Outreach

The fig-leaf that the Department of Education is clinging to in the Armstrong Williams scandal is that the payments made to the commentator were "outreach" to the minority community about the No Child Left Behind Act. Secretary Ron Paige issued a statement on Thursday re-iterating this claim.

I'll leave it to others to discuss what "outreach" for a government program usually consists of, and how, if at all, anything aired by Williams fits that description.

I'm more interested in why we're paying for "outreach" on this program at all. The parents only become involved with NCLB after a school has been declared as "needing improvement" which happens only after a school has failed to meet targets for two consecutive years. At that point, parents can ask for a different school, which is called "school choice." There are also provisions for school choice for schools identified by the states as "persistently dangerous". Some schools were eligible to be found "needing improvement" already, because NCLB counts performance against the previous law.

But here's what I don't get. The school districts are required by law to notify parents if a school needs improvement, and they are eligible for school choice. If a state finds a school "persistently dangerous", the state is required by law to notify parents that they are eligible for school choice. (This seems pretty sensible, if you're going to have a law like NCLB in the first place.) In fact, there are numerous other provisions requiring various authorities to notify parents about their options and choices. I guess since the Republicans had already abandoned their aversion to onerous Federal regulation and infringement of states' rights, they decided to do it up all the way.

So, it isn't like parents have to go asking; the law says they need to be told by the schools and states. And there is extensive coverage of NCLB is all over the Department of Education website, which is where I got all this info.

So just what was Armstrong Williams supposed to be telling people that is worth nearly a quarter-million dollars? With such extensive Federal requirements about what schools and states must do to notify people, why are we paying for "outreach" at all? When we're not balancing our budget, couldn't we just let the law do its work, and count on parents to find out about school choice if and when they get their legal notifications from the schools or states?

Of course we could, but then we wouldn't have heard all of the pro-Bush propaganda, and the Department of Education wouldn't have been seen fawning over El Jefe sufficiently. And of course, it always helps to have tax dollars pay for your re-election campaign.