LA: Betsy DeVos Would Be Pleased

One of the ideas beloved by right-wing folks and pushed unsuccessfully by Betsy DeVos in her Ed Secretary days is the idea of block grants. 

Title I and all the rest of those federal Title Something funds go to states with strings attached. Spend this money to help English Language Learners. Spend this money to help rural schools. Spend this money to help poor kids. It's such a pain-- wouldn't it be better, the reasoning goes, to just hand the states a big pile of money and tell them to use it for whatever strikes their fancy. Code word: flexibility.

For some states this seems like a swell idea. They could spend the block grants on school vouchers. They could spend it on things other than Those Peoples' Children, which you may recall was kind of a problem in many Southern states for-basically-ever. The block grant approach would work nicely for anyone who believes A) I have no responsibility to take care of other people, particularly the poor ones and B) the only really oppressed group in this country is white guys. 

The current regime has tried in a couple of budgets to get at least some of these federal grant monies turned into block grants and/or dust. But there is another way.

Louisiana's Department of Education has asked for a waiver so that they can implement a "consolidated allocation plan." It would provide flexibility, by taking a bunch of federal programs, like money for English Language Learners, and rural schools, and schools that serve poor kids, and putting all those monies into a big pile that the state would dole out according to its own priorities. It would also pass some of that flexibility to local districts so that local officials could also decide which students not to serve to benefit from flexibility.

It would allow strategic alignment across programs! Fiscal efficiency! Enhanced innovation! Back to basics! And if those aren't enough magic words, the state also throws in improving student achievement in ELA and mat and early childhood leading to kindergarten readiness.

Oh, and expanding education freedom by "cultivating a more robust array of educational choices beyond high-quality traditional public schools, encompassing options like public charters, non-public institutions, and home-study programs." Also, this classic-- "Students should not be mandated to attend failing schools simply because of their zip code," a popular privatizer sentiment that is never ever followed by "And that's why we are committed to making sure that every zip code is served by an excellent school." It's kind of like "This building is on fire, but instead of trying to put the fire out, we're going to get a few people out of it."

There's a lot of argle bargle in this 34-page request, but the bottom line is the state saying, "Can you just give us our grant money in a big bucket and let us spend it on whatever strikes our fancy without any rules or regulations, and by the way, we like a lot of the same public ed dismantling policies that you guys in DC like these days."

Will Louisiana get its waiver to allow for this? I am not prepared to predict what DC will do, and right now the federal proposal for 2027's education budget has already been run through a pack of sharptoothed gators. Let's hope Louisiana doesn't get their way.