Today the Washington Post and Ed Week provided us all insight on the President’s 2011 education budget proposals. The highlights include a $4 billion (6.2% increase):
• $1.35 billion in Race to the Top II
• $1 billion reserved for ESEA reauthorization
• $1.65 billion for other priorities as part of a program consolidation proposal.
This sounds like good [...]
All Posts Tagged: 'Title I'
Obama’s Ed Budget – When does an Increase Feel Like a Cut?
Random Thoughts on the Race to the Top
First of all kudos to the Dept. of Education staff for putting out these regulation and largely sticking to a reform agenda while making reasonable adjustments. While some technical details caught my attention like the myopic calculation of ensuring that education is a funding priority, I found myself agreeing with most of the priorities the [...]
Advertising Reform
I finally opened my copy of Diplomas Count, an annual publication from Education Week devoted entirely to issues around high school graduation, and I didn’t get far before something caught my eye. It wasn’t the article on Florida’s data system, the piece on ensuring graduation rates mean the same state-to-state, or the map of graduation [...]
Comparable Difficulties
New York City is full of high profile, compelling education controversies. Mayoral control! Rubber room! Budget cuts! Swine flu! So it won’t be surprising if little attention is paid to the recent announcement that a plan to phase in the use of actual teacher salaries in the city’s Fair Student Funding budgeting system has been [...]
Backfilling Cuts? Not at the State Level
In California, the state took action last month to address an over $40 billion budget gap through a combination of program cuts, new taxes and a whole lot of other manipulations. The voters will decide what they think about the package in a special election on May 19th. While the actions taken were historic, they [...]
That’s Settled
The recently-enacted stimulus bill includes $13 billion in extra funding for Title I of the No Child Left Behind Act. Since Title I currently receives a little over $12 billion per year and the maximum amount authorized under the law is $25 billion, by my count NCLB is now “fully funded” and I assume those [...]
Stimulus Package – Restricted Funds Grow While Unrestricted Funds Shrink
States will be glad to see the in large infusion of federal funds into K-12 education. But will they help districts balance their budgets without major teacher layoffs? Most of the reductions in state and local resources are unrestricted funds resulting from reductions in local property tax revenues or state general support for schools. All [...]
Equal Funding for All Low-Income Students
The stimulus proposal recently released by the House of Representatives includes a lot of money for education. That’s a good thing, unless you subscribe to the Petrilli school bankruptcy theory of education reform. But while Mike and his colleagues are wrong to think that financial stress will induce more reform-mindedness, they’re right to point out [...]
The State and District Dilemma of the Stimulus Package –Supplanting Language will be Critical
Leaks about the content of the House version of the stimulus package surfaced publically this morning (2009%20Stimulus%20Executive%20Summary.pdf). State and school district budgets are clearly facing difficult times, and an infusion of federal funds will be a welcomed event. Education related, the package includes $79 billion for general state fiscal relief, ($39 billion of which is [...]
A Very Bad Good Idea
In the course of composing what sounds like the winning entry in a Thomas Friedman column parody contest, Thomas Friedman wrote the following in his new column:
“One of the smartest stimulus moves we could make would be to eliminate federal income taxes on all public schoolteachers so more talented people would choose these careers.”
Look, being [...]
Seven Percent
When the media report the number of schools failing to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), they generally report things like, “xxx number of schools failed this year under the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law.” This does a real disservice on lots of fronts. One, it belies the fact that states set their own [...]
Grab That Cash With Both Hands And Make A Stash
Joel Packer, chief lobbyist for the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union, has started a blog. (Technically, a transcript of a podcast, but close enough.) Eager to counter the impression that the teachers union agenda begins and ends with a bottomless appetite for new funding without accountability to match, he quickly put up [...]
President Bush’s Secret $5 Billion Anti-Poverty Program
The Bush Administration hasn’t exactly been a friend to low-income Americans. Vetoing health insurance for poor children, undermining labor protections, squandering resources on tax cuts for the super-rich–the list goes on. But as David Hoff reports in Education Week, there’s one area where both the President and Congress have consistently pursued what can only be [...]
Edwards on Teachers and Super Tutors
As part of Edwards’ plan to Restore the Promise to America’s Schools, he wants to ensure an excellent teacher in every classroom. To do this, he’ll raise the pay of teachers in high-poverty schools, provide more resources and support for new teachers, train more principals to work in high-poverty schools, reduce class sizes, and require [...]
The Rich Get Richer
The Education Trust released its annual Funding Gap report yesterday, just in time for New Year’s. (Disclosure: I used to work at Ed Trust and wrote the 2003 and 2004 editions of the report.) As always, the report exposes the basic resource inequities that hamstring many educators and disadvantaged children. Despite the fact that low-income [...]
Smart, Unselfish Congressional Budget Policy. No, Really.
The iron-clad conventional wisdom around NCLB is that the law is an “unfunded mandate,” an idea driven by the disparity between the amount of money Congress has appropriated for the Title I program and the maximum amount it could appropriate, given the escalating annual authorization targets established in NCLB. For the first few years of [...]
Lowering Student Loan Default Rates: What One Consortium of Historically Black Institutions Did to Succeed 
College and Career-Ready: Using Outcomes Data to Hold High Schools Accountable for Student Success
03/11/10 | Kevin Carey is quoted on the rising costs of education in The Economist.
03/10/10 | Chad Aldeman's False Fronts paper is quoted on Accuracy in Academia.
03/09/10 | Ben Miller is quoted on Federal Family Education Loan defaults on The Huffington Post.
03/09/10 | Ben Miller is quoted on loan origination on the Firedog Lake blog.
03/07/10 | Kevin Carey calls for a Race to the Top in higher education in a column in The Chronicle of Higher Education.