachers for being great at teaching to low-level tests? Let's talk merit pay later, when we have assessments of merit.

2. Funding for construction of charter schools. With no guarantee that shiny new charter schools will be any better - or as equitable and inclusive - as truly public schools, why should tax-payer dollars fund Business Roundtable projects? Let the privatizers pay. They generally have deep pockets. And let's spend tax dollars on improving public schools so that alternatives are not necessary.

3. Funding for "data infrastructure." If this refers to the support for state-wide longitudinal data systems that can track individual progress over years, I'm stumped as to why it shouldn't be supported. Maybe it goes back to "let's fix NCLB first" - assuming the popular wisdom that Congress won't think of axing it altogether.

In any case, it's an interesting reminder that Duncan and the DoE won't be working in a vacuum, and that the Senate Dems may be pulling the education Overton Window leftward.

If you want to see how much your district is estimated to receive from the education slice of the stimulus, check out the EdLabor Committee report here.

And if you want to see the New America Foundation's critique of that distribution, this New York Times article summarizes it, or you can read more at the NAF site.

Finally, as reader and commenter extraordinaire Joe Beckman pointed out to me a week ago, the stimulus contains some brow-raisers in the fine print, which the Times article notes as well:

Analysts were also turning up surprises in the fine print.

One provision, which was sought by the student lending industry and went unmentioned in early Congressional summaries of the stimulus package, would temporarily increase subsidies to banks in the guaranteed student loan program by tying them to a new index, partly because recent federal intervention in the credit markets has invalidated the previous index. A spokesman for Sallie Mae, one of the largest student lenders, said the change was needed to keep student loan markets fluid. Critics said it represented a potential new windfall for lenders.

“This just continues the well-established tradition of welfare for the student loan industry,” said Barmak Nassirian, an expert in student lending.

If nothing else, it's heartening to hear Duncan state,

This is going to avert literally hundreds of thousands of teacher layoffs.

Image by Chris Campbell