Secretary Duncan & Key Senators Seek to Avoid Edu-Jobs Bill Collision with Obama Ed Agenda
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July 13, 2010
With the Senate’s return from recess July 12, lawmakers are working with the Secretary Duncan to figure out how to pay for the edu-jobs bill that won’t run afoul of a White House veto over different funding priorities. The Obama administration threatened to veto the measure if it includes $800 million in cuts to its key K-12 initiatives.
The Cuts
The revised, “Keeping Educators Working Act” takes aim at three of the administration’s most-prized education priorities. Most notably, it would cut $500 million from the $4.35 billion Race to the Top program, which rewards states for making progress on certain education redesign initiatives.
It also would cut $200 million from the Teacher Incentive Fund, which doles out grants to support pay-for-performance programs, and $100 million intended to help start new charter schools. The TIF received $400 million in fiscal year 2010, plus $200 million in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the economic-stimulus package passed last year. The charter program received $265 million in federal funding.
The money cut from the education programs would go toward a $10 billion fund aimed at helping states keep what congressional supporters say would be an estimated 140,000 teachers on the job and toward providing nearly $5 billion to help close a major shortfall in the Pell Grant program, which helps low-income students gain access to college.
The U.S. House of Representatives approved the legislation July 1. The measure passed as an amendment to a military spending bill that had already been approved by the Senate. The amendment was approved on a vote of 239 to 182 July 1, with one member voting present. The vote generally split along party lines.
The Controversy
The Obama administration has voiced support of the goal of averting layoffs, but wants Congress to find another way to pay for it, Peter Cunningham, a spokesman for U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said the week of July 5. President Obama advocated for the bill personally in mid-June, sending a letter to June 12 to congressional leaders asking them to pass legislation to stave off what some warn could be 300,000 educator layoffs (President Advocates for Keeping Educators Working Act, June 17, 2010). But President Obama has made it clear that he wants Congress to look to funds other than his signature education initiative—and he is willing to reject the entire jobs package if other funding sources are not chosen.
Rep. David R. Obey, the House Appropriations Chairman and the author of the bill, has made no apologies for the education offsets he chose, which were part of a broader package of $16 billion in cuts to pay for the jobs fund, and other new domestic spending.
"The secretary of education is somewhat unhappy," Obey acknowledged. "One of the secretary's objections, evidently, is the fact that last year in the stimulus we provided him with a $4.3 billion pot of money to use virtually any way he wanted to stimulate educational progress--$4.3 billion. He has spent a small amount of that." Even if this legislation cuts $500 million, "that still leaves him with $3.2 billion that he can spend any way his department wants. ... The secretary is somehow offended because he only has $3.2 billion to pass around," Obey said. "To suggest that we're being unduly harsh is a joke."
Rep. Obey’s staff also released a memo to reporters, explaining that the proposed cuts would be for new grants and that no program would lose existing funds because of the reductions. The memo said that Rep. Obey placed a higher priority on saving teachers’ jobs than on allocating new, education redesign-oriented grants. And the memo stated that the programs could see their funding restored in better economic times.
The Compromise?
Sen. Evan Bayh, (Ind.), Sen. Michael Bennet, (Colo.), a former Denver schools superintendent and an ally of the administration on education policy, and a group of 11 other Senators are working to identify alternative ways to pay for the jobs package.
"The proposed education cuts are unacceptable," the group wrote in a letter to Sen. Daniel Inouye, (Hawaii), the Senate Appropriations Committee chairman. "Choosing between preserving teacher jobs and supporting vital education reforms is a false choice and would set a dangerous precedent. By reducing promised funding for these important reforms, Congress would be pulling the rug out from under the efforts of thousands of communities around the country working to improve their schools."
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan spent July 9 in Washington state stumping for the edujobs bill, alongside Sen. Patty Murray, (Wash.), a key member of Congress who hasn't always been eye-to-eye with the administration on K-12 policy issues. If Duncan wants to get edujobs through the Senate without those "wrong offsets," he may need help from folks like Murray, who sits on both the Senate education committee and the Senate appropriations subcommittee that oversees K-12 spending, and has many fans in traditional education organizations.
The $10 billion would be a significant decrease from the $23 billion that Rep. David R. Obey, (Wis.), and Sen. Tom Harkin, (Iowa), initially sought to stave off school staff reductions. Conservative Democrats balked at the $23 billion price tag and demanded that the sponsors make other cuts to cover the cost (Keeping Educators Working Act On Life Support But Not Dead, June 2, 2010).