The Education of the President

The government wants to take over your student loan — and that’s not all. The Obama administration’s education ambitions, outlined in a speech yesterday to the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, will affect a large range of issues, from early-childhood education programs to college lending. The recently proposed $3.6 trillion budget includes a plan to end federal subsidies to private lenders, such as Sallie Mae, effectively putting all federal student loans under direct government control.

Obama also wants to increase Pell grants for low-income students to a maximum of $5,550, from $4,731, and to keep these grants growing along with inflation. In addition, his budget proposes major investments in K-12 assessments, teacher training, and charter schools and a significant expansion of prekindergarten programs such as Head Start. These initiatives would be in addition to the tens of billions of dollars for retaining teachers and rebuilding schools allocated by last month’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (also known as the federal stimulus package).

BU Today turned to Hardin Coleman, dean of Boston University’s School of Education, for some perspective.

BU Today: Let’s start with the effect on colleges and universities — can you explain the proposed changes in federal student loans?
Coleman: The essential change is that for the past 20 or 30 years there’s been this growing private market for student loans, subsidized and guaranteed by the federal government. As you know, universities provide a certain amount of financial aid, and there’s often a gap between what the university can provide and the need. That’s when people are referred to the private establishment, where interest rates have increased as more private companies have been involved. This effectively starts to price out some middle-class students in particular, because a poor student will have a higher percentage of need covered by the university, while a middle-class student is offered less and less. For many of them, the gap would be too large for them to be able to afford to come to a place like BU.

Also, last spring there was a huge uproar about how many colleges were funneling all of the students into certain private purveyors of student loans in exchange for kickbacks. So the federal government is essentially taking over these loans, which I think will make the interest rates more reasonable and will provide more appropriate payback schedules, so that a place like BU will become more affordable to a broader range of students. I think it will be a fairly positive thing for students, although my more private industry, capitalist-oriented friends will find it dangerous.

How about K-12 education — what changes will we see there?
What’s proposed in Obama’s budget will build on what’s already been authorized through the federal stimulus, in particular the aid to states, which will help local districts reduce the number of teacher layoffs. There will also be funding for school building renovations, which will not only improve the quality of the educational experience, but will have a beneficial ripple effect in the economy.

They’re also proposing a substantive growth in our ability to support teacher training and educational research. There have been developments in the last 15 years in the field of education that can have real impact on the classroom. For instance, the budget is filled with extra work for BU’s STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) training initiatives. So the University will benefit, and the field will benefit.

Is this really a new direction for school funding, or just more dollars?
It is new. If you look back at the past eight years, there has been significant growth in federal education funding. But a huge amount of that money was targeted toward the development of assessments and testing, which mostly went to private companies that developed the tests. So this budget represents a radical shift. It’s no longer just about punishing the educational system for perceived failures and inadequacies; it’s about identifying and building on the great strengths in the American system — and they’re manifold — and building on them.

What do you make of the suggested shift toward performance pay for teachers?
Well, one of the positive impacts of No Child Left Behind is the creation of these state data systems, and there’s more money in this proposed budget to support that as well. These data systems allowed us to identify teachers with their students’ achievement and do a value-added model to see the actual impact of a particular teacher on a student’s achievement over time. To be able to make comparisons among teachers in an objective way is really, really new — it allows you to say, we now have an objective way to suggest that you’re performing better than somebody else and how do we reward that. But having said that, there is some evidence that giving merit pay to individual teachers is not as effective as rewarding the whole school for rising student achievement.

But it also makes it easier to dismiss underperforming teachers, right?
Well, it’s all about using more objective data. So yes, with the new data you’re able to say a teacher’s class is underperforming for the school — not for the city, not for the state, but for the school. And now you can use real data to identify the weaknesses and provide the type of support teachers need to improve. If they don’t improve, then you have more data to use through the whole process of removing that teacher from the classroom.

How many of these education initiatives do you think will eventually win the approval of Congress?
I think the education spending may solicit some of the deepest support of any part of this budget, because it fits the needs of the broadest part of the population and there’s something in there for virtually everyone — from the middle-class families who would otherwise be squeezed out of universities to people who are at the lower end of the economic spectrum struggling in underperforming schools. And the history of successful federal government interventions are when that middle class is as well served by the legislation as lower-income groups.

Chris Berdik can be reached at cberdik@bu.edu.