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DA Answers

Uniqueness – General

U – Title I increasing funding

Continuing resolution increase Title I funding – but formula problems persist

Ujifusa, 2017

(Andrew Budget Deal for 2017 Includes Increases for Title I, Special Education, Edweek May 1, 2017 http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/campaign-k-12/2017/05/budget_deal_2017_title_I_special_education_spending.html accessed GDI – TM)

Federal lawmakers have agreed to relatively small spending increases for Title I programs to districts and for special education, as part of a budget deal covering the rest of fiscal 2017 through the end of September. Title I spending on disadvantaged students would rise by $100 million up to $15.5 billion from fiscal 2016 to fiscal 2017, along with $450 million in new money that was already slated to be shifted over from the now-defunct School Improvement Grants program. And state grants for special education would increase by $90 million up to $12 billion. However, Title II grants for teacher development would be cut by $294 million, down to about $2.1 billion for the rest of fiscal 2017. The bill would also provide $400 million for the Student Support and Academic Enrichment Grant program, also known as Title IV of the Every Student Succeeds Act. Title IV is a block grant that districts can use for a wide range of programs, including health, safety, arts education, college readiness, and more. Total U.S. Department of Education spending, including both discretionary and mandatory spending covering K-12 and other issues, would fall by $60 million from fiscal 2016, down to $71.6 billion. Congress is expected to vote on this budget deal early this week, the Washington Post reported. The federal government has been operating on a resolution that kept fiscal 2017 funding at fiscal 2016 levels. This resolution was slated to expire on April 28, leading to the possibility of a government shutdown, but Congress passed a one-week extension late last week to provide time for a budget deal.

U – increase fed oversight now

ESSA increase fed oversight

Hess, Director of education policy studies, 15(Fredrick, a resident scholar and the director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he works on K–12 and higher education issues http://www.aei.org/publication/the-rewrite-of-no-child-left-behind-is-a-compromise-but-a-principled-one// . “The rewrite of No Child Left Behind is a compromise, but a principled one” 11-24-2015//7-4-2017/GDI/CH)

ESSA allows for too much federal oversight. The new law would explicitly strip Washington of the right to micro-manage state accountability systems and school-improvement strategies, but it does leave too many vague federal guidelines and recommendations on this score. While an unfortunate concession to the White House and the civil-rights lobby, the requirements are so deferential to states and the provisions restricting the federal Department of Education are so stark that the result is acceptable, even though I’d have vastly preferred to see Congress simply excise these provisions.

U-Devos increasing fed influence

ESSA rules enforcement increases Devos interventions with states

Green, The New York Times Education Reporter, 7/17 (Erica, “DeVos’s Hard Line on New Education Law Surprises States” New York Times, 7-7-17, www.nytimes.com/2017/07/07/us/politics/devos-federal-education-law-states.html 7-8-17, GDI-JIJD)

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who made a career of promoting local control of education, has signaled a surprisingly hard-line approach to carrying out an expansive new federal education law, issuing critical feedback that has rattled state school chiefs and conservative education experts alike. ¶ President Barack Obama signed the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015 as the less intrusive successor to the No Child Left Behind law, which was maligned by many in both political parties as punitive and prescriptive. But in the Education Department’s feedback to states about their plans to put the new law into effect, it applied strict interpretations of statutes, required extensive detail and even deemed some state education goals lackluster. ¶ In one case, the acting assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education, Jason Botel, wrote to the State of Delaware that its long-term goals for student achievement were not “ambitious.” ¶ “It is mind-boggling that the department could decide that it’s going to challenge them on what’s ambitious,” said Michael J. Petrilli, the president of the conservative-leaning Thomas B. Fordham Institute, who worked in the Education Department under President George W. Bush. He called the letter “directly in opposition to the rhetoric and the promises of DeVos.” ¶ After more than a decade of strict federal education standards and standardized testing regimes, the Every Student Succeeds Act was to return latitude to the states to come up with plans to improve student achievement and hold schools accountable for student performance. ¶ It sought to relieve states from the federal pressures of its predecessor, which required that 100 percent of the students of every school reach proficiency on state tests or the school would face harsh penalties and aggressive interventions. Unlike No Child Left Behind, the new law does not set numerical achievement targets, nor does it mandate how a state should intervene if a school fails to reach them. The law does require that states set such benchmarks on their own. ¶ Proponents, especially congressional Republicans and conservative education advocates, believed that a new era of local control would flourish under Ms. DeVos, who pointed to the new law as illustrative of the state-level empowerment she champions. ¶ But her department’s feedback reflects a tension between ideology and legal responsibility: While she has said she would like to see her office’s role in running the nation’s public schools diminished, she has also said she will uphold the law. ¶ “All of the signals she has been sending is that she’s going to approve any plan that follows the law,” Mr. Petrilli said. “And when in doubt, she’s going to give the states the benefit of the doubt.” ¶ Mr. Botel defended the department’s feedback, saying it was measuring state plans against federal statutes — including a requirement that plans be ambitious. ¶ “Because the statute does not define the word ‘ambitious,’ the secretary has the responsibility of determining whether a state’s long-term goals are ambitious,” Mr. Botel said. ¶ In the department’s letter to Delaware — which incited the most outrage from conservative observers — Mr. Botel took aim at the state’s plan to halve the number of students not meeting proficiency rates in the next decade. Such a goal would have resulted in only one-half to two thirds of some groups of students achieving proficiency, he noted. ¶ The department deemed those long-term goals, as well as those for English-language learners, not ambitious, and directed the state to revise its plans to make them more so. ¶ So far, 16 states and the District of Columbia have submitted plans, and more states will present plans in the fall. Delaware, New Mexico and Nevada were the first three to be reviewed by Education Department staff and a panel of peer reviewers. ¶ State education officials in Delaware said they had spent a year engaging the community on their plan and would resubmit it with clarifications. ¶ But Atnre Alleyne, the executive director of DelawareCAN, an advocacy group that helped draft the plan, agreed with the department’s findings. ¶ He said that his group had challenged the state about accountability measures, such as setting firm goals and consequences for failing to meet them, and found that “there was a lot of fear about being bold or aggressive” after No Child Left Behind. ¶ “Ultimately this has to be about every student succeeding, so to say that one-third are going to be proficient in 10 years, the department is right to call that into question,” Mr. Alleyne said. “A lot of people thought it was just going to be a breeze. I was glad to see it was a push.” ¶ Since Ms. DeVos was confirmed, civil rights and education advocates have expressed concern that state plans would get assembly-line approval and states would be allowed to skirt responsibility for low-performing and historically underserved students. ¶ For all of its flaws, the No Child Left Behind Act was praised for holding schools accountable for performance data. Under the law, a school was considered failing if all of its student groups, including all racial and ethnic groups, English-language learners and students with disabilities, did not meet annual achievement targets. By the end of the law, more than half of the nation’s schools were considered failures. ¶ But even after the first round of feedback, the advocates would like the department to be more aggressive and reject any state plan that lacks specifics on how they will account for the performance of historically underperforming and underserved student populations. ¶ “Pushback and feedback in and of themselves are of no interest and of no value,” said Liz King, the director of education policy at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.

U – Overall Education cuts now

UQ – Education cuts coming now from Trump’s budget, shift to school vouchers now

Johnson et. al 17

[By Stephenie Johnson, Neil Campbell, Kami Spicklemire, and Lisette Partelow Posted on March 17, 2017 “The Trump-DeVos Budget Would Dismantle Public Education, Hurting Vulnerable Kids, Working Families, and Teachers; “ need source title here https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/education/news/2017/03/17/428598/trump-devos-budget-dismantle-public-education-hurting-vulnerable-kids-working-families-teachers/, Accessed 7-3-17 DWRS]

Yesterday, President Donald Trump released his devastating budget for the 2018 fiscal year. It would dismantle public schools through massive cuts to teacher training, after-school programs in public schools, and transfers of public funds to private school vouchers. Every budget is a statement of values and this one could not be more clear in the vision it presents: starve the public school system and privatize education.

The Trump budget would slash $9 billion—13 percent of the U.S. Department of Education’s funding—while investing $1.4 billion of new money in school choice, including private school vouchers, sending a clear signal that the Trump administration prioritizes ideologically driven voucher schemes over great public schools.

For such a draconian proposal, the budget is remarkably short on details. Although it cuts $9 billion in education, only about $7 billion of cuts are specifically mentioned, raising the question of what other cuts the Trump administration is planning to make. Is the federal investment in career and technical education at risk, for example? It mentions a $1 billion increase in Title I but provides virtually no details about this proposal and implies that the funding would not run through the Title I formula, which provides more resources to high-poverty districts.

Dismantling our nation’s public education system while investing in unproven schemes to incentivize private school vouchers that have no evidence of improving student achievement could have devastating consequences for students that could take decades to fix.

NO Trump civil rights enforcement in education – increase school choice under banner of school choice

Mann, 17, Brown Center on Education Policy [Elizabeth; "3 observations on Trump’s education budget," 6-7-2017, Brookings, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2017/06/07/3-observations-on-trumps-education-budget/ ; RJC]

The Trump budget proposes level funding for the Office of Civil Rights (OCR), which may have surprised Democrats who worry that OCR will play a diminished role in this administration. The joint repeal with the Department of Justice of the Obama administration’s guidance on bathroom access for transgender students, for example, signaled a retreat from the previous administration’s approach in this arena. Since her confirmation hearing, DeVos has not offered much clarity on how she views the Department of Education’s role in enforcing civil rights laws. Recently, in both the House and Senate hearings on the budget, Democrats have pressed her to affirm her commitment to protecting students’ civil rights, particularly in the context of school choice programs.

This level funding proposal might reflect an awareness that decreasing the OCR budget would only provide additional fodder for Democrats to criticize DeVos’s commitment to enforcing federal civil rights laws. Nonetheless, the department has sent mixed signals about its intentions regarding the direction of civil rights enforcement, and it remains difficult to say what DeVos’s philosophy is regarding what exactly this responsibility entails.

Budget proposal faces criticism from both Democrats and Republicans

While the scale of the proposed cuts is dramatic and perhaps surprising–a 13.5 percent reduction in funding overall–the budget reflects many of the priorities DeVos has articulated from early on in her tenure. In particular, a consistent theme is her emphasis on state flexibility. During her confirmation and in recent House and Senate committee hearings on the budget, DeVos frequently described a desire to grant states increased flexibility as the motivation for her department’s policy positions and budget proposals.

Democrats and Republicans alike embraced this concept in the bipartisan Every Student Succeeds Act, but judging by their questions during the recent budget hearings, Democrats are weary of DeVos justifying her agenda under the banner of flexibility. And although Republicans consistently champion state flexibility in the administration of public education and federal cost saving generally, the proposed cuts seem to be a bridge too far. Indeed, during the Senate subcommittee hearing on Tuesday, chairman Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) told DeVos: “This is a difficult budget request to defend.

U- increased state school choice now

States increasingly employing school choice programs.

Rios, Report at Mother Jones, 17 (Edwin. “The Battle Over School Choice Is Happening in Statehouses Across America”. Mother Jones. 3-8-17. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/03/school-voucher-bills-across-country/. Accessed 7-8-17, GDI-PM)

In last week’s speech before a joint session of Congress, President Donald Trump once again brought up the issue of school choice, signaling to lawmakers an interest in pursuing federal legislation that would divert taxpayer dollars to private school tuition. But the real action is already taking place in statehouses across the country.

Since 2010, when a Republican wave washed over the House, Senate, and governor’s mansions across the country, states have been steadily introducing voucher programs and voucher-like initiatives such as tax credits or education savings accounts. And 2017 is no different: 31 states have introduced bills to create or expand some private school choice program, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

So far, 22 states have bills dedicated toward tax credit scholarship programs, which, as my colleague Kristina Rizga pointed out last week, are increasingly popular among choice advocates like Education Secretary Betsy DeVos because they allow parents to receive tax credits for sending their kids to religious schools without governments technically transferring taxpayer money to religious organizations. Meanwhile, 20 states have legislation proposing education savings accounts, which allow families to use state money set aside in authorized accounts for education expenses, like private school tuition, homeschooling, or therapy.

Decades of research on voucher programs shows that they have little to no effect on academic achievement. In the past two years, research on newer programs in Louisiana and Ohio have mainly shown poorer academic outcomes. Last July, researchers at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative think tank, concluded in a study about Ohio’s program that students who attended private schools on vouchers fared worse academically than those who attended public schools. “Let us acknowledge that we did not expect—or, frankly, wish—to see these negative effects for voucher participants,” researchers wrote.

Josh Cunningham, a senior education policy specialist at the National Conference of State Legislatures, cautioned that the Trump administration isn’t necessarily driving more legislation at the state level. “But if we see action out of the administration or out of Congress addressing school choice,” Cunningham says, “I’d imagine states would have to respond to that.”