Bush’s DOA Budget: Education

by David Safier

Just a quick post today, because it’s all elections all the time for me.

Everyone assumes that Bush’s proposed budget will be Dead on Arrival when it gets to Congress, but the budget he sent to the Hill is his wish list. So let’s see what Bush wishes for in education.

Based on information I found in the Washington Post, Politico and Bloomberg news, the education budget is basically frozen at current levels, but Bush has made some significant shifts in where the money goes.

He has added money to No Child Left Behind, Title I, Reading First and math-and-science programs. He wants to extend the life of abstinence-only education and put money into vouchers for K-12 students.

He has asked for reduced funding for after school programs, medical programs for minorities, grants to states to subsidize technical education, a program giving counseling for alcohol abuse, and a scholarship program named after Democratic Senator Robert Byrd. Head Start gets a slight bump which is less that the rise in inflation.

The cuts don’t need much discussion – they speak for themselves about Bush’s priorities — but two of his pet programs do – the K-12 vouchers and Reading First.

Increasing vouchers to pull money away from public education is an ongoing crusade for conservatives, and at a time when education budgets are stretched, it’s a wrongheaded way to divert money, even if vouchers make sense, which they don’t, in my opinion.

As for Reading First, the idea of putting money into reading programs is a noble one, but as usual with this administration, the granting of money has been riddled with corruption and has been skewed toward one favored form of reading instruction without giving a fair hearing to other methods.

I’ll try and go into vouchers and Reading First in more detail when I have more time.

Over the next few days, I plan to look at the issues papers on education by the candidates still standing after Super Tuesday. But now it’s time to do a little poll watching, followed by an anxiety-fueled night watching election returns.