Trump’s pick for Education Department’s top lawyer in the hot seat Presented by Comcast

With help from Mel Leonor and Caitlin Emma

TRUMP’S PICK FOR EDUCATION DEPARTMENT’S TOP LAWYER IN THE HOT SEAT: Senate Democrats are furious with Secretary Betsy DeVos’ plans to rewrite Obama-era efforts designed to protect defrauded for-profit college students and campus sexual assault victims — and they plan to air their grievances with the attorney nominated as the agency’s general counsel during his confirmation hearing this morning. If confirmed, Carlos G. Muñiz will be the agency’s top attorney and will decide which school legal battles to pursue. Kimberly Hefling has everything you need to know about his confirmation hearing.


— The Senate panel Muñiz faces this morning is chock full of high-profile Democrats who made DeVos’ life hell during the confirmation process. Muñiz is the first Education Department nominee to appear before the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee since DeVos, and the Democrats want to pin him down on whether he supports DeVos’ views. While it’s unlikely the Democrats can derail Muñiz’s confirmation, their success rallying opposition to DeVos during the confirmation process has emboldened them to follow the same playbook. That will make it harder for the department to make changes Democrats oppose.

— Muñiz, meanwhile, brings his own history to the hearing. He has done consulting or legal work on behalf of a for-profit college and both Florida State University and the University of Florida in their handling of high-profile sexual assault cases. Democrats also could showcase Muñiz’s work as an adviser to Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi when she opted not to go after Trump University, a controversial real estate seminar owned by Donald Trump.

— Muñiz has earned praise from high-profile Republicans — including the chairman of the committee that will question him this morning. In a statement to POLITICO, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) said that during a recent meeting, the two discussed the Every Student Succeeds Act. “I’m glad Congress has a nominee in Mr. Muñiz who will help advise Secretary DeVos to implement the law as Congress wrote it — which will be especially critical as the department continues to review state plans for how they spend their Title I funding,” Alexander said. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Muñiz’s former boss, said in a statement to POLITICO that Muñiz has an “exceptional record of public service” and is a “very fine attorney.”

— The hearing starts at 10 a.m. ET in room 430 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building. Muñiz will be joined at the hearing by two nominees to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Janet Dhillon and Daniel Gade. Watch a livestream here.

GOOD TUESDAY MORNING AND WELCOME TO MORNING EDUCATION. Here’s some food for thought: Millennials spend $96 billion a year on ramen, craft beer and other food and yet more Millennial households are in poverty than households headed by any other generation. Tips? Feedback? Let me know: [email protected] or @BenjaminEW. Share event listings: [email protected]. And follow us on Twitter: @Morning_Edu and @POLITICOPro.

NEW THIS MORNING: MOST VOTERS SUPPORT FREE COLLEGE: The majority of voters surveyed would support a proposal to make four-year public colleges and universities tuition free, according to a new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll. Thirty eight percent of registered voters said they would strongly support such a proposal and another 25 percent said they would somewhat support it. Just 16 percent was strongly opposed and 13 percent was somewhat opposed. Nine percent was undecided. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points. Free college is, unsurprisingly, more popular among those who describe themselves as liberal than conservative — though 40 percent of conservatives said they’d support the proposal — and it enjoyed strong support from younger voters.

‘FIRST STEP’ FOR TRUMP ADMINISTRATION WITH HBCUS: The White House’s appointment of a director for a federal initiative aimed at boosting historically black colleges and universities is “the first step” toward repairing the administration’s relationship with HBCUs, said Rep. Alma Adams (D-N.C.), the co-chairwoman of the Bipartisan HBCU Caucus. The White House formally announced that Johnathan Holifield, a former NFL player and economic development consultant, is the next executive director of the White House Initiative on HBCUs. Adams, who has been a critic of the administration’s approach to the schools, said she is hopeful that with a leader in place “we’ll get past talking the talk and maybe we’ll see somebody walking the walk.”

— Holifield, however, has no ties to HBCUs, Adams pointed out. “A lot of folks really don’t know a lot about him. That may or may not mean something,” Adams said. “We did offer to assist in this process, but you know, I guess they did what they felt they needed to do.” Holifield told a group of HBCU students and leaders at a White House summit on Monday that, although he didn’t attend an HBCU, he feels an affinity for the schools. Holifield said HBCUs are the "most entrepreneurial institutions on the face of the earth." He defines entrepreneurship, he said, as "the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled. … It is a way of life. The mission work of HBCUs is an expression of entrepreneurship."

— HBCU Week continues with events sponsored by the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, including meetings between HBCU presidents and members of Congress on Wednesday and a series of panels Thursday featuring HBCU presidents and executives from major corporations including Apple, Microsoft, Bank of America, the NFL, Wells Fargo and Toyota.

LIGHTS, INTERNET, ACTION: The share of public school districts with connectivity that supports 100 kbps per student of Internet access is now 94 percent — an increase from 88 percent last year that means 4.3 million more students now have the minimum recommended bandwidth to engage in digital learning. That’s according to data released Tuesday by EducationSuperHighway, a San Francisco-based nonprofit working to bring internet access to classrooms across the U.S. According to the group’s report, 97 percent of schools in the U.S. have a fiber optic connection to deliver high-speed broadband, and 88 percent report having sufficient Wi-Fi in their classrooms — both improvements over last year. The data also shows progress toward the school connectivity goals of the Federal Communications Commission, which wants those figures to hit 100 percent in the near future.

— “We continue to make terrific progress,” said Evan Marwell, founder and CEO of EducationSuperHighway. Marwell said connecting the remaining 6.5 million students to broadband in their classrooms could be largely achieved by getting school districts to obtain the service rates comparable districts in their states already receive. Sometimes this takes little more than a phone call, he said. Marwell said he is less optimistic about bringing fiber optic connections to all U.S. schools because of regulatory slough at the FCC when it comes to approving fiber projects.

— Still, school connectivity is on the radar of state and federal policymakers. Forty-five governors have made this a public priority, while 33 have moved toward increasing school connectivity, according to EducationSuperHighway. Marwell also said thousands of students have benefited from the FCC’s 2014 boost of the E-rate program, which provides subsidies to school districts wishing to expand their telecommunications and internet access.

COLLEGES SAY TRAVEL BAN ‘FUNDAMENTALLY ALTERED’ PERCEPTION OF U.S. HIGHER EDUCATION: The American Council on Education, the nation’s leading higher education lobby group, argues in a friend of the court brief it plans to file with the Supreme Court that the Trump administration’s travel ban has harmed America’s reputation in a global education market. “From the moment it was signed, prospective students expressed serious concerns about attending American colleges and universities,” the brief says. “Faculty recruits were similarly deterred from accepting teaching and research positions. And scholars based abroad pulled out of academic conferences in the United States, either because they were directly affected by the EO or because they are concerned about the EO’s harmful impact on academic discourse and research worldwide.” Read it in full here.

NO BUDGET, MORE PROBLEMS FOR CONNECTICUT SCHOOLS: A Republican budget proposal cleared by the majority-Democrat state legislature over the weekend is heading for a veto from Democratic Gov. Dannel Malloy — which will mean more than 100 school districts must brace for funding cuts come Oct. 1. That’s when Connecticut public schools are due for state education dollars, funding they’re unlikely to get unless state lawmakers approve a budget by the start of the coming month. In the absence of one, Malloy plans to disburse available dollars to the state’s neediest schools, leaving 54 districts with significant funding reductions and 85 districts with no state funding at all.

— “ What we have told superintendents and board of education members for months has been, there is no easy answer to this budget crisis, and it’s going to be bad,” said Michael Morton, a spokesman for the School District Finance Project, a nonpartisan group advocating for public school funding. “There are going to be cuts and the stalemate will continue. Prepare for the worst.”

— The veto will be welcomed by public universities in the state, whose funding faces the ax under the Republican budget proposal. University of Connecticut President Susan Herbst said the flagship would see more than $300 million in spending reductions during the next two years. “That level of cut is unprecedented and would be devastating for UConn, higher education in Connecticut, and the state as a whole,” she said in a statement.

— Malloy said Monday he’ll continue to work toward “a budget that is balanced and that will put the state on the right path.” He added that while he understands “enough about the bill already to know that I will veto it,” he’ll nevertheless review the Republican proposal in the coming days. More from the Hartford Courant.

ACCEPTANCE LETTERS ARRIVE EARLY IN SOUTH DAKOTA: South Dakota high school seniors who achieve a level 3 or 4 on their 11th grade Smarter Balanced state assessments in English and math, or who achieve an ACT composite score of 18, will be automatically admitted into the state’s public universities and technical institutes. South Dakota education officials announced the admissions initiative Monday.

— “We are alerting our public high school seniors to the great opportunities available to them, with a goal of encouraging more to attend the exceptional public universities and technical institutes here in our state,” said Paul Turman, system vice president for academic affairs for the South Dakota Board of Regents. “This is a way to retain our best students and build a vibrant workforce firmly rooted in South Dakota.” Students who want to take advantage will need to submit an application to the school of their choice, pay the application fee and send in their transcripts by Dec. 1 of their senior year.

REPORT ROLL CALL

— High-stakes testing under No Child Left Behind didn’t have much of an effect on whether students felt anxious, or had trouble paying attention or behaving in school, according to a new study published by the American Educational Research Association.

— The Education Commission of the States, a nonprofit, is out with a 50-state review of how state-specific teacher licensing requirements affect the teacher labor market.

SYLLABUS

— ‘The strange world of sorority rush consultants’: Town & Country.

— Massachusetts Democrats hope to use last year’s charter school campaign to unseat Republican Gov. Charlie Baker in next year’s election: Boston.com.

— South Dakota’s governor is accusing one school district of scamming the state by inviting home-school students to visit on the day enrollment is counted: The Associated Press.

— ‘Homeless and in college. Then Harvey hit.’: NPR.

— The student group that invited Milo Yiannopoulos and others for a so-called ‘Free Speech Week’ at Berkeley says it will host the event whether it can get indoor venues on campus or not: The Washington Post.

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