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 Bush's
Budget: Taking From Peter to Pay Paul?
District Administration "The Magazine for K-12 Education
Leaders" April 2005
For more articles like this
visit
https://www.bridges4kids.org.
This time of
year, education lobbyists work hardest for their paychecks, and
President Bush's proposed $56 billion education budget for
fiscal year 2006 will mean plenty of overtime as advocates work
toward restoring $4.3 billion in programs proposed for
elimination.
The proposed budget, down .9 percent or $530 million from last
year's $56.6 billion budget, is the first overall reduction in
education spending in more than 10 years.
"We're disappointed that 48 of the 150 programs that were zeroed
out in the president's budget were education programs," says
Denise Cardinal, spokeswoman for the National Education
Association. "We're working with members of Congress to restore
funding to some of these, which we consider to be a fairly
likely scenario given recent history."
The biggest news for educators in the president's budget is the
proposed High School Initiative. It would extend many of the
provisions of No Child Left Behind into high school, supported
by $1.5 million in redirected funding. But the high school
initiative is paired with the proposed elimination of $1.3
billion in state grants for vocational education. (The new high
school money could be used to maintain support for vocational
education at the state's discretion.)
This jockeying between Peter and Paul is a result of the
politics of the budget deficit.
Other large ticket items that would be eliminated include Safe
and Drug Free Schools initiative, Education Technology State
Grants, and Upward Bound, a college prep program. (For the full
list see www.ed.gov) In many ways the program cuts may be a
political statement as 33 of the same programs were targeted for
elimination last year but still received funding from Congress,
according to the Alliance for Excellent Education, a
Washington-based non-profit.
"The problem here is that the cuts proposed, in some cases, are
congressional priorities," says Mary Kusler, senior legislative
specialist with the American Association of School
Administrators. "But if [Congress] starts putting back some of
those eliminated programs, without adding more money for
education, we're just fighting among ourselves" to see which
area has to take cuts, she says.
Though many have lauded the president's proposed new focus on
high school achievement, Washington insiders are calling it
'dead on arrival' because it would be funded through the
elimination of other programs. The initiative would have two
major components: $1.24 billion for "high school intervention,"
aimed at increasing achievement and reducing racial and economic
performance gaps; and $250 million to help states create annual
assessments in language arts and math in two additional grades
in high school by 2009-10. (NCLB already requires one assessment
in grades 10-12.)
Title I and IDEA would be net beneficiaries under the
president's budget; Title I would receive an additional $600
million, and IDEA an additional $510 million. Also proposed is
the creation of a $500 million teacher incentive fund, a state
grant program to reward effective teachers and offer incentives
for highly qualified teachers to teach in high-poverty schools.
See this and more information online at
http://www.districtadministration.com/page.cfm?p=1052.
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