Bottom line: The federal government failed for days to fix an online grant-filing system, and a bunch of poor kids are going to bear the price.
That’s the charitable interpretation. Others are suggesting that politics and ideology are as much to blame for this travesty as balky technology. They’ll get no argument from me.
According to this morning’s Boston Globe:
Choice Thru Education, which for decades has provided Chelsea (Mass.) students with tutoring, classes for the high school equivalency test, career counseling, and intensive summer programs at major universities, will probably run out of money in a few months because the US Department of Education has refused to reconsider the program’s grant proposal. The program’s request for grants arrived 46 minutes late after an error on the department’s website foiled repeated efforts to file it through the federal electronic grant-filing system.
The details demonstrate beyond any reasonable doubt that fault for the grant application being late can only be attributed to the federal government’s inability to fix a technical problem in a timely manner. (I’m attempting to get more detail on the exact nature of that problem, but don’t hold your breath.)
The city of Chelsea is a dirt-poor neighbor to Boston that has had so much trouble funding and running its school system over the years that it was for a long time a ward of Boston University. Chelsea kids for the most part get the short end of the stick, so any help the government is able to provide in terms of getting them the best possible educations not only makes sense from a public policy perspective, but it’s the right thing to do.
U.S. Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., smells more than a technical snafu at work here:
“Everything the administration does is ideological,” Kerry said. “They bend the rules and break the rules for their cronies, but they’re unwilling to protect the people who most need it. We think it’s disgraceful.”
After being badgered for months, the Department of Education did yesterday finally provide a mealy-mouthed explanation to Sen. Edward Kennedy:
“The Department does not have the discretion to waive the deadline nor the flexibility to alter Grants.gov requirements,” wrote Diane Jones, an assistant secretary in the department’s office of postsecondary education.
Rules are rules, right?
Nonsense. The government of this administration has proven nothing if not that rules are made to be broken. And in this case, the rule of who’s to blame should supersede any technicality in a granting agency’s regulations.
Here’s how the Chelsea program’s director put it in a letter to the Department of Education:
“Over 3,000 of our many students have gone to post-secondary school. Chelsea’s children need this program. Clearly, you cannot mean to deprive the public of this necessary program because you had a glitch.”
Clearly they can. Clearly they have no shame.
