President Obama's 'Free' Community College Plan Could Cost $34B Per Year

    Previewing an item from his upcoming State of the Union address, President Obama announced a "Free Community College" plan Thursday evening:

    According to Justin Sink of The Hill, Cecilia Muñoz, director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, declined to put a price tag on the plan during a conference call Thursday evening. Rather Muñoz said details of the plan will be in the president's next budget proposal.
    However, the president's announcement said that the plan could benefit as many as nine million students who could save an average of $3,800 per year. This would put the total cost at a little more than $34 billion.
    In a video accompanying the announcement, the president said that his plan would be "making two years of community college free for anyone who's willing to work for it." At $34 billion per year, taxpayers at least will be working for it, willing or not.

Note: A version of this post first appeared at The Weekly Standard.

Gov't Report: Nearly Half Sampled Approved School Lunch Applications Found to Be Ineligible

    A Government Accountability Office (GAO) report published a month ago but just publicly released on Monday found that while the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has taken steps to see that ineligible beneficiaries do not receive reduced-price or free school meals, oversight still needs to be improved. An analysis of a small, "nongeneralizable" sample of twenty-five approved applications found that eleven of them were in fact ineligible.
    The sample included two categories of applications: those which automatically qualify due to "categorical eligibility (by participating in certain public-assistance programs or meeting an approved designation, such as foster children)", and those which qualify based on self-reported household size and income.
    Of the six applications that indicated categorical eligibility, half were either completely ineligible (2) or qualified for reduced-price meals instead of free. These type of applications are not even subject to standard verification. The GAO recommended that the USDA conduct sample verification such as the one conducted by the GAO to help prevent this problem.
    Of the remaining nineteen applications, the GAO found that nine were ineligible, and only two of the nine could have been verified as ineligible under standard USDA procedures. The GAO suggests that using computer matching with external income data (state payroll records) could help in weeding out participants who do not qualify despite the self-reported information that resulted in the initial approval.
    A chart included in the report illustrates the relatively small window of income variation ($1,200) from the established thresholds that subjects an application to standard verification:

    The report noted that "[t]he Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has designated the NSLP [National School Lunch Program] as 1 of 13 federal 'high-error' programs due to its large estimated improper payments—approximately $1.8 billion in fiscal year 2013," for an error rate of 15.7 percent.  The School Breakfast Program (SBP) error rate was even higher at 25.3 percent for an estimated $831 million in improper payments in fiscal 2013.
    As of this date, the USDA has not responded to the GAO regarding the recommendations made in the report.


Note: A version of this article first appeared at The Weekly Standard. 

Education Secretary: If You Don't Graduate High School, 'You're Basically Condemned to Poverty and Social Failure'

    Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, on Air Force One en route to New York for the president's education bus tour, had some strong words to say about the prospects of those who do not attend college.  While answering a question about the cost of college and whether the administration might be exaggerating those costs, Duncan said [emphasis added]:

But, again, if you look at polls of the public -- this isn't me -- if you look at polls, the vast -- it’s like two-thirds of the American public think college is for the wealthy today.  There is something dramatically wrong with that picture.  Some form of higher education -- four-year universities, two-year community colleges, trade, technical vocation training -- some form of higher education training has to be the goal for every single young person in this country. 

Again, we know the long-term economic benefits, dividends are just tremendous -- more than doubling long-term salaries.  So if you drop out of high school today, you’re basically condemned to poverty and social failure.  There are no good jobs out there. If you have a high school diploma, there’s almost nothing for you.  College has to be the goal, has to be the aspiration.

UPDATE: It turns out Duncan has been using this line since at least 2010.  In a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, he said:

Just as troubling, about one in four -- about 25 percent -- of high school students in the United States drops out or fails to graduate on time. That's almost 1 million students each year leaving our schools for the streets. That is economically unsustainable and is morally unacceptable. As all of you know, high school dropouts today are basically condemned to poverty and social failure.

Note: A version of this article first appeared at The Weekly Standard. 

Give or Take 100,000

    This week, the Obama campaign launched another (surprise!) group to assist in the 2012 effort to return Barack Obama to the White House in November.  The Educators for Obama webpage explains how the president actually cares about education while Mitt Romney would prefer illiteracy and ignorance to run rampant across the land (I'm paraphrasing.)  If I've learned anything about the Obama campaign, it's their willingness to throw numbers around with abandon if there are political points to be scored, and this new group is no exception.  Reaching back to the 2009 "stimulus" (although no source is actually cited for the statistic,) the campaign claims the following on the Educators for Obama home page:

When states were cutting their budgets and laying off teachers, the President took action to keep 300,000 educators in the classrooms where they were needed.

    While the underlying validity of the claim is debatable, the source of one such discrepancy has a rather unusual source.  The Obama campaign!  Just a week before the new website was launched, the campaign put this out on Twitter:

Once again, no source is cited.  More than 100,000 educators vanished in less than a week with no explanation.  And this is actually the second time the numbers have changed, as I wrote last week.  No doubt if pressed, Jay Carney or some other administration spokesman could pull a rabbit out of the hat to justify the inconsistency.  But when you have demonstrated that you are willing to abuse numbers to advance your cause, what's 100,000 teachers anyway? After all, there are plenty more groups out there just begging for pandering.

We Don't Need No Education

    Normally I would not do an entire post over a two-letter word (although those who have been subjected to my grammar/copyediting-Nazism might dispute that,) but if you are going to pick on someone about education, you'd better have all your i's dotted, t's crossed, and use the correct prepositions.  Today, @BarackObama retweeted this:

"On" subjects?  When your child brings come his report card, do you say, "What grade did you get on math?"  Of course not.  Rather, "What grade did you get in math?" Nit-picky?   Sure, but that's half the fun of grammar.  And another thing: Should the Democrats, the party that calls itself "progressive" really be giving F's anyway?  F's are so twentieth-century.
    Oh, and one more thing.  At least now that we've seen Romney's report card above, we know more about his grades than we do about Obama's, since he has yet to release his college transcripts... KIDDING!  (I know, Romney has not released his either.)