by David Safier
Bush has some qualms about the $15-25 billion proposed to help out the auto industry.
"These are important companies, but on the other hand, we just don't want to put good money after bad."
Let's talk good money after bad. When you ship pallets piled with bricks of money to Iraq and ask contractors "How many of these bricks do you need?" then continue to give the same failed, crooked, no-bid contractors money over and over and over, that's good money after bad.
When you take a $700 billion chunk of change and give it to failing financial institutions with a "No questions asked" handshake and expect the greedy, corrupt, apparently incompetent CEOs to spend the money wisely, that's good money after bad.
But here's my personal favorite, though it's a mere $6 billion example. I know, I know, that's chump change. Except it's education money, which makes it huge.
Bush's Dept of Ed spent a billion a year for six years on its Reading First program, to improve children's reading. The money was only supposed to go to scientifically tested reading programs. For the Bushies, that meant choosing the one program they like, a drill-and-kill phonics program, and rejecting the others, saying they have no scientific foundation.
The effectiveness of the programs have been studied by the Dept of Ed three times.
First study. There was no evidence the billion-a-year reading program produced better readers than teachers who worked in schools without the Reading First funding. Bush's Ed folks said, it's too early to tell if the program will yield positive results.
Second study. Again, no evidence of any difference. Again, Bush's folks said, we just haven't given the program enough time.
The third study just came out. It is said to be "One of the largest and most rigorous studies ever undertaken by the U.S. Department of Education." It found that the Reading First kids were somewhat better at decoding but there was no effect on reading comprehension. And that was true even though the Reading First kids spent more class time being taught how to read.
If the Bush folks said at the beginning of the Reading First program, "Let's use lots of different strategies for teaching reading," then evaluated them, we might have found that one or two of them were more successful than the others. That's valuable information. If, after the first and second studies, the Ed folks said, "OK, this doesn't seem to be working. Now let's add some different strategies to the mix," we also might have learned something about what kind of reading instruction works and what doesn't. Six billion dollars is an awful lot of money for results like that, but it would have been something.
Instead, we spent six billion badly needed education dollars, and all we learned is that one drill-and-kill phonics approach doesn't appear help children learn to read any better than if schools and teachers determine how they want to teach reading — with no extra funding.
Now that's good money after bad.
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