LD Blog

Mississippi (US) Governor Haley Barbour and the state legislature for Mississippi appear to be at political loggerheads about education funding, according to an article entitled “Gov. Haley Barbour: Version 2.0 — Katrina still in his sights: Ongoing hurricane recovery, funding Medicaid and education gains top Barbour’s agenda” by Sid Salter of the Clarion Ledger. Mr. Salter’s article has a broader focus than education, but there are several paragraphs which caught my attention. In them, Mr. Salter reports about Gov. Barbour and Representative Cecil Brown disagree about the targets for education funding. Funding of programs for reading instruction, including programs addressing dyslexia, appear to be among the casualties in this disagreement.

In addition to Medicaid and health care issues, Barbour said public education was another major item on his agenda for 2008.

“The biggest priority is public education at all levels,” said Barbour. “I intend to support full funding for the Mississippi Adequate Education Program, as I have previously said I would. But education, as important as it is, isn’t the only priority. Education is getting 62 percent of the state’s general fund budget right now and K-12, the community colleges and the universities have each, each asked for increases in excess of the state’s revenue growth projections.”

Barbour said he supported “many of the concepts” of the proposed “Mississippi Quality Education Act” - including backing proposals for appointed school superintendents, dropout prevention, mentoring, and the MAEP funding.

“I’m on the record in support of many of the nine proposals being discussed. I proposed $5 million for a pilot program last year for early childhood education, but Rep. Cecil Brown killed it in the House,” said Barbour. “I proposed $2 million for dyslexia programs last year, but Mr. Brown killed that in conference committees as well. So, while we agree with most of the proposed education reforms, there may be some disagreement over the funding levels because the costs have to be reasonable.”

Last year in budget conference negotiations, Brown and other House leaders stripped $10 million worth of Senate-proposed programs for mentoring, dyslexia, and early childhood education in protest over the Senate’s refusal to spend $13 million more on educating the state’s 290,000 at-risk students.

House leaders blamed Barbour for the budget impasse. “I’m trying to focus on priorities and early childhood education and dyslexia programs are some of those priorities, but there is also corrections, the community colleges, universities and a host of other government services that all have needs,” said Barbour.

It’d be nice if these (and other) elected officials would focus on addressing the problems rather than adopting what appear to me to be poses about relatively less important points. “Find the common ground, please” we might want to say, “And get the funds into place to provide effective reading instruction.”

Link to Mr. Salter’s story.