When a bill is introduced by only one member of Congress in only one house, it’s safe to say you can probably ignore it. When it’s introduced in both houses by an unusual and bipartisan coalition and backed by powerful interest groups, it deserves to be taken seriously. Hence, people should take note of the news yesterday that Senators Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) and Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) introduced the Fiscal Fairness Act in the Senate. The bill, introduced in the House by Chaka Fattah (D-Pa.), would close the comparability loophole in federal Title I spending. It has backing from the NAACP and Education Trust, and the NEA supported it when it was first introduced in 2010.
Update: Thomas has the bill up here, but it doesn’t have the full text quite yet. Here’s the version Fattah introduced in the last Congress.
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Chad and Sherman,
We’ll make sure the introduced version is on our website if the Thomas version doesn’t pop up (H.R. 1294 is right). The House and Senate versions are identical and only slightly different from H.R. 5071 in the 111th.
Thanks,
Liz King
Senior Policy Advisor
Congressman Chaka Fattah (PA-02)
Oh good, thanks Sherman. I looked for it in Thomas but assumed it was a system update issue. I’ll put a link in the post.
Found it! It’s H.R. 1294. I think I know why Thomas couldn’t find it when I tried to search for “Fiscal Fairness Act”: the title in Thomas is “To amend section 1120A(c) of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 to assure comparability of opportunity for educationally disadvantaged students,” and the bill text isn’t in the system yet (just the metadata).
Chad,
I can’t find the bill in Thomas. Yesterday, I thought it might be because the system doesn’t change status more than once a day. Today, I’m wondering if the bill really was filed yesterday. Could you please update this entry if you ever find out where in Thomas one could read this item?
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