Transcript Slide 1

Reauthorizing ESEA
Maybe
Education Jobs
Less and Less Likely
AASA Summer Leadership Institute
July 31, 2010
Reauthorizing ESEA
•AASA is pushing hard for reauthorization this
year or REGULATORY RELIEF
•Secretary Duncan is pushing hard for
reauthorization this year, but
•Tom Harkin Senate committee Chairman
wanted to have a bill on the floor in June, but
•House Chairman George Miller’s staff indicate
that they are working on a bill for July that will
incorporate parts of his 2007 discussion draft
and the Administration’s Blueprint, maybe …
2
Competing Views on
Federal Education Policy
• The old competition in ESEA was between
– Groups and individuals who wanted to privatize
public education and
– Advocates for public education
• The old policy debate has disappeared and a
new debaters have emerged
– Educators want continuous improvement
– Mostly non educators calling themselves
“Reformers” wanting structural changes
Is there a New Education Establishment?
“Reformers”
• Think tanks, privately
funded advocacy groups
and foundations
– Democrats for Education
Reform
– Education trust
– Fordham foundation
– Alliance for Excellent
Education
– Aspen Group
– Gates Foundation
– Broad Foundation
– Walton foundation
Educators
• Education Organizations
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AASA
NSBA
NEA
AFT
CCSSO
PTA
NAESP
NASSP
NABSE
etc
Competing Views Using ESEA to:
1. Force standardization of state and local policy
2. Supplement efforts to improve outcomes
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Federal requirements/mandates
– Uniformity among states
• Graduation
• Standards
• Assessment
• Accountability system
• What is good enough
• Student data systems
• Transparency
– Teacher evaluation model
– Performance compensation
– Alternate pathways to certification
– Terminating of removing personnel
Stronger state role
– Enforcement of national standards
– New attendance choice options
– Implementing new teacher standards
Diminished Local authority
Increased Local Responsibility
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Seeking Federal Assistance to
Continue Progress for Students
With Greater Needs
– Unequal distribution of resources
– Unstable resource base
– Unequal opportunities to learn
Seeking Federal Funds to Help
Address Systemic problems
– Improved teacher preparation &
continuous development
– Improved instruction and leadership
– Improved information about student
progress
– Improved assessments
– Addressing all barriers to learning school
and non school based
– Greater flexibility to address local
operations
– Improved parental engagement
Balance local/state federal
authority and responsibility
Greater federal/state transparency
in rule making
Competing Views on Federal role and
Changes Needed in ESEA
• Use federal funds as
leverage to increase
federal authority over:
– How instruction is
delivered
– How teachers are hired
– How teachers are
evaluated
– How teachers are paid
– How teachers are assigned
– How students are assigned
to schools
• Use federal funds to
supplement local efforts
to improve outcomes for
low income students and
other high need students
What v. How
• Historically the federal role, except in special
education, has been limited to what schools
are expected to accomplish
• How the work was done was a matter for state
and local policy makers
• Some states have been more active in How
the work is done than other states
• TEACHER UNION CHIEF RAPS OBAMA AT
NATIONAL CONVENTION:
SAYS INNOVATION KEY, BUT "BLAME THE
TEACHER" CROWD NOT PRODUCTIVE
Seattle Post-Intelligencer -- July 8, 2010
By Fiona Cohen
• TEACHERS UNION CHIEF BLASTS OBAMA
ADMINISTRATION'S EDUCATION POLICIES
• The (New Orleans) Times-Picayune -- July 4, 2010
By Masako Hirsch
TEACHERS' UNION SHUNS OBAMA
AIDES AT CONVENTION
New York Times -- July 5, 2010
By Sam Dillon
New Orleans -- For two years as a presidential candidate, Barack
Obama addressed educators gathered for the summer conventions
of the two national teachers’ unions, and last year both groups
rolled out the welcome mat for Education Secretary Arne Duncan.
But in a sign of the Obama administration’s strained relations with two
of its most powerful political allies, no federal official was scheduled
to speak at either convention this month, partly because union
officials feared that administration speakers would face heckling.
“Today our members face the most anti-educator, anti-union, antistudent environment I have ever experienced,” Dennis Van Roekel,
president of the union, the National Education Association, told
thousands of members gathered at the convention center here.
7 Civil Rights Groups Question Parts of
Administration’s ESEA proposal
• “If education is a civil right, children in “winning” states should
not be the only ones who have the opportunity to learn in
high-quality environments. Such an approach reinstates the
antiquated and highly politicized frame for distributing federal
support to states that civil rights organizations fought to
remove in 1965. With the creation of the ESEA as a part of
President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty, the federal
government took the first steps toward requiring an equitable
distribution of funding among states. Shifting the emphasis
from competitive grants to conditional incentives can preserve
those gains. Incentivizing behavior through limited
competition, in and of itself, is not a bad strategy, but we must
go further to recognize that many states and districts in our
union will not compete, either because they do not have the
capacity or because they lack the political will. This increases
the likelihood that better-resourced states and communities
will win out. For these reasons, a competitive framework does
not go far enough to ensure equity.”
ESEA Reauthorization
House Rumors
• Chairman Miller plans to:
– Keep AYP, but call it something else
– Keep the matrix, but it might grow
– Keep the all or nothing accountability design
– Focus on comparability in instructional costs per
pupil at the school level
– Include the administration’s blue print design by
consolidating some programs
House Rumors
• Chairman Miller plans to:
– Incorporate growth or progress in accountability
• Not clear exactly what that means
– Keep the important formula programs such as
Title II (D) and Title III, besides Title I
The Bottom Line
• ESEA is not going to get
finished in 2010
• But it might get started in 2010 and get
done in 2011
• Because the is no consensus about what to do ESEA could
possibly not get done in 2012
Keep our Educators Working Act
• Senator Tom Harkin introduced S. 3206
proposing $23 billion to save or create
education jobs
• Was to be offered as an amendment to the
Emergency Supplemental Appropriations bill
• But Blue dog Democrats torpedoed that
• Was given last rites on June 24th
• Shrunk to $10 billion to seek votes and was
offset rather than deficit spending
Getting Education Jobs $$
Let the Games Begin
• Supplemental update: $10 billion for education jobs and $4.95
billion for Pell grants.
• $800 million in education rescissions partially from ARRA funds,
but not Title I or IDEA:
• $100 million from FY 10 funding for the Public Charter School
program (ESEA Title V, Part B, Subpart 1) (reducing funding from
$256 million to $156 million)
• $200 million combined from both FY 10 and ARRA funds for the
Teacher Incentive Fund (reducing the combined FY 10 and ARRA
funding from $600 million to $400 million)
• $500 million from ARRA funds for the Race to the Top (reducing
available funding from $3.4 billion to $2.9 billion ($600 million has
already been awarded and $300 million is set-aside for Race to the
Top Assessment Grants))
Pared-Down Spending Bill Pending
By Edward Epstein, CQ Staff, July 19, 2010 – 1:41 p.m.
• House Democratic leaders have decided to accept the
Senate’s stripped-down supplemental spending bill for
the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and seek a different
vehicle for domestic spending, including aid for local
school districts.
• House and Senate Democratic aides said Monday that
the decision resulted from the inability of Senate
Democrats to muster the votes needed to take up the
fiscal 2010 supplemental measure (HR 4899), which
the House passed July 1 after adding more than $22
billion in domestic spending, including $10 billion to
keep teachers and other school employees on the
payroll this fall.
Education Jobs Bill Update
Edward Epstein and Kerry Young, Congressional Quarterly, June 29, 2010
• Democratic leaders have said they hope to move the supplemental this
week, before Congress departs for its July Fourth recess. Defense
Secretary Robert M. Gates has said the Pentagon needs the added funds
quickly, a plea echoed Tuesday by Army Gen. David H. Petraeus during his
Senate confirmation hearings to be commander of U.S. forces in
Afghanistan.
• But a divided Democratic Caucus might not have the votes to pass a war
supplemental without Republican help, because a number of Democrats
oppose further funding for the conflicts. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., a longtime
and vocal critic of the wars, has said Democrats are increasingly uneasy
about funding them.
• Democratic House leaders have been polling members on their support
for added domestic spending in a supplemental.
• C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger of Maryland, a deputy Democratic whip, said he
expected that it would be easy to win support for the war funding, but
that winning support for domestic spending would be harder, given rising
concerns about the deficit. “When we are at war, we understand that we
have to support the troops,” he said, adding that “this deficit eventually
will make us weaker as a nation, and we can’t afford that.”
Domestic (spending) tranquility?
JONATHAN ALLEN, Politico, June 30, 2010
• House leaders are trying to win support for a two-part emergency
war-spending measure – one section that would pay for the
Pentagon’s needs and another that would load on tens of billions of
dollars in cash for schoolteachers, college grants and other
domestic programs. The Democratic whip team recorded the
leanings of rank-and-file lawmakers on two-column response sheets
Tuesday to get a count of where each member stands on each part.
CQ’s Kerry Young, Dave Clarke and Joe Schatz have the details of the
domestic-spending proposal: “[T]he measure includes $10 billion
for the Education Department to avert teacher layoffs, as well as
$4.95 billion in discretionary funding for Pell grants to fix what
Democrats perceive as a problem in President Obama’s budget
request
Getting Education Jobs $$
game ON
• Thursday July 1st the House was voting on
supplemental war funding. The vote AASA cared about
was on Rep. Dave Obey’s amendment to add
emergency funds, including $10 billion for teacher jobs
and Pell grants.
• Earlier in the day, the President threatened to veto the
legislation if the current language of the Obey
amendment is included.
• The House voted, 239-182 to attach the domestic
spending provisions to the FY10 supplemental war
funding bill (HR 4899).
• The bill has gone back to the Senate. The Senate
could well oppose the additional domestic spending,
even if the costs are fully off-set.
War Supplemental Likely Stuck in the
Senate for Weeks, Harkin Says
By Brian Friel, CQ Staff, July 13, 2010
• The fiscal 2010 supplemental appropriations bill
including money for military action in Iraq and
Afghanistan is likely to remain stuck in a Senate logjam
for weeks, a senior Senate appropriator said Tuesday.
• Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., said he will not support the domestic
funding the House added. “We’d like to fund the troops
and not have a bunch of add-ons that don’t have the
emergency status that these kinds of bills ordinarily
require,” he said.
• Harkin said he will fight to keep the teacher funding in
the bill. “It seems to me the Republicans are drawing a
line and saying no money for teachers,” Harkin said.
“That’s an interesting position to take
Senate Republicans Call for Return to a
Streamlined War Supplemental
July 14, 2010 – 8:11 p.m., By Kerry Young, CQ Staff
• A dozen Republicans helped Senate Democrats pass a supplemental
fiscal 2010 war funding bill in May. But their support does not to
extend to the version of the supplemental the House passed earlier
this month.
• In a related development, education groups who previously differed
on some provisions of the House bill have set aside their differences
and plan a united appeal to senators, asking them to find ways to
fund the $10 billion for school aid.
• “Because some have concerns with the education offsets in the
House-passed supplemental, we urge the Senate to work with the
House and the administration to craft a package that can garner the
needed votes for swift passage,” the two largest education unions,
the National Education Association and the American Federation of
Teachers (AFT), said in a July 15 letter.
The Week Ahead: Senate to Tackle Education Jobs
Aid, Energy, Kagan Confirmation Before Recess
By Niels Lesniewski, CQ Staff
• On Monday evening, the Senate will take a
procedural vote on a $26.1 billion measure to
provide education jobs funding and Federal
Medical Assistance Percentage (FMAP) aid to
states. State and local government officials
have campaigned for the aid to prevent layoffs
of public-sector employees. The measure is
fully offset with a variety of spending
rescissions.
Funding Proposal for Labor, HHS and Education
Reflects Anxiety About the Deficit
By Ben Weyl, CQ Staff July 29, 2010 – 9:06 p.m
• The draft bill would provide $169.6 billion in
discretionary funding — a $5.9 billion, or 4
percent, increase from the level for the
current fiscal year, but $986 million less than
Obama requested.
Funding Proposal for Labor, HHS and Education
Reflects Anxiety About the Deficit
By Ben Weyl, CQ Staff July 29, 2010 – 9:06 p.m
• The bill would provide $74.6 billion to the
Department of Health and Human Services, $300
million more than the administration requested,
and $66.4 billion to the Education Department, a
$937 million reduction from the president’s
request. By trimming President Obama’s
education priorities in favor of expanded health
care spending, the president’s signature
education initiative, Race to the Top, which
provides competitive education grants to states,
would receive $675 million — half of what he
requested in his fiscal 2011 budget proposal.
Funding Proposal for Labor, HHS and Education
Reflects Anxiety About the Deficit
By Ben Weyl, CQ Staff July 29, 2010 – 9:06 p.m
• Neither the funding bill nor the energy
measure is expected to clear the 60-vote
threshold required to limit debate in the
Senate. If that happens, the bills are likely to
be pulled from the floor.
Money management Bomb Buried in
Child Nutrition House and Senate Bills
• “If the program directors of every federal
program can go to the Hill and get regulatory
authority to vary the government-wide directives
of OMB on grant management and cost
accounting, then the Title I directors, the special
education directors, the voc education directors,
and of course the homeless directors will want
their own special regulatory authority -- really
bad precedent…” Jeff Simering, Council of Great City
Schools