Reform and improvement?

At the beginning of February, the Obama administration released the new proposed budget for next year. We can take it for granted that almost anything involving politics and money will inevitably be controversial, and so I imagine every little detail of the proposal is probably getting heat from somewhere. What caught my attention, thanks to a recent NCTE newsletter, was a cut in funding for the National Writing Project, a highly successful nationwide professional development program that has been praised as "one of the big success stories in professional development" in Education Week. NWP funding, if any, will now have to come through states, who must engage in a competitive funding race for federal money that has already begun to create a cut-throat, antagonistic atmosphere amongst educational institutions. Now any given local NWP site can only hope that its state will win the funding race, and then hope that state officials will see fit to allocate some of those funds to NWP. For all intents and purposes, this will be the end of the "national" in the National Writing Project.

Of course we have limited funds to draw from, so of course we can't give unlimited funding to every educational program. But it seems to me that our efforts at redesigning educational budgets should be directed toward eliminating or reforming failing programs, those that use money poorly. If we eliminate the funding of successful programs, overall educational quality cannot help but suffer.