Education Budget

In mid-August the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its 2009 Budget Options, a bi-annual publication estimating the cost or savings associated with numerous possible changes to federal programs. Last November Ed Money Watch discussed problems with a proposal to change the Child Nutrition Program (CNP) analyzed in previous Budget Options (2003, 2005, and 2007). While the Child Nutrition Program proposal analyzed in this year's publication differs significantly from the one included in the past, it still misses out on an important improvement to the program - including Medicaid data as a method of identifying eligible students.

The National Child Nutrition Program provides free and reduced priced meals to low-income children through a per-meal federal subsidy based on family income. Students from families with incomes below 130 percent of the poverty line receive free meals, students from families with incomes below 185 percent of poverty receive reduced-price meals, and all other students receive full-price meals. Student income levels are established either through TANF (the federal welfare program) or food stamp data or paper application.

Tomorrow is the deadline to submit comments on the Department of Education's proposed guidelines for Race to the Top, the new grant program created under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.  Secretary Duncan released draft guidelines for RTT last month, and with more than 650 comments submitted so far, he is getting plenty of feedback on his vision.

Race to the Top gives the Secretary unprecedented discretion to dole out $4.3 billion in grants to states over the next year.  But the money doesn't come free. States have to be looking pretty good in Duncan's eyes even before they apply for the money. What's more, if they want their applications to have any shot of being competitive, they will have to show that they are already making progress on many fronts, including working toward common standards, allowing for the creation of more charter schools and using longitudinal data systems to track students' performance.

At Ed Money Watch, we discuss and analyze major issues affecting education funding. In our Friday News Roundup, we try to highlight interesting stories that might otherwise get overlooked. These stories emphasize how federal and state policy changes can affect local schools and districts.

Pennsylvania Budget Impasses Leaves Grant Recipients in Limbo

Schools Dealing with Oklahoma's 5 Percent Budget Cut

GAO Releases Teacher Quality Report

Early education advocates in Illinois are breathing a little easier this month after Gov. Patrick Quinn restored over $85 million in funds for early childhood programs that the Illinois State Board of Education had eliminated during deliberations on the 2010 budget a few weeks ago. The board's cuts represented more than 32 percent of the 2009 budget and would have had disastrous results for state-funded preschool programs. But even with the governor's reparation, the early childhood budget will lose 10 percent of its budget -- a loss which could affect thousands of children in the state.

Just when you thought that the debate over health care reform couldn't possibly devolve any further, Chuck Norris comes karate-chopping onto the scene.

The "martial arts champ, action star, TV hero, and media phenomenon" has just blogged about "Dirty Secret No. 1 in Obamacare" and the honor goes to the home visitation proposal that provides support to new mothers and their babies. It is, he says, "about the government's coming into homes and usurping parental rights over child care and development."

Funny, we thought it was about giving children every chance to grow up strong and healthy. Last we checked, helping mothers help their children was a pretty universal family value.

Among his remarks: "Children belong to their parents, not the government. And the parents ought to have the right -- and government support -- to parent them without the fed's mandates, education or intervention in our homes."

School districts around the country are engaging in some tricky budget tactics to make ends meet during these tough economic times. Current teacher salary schedules, which provide salary increases in "steps" based on experience and credentials, provide obstacles to simply lowering teacher compensation to prevent layoffs. While some districts have been able to use stimulus funds to rehire previously laid-off teachers, many have not been so lucky.

A recently released study by Marguerite Roza from the Center on Reinventing Public Education outlines several options districts can use to balance their budgets. While these provide alternatives to significant layoffs, they often require approval by local teachers unions - a difficult task. Nevertheless, news sources suggest that districts are successfully engaging in many of these options.

Earlier this week, Ed Money Watch compared House and Senate versions of the fiscal year 2010 Labor - HHS - Education appropriations bills and showed that there are significant differences among the President's request and House- and Senate-proposed education funding levels. These funding differences might spell the end of the Even Start program when the 2010 appropriation becomes law later this year.

Even Start is a small education program ($66.5 million in fiscal year 2009) that has been under fire since early in the Bush Administration. It is intended to integrate early education, adult education, and parenting education into "family literacy" programs in order to improve educational opportunities for low-income children and parents.

Evaluations of the program's effectiveness have been mixed, which prompted the Bush Administration to recommend year after year that Congress eliminate the program. The often-cited Third National Even Start Evaluation: Program Impacts and Implications for Improvement of 2003 concluded that Even Start participants did not make significantly greater gains than those in a comparison group not receiving services. However, many Even Start supporters and advocates have argued that this evaluation is now outdated, and it relies on too small a sample to represent the entire Even Start program. They also claim that the program's results cannot be adequately measured through quantitative evaluations.

Funding legislation for most federal education programs has been advancing in both the House and Senate in the past weeks. The fiscal year 2010 Labor-HHS-Education appropriations bill has been approved by the full House and has been cleared by the Appropriations Committee in the Senate. It appears that the full Senate will take up the bill when it returns in September from recess. Then, both Chambers will still need to work out any differences among their respective versions before the appropriations bill can be sent to the President for his signature. Fiscal year 2010 begins October 1^st, 2009, although much of the education funding provided in the bill is intended for the 2010-11 school year. 

The table below compares proposed 2010 funding levels for key federal programs in the President's request and the House and Senate versions of the Labor-HHS-Education appropriations bill. Note that the Senate has not yet publicly released its version, so only limited information is available for the table below.

As Congress determines how to spend federal dollars in the next fiscal year, a significant federal investment in advancing preschoolers’ literacy skills – Early Reading First – appears to be in jeopardy.

On Thursday the Senate Appropriations Committee marked up its version of the fiscal year 2010 Labor-HHS-Education appropriations bill, which includes funding for major federal early childhood programs. Last week, we reported on the House Appropriations Committee’s version of the same legislation.

When it comes to early childhood programs, the two bills have a lot in common. Both would hold funding for the Child Care and Development Block Grant to its fiscal year 2009 level of $2.1 billion, and both would provide a modest $122 million increase in funding for Head Start, raising total Head Start funding to $7.2 million.

In May, when President Obama released his budget proposal for fiscal year 2010, he requested funds -- $124 million for the first year -- to create a federal program to send nurses to the homes of low-income women who are pregnant or caring for babies. The idea was to scale up fledgling programs that, according to randomized and controlled studies, improve women's and children's health and well-being and can reduce healthcare costs in the long run.

Home visitation doesn't appear in the Labor-HHS-Education appropriations bill moving through Congress this month; it was proposed to reside on the "mandatory" side of the funding column and therefore not be subject to the year-to-year appropriations process. But it does have a spot -- for the moment at least -- in the massive health-care reform bills being shaped in fits and starts this summer.