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: Higher Education
Senate Hearing on HEA
The Senate will be holding a hearing on the HEA this Wednesday entitled Reauthorizing the Higher Education Act: Exploring Barriers and Opportunities within Innovation. The hearing will be held at 10 am on Wednesday, July 22.
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.