Education

In today’s blog post, I will examine some basic problems with current data collection processes in pre-K, kindergarten and across the PreK-12 landscape. Look for Part 2 later this week, when I’ll propose hourly tracking -- an outside-the-box approach to solving some of these issues. 

Last week, the New America Foundation’s Education Policy Program published an issue brief on the recently completed (and two months late) fiscal year 2013 budget, with an early analysis of how the 2014 budget process is likely to affect education programs. One careful reader noticed that the explanation about sequestration failed to mention two lesser-known education programs: the TEACH Grants and Iraq-Afghanistan Service Grant programs.

The former provides tuition aid to prospective teachers, but it converts to a loan if the student fails to complete four years of teaching to high-needs students after graduation. The latter provides tuition aid to the children of military parents who died during military service after September 11. Both programs are affected by across-the-board spending cuts implemented last year.

Although sequestration was meant to apply uniformly to most education programs, slicing evenly program by program, there were some exceptions. Pell Grants, as we’ve reported, were exempt, and student loans were subject only to a fee increase to reduce costs. And it appears that cuts will be larger for TEACH Grant and the Iraq-Afghanistan Service Grant than for other programs.

How much larger will the cuts be?

Recall that in accordance with the Budget Control Act of 2011, the failure of an appointed “supercommittee” to find $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction over 10 years triggered the execution of across-the-board spending cuts in mid-fiscal year 2013. The final size of the cuts was 5.0 percent cut for education programs funded through appropriations, and 5.1 percent for those funded on the so-called mandatory side of the budget. (Both TEACH Grants and Iraq-Afghanistan Service Grants are considered mandatory funding.)

For the Iraq-Afghanistan Service Grant program, though, the reduction will be 10.0 percent. For the TEACH Grant, it will be 7.1 percent. Therefore, the maximum Iraq-Afghanistan Service Grant will drop from $5,645 (the program is meant to match the size of the maximum Pell Grant) to $5,081 next year. The maximum annual TEACH Grant drops from $4,000 to $3,716. Those reductions affect the first disbursement that occurs after March 1, 2013, which in most cases means the 2013-14 school year, and the reductions are effectively permanent, so they’ll remain at that lower level thereafter.

Why did sequestration impose larger reduction for these programs than for others? And why 10.0 percent for one and 7.1 percent for the other? The reasons remain unclear, and the U.S. Department of Education has not offered much explanation. Some media reports have suggested that the White House is working to limit the impact of sequestration by moving money around and restoring some funding under its budget authority – but thus far, there’s no word from the White House that such flexibility options were the case for these Department of Education programs. We’ll keep an eye out for a good explanation over the coming weeks and months.

And the confusion isn’t limited to these programs. The president’s fiscal year 2014 budget request, which usually includes spending levels for the prior two years, didn’t even incorporate final, post-sequester fiscal year 2013 spending into its budget tables, for the Department of Education or other agencies. So one thing is clear: The government still isn’t able to provide much evidence around sequestration’s implementation. In spite of anecdotal stories about children losing access to Head Start and special education and Title I services being cut across the country, there’s not yet a comprehensive understanding of how sequestration is affecting education programs.

For more on last year’s budget, check out our issue brief, Federal Education Budget Update: Fiscal Year 2013 Recap and Fiscal Year 2014 Early Analysis.

This week, the National Journal’s expert blog asked writers to respond to a series of questions about assessment. I zoomed in on several lessons from early childhood assessments, PreK-3rd grade, that educators can and should integrate into 3rd – 12th grade standardized assessment practices.

New America higher education experts Amy Laitinen and Rachel Fishman discuss policy reforms that could alter the higher education system for the better. Laitinen explains how to move past the credit hour and measure learning, not just seat time, and Fishman explores how public universities are collaborating on that and other issues to develop online courses. Fuzz Hogan hosts.

On April 29, 2013, Lisa Guernsey was part of a panel at the Office of Head Start's 2nd Bi-Annual Birth-to-Five Leadership Institute, where she presented findings on what scientists know about the impact of electronic media on children's learning. Lisa focused on how early childhood policies need to bend to accommodate a "BooksPlus" view of children's learning environment, in which books remain critically important, especially for early literacy skills, but where children also have chances to learn from and engage with multimedia of all kinds.

Today, the New America Foundation’s Federal Education Budget Project released Federal Education Budget Update: Fiscal Year 2013 Recap and Fiscal Year 2014 Early Analysis, an issue brief that explores the 2013 and 2014 budgeting processes and their implications for federal education programs. The brief outlines the key benchmarks Congress and the president reached, and provides a simple, comprehensive resource to understand the broader budget picture.

As the brief notes, the fiscal year 2013 budget is now complete, and the 2014 appropriations process is officially underway. But the complex circumstances of 2013 – including a temporary funding measure that Congress passed to hold funding steady at last year’s level (continuing resolution), and then an across-the-board 5.0 percent spending cut (sequestration) applied to most federal education programs – have made it challenging to track the vital figures in appropriations spending. That’s why many education stakeholders might be surprised to discover this: Next year’s budget could bring even more pain than sequestration has.

Sequestration was a product of the Budget Control Act of 2011 (BCA), a broader deficit reduction bill passed as a compromise to raise the federal debt ceiling. According to the law, when a congressionally appointed “supercommittee” of legislators couldn’t agree on $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction over 10 years, the BCA ensured most of that would happen anyway – through sequestration in 2013, and through lower spending caps from 2014 through 2021.

Sequestration was applied indiscriminately to virtually every program funded by the federal government – a poorly targeted, mid-year cut. However, the spending caps laid out by the BCA will force federal appropriations spending even lower next year than sequestration forced it this year. Instead of $984 billion in total appropriations spending, the post-sequestration total for 2013, the law caps appropriations at $966 billion next year.

Importantly, the spending cap for next year is only an aggregate one. Whereas the sequester in 2013 applied evenly to every program, the 2014 cap instead means that Congress will have to make difficult choices as it drafts spending bills. Lawmakers are supposed to appropriate not more than what the cap allows (though they may pass a law to override that limit) but within the broad category of discretionary spending, the law does not limit funding for any one program (think Head Start, Title I, and Pell Grants).

Some policymakers have opted not to make those hard decisions, at least so far. Both President Obama’s 2014 budget request and the budget resolution passed by the Democratic Senate for 2014 ignore the overall spending cap, and instead revert to the BCA spending caps set out before the supercommittee’s failure ($1.058 trillion in 2014). The House, meanwhile, stuck with the post-sequester cap in its own budget resolution.

Any joint budget resolution between the House and Senate is still a mystery; in fact, for the past several years, Congress has elected to stick with the BCA limits rather than pass a joint resolution at all. But if lawmakers vote to exceed the cap, they’ll also have to vote to override the BCA, because the BCA takes precedence over a non-binding budget resolution. If, on the other hand, lawmakers stick within the BCA limits, federal education programs will be fighting for a share of an even smaller pie than was provided in 2013.

Click here to read the full brief

State pre-K funding shrunk by over half a billion dollars from the 2010-11 to the 2011-12 school year. That was the largest one-year decrease in the last 10 years, leading the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) to declare it the "worst year in a decade” for high-quality pre-K access across the United States.

The New America Foundation’s Education Policy Program released an issue brief detailing the completion of the fiscal year 2013 appropriations process and the start of 2014 budgeting. The brief explores congressional budget actions over the past year and describes their effects on federal education programs.

Correction: An earlier version of this post erroneously reported the total number of Head Start teachers with bachelor's degrees as 44 percent. Of the Head Start teachers subject to a 2007 requirement that half earn bachelor's degrees, 62 percent of Head Start teachers have bachelor's degrees as of 2013.

In addition to the president’s fiscal year 2014 budget request, released earlier this month, information on the administration’s education agenda can be gleaned from the new Congressional Justifications documents from the Departments of Education and Health & Human Services.

The Congressional Justifications typically contain details on the president’s latest proposals, but they also include a wealth of information about existing programs. According to the documents, Head Start and Early Head Start declined in enrollment between 2012 and 2013, before an across-the-board budgetary cut resulted in the elimination of seats in some centers around the country. Meanwhile, funding for each program increased slightly before the implementation of this year’s federal sequester.

Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, of the famed Simpson-Bowles commission (officially the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform) that the Obama administration tapped to generate ideas to reduce federal budget deficits, are out with a new wide-ranging proposal. Titled A Bipartisan Path Forward to Securing America’s Future, the report was published by the Moment of Truth Project, which is itself affiliated with the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, an organization previously housed at New America.

The report includes higher education reforms that they say will create $35 billion in savings through 2023. These reforms mirror some of the ideas outlined earlier this year in the Education Policy Program’s report, Rebalancing Resources and Incentives in Federal Student Aid. Unlike the latest Moment of Truth Project report, though, the New America Foundation report argues that the savings these proposals generate should be reinvested fully in more effective and higher-quality postsecondary education aid. (The Path Forward proposal reinvests most, but not all of the savings into higher education aid.)

One way that Path Forward finds big savings is through eliminating the in-school interest rate subsidy, which defers accrued interest on the borrowers loans until after graduation. This is basically identical to New America’s proposal to eliminate Subsidized Stafford loans.

According to the Moment of Truth Project report, the subsidy is poorly targeted and that money can be better spent by funding the Pell Grant program. The authors argue that income-based repayment is a far better benefit to struggling borrowers, something we made the case for in Rebalancing Resources and Incentives. The deficit reduction report writes:

Another $15 to $20 billion could be generated through a number of more targeted changes such as adopting the President's proposal to reform Perkins loans, lowering Guaranty Agency Compensation Rehabilitation loans, repealing Grad PLUS loans, equalizing loans for dependent and independent students, creating a two-tiered income-based repayment system, and reducing or discontinuing funding for underperforming for-profit schools.

The authors go on to note that such reforms would fix the Pell Grant funding cliff, something we also accomplished in the Education Policy Program report. The authors further note that "by providing mandatory funding to cover much of the projected shortfall in the Pell Grant program, this option would limit the pressure on the Appropriations Committee" to make deep cuts in discretionary programs or to decrease the benefits Pell provides. In 2014, Congress was pleasantly surprised by a Congressional Budget Office estimate that showed a surplus had accumulated in the program over the past several years, permitting lawmakers to flat-fund the program at 2013 pre-sequester levels. Still, costs of the Pell program are expected to increase rapidly over the next several years, demanding a long-term solution.

The report also endorses a proposal first offered by the Education Policy Program’s Jason Delisle. Recently highlighted both in President Obama's fiscal year 2014 budget proposal and in a bill proposed by Republican Senators Coburn, Burr, and Alexander, the plan would interest rates on federal student loans to the rate of 10-year Treasury notes, plus a mark-up. As the commission notes, this addresses the interest rate problem more gradually than a bump from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent – and it would permanently resolve the annual debate over setting the rates by creating a long-term policy subject to the market, not lawmakers’ whims and political interests.

In the Education Policy Program paper Rebalancing Resources and Incentives in Federal Student Aid, we recommend nearly all of these fixes as part of a larger reform to make federal student aid more equitable and rational. And we did this in a budget-neutral way – that is, we used savings found in some programs to increase funding for other programs, or to create completely new ones. While the new Simpson-Bowles report would use some of the savings to fund the looming Pell Grant program shortfall, the authors would also redirect a portion of the savings to deficit reduction.

Our proposal included a broad array of reform proposals, covering loans, grants, tax expenditures, transparency, and other federal aid issues, and it is meant to be seen as an entire package, not a menu of options, because each component of aid affects the others. We stand by that belief, but we are pleased to see other groups arrive at the same conclusions that we did in reforming the federal student aid system: Policymakers can better spend the significant resources they have already committed to federal student aid programs to benefit students, taxpayers, and other education stakeholders.