Senate To Take Up ESSA Next Week
The House did not listen to the grassroots who tried to educate them on the bill they were about to pass. Their education staffers kept focusing on the positive language in the bill and ignoring the aspects that teachers and parents told them would be problematic, often saying, “It doesn’t say that,” which was a strong indication that these staffers have no real experience in public education to understand the terms and how they play out at the implementation point. Given that there was little agreement between the grassroots and the staffers it can be assumed that the 1061 pages of legalistic obfuscation will provide lawyers in all fifty states plenty of opportunity to rake in the fees arguing over what the terms actually mean for many years to come. Those the staffers/Congressmen did listen to include the teachers union representatives, who many teachers feel sold them out with this bill. ESSA does appear sever the link between student test scores and teacher evaluations, at least at the federal level, but there are many other requirements in the bill that the rank and file are not happy about. The other ear was held by big Wall Street investors who see the large potential for profit in the ESSA. The question now will be, do those money movers have similar influence in the Senate?
There is a clear focus on privatization and computer aided teaching in ESSA. Both are already being pushed into schools, so in some ways they are not new, but they will now officially be endorsed by the federal government. More importantly they will be endorsed by our elected officials, not unelected political appointees which makes them much harder to oppose. Whether such education reforms are effective or not is not the concern of this Congress or this bill, though there is evidence that casts doubt on the effectiveness of either mechanism. But why worry about that? Being effective can be such a subjective and lucrative thing.
Take the Social Impact Bonds, defined on page 797 of ESSA as “Pay for Success.” These SIBs are a way for big banks and private investors to pull public money out of the education system using low risk high yield financial instruments designed to incentivize certain social goals. The result is government sanctioned removal of money allocated to serve the poorest of the poor and the most vulnerable, and frequently expensive, to educate from the school system. Peter Greene did a decent job of explaining the SIBs.
“In the classic… social impact bond, a government agency sets a specific, measurable social outcome they want to see achieved within a well-defined population over a period of time. …The government then contracts with an external organization—sometimes called an intermediary—that is in charge of achieving that outcome. … The intermediary hires and manages service providers who perform the interventions intended to achieve the desired outcome. Because the government does not pay until and unless the outcome is achieved, the intermediary raises money from outside investors. These investors will be repaid and receive a return on their investment for taking on the performance risk of the interventions if and only if the outcome is achieved.”
On the surface it may sound good because it gives districts money to provide services and only pays out if the gamble is successful. The services are generally meant to reduce anticipated future costs to the district thus saving them money. The problem is those savings go to the investor, not the district to use in other necessary programs. The end result is that such investment is steered toward programs that have easily Senate To Take Up ESSA Next Week » Missouri Education Watchdog: