In a May 25 letter to the four top federal lawmakers responsible for funding the U.S. Department of Education, Gov. Brian Sandoval, R-Nev., and Gov. Jay Inslee, D-Wash., urged Congress to “prioritize investments” in programs related to the Every Student Succeeds Act, career and technical education, and elsewhere.
“Governors’ message to Congress is clear: There must be careful consideration as to how to appropriately invest in these types of programs (and many others),” Sandoval and Inslee wrote. “Otherwise, cuts and changes not carefully considered could lead to a deterioration of state budgets.” Sandoval is the vice chairman of the NGA…
WASHINGTON — Democrats sparred with U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos about the budget proposal from President Donald Trump that would direct $1.4 billion to expand school choice and sharply questioning her commitment to protecting students with federal vouchers from discrimination during a House subcommittee hearing Tuesday.
Meanwhile, Republicans questioned the education secretary more gently, focusing on special education and applauding the fiscal 2018 budget plan’s emphasis on new resources for school choice.
Democratic lawmakers pushed DeVos to explain why public schools wouldn’t suffer and lose out because of a proposed $1 billion in new Title I for public school choice, as well as $250 million for a new research program to study the impact of vouchers on needy students…
washingtonpost.com — Does this sound familiar? Betsy DeVos went to Capitol Hill to testify before U.S. lawmakers. She didn’t answer a lot of direct questions and engaged in some contentious debates with some members.
That happened in January when she went before the Senate education committee for her confirmation hearing, during which she said schools needed guns to protect against grizzly bears. This time, the education secretary didn’t talk about guns, but she did say that states should have the right to decide whether private schools that accept publicly funded voucher students should be allowed to discriminate against students for whatever reason they want.
DeVos testified before the House subcommittee on labor, health and human services, education and related agencies about the Trump administration’s 2018 budget proposal, which would cut $10.6 billion — or more than 13 percent — from education programs and re-invest $1.4 billion of the savings into promoting school choice.
Both DeVos and President Trump have said expanding alternatives to traditional public schools are their top priority, and during tough questioning from some committee members, DeVos doubled down on that as well as on giving states and local communities flexibility to do what they want with their education programs. It is worth noting, however, that she said recently that people who don’t agree with expanding school choice are “flat Earthers,” people who refuse to face the facts.
Van Wert, Ohio — Long-time adversaries U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten spent more than four hours touring this rural Ohio district together Thursday. Both were still alive and well by the end of the day.
And so were the deep divisions in this corner of the country over K-12 education and President Donald Trump.
Even as DeVos and Weingarten counted model dinosaurs with preschool students, watched high school students demonstrate their robotics know-how, and chatted with teachers about social-emotional supports, small groups of protestors from both sides of the political divide gathered…
Have you been waiting for President Donald Trump to work with the Republican-controlled Congress and get rolling on a big K-12 education initiative? If so, you might be getting a little bit antsy. But is that unusual during the first 100 days or so of a presidential administration?
Here’s a quick sketch of some of the bigger things the Trump administration has gotten done so far on public school policy after nearly 100 days in office:
One of the big goals of the Every Student Succeeds Act was to give districts way more control over their federal funding, in part by creating a new block grant aka the Student Support and Academic Enrichment Grants or Title IV. Under the law, districts can use the money for a whole smorgasboard of things: student safety, dual enrollment, dance instruction, training teachers to use technology, hiring school counselors.
And the funding, a whopping $1.6 billion, was supposed to flow to districts through a formula, meaning that pretty much every district in the country would get a piece of it. The districts would have serious latitude in deciding the dollars are spent.
It may not quite work out that way, at least not this year…
WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump signed bills Monday (March 27) overturning two Obama-era education regulations, continuing the Republican majority’s effort to undo key pieces of the previous administration’s legacy.
Trump’s move scraps new requirements for programs that train new K-12 teachers and rolls back a set of rules outlining how states must carry out the Every Student Succeeds Act, a bipartisan federal law meant to hold schools accountable for student performance. In a signing ceremony at the White House Monday, the president hailed the measures for “removing an additional layer of bureaucracy to encourage freedom in our schools.”
Leaders of the Republican majority claimed that the accountability rules represented an executive overreach by former president Barack Obama. Democrats argued that rescinding the rules opens loopholes that states can use to shield poorly performing schools from scrutiny, especially when they fail to serve poor children, minorities, English-language learners and students with disabilities.
Civil rights and business groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, also opposed doing away with the rules. The measure to repeal the regulations passed easily in the GOP-dominated House, but barely made it out of the Senate on a 50 to 49 vote, mostly along party lines…
On Monday, Trump released a new executive order that directs each agency leader to submit “recommendations to eliminate unnecessary agencies, components of agencies, and agency programs, and to merge functions” to Mick Mulvaney, the director of the Office of Management and Budget. The recommendations, which agency head must submit to Mulvaney within 180 days, must consider the following factors, according…
That begs two questions: One, will the Trump administration re-regulate? And two, what exactly would constitute “substantially similar” regulations to the Obama ones that Congress just tossed? (Spoiler: Congress may essentially get to decide whether any new Trump regulations are too much like the Obama regulations to pass muster. More below.)
