NSBA Executive Director & CEO Thomas J. Gentzel today released the following statement in response to the Trump Administration’s Proposed FY 2018 Education Budget: “President Trump’s proposed $9.2 billion cut to education initiatives will deliver a devastating blow to the country’s public education system if enacted by Congress. The proposed cut is a disinvestment in schoolchildren that harms students and the country.
“Over 50 million children attend public schools and our primary mission should be supporting their education. Funding for teacher training, career and technical education, student support services and innovative programs that boost college and career readiness are urgently needed, especially as neighborhood public schools continue to cope with financial challenges.
“The proposed budget disregards the need to prepare students so they can lead fulfilling and secure lives and secure the country’s economic future. Proposals for vouchers, tuition tax credits, and the Title I portability will not advance student learning or help close achievement and opportunity gaps. They will, however, effectively redirect taxpayers’ dollars from public to private schools, effectively creating a second system of taxpayer-funded education.
“NSBA is committed to keeping public schools as a top priority in the upcoming budget deliberations. The Association will vigorously oppose the cuts proposed by the Administration.”
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.
Legislation that would direct more than $100 billion into building and upgrading school infrastructure around the country was introduced Wednesday by Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., the House education committee’s top Democrat.
The Rebuild America’s Schools Act of 2017 would be tailored for schools in high-poverty areas, and would direct money to high-speed broadband internet as well as school construction. In a summary of the legislation, Scott and other Democratic lawmakers also said the bill would create 1.9 million jobs that latter figure is via an estimate from the Economic…
Funding for college work-study programs would be cut in half, public-service loan forgiveness would end and hundreds of millions of dollars that public schools could use for mental health, advanced coursework and other services would vanish under a Trump administration plan to cut $10.6 billion from federal education initiatives, according to budget documents obtained by The Washington Post.
The administration would channel part of the savings into its top priority: school choice. It seeks to spend about $400 million to expand charter schools and vouchers for private and religious schools, and another $1 billion to push public schools to adopt choice-friendly policies.
President Donald Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos have repeatedly said they want to shrink the federal role in education and give parents more opportunity to choose their children’s schools.
The documents – described by an Education Department employee as a near-final version of the budget expected to be released next week – offer the clearest picture yet of how the administration intends to accomplish that goal.
Though Trump and DeVos are proponents of local control, their proposal to use federal dollars to entice districts to adopt school-choice policies is reminiscent of the way the Obama administration offered federal money to states that agreed to adopt its preferred education policies through a program called Race to the Top.
The proposed cuts in longstanding programs – and the simultaneous new investment in alternatives to traditional public schools – are a sign of the Trump administration’s belief that federal efforts to improve education have failed. DeVos, who has previously derided government, is now leading an agency she views as an impediment to progress.
“It’s time for us to break out of the confines of the federal government’s arcane approach to education,” DeVos said this month in Salt Lake City. “Washington has been in the driver’s seat for over 50 years with very little to show for its efforts.”
The proposed budget would also reshape financial aid programs that help 12 million students pay for college.
A White House official said Wednesday (May 17) it would be premature to comment on any aspect of “ever-changing, internal discussion” about the president’s budget prior to its publication. “The president and his Cabinet are working collaboratively to create a leaner, more efficient government that does more with less of taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars,” the official said.
The Education Department had no immediate comment.
The budget proposal calls for a net $9.2 billion cut to the department, or 13.6 percent of the spending level Congress approved last month. It is likely to meet resistance on Capitol Hill because of strong constituencies seeking to protect current funding, ideological opposition to vouchers and fierce criticism of DeVos, a longtime Republican donor who became a household name during a bruising Senate confirmation battle.
Asked for comment, a spokesman for Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., chairman of the Senate education committee, referred to Alexander’s response in March to the release of Trump’s budget outline. That statement emphasized that while the president may suggest a budget, “under the Constitution, Congress passes appropriations bills.”
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.
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…
U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos seems to be indicating that, as far as she’s concerned, the Common Core State Standards aren’t really a big point of discussion in education any longer. But how did she express that idea, and does it hold up to scrutiny?
During a Fox News interview Monday, anchor Bill Hemmer asked DeVos whether the U.S. Department of Education would withhold federal money from states that use the standards.
“The Every Students Succeeds Act … essentially does away with the whole argument about common core,” DeVos responded, adding that the law gives states more flexibility in education policy decisions. She added that she hoped all states in their ESSA plans would include high expectations for students…
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:
A little over a year ago, Barack Obama signed into law the biggest K-12 education reform in over a decade: the Every Student Succeeds Act, a product of years-long compromise in Congress, was intended to smooth over the shortcomings of the previous education law of the land, No Child Left Behind.
The bill, informally called ESSA, aims to lighten the footprint of the federal government in K-12 education policy. Democrats and Republicans in Congress agreed to give local education policymakers greater authority to decide how schools and students were performing, and to decide how to allocate federal education dollars.
Minnesota and other states are currently working on their plans for complying with ESSA, and they will ultimately require approval from the U.S. Department of Education. Those plans, however, will arrive in a Washington under much different leadership than the one that signed ESSA into law.
Where Obama’s team believed there was an important role for the federal government to play in education, President Donald Trump’s controversial Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, has supported conservative education causes — like providing vouchers to students attending private schools — and an ethos of taking power away from D.C.
NSBA Executive Director & CEO Thomas J. Gentzel today released the following statement in response to the Trump Administration’s Proposed FY 2018 Education Budget: “President Trump’s proposed $9.2 billion cut to education initiatives will deliver a devastating blow to the country’s public education system if enacted by Congress. The proposed cut is a disinvestment in schoolchildren that harms students and the country.
