Last week had two red-letter days for the National Education Association, as Gov. Charlie Crist of Florida and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan opted, at crucial moments, to forsake reform and preen for easy applause from the cheap seats.

The result: two substantial setbacks for those who believe we need to rethink teacher tenure, evaluation, and pay, and who believe K–12 schooling needs to stop mortgaging the future of the kids it's supposed to serve.

The big news from Florida was Crist's decision to veto Senate Bill 6, which would have abolished teacher tenure and shifted teacher pay from a seniority-driven industrial model to one centered on student performance. While there were reasonable concerns about the test-based rigidity of the ambitious legislation, it represented a crucial opportunity to reimagine teacher tenure and pay. The right move would have been for Crist to sign it, and then work with legislators to fix it.

Unfortunately, faced with fierce pressure from the Florida Education Association, Crist folded like a cheap suit. NEA president Dennis Van Roekel crowed, "I commend Governor Crist for vetoing SB6 and ensuring that this harmful and disruptive legislation did not become law."

Last week's second setback was the secretary of education's craven decision to curry favor with Sen. Tom Harkin (D., Iowa) by endorsing Harkin's $23-billion scheme to ladle out new, borrowed dollars to educators. Because the dollars would be "emergency" spending, Harkin sees no need to pay for or offset the cost of his "Keep Our Educators Working Act."

Harkin explained, "If there's one legitimate area where we can borrow from the future, it's education, because what sort of jobs will we have for my grandkids and great-grandkids in the future if we don't have a well-educated group of young people today?" Harkin imagines, I presume, that our kids and grandkids will one day thank us profusely for putting them even deeper in debt so that school districts can avoid trimming unaffordable benefits or shuttering underutilized facilities.

Duncan didn't just grimace and grudgingly go along. Instead, he gave Harkin his full, moony-eyed encouragement. He declared, "We absolutely need a jobs bill. It's the right thing for our country; it's the right thing for our economy; it's the right thing for our children." He added, "We are gravely concerned that the kind of state and local budget threats our schools face today will put our hard-earned reforms at risk." Yeah, that's the problem. Districts are so busy taking a scalpel to budgets and redirecting dollars based on cost-effectiveness that every nickel they cut comes from the marrow. Not so much.

Recall that, as education guru Charles Miller has pointed out, adjusted for inflation, total education spending in the United States rose by about 39 percent in the decade from 1998–99 to 2008–09. K–12 expenditures rose by about 32 percent, and higher-education outlays by about 51 percent. Meanwhile, total K–12 enrollment grew by less than 1 percent a year in that decade, while total enrollment in higher education grew by about 3 percent a year. In other words, districts have been adding dollars to their budgets much faster than they've been adding students to their classrooms--and yet, unlike tens of thousands of non-profit and for-profit entities, they claim they can't possibly find smart cuts to make. (See the National Center for Education Statistics' Mini-Digest of Education Statistics 2009, page 42.)

Duncan's stance is especially egregious given that President Obama pledged less than three months ago, in the run-up to the State of the Union address, that he was launching a three-year spending freeze on all non-security discretionary spending. Was Duncan's announcement last week his own freelance capitulation, or does it represent another step in a full-blown retreat from the president's already milquetoast discretionary freeze? Maybe it's just me, but I swear I remember our president saying that we were done kicking the can down the road on tough decisions and, in his State of the Union address, that he had reluctantly embraced the huge outlays of borrowed funds in the stimulus plan and was now eager to "work within a budget to invest in what we need and sacrifice what we don't."

This is all the more maddening because the administration purposely encouraged states and school districts to spend the last year focusing on new programs and initiatives in order to compete for Race to the Top money, distracting attention from strategic efforts to rethink costs, reprice benefits, or identify inefficiencies. With last year's $100 billion in education stimulus spending, the administration subsidized unaffordable outlays and discouraged attention to cost cutting.

We can only hope, as we persist in our quest to become Greece, that, at a bare minimum, Secretary Duncan is going to insist that this new aid come with conditions that will promote reform and fiscal sanity downstream. The money could be made contingent on states' auditing their teacher-benefit systems and providing a clean accounting of the shortfall. Congress could require that receiving states embrace the GM-bankruptcy model for persistently low-performing districts and statutorily modify contractual restrictions governing teacher evaluation, assignment, compensation, and dismissal. Alternatively, the dollars could fund competitive grants constructed so as to avoid repeating the missteps made in the first go-round of Race to the Top.

Well, we can always hope.

Frederick M. Hess is a resident scholar and director of education policy studies at AEI.

Photo Credit: iStockphoto/Lise Gagne