James Blew Wants To Squelch Title I

James Blew has made a career out of ed reformsterism. He was director of Student Success California, part of the 50CAN reformy network, the Alliance for School Choice, and he served a stint as president of StudentsFirst, the national reform advocacy group founded by Michelle Rhee, former DC chancellor and ed reform's Kim Kardashian. He was the director of the Walton family Foundation's K-12 "reform investments" for a decade. His background is, of course, not education, but business, politics and "communications."

In July of 2018, he rounded that career in dismantling public ed by going to work for Betsy DeVos as Assistant Secretary for Planning, Evaluation and Policy Development, where he continued that work. After that, he became a roaming consultant and then launched the Defense of Freedom Institute for Policy Studies ("America is under siege by radical activists and teacher union bosses. DFI exists to fight back.")

Blew pops up occasionally at Education Next, the publication of the right-tilted Fordham Institution thinky tank, most recently to complain that the Biden budget wants to spend too much money on education, specifically, Title I. 

Blew has articulated some special positions before, like the time he argued that schools aren't systematically racist, they're just a system that reinforces racism, and then extended that thought to say that, actually, schools are the source of racism. But this piece is a good concise example of the arguments being made now around Biden's education spending.

Blew is honest about his ideal funding arrangement right up front, as he introduces the idea that Biden's view of the federal role in education funding is all wrong:

Looking critically at it will help explain why Betsy DeVos and other thoughtful conservatives advocate block-granting the whole amount to states without strings, and then weaning them off federal funds completely over time.

Federal spending on education should be $0.00, so the budget proposal's big numbers are Bad. Having expressed his real reason for the objection (the feds shouldn't spend money on education), he will now try to construct some other arguments.

For instance, Now Is Not The Time because we have A) inflation, B) war and C) all those relief dollars that schools are "swimming--some would say drowning" in. 

But the big line item is Title I, and that's what Blew really wants to talk about. He wants you to know that 90% of districts and 60% of schools see a piece of this action. 

That’s based on the education department’s definition of “economically disadvantaged,” in case you thought Title I-A was directed to the less than 20 percent of American children who live in poverty.

Respect to Blew, whose snark game is strong. He also notes that "education department politicos" talk about the large asked-for increase 'defensively." They note that Biden promised to triple it (I can confirm that during the primary, Dem candidates got all caught up in a contest of Title I multipliers; given a long enough primary, we probably would have seen promises to increase it a gazillion times). 

But Blew is unimpressed. Title I is "immensely popular"--well, 'among public-school employees." It's aimed at children that "our K-12 system has historically failed to educate" and is helpful for "if nothing else, assuaging guilt." It "flows painlessly from federal coffers," and finally, "compliance and management of Title I creates more than a few jobs." Blew says "Title I has a good brand, especially among public-school employees." 

If you don't yet get that Title I is kind of a scam, Blew goes on to claim that "economically disadvantaged students are, sadly, still ill-educated today pretty much as they were in 1965." He is not going to offer any evidence for that assertion.

Blew offers some explanation of the tactics behind Title I. Democrats, of course, back it because they count on the "powerful labor unions" to get them elected. Meanwhile, the GOP worries they'll get "smeared" if the dare oppose the popular brand. 

Blew also notes that Biden is holding back some Titel I increase to reward states that take certain equity measures, and I don't disagree with him as he calls out the feds for using money to manipulate states. He also points out that the Biden administration probably will claim to have tripled Title I by counting both the budget increase and the emergency relief funding. Probably true. 

In the end, Blew dismisses the proposed education budget as pandering on behalf of "political allies," claiming that "money is being thrown at just about everything his political allies could hope for" and that "this administration values its political allies without regard for student outcomes or stewardship of taxpayer resources." And he's upset that the expenditures don't "encourage the changes that our students need and deserve," which is a little at odds with his opening argument that federal spending on education should be $0.00 (nor is it clear how a budget of $0.00 can be used to push changes).

Look, I'm no huge fan of the feds, who have a bipartisan talent for getting education policy Really Wrong. Blew complains about the status quo, but at this point the status quo has been largely created by reformsters, as well as an endless game of political football far more informed by gamesmanship and messaging than actual knowledge of or concern about education. 

But this far right framing of public education as a giant scam concocted so that teachers can be used to funnel money to the unions which in turn only to grab more money and use it to elect Democrats is both tiresome and completely divorced from the actual reality of actual teachers working in actual classrooms to educate actual students. It treats the pursuit of a decent, equitable public education system as a grift and gets in the way of the conversations we need to have, like how to best serve the underserved students in this country.