Understanding Government

Illinois needs all the outside money it can get for education — several individual school districts, including the Chicago Public Schools, face unprecedented deficits. However, the state looks unprepared to spend money in the state aid package the U.S. House of Representatives passed Tuesday. (more…)

Via Progress Illinois, The Hill’s Julian Pecquet reports that Senate leader Harry Reid is expected to table a bill that extends increased Medicaid payments to states for six months.  These Medicaid payments were a critical part of the stimulus bill and their extension could make the Illinois budget crisis less dire. (more…)

The New York Times’ Sam Dillon reports that, according to a statement by Education Sec. Arne Duncan, the Dept. of Education’s civil rights office will “reinvigorate civil rights enforcement.” The Education Dept. will do this through compliance reviews — that is, looking at whether individual districts are giving equal educational opportunities to women, minorities and disabled students. However, the Obama administration won’t do significantly more compliance reviews than the Bush administration did:

Russlyn H. Ali, assistant secretary of education for civil rights, said in an interview that the department would begin 38 compliance reviews before the current fiscal year ended on Oct. 1. That number compares with 29 such reviews carried out last year, 42 in 2008, 23 in 2007 and nine in 2006, she said.

“But the big difference is not in the number of the reviews we intend to carry out, but in their complexity and depth,” Ms. Ali said. “Most of the reviews in the recent past have looked at procedures.”

The Obama Education Dept. has not incorporated civil rights enforcement into their overall policies. Duncan’s prescriptions for urban schools — more charter schools, teacher evaluation based on student test scores, shut downs of poor-performing schools — doesn’t address the intense concentration of black and Latino students in many of these districts.

These more rigorous compliance reviews could be important. But what would be more important is if Obama and Duncan confronted lingering segregation in public schools, including charter schools.

In 1860 South Carolina became the first confederate state to secede from the Union. In 2009, South Carolina’s governor, Mark Sanford, has seceded from the state. Corey Dade and Alex Roth of the Wall Street Journal report that a federal judge yesterday rejected Sanford’s rejection of $700 million in federal stimulus money. The stimulus cash — which would go toward education and public safety — was desperately wanted by the South Carolina state legislature, including the Republican president of the legislature. But Sanford feels the money could be better spent trimming the state’s debt.

Sanford has been ridiculed but there’s a legit federalism argument to be made that Washington can’t detail how state governments should spend money. Unfortunately, Sanford is making a political point here about deficit spending instead of looking out for South Carolina. Sanford allegedly wants  to drum up interest in a possible 2012 presidential bid. He probably won’t running on the record of South Carolina’s schools and public safety level.-MB