President Barack Obama made efforts to improve public schools by diverting billions of funds to some of the worst-performing institutions in America. An analysis, however, shows that the reforms delivered nothing to impact substantial change.
The Department of Education published the findings, entitled "School Improvement Grants: Implementation and Effectiveness," days before Obama was set to leave the White House. The School Improvement Grants has been established under President George W. Bush, which Obama inherited.
According to The Washington Post, Obama poured $7 billion for the program from 2010 to 2015 from its initial budget of $4 billion. Schools that have been underperforming received at least $2 million each year for reforms that included replacing or adding teachers, adopting new teaching tools and strategies, or converting to charter schools, or else face closure altogether.
A few schools did close or became charters but the bulk of the problem in transforming the schools became a hurdle. "Turning around our lowest-performing schools is some of the hardest, most complex work in education," Dorie Nolt of the Education department said in the Post's report. "We don't yet have solid evidence on effective, replicable, comprehensive school improvement strategies."
According to the New York Post, some educators believe the program became a terrible investment when the Education department failed in its monitoring. As a result, students from these schools continue to get low test scores or have low graduation turnouts even after five years of "reforms" and wasted money.
From 2009 to 2015, Arne Duncan was tasked as Obama's Education secretary who would have overseen this program. According to Press Herald, before Duncan left his position, he would often say that the school reform programs lacked attention.
Meanwhile, the American Thinker cites the analysis is a boost to the stance of President Donald Trump and incoming Education secretary Betsy DeVos regarding public school education. The Trump administration has always said the funds for public schools have not been wisely spent, thus this will likely be used for charter and voucher school funding.
