Trump wants $3B cut to education this year Presented by Comcast

With help from Caitlin Emma, Kimberly Hefling, Helena Bottemiller Evich and Sarah Ferris

TRUMP WANTS A $3 BILLION CUT TO EDUCATION THIS YEAR: After proposing a $9.2 billion cut to the Education Department’s budget for next year, the President Donald Trump is now calling on Congress to slash nearly $3 billion in education funding for the remaining five months of this fiscal year, according to a document obtained by POLITICO. The White House on Friday sent House and Senate appropriators detailed instructions on how they should craft spending legislation to fund the federal government beyond April 28, when the current stopgap spending bill expires.


— The Trump proposal seeks cuts across many federal agencies, but calls for the deepest reductions at the Education Department. The administration proposes $1.3 billion in cuts from the Pell grant program’s surplus this year — on top of the $3.9 billion proposed cut for next fiscal year. The CBO estimates the program will operate with a $10.6 billion surplus next year, but advocates for student aid and Congressional Democrats have blasted efforts to “raid” the Pell surplus and direct that money outside of financial aid programs.

— The White House is seeking to slash in half Title II, Part A funding for the current year. The program helps boost teacher and principal quality through professional development and also funds efforts to reduce class sizes. “Funding is poorly targeted and supports practices that are not evidence-based,” the administration wrote in the document. Trump’s “skinny budget” for next fiscal year called for eliminating the $2.4 billion program entirely.

— Also on the chopping block for elimination this year: A $47 million program that provides grants to school districts and other organizations to support physical education programs and a $49 million competitive grant program that provides money for elementary and secondary school counseling. The White House is also proposing to nix a $152 million program to boost math and science instruction and a $189 million program called Striving Readers that provides competitive grants to states to improve literacy instruction. All of those programs were eliminated by the Every Student Succeeds Act, which created a new large state block grant for those types of support and enrichment activities. But that grant program isn’t currently funded under the continuing resolution.

— The Trump plan calls for reductions this year to other agencies that affect education: National Institutes of Health (3.8 percent cut); National Science Foundation (5 percent cut); NASA (nearly 1 percent cut); National Endowment for the Arts (10 percent cut); National Endowment for the Humanities (10 percent cut); and educational and cultural exchange programs at the State Department (23.7 percent cut).

— But the request for cuts — which would be absorbed by federal agencies between April 28 and Sept. 30 — could prove to be too little, too late from the White House, report POLITICO’s Helena Bottemiller Evich and Sarah Ferris. Top Congressional appropriators have indicated that they’re prepared to reject Trump's calls to gut programs they deem important – and some have said the White House weigh in too late in the appropriations process to affect the outcome for the current fiscal year.

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HAPPENING TODAY: Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and Ivanka Trump will join students at an event this morning to promote STEM education at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. “They’ll discuss empowering young women to pursue STEM-related careers and introduce a viewing of the acclaimed film Hidden Figures,” the Education Department said.

FALLOUT FROM SCOTUS’ SPECIAL EDUCATION RULING: A unanimous Supreme Court ruling on special education last week could prompt school districts to reexamine their programs and how they measure progress for students with disabilities. Possible outcomes include higher costs for already-strapped states and school districts, and increased litigation as more parents sue districts over what they see as inadequate public education for their children.

— The Supreme Court endorsed a higher standard that schools must meet to comply with the federal requirement that students with disabilities receive a “free appropriate public education.” While the court doesn’t lay out a bright line new standard, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that an “educational program must be appropriately ambitious” in light of a child’s circumstances — “just as advancement from grade to grade is appropriately ambitious for most children in the regular classroom.” That contrasts with the high court’s 1982 ruling that an individualized education program should provide students with “some educational benefit.”

— Some special education advocates champion the ruling as a major victory which will push school districts to better serve students with disabilities. Others say the bar was low to begin with — and it’s still low with the new standard. Groups representing school districts, superintendents and school boards, meanwhile, argue they’re already crafting individualized education programs, or IEPs to meet the new standard.

— “AASA is fairly confident that the vast majority of school districts are already crafting IEPs that enable a child to make progress in light of the child’s circumstances,” AASA: The School Superintendent’s Association wrote in a blog post. “That said, districts should take care to make sure that they can provide ‘a cogent and responsive explanation’ for the IEPs they produce, particularly for students who are not expected to perform on grade-level.”

— Groups seek more federal funding: Groups like AASA, the National PTA, the National School Boards Association and teachers unions are using the ruling to call for a greater federal investment in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Formula grants through IDEA, the second largest source of federal education funding, have been flat funded at nearly $13 billion for several years. Trump proposed the same in his “skinny budget” last month. Yet when the law that became IDEA was enacted in the 1970s, Congress promised to pay 40% of the average cost of teaching a student with disabilities, the groups recently wrote congressional appropriators.

— “While special education funding has received significant increases over the past 17 years, federal funding has leveled off recently and has even been cut,” the groups said. “The closest the federal government has come to reaching its 40 percent commitment was 18 percent in 2005.” Federal funding is typically only a small part of the total money that districts spend on students with disabilities. The largest share comes from sources like state formula funding and local taxpayers.

— But more federal special education funding is all but off the table. The Trump administration proposed a 13 percent cut to the Education Department’s $68 billion budget while proposing a $1.4 billion investment in school choice, including charter schools and private school options. And a Republican-controlled Congress is still operating under budget caps placed on the federal government in 2011. Still, some Democrats like Reps. Jared Polis of Colorado and Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, a ranking member of the House Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Appropriations Subcommittee, are pushing for it.

— “The federal government only provides about 16 percent of the total funding for programs serving students with disabilities,” DeLauro said, “which is far below the 40 percent called for by law. The equal protection of civil rights, including the rights of students with disabilities, is a basic function of the U.S. Department of Education.”

LAWMAKERS URGE DEVOS TO HELP STUDENTS AFFECTED BY DISABLED FAFSA TOOL: The Republican and Democratic leadership of the Congressional education committees and a bipartisan group of 39 other lawmakers are urging DeVos to take steps to alleviate the problems caused by the federal government decision earlier this month to disable the IRS Data Retrieval Tool. The lawmakers, led by Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Reps. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) and Bobby Scott (D-Va.), sent a letter to DeVos on Monday asking her agency to “provide prominent notice and guidance to students, parents and borrowers” about the unavailable tool and communicate directly with states.

— The lawmakers also asked DeVos to allow aid applicants to “use signed copies of their tax returns to satisfy the document requirements of verification” while the Data Retrieval Tool is down. When working, the tool automatically fills out a student’s tax information on the FAFSA and reduces the chance they will have to go through a secondary verification process. The letter also calls on DeVos to ensure the department’s call center can handle the increased call volume from the outage. The Education Department did not respond to a request for comment on the letter.

HERITAGE FOUNDATION RELEASES 2018 BUDGET PROPOSAL: The conservative think tank that has the ear of the Trump administration and many Congressional Republicans is out this morning with a new budget blueprint for the 2018 fiscal year. The plan, which is coming out before Trump is expected to release his full budget in May, calls for deep cuts to education-related programs with the goal of reducing federal involvement in both K-12 and higher education.

— Among Heritage’s proposals: Eliminate the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act’s job-training programs, which involves many community colleges; eliminate the Corporation for National and Community Service, which supports AmeriCorps; and reduce funding for Head Start with the intention of eliminating it completely over the next decade. The think tank also proposes to halve the budget for the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights and eliminate competitive and project grant programs under the Every Student Succeeds Act. Other formula grant programs for K-12 education would be slashed by 10 percent under the plan.

— The budget proposal also proposes getting rid of the Obama administration’s “gainful employment” regulation, which judges career college programs based on the ratio of graduates’ student loan debt relative to their earnings; switching to fair-value accounting for how the government tallies the cost of federal student loans; and making “major reforms to accreditation, including decoupling federal financing from the ossified accreditation system.” Read the full document here.

DEVOS MEETS WITH FLORIDA ATTORNEY GENERAL PAM BONDI: In a sign she might be bound for the White House, Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi made a special trip Monday to meet with the president and two Cabinet secretaries to talk about children’s issues — with fellow Floridians and former football greats Tony Dungy and Derrick Brooks in tow. Bondi’s visit, which included meetings with DeVos and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson, may suggest she’s testing the waters for an as-yet-unnamed job in Trump’s White House before her term expires in 2019. POLITICO Florida’s Marc Caputo has the story here.

CONGRESSMAN SEEKS FEDERAL CIVIL RIGHTS INQUIRY INTO SOME VIRGINIA SCHOOLS: Rep. A. Donald McEachin (D-Va.) on Monday called on the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights investigate racial disparities in public school suspensions in his district, which spans the greater Richmond, Va. area. McEachin said in a letter to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos that he was responding to a Richmond Times-Dispatch report that found that African-American students with disabilities in Chesterfield and Henrico were, respectively, nearly four times and 6.7 times more likely to face long-term suspension from school compared with other students with disabilities. Read McEachin’s letter here.

STUDY LINKS DROP IN HOME PRICES TO STUDENT LOAN DEFAULTS: A new paper this week by the National Bureau of Economic Research finds that the drop in home prices during the recession drove as much as 32 percent of the increase in student loan defaults during that time. The study by two New York University professors — Constantine Yannelis and Holger M. Mueller — also finds that federal income-based repayment programs helped reduce defaults and provided “student loan borrowers with valuable insurance against adverse income shocks” associated with plummeting home prices. Read the study here.

ANALYSIS: NORTH CAROLINA’S ‘BATHROOM BILL’ WILL COST STATE $3 BILLION: North Carolina’s controversial law that requires people to use the restrooms in public buildings -- including schools and college campuses – that match with the sex listed on their birth certificates will cost the state billions in lost business, according to a new analysis by The Associated Press. The report says that the economic hit to the state as businesses cancel plans to expand and as the NCAA avoids hosting championships could top $3.76 billion over a dozen years. Read it here.

THE U.S. COMMISSION ON CIVIL RIGHTS GOES SOCIAL: The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has a new Facebook page. Catherine Lhamon, the commission chair, said in an email to supporters that the commission plans to post commission activities and positions on the site and on its Twitter feed.

MOVERS AND SHAKERS

— Amy Stuart Wells, professor of sociology and education at Teachers College, Columbia University, has been voted president-elect of the American Educational Research Association.

SYLLABUS

— As budget cuts loom, NIH’s director is seen as its chief protector: The Chronicle of Higher Education.

— D.C. Public Schools launch effort to help girls of color, but not an all-girls school: The Washington Post.

— North Carolina state lawmakers advance bill that would allow concealed permit holders to carry handguns on private K-12 school property where church services are also held: The Associated Press.

— Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy says he’s lost faith in the state’s nationally-touted school desegregation efforts: The Hartford Courant.

— Massachusetts plans to significantly expand early college programs: The Springfield Republican.

— Texas braces for another STAAR testing season, hoping to avoid last year’s glitches: The Dallas Morning News.

— Wisconsin State Schools Superintendent Tony Evers raises two and a half times as much money as challenger Lowell Holtz ahead of the April 4 election: The Associated Press.

— Some colleges are offering to help their graduates with loan payments: The Wall Street Journal.

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