The House bill funding the department for fiscal year 2018 would eliminate $2 billion in Title II funding for teacher training and class size reduction, and cut $100 million from current spending on after-school aid. (More on that last issue here.) The legislation, which was approved by a 211-198 vote, keeps Title I funding for disadvantaged students flat at about $15.4 billion, and also includes a $200 million increase for special education. It also rejects prominent elements of President Donald Trump’s budget proposal, most specifically on school choice—more on that below.
The House spending bill, which provides $66.1 billion to the Education Department as part of a broader $1.2 trillion spending package for various government agencies, must be reconciled with the Senate legislation. Unlike House lawmakers, Senators in charge of the appropriations process have so far, in the subcommittee and committee that oversee K-12 spending respectively, voted to increase spending slightly at the Education Department…
A bill to reauthorize the federal career and technical education law is so popular that it recently got unanimous approval from House lawmakers. Is there any other big K-12 bill that will get the same kind of love? Don’t bet on it.
That doesn’t mean federal lawmakers don’t have a “honey-do” list when it comes to education policy. True, the Every Student Succeeds Act covers a lot of the ground when it comes to public schools. (We’re still watching for when #FixESSA starts trending on Twitter, however.) But we’ve put together a list of policy issues that the 115th Congress could address, at least in theory. Scroll down to see them in detail, or click a policy issue in the menu below to jump to that one.
The commission, which made the move on Friday, plans to take a closer look at civil rights enforcement across the government, including the Departments of Justice, Health and Human Services, Labor, and Housing and Urban Development.
The panel is particularly concerned that the Trump administration is seeking to cut the budgets of the civil rights arms of these agencies. And it is bothered by statements by some cabinet officials, including U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, that the commisssion says may demonstrate that the Trump administration isn’t going to take civil rights enforcement seriously. (DeVos is, in fact, the only cabinet official the statement mentions by name)…
WASHINGTON – The House education committee approved a bipartisan bill to reauthorize the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act on Wednesday.
The Strengthening Career and Technical Education for the 21st Century Act, with Rep. Glenn Thompson, R-Pa., and Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi as the lead co-sponsors, passed unanimously out of the committee. It now moves to the full House for consideration, and could become the first major education legislation sent to President Donald Trump during this Congress.
Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., the committee chairwoman, and Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., the top Democrat, both said there is a skills gap between what students are provided in educational settings and the demands of the current workforce.
“This legislation will empower state and local leaders to tailor programs to meet the unique needs” of students in their community, Foxx said in the Wednesday committee meeting. “Local leaders will be better equipped to respond to changing education and economic needs.”
As we reported earlier this month, the legislation is tailored to give states more flexibility in their plans for Perkins funds and for prioritizing programs that meet their particular workforce environments. It is very similar to a 2016 bill that easily passed the House, although this year’s version does impose somewhat stricter requirements on state CTE spending, as well as the process by which state plans are approved or rejected. In several respects, it matches the emphasis on greater state and local control in the Every Student Succeeds Act.
Scott said the bill promotes equity in career and technical education while updating the Perkins law to reflect the changing economy. However, he said the bill isn’t perfect in its current form and that the authority of the education secretary in the bill over funding issues isn’t as strong as he would like.
Rep. Suzanne Bonamici, D-Ore., introduced and then withdrew an amendment to the bill to beef up secretarial authority she expressed concern that the bill in its current form would allow states to use federal funds on failing CTE programs. (Disputes over secretarial authority led last year’s bill to stall out in the Senate.) She said lawmakers should continue to discuss this issue as the bill moves ahead.
On Tuesday, Foxx expressed optimism about the bill’s prospects in public remarks at a CTE event. In addition to more freedom for states, Foxx said the Thompson-Krishnamoorthi bill creates greater transparency and accountability for CTE programs.
Read the full CTE bill below, which Thompson introduced as a substitute on Wednesday and which makes a few technical changes to the legislation he and Krishnamoorthi introduced earlier this month.
A bill that would repeal the means Congress used to overturn regulations for the Every Student Succeeds Act has been introduced by three Democratic lawmakers, including one possible presidential hopeful for 2020.
The legislation, introduced Tuesday, would get rid of the Congressional Review Act, which allows Congress to overturn recently enacted federal regulations, like those that President Barack Obama’s administration wrote to govern accountability and state plans for ESSA. It was introduced by Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., who could be a candidate for the White House in three years, and Sen. Tom Udall, D-N.M. Rep. David Cicilline, D-R.I., also introduced a companion bill in the House of Representatives.
A new bill in Congress to overhaul the nation’s law governing career-and-technical-education programs follows in the footsteps of the Every Student Succeeds Act by seeking to give states more discretion over decisions about spending, which programs to prioritize, and other issues.
The bipartisan Strengthening Career and Technical Education for the 21st Century Act was introduced this month by Reps. Glenn Thompson, R-Pa., and Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill., in order to reauthorize the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act.
It would redefine which students are considered “concentrators” in CTE programs, allow states more flexibility in setting performance targets on core …
Read the full article here: May require an Education Week subscription.
This week President Trump signed a resolution to invalidate a regulation designed to help implement the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). This move will create tremendous confusion among states that are currently in the middle of putting the new law in place in time for the 2017-2018 school year.
Even more egregious is that congressional Republicans attempted to rewrite or ignore the intention, history and plain text of the law to eliminate the rule.
The 2015 passage of ESSA was a rare recent example of successful bipartisan policymaking. The legislation both reauthorized the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) and reinforced ESEA’s core principles to ensure schools have the resources they need to teach all children well, particularly Black children and other children who’ve been neglected for too long, and give them the opportunity to succeed.
Now that the rule is gone, it’s essential that the civil rights legacy and legislative intent behind ESSA and the original ESEA not be obscured and that states recognize in developing their state accountability plans that they are still bound by the provisions of the law designed to ensure all children have equal educational opportunity.
ESEA is — and always has been — a civil rights law. It was a central plank in the Johnson Administration’s “War on Poverty” and one of a long string of legislative successes emanating from the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s. The legislation provided federal funds to help educate low-income children and recognized that the federal government has an important role in the educational success of every American child, no matter where they lived, how much money their parents had, or what they looked like.
Honoring this civil rights legacy, legislators ensured in 2015 that the ESSA reaffirmed that the federal government has an essential and irreplaceable role in enforcing civil rights laws and holding states and districts accountable if schools are not educating all children well.
One only has to reflect on the long history of state and local decisions shortchanging vulnerable students to understand why the federal role is essential for historically marginalized students, including the children of color who now comprise a majority of K-12 students in America’s public school classrooms.
Children facing the greatest barriers to their success like Black children and children from low-income communities need and deserve schools that educate all children well. They also deserve to know that the federal government will still hold states and school districts responsible if schools are not doing well or need help to improve.
And yet Republicans, in their zeal to rewrite ESSA’s legislative history, have been claiming that states would have carte blanche to ignore the students who’ve been deprived for far too long and sweep problems in schools under the rug now that the rule is gone. And that has led to more confusion and uncertainty for states who are in the middle of drafting their accountability plans, attempting to comply with the law, and deciding how best to support their students.
But make no mistake, ESSA – and its requirements for states – are still on the books and it’s important for our children’s future that states understand their responsibilities under the law.
Given our nation’s history, asking states to faithfully implement the law and meet their legal obligations to historically marginalized groups of children, while refusing to provide sufficient federal guidance and oversight, is a recipe for failure. No matter what Republicans say, Congress knew this and that’s why provisions that were in the law since 1965 remained, which is ultimately why the civil rights community supported the final law.
The state accountability plans are, at their core, a declaration of a state’s commitment to the education of all of their children. It’s the one place where parents and families can see what their state expects of schools – and what they plan to do when schools need more help doing their job well. The federal government’s role in helping to ensure these plans put the needs of children first is essential.
Every child in every school in every community across America deserves an education that equips them with the skills they need to forge a bright future. But ESSA’s success depends on states doing the right thing and the U.S. Department of Education holding them accountable when they fail to do so.
Overturning the regulation didn’t change this fundamental dynamic.
Wade Henderson is the president and CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and The Leadership Conference Education Fund.
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…
President Donald Trump’s first budget seeks to slash the Education Department’s roughly $68 billion budget by $9 billion, or 13 percent in the coming fiscal year, whacking popular programs that help districts offer after-school programs, and hire and train teachers.
At the same time, it seeks a historic $1.4 billion federal investment in school choice, including new money for private school vouchers and charter schools, as well as directing $1 billion to follow students to the school of their choice.
But the proposal would completely scraptwo big programs Supporting Effective Instruction State Grants, or Title II, which is currently funded at $2.25 billion and helps states and districts hire and provide professional development for teachers. The budget proposal would also get rid of the 21st Century Community Learning Centers program, which is funded at more than $1 billion currently and finances after-school and extended-learning programs. Trump’s budget says both programs are spread too thin to be effective.
The federal spending plan still need to go through Congress for approval, and cuts of this magnitude will almost certainly be a tough political lift. And it could be months before lawmakers decide which of these cuts to accept or reject. The proposal would set spending levels for federal fiscal year 2018, which begins Oct. 1 and generally impacts the 2018-19 school year.
A new bill in Congress to overhaul the nation’s law governing career-and-technical-education programs follows in the footsteps of the 
