Sifting reality from rhetoric

Amid the sighs of apprehensive or relieved parents and plaintive students, school buses are rumbling through the central Shenandoah Valley this morning signaling the start of classes in Augusta County. A sound President Barack Obama had expected, that of school officials scurrying for a piece of $4 billion in education stimulus money, is noticeably absent.

To acquire a taste of another federal pie, this one known as the “Race to the Top” fund, schools must wade through another morass of federal bureaucracy. Introduced by Obama last month, “Race to the Top” aims to stir innovation by way of money’s allure. The National Review fittingly has referred to it and the 2002 No Child Left Behind law as a “federal-funding carnival ... the latest and most forceful efforts to make the old system work better.”

It might well work like Obama’s other stimulus package, the one passed to rouse the economy, which persists in languishing while federal goodies remain mostly untouched, like the damnable green beans little Johnny keeps leaving on the plate. Were the feds feeding the lad, they would insist that he file hundreds of pages of requisition forms. In triplicate. And Johnny retches.

School officials similarly are swept by nausea. Filling out an application for some of Obama’s “Race” money will require an investment of 642 hours – or more than 26 days – in state staff time. How do we know this? Why, it’s right there in the 35 pages of draft guidelines published in the Federal Register. The time element is a tad problematic on its face, but also because states will have just three months to complete the applications.

Of course, there’s more. States are operating with less money as the recession drives down tax revenues. Here, as elsewhere, talk of slashing education money is like discussing pulling the plug on grandma – heaven knows, nobody wants that – but it’s the reality of the moment, as Virginia shows. Lawmakers in both parties in Richmond have acknowledged that more state education cuts on top of those already made loom.

So who to invest those 642 days, all without the assurance that the money will come? The grants are competitive, meaning that not everyone will cash in. Rural districts, like say, Augusta or Nelson, need not bother trying. The “Race” criteria are heavily titled toward urban schools, the Arlington-based Rural School and Community Trust says. “The criteria are so onerous for some rural states,” the trust’s Marty Strange told Education Week, “they won’t apply.”

Local school officials privately utter the same complaints about Obama’s economic stimulus. Some of the $787 billion tied to that initiative could go to schools, but officials say they have to spend the money first without the guarantee that the feds later will approve a payout. So local money could be lost. In many cases, schools simply are deciding to skip the ordinary feeding frenzy.

This is a pattern in the new administration. Adjectives, or clichés, connoting thrills up legs are attached to the ideas. They are bold and sweeping. But when the TV crews turn off their lights and the power shuts down on Obama’s teleprompters, the ideas are something else – they are cumbersome, adding burdens on top of others without promise of gain. Obama promised better. Those who hoped for this might notice the chasm forming between the rhetoric of Obama and the fact of him.