Winter 1999 (v3#3)

The Federal Budget for education:
Surprises in 1998 but Up for Grabs in 1999

Public education was the subject of intense ideological and partisan battles throughout the 1998 session of 105th Congress. By summer, two different bills creating "education savings accounts," a thinly veiled private school voucher system, were passed by Republican majorities in the House and Senate only to be vetoed by the President. Almost identical pro-voucher editorials appeared regularly in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, including one by the president of Columbia University’s Teachers College. Senator D’Amato, even before he knew who his challenger would be, launched his re election campaign with television commercials attacking teachers’ unions. On the other side of the ideological divide, most Democratic candidates for Congress used the same three-point blueprint in their campaign positions on public education: smaller class sizes, better trained teachers, and repair of aging school facilities.

The October Surprises
The ideological fight over public education was so fierce that there was even a stand-off between right wing and moderate Republicans. By the beginning of the federal fiscal year on October 1, Congress had not fully crafted a proposed budget due to Republican internal disagreements. The surprise was that two weeks later, President Bill Clinton, who was facing public embarrassment through disclosures of the Special Prosecutor’s investigation and the possibility of impeachment in the House, succeeded in his demand for $1.2 billion in federal funds to reduce class size in return for not vetoing the budget. The method for distributing these funds to local school districts, targeting 80% of the funds to schools with high poverty, was also unexpectedly progressive. New York City, which has the highest average class sizes in the state, will see $61.691 million in federal funds for class size reductions. Though the state must direct all funding to school districts, district administrators can use 3% for their costs of implementing the program and can redirect 15% for staff development. If the school district opts to use funds for teacher training, then private schools become eligible for a portion. Unfortunately, the federal class size reduction initiative does not prohibit putting two teachers in charge of a large class, a practice that, so far, has shown no improvement in student learning. Though touted as enabling the hiring of an additional 100,000 across the nation, the American Federation of Teachers calculated that it would cost $4.07 billion to hire an additional 100,000 teachers for just one year.

Republican opposition to federal funding for school facilities was so intense that the President was unable to get even a portion of his $22.6 billion proposal for school repairs funded. Minor items, such as rule changes for already enacted tax-exempt bonds for school construction and IRS rules for school board debt, were not part of the omnibus budget bill because there was no bi-partisan agreement on even the most minor technical issue. Republicans also required that the final budget bill contain language to prohibit the development of any national level testing, assessment of student progress, or learning standards.

The other big surprise in October was the success of grassroots efforts of parents of children with disabilities to prevent punitive amendments or language that would have imposed new requirements for student discipline, suspensions, and expulsions in the reauthorization of Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), the federal legislation that guides special education services and programs in all public schools. Television coverage of two incidents where students killed teachers and classmates made it seem hopeless to prevent these "get tough" measures, even though these acts were committed by students who were not in special education programs. The National Parent Network on Disabilities, working with parents who feared that their children would be unfairly denied instruction and services, used faxes and e-mails to flood Congressmembers with letters, calls, and visits. By October, this grassroots effort succeeded in securing a compromise in a highly polarized Congress for a nine-month study of the impact of special education disciplinary policy on schools.

What’s Ahead
Next year the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) will be up for reauthorization, the largest source of federal funding for a host of education programs, "the big enchilada." While across the nation federal funding only supports 4% of the cost of kindergarten through twelfth grade education, 10% of New York City’s school funding comes from this source. The primary reason why the city gets such a large share is that the key funding program in ESEA is Title I which is targeted to schools serving high numbers of children from low-income communities, one of the last "War on Poverty" programs from President Johnson’s administration. Up until 1994, most of this "compensatory" education money went to remediation for a limited number of eligible children, most often pulled out of their classroom for sessions with paraprofessionals or reading teachers. But in the last re-authorization of ESEA, the funds were allowed to be fashioned to support improvements in the quality of instruction for the entire school population in high-poverty neighborhoods, so-called "School-wide Projects". This flexibility in funding allowed schools to use funds for staff development, to reduce class size, to hire guidance counselors, or any other strategy for helping all students in a school improve their academic performance.

Indications are that pro-voucher Congressmembers are eyeing the annual $8.37 billion funding level of Title I as a source for funding private-school vouchers. William Bennett’s think tank, Empower America, has a slightly different proposal to provide these funds to parents so that they can purchase private remedial services. Lobbying efforts by various for-profit companies already offering these services may make this proposal "the compromise" with pro-voucher Congressmembers. Other Republicans, who do not support vouchers, have indicated that they want to transform all of ESEA into block grants to the states. Given New York State’s inequitable funding system and the annual legislative tinkering and deal making along regional lines, New York City’s current Title I funding level of $439 million may be in jeopardy should ESEA be block-granted.

A sign that these plans for vouchers or block grants may not be "a done deal" is that the Republican who heads the House Education and Workforce Committee, Congressmember Bill Goodling of Pennsylvania, has indicated that the full committee will mark up the House bill rather than the K-12 subcommittee. In May 1997, members of this subcommittee held a "field hearing" in a New York City parochial school without public notice to hear testimony from right-wing parent and think tank representatives on why the public school system must be abandoned. Despite this procedural change, all observers expect that the ESEA reauthorization will be an ideological feeding frenzy on both the House and Senate sides. Conservative Congressmembers have already stated their intentions to use the legislation to require teacher testing, to ban bilingual education, and to prohibit teachers from contributing to political action committees. On the Democratic side, the challenge will be to fund class size reductions for another year and to make some headway in getting federal funding for school construction and repair.