No College Left Behind

Boy, Margaret Spellings has been busy, hasn’t she? First, one of her underlings is found out in a scheme to heap federal funds on states that dealt with a vendor called Direct Instruction, whose members were on the oversight board of Reading First, part of the No Child Left Behind program.

Now, she’s back with some master plan including a comprehensive database of student information (already raising privacy concerns), and speeding up the process of receiving financial aid.

The part about speeding up the financial aid process sounds nice until you realize 1) this is an election year, and if it weren’t for that, this probably wouldn’t even be coming up, 2) Spellings supposedly cares about this because she’s trying to put her own daughter through college.

Besides, this whole “stop and shop” idea for colleges may sound appealing until you wonder how the colleges are going to be judged under this approach, and also if some arbitrary rating by Spellings or someone else in this woeful administration will have a factor in what kind of loan funding would be available for a prospective student for a given college, or if the “speeding up” process will be applied equally among all schools.

As for how this played among those in “the hallowed halls of academia”…

The United States Student Association liked the news that the federal government planned to simplify, and speed up, the process of getting financial aid. But a prominent faculty voice said the basis of Spellings' agenda is all wrong.

The American Association of University Professors says the emerging vision of higher education is only a marketplace, focused on outcomes and skills. Developing a love of learning and civic virtues, the group says, "are marginalized to the point of irrelevance."

Kate Sabatini and John S. Irons of the Center for American Progress had (I thought) some good ideas on funding Pell Grants through the Student Loan program (something Spellings should consider reading, including this excerpt).

President Bush’s budget for Fiscal Year 2007 will direct approximately $8 billion in net subsidies to private student lenders next year through the government-guaranteed loan program—even though taxpayers will subsidize that program at a rate nearly 4.5 times higher than that of direct loans in 2007, according to the President’s own budget. If 100 percent of loans were disbursed through the direct loan program, the savings could be redirected to the Pell Grant Program to provide up to 1.5 million new grants to students.

And by the way, raising the rate on student loans as of July 1 wasn’t a very bright idea either.