At a speech today at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, Education Secretary Arne Duncan outlined the Administration’s priorities for a higher education reauthorization.The bulk of the remarks focused on affordability, which has been a focus for the Obama Administration for nearly his whole tenure. Secretary Duncan reiterated the dual goals of paying for college and limiting college debt. He also focused on degree completion and the Administration’s goal that those that start college, finish college. Part of this formulation will be colleges and universities putting “skin in the game” and attaching federal student loan funding to the outputs of institutes of higher education, focusing on degree completion and graduates who get jobs. States will also have skin in the game and will be called upon to stop the disinvestment of higher education.
Category: Administration
Senate Passes ESEA
Today, the Senate finished its debate and votes on amendments to S. 1177, the Every Child Achieves Act, a bill to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). In total, of the 79 amendments that were voted on, 66 were adopted and 13 failed.
The Senate has passed a bipartisan overhaul of the long-expired No Child Left Behind education law by a vote of 81-17.
The bill would continue to require annual testing in reading and math but restores power over low-performing schools back to states.
The partisan House-passed version, which passed earlier this month, goes to an extreme that Democrats and the White House have condemned. The most contentious point of the House version is that it would allow federal dollars to follow students to another public school of their choice.
To devise a version that can become law, lawmakers will have to satisfy White House concerns about the bill’s protections for poor and minority students and House GOP demands that the bill diminish the federal role in education.
White House Memo on Science Priorities for FY2017
The White House’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Shaun Donovan, and OSTP Director, John Holdren, sent their annual joint FY2017 priorities memo to the science agency heads.
The memo urges agency leaders to take the priorities into consideration as they begin to prepare their FY2017 budget proposals for OMB. Per the memo, “Agency proposals aligned with multi-agency R&D priorities and demonstrating interagency coordination are more likely to be prioritized in FY2017 Budget deliberations.”
House Turns to 21st Century Cures
The House will consider HR 6, the 21st Century Cures Act. The bipartisan bill modifies current federal processes involving medical research, developing drugs and other treatments, and testing and approving those drugs and treatments in an effort to accelerate the development and delivery of cures to diseases and medical conditions. It reauthorizes the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for three years and includes numerous initiatives to promote medical research and attract young scientists, and it reauthorizes Food and Drug Administration (FDA) activities for five years and modifies elements of FDA’s drug and medical device review and approval process to accelerate the approval and distribution of new drugs and medical devices for diseases and conditions that don’t currently have treatments. It provides $9.3 billion in fully offset mandatory spending for a five-year “Innovation Fund” to provide additional funding to the two agencies, with NIH to receive $1.75 billion a year for biomedical research and the FDA to receive $110 million a year for Cures development activities.
The measure has bipartisan and Administrative support.
The House will begin to consider the measure today and pass it by Friday.
House and Senate Consider Elementary Education Proposals
Dueling education proposals are up in the House and the Senate this week. Eight years after No Child Left Behind (NCLB) officially expired, congressional leaders want to pass a rewrite of the main federal K-12 education law (ESEA) that can get President Obama’s signature. Today, the Senate will begin consideration of S 1177, Every Child Achieves Act of 2015, which reauthorizes the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). The bill passed the Senate education committee in April by a unanimous vote. The Senate is expected to start debate on the bill this afternoon.
Also today, the House Committee on Rules will meet to consider HR 5, Student Success Act, which is the House bill to reauthorize ESEA. In late February, the House postponed consideration of HR 5 after 43 amendments were debated. Floor consideration will likely resume on Wednesday or Thursday this week under a new rule allowing additional amendments to be made in order.
The bill being considered in the House would transfer far more power away from the federal government than the Senate bill, which passed unanimously out of the HELP committee after bipartisan negotiations between Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-TN) and ranking member Patty Murray (D-WA). Both bills explicitly prohibit the Education secretary from influencing state academic standards.
As Congress debates education this week, Republicans will try to highlight how far to the right they have moved on the issue since NCLB first passed. Even though the law significantly expanded the federal government’s role, only six Republican senators opposed it in 2001. Keep in mind that, running for president just five years before the law was approved, then-Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole supported eliminating the Department of Education altogether. However, President George W. Bush pulled his party along with him by pushing for passage of NCLB.
While it is unclear which bill will become law, it seems certain that any legislation that emerges from Congress would dramatically curtail the federal government’s involvement in state standards.
Additionally, it is a very telling, and productive sign, that both the House and Senate can each consider a bill considered such a political hot-potato and essentially a nonstarter last year.