SAFRA
In non-health care domestic policy news, today the House is going to be moving forward on the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act, SAFRA, which is aimed primarily at eliminating the waste involved in federal funding of the for-profit student loan agency. The money saved by just doing the lending directly can then be plowed into other worthy endeavors, like more Pell Grants:
The bill also has an important early education component despite being primarily a higher education issue. Basically, a chunk of the money is going to finance challenge grants to states to work on improving quality in early education programs. There’s a considerably body of research indicating that high-quality preschool can do wonders for kids’ performance down the road. But that research has spurred a lot of expansion of early education programs that don’t necessarily keep their eyes on the quality ball. Cutting corners can save money and/or political headaches, but it’s a major case of penny wise point foolish. A preschool program that works is worth investing a lot of money in, but a preschool program that doesn’t work is useless. The idea here is that by giving states an incentive to refocus on quality issues, they can spur the reallocation of money in more useful ways.
9 Responses to “SAFRA”
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September 16th, 2009 at 3:23 pm
Cutting corners can save money and/or political headaches, but it’s a major case of penny wise point foolish.
I was wondering how they would assess pre-school performance. Via test scores, I guess.
September 16th, 2009 at 3:28 pm
Anybody have any idea on the bill’s chances? This one seems like such a no brainer that failure to reach the president’s desk will provide conclusive proof as far as I’m concerned that Satan has finally managed to convince God to become a Republican.
September 16th, 2009 at 3:30 pm
This will be a good test of whether our political system can still accomplish anything non-corrupt. Because there is simply no honest excuse for continuing to let private lenders profit at the taxpayers’ expense rather than simply lending the money directly.
September 16th, 2009 at 3:33 pm
it’s a major case of penny wise point foolish
Penny wise, pound foolish?
September 16th, 2009 at 4:16 pm
This one seems like such a no brainer that failure to reach the president’s desk will provide conclusive proof as far as I’m concerned that Satan has finally managed to convince God to become a Republican.
Ah, the Senate has a few Blue Dogs who appreciate having federally-subsidised student loan sharks in their states. Stand up, Bullshit Ben Nelson! Stand up, Milquetoast Evan Bayh!
September 16th, 2009 at 6:10 pm
Probably reducing the amount of profit-taking on government-subsidized student loans is a good thing.
But I wonder why we don’;t try and take on “big university” to get down its cost increases, which would solve a lot of this as well.
September 17th, 2009 at 1:21 pm
I was wondering how they would assess pre-school performance. Via test scores, I guess.
There are actually some pretty good ways to assess quality. At this point there’s a sizeable body of research about what makes an early childhood program effective. So it’s not a question of testing individual children (very difficult to accomplish with 3 and 4 year olds) but one of evaluating whether a program is implementing practices that work. There are already pretty good tools to accomplish this, like the ECERS and CLAS tools. These look at things like classroom environment, staffing ratios, and teacher-child interactions to assess whether a program is developmentally appropriate (providing an environment and activities supportive of health child learning and growth).
September 17th, 2009 at 2:26 pm
Thanks for bringing up the very promising early education program in the bill. It’s a very solid investment in our education system and rarely gets the attention it deserves.
September 17th, 2009 at 4:09 pm
[...] bill also has an early education component which Matthew Yglesias [...]