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Public
Policy Update
July/August 2013
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Congress
Markup of the Perkins Funding Bill
Postponed in the House
A markup that was scheduled in mid-July for the House's FY 2014
Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education (Labor-HHS-Education)
appropriations bill, which includes Perkins funding, was postponed by
the House Appropriations Committee until further notice.
Earlier this month, the Senate Appropriations Committee approved its
Labor-HHS-Ed bill, which would restore Perkins funding to
pre-sequestration levels. The Senate bill provides a $3.52 billion,
or 5.4%, increase for discretionary education spending compared to FY
2013. The overall funding level for the approved House Labor-HHS-Ed
bill is 19% below current funding levels and is expected to contain
deep cuts to many programs.
The appropriations process is expected to be very challenging this
year because of the extremely different proposals offered in the
House and Senate.
Senate
Introduces Bipartisan WIA Legislation
Senators Patty Murray (D-WA), Lamar Alexander (R-TN), Tom Harkin
(D-IA), and Johnny Isakson (R-GA) officially introduced bipartisan
legislation to reauthorize the Workforce
Investment Act (WIA). S.1356 contains some positive elements
for CTE, including prioritization of career pathways and programs
that lead to industry-recognized credential and high-demand jobs.
The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions markup
of WIA was on July 31, 2013. The Committee voted 18-3 in support of
advancing S. 1356, a bill to reauthorize WIA, to the Senate floor.
There is no information on when the bill will go to the full Senate
for a vote.
Senate Passes
Bill on Student Loans
The Senate passed a bill that would allow students to lock in
currently low interest rates on student loans. In future years, fixed
rates would depend on current market conditions. The Bipartisan
Student Loan Certainty Act, or S.1334, passed by a
vote of 81 to 18 and will be sent to the House for approval.
Senate
Confirms New Labor Secretary
On July 18, the Senate voted to confirm President Obama's nomination
for labor secretary, Thomas Perez, replacing Hilda Solis, who held
the position from 2009 through January 2013. The vote was on party
lines, 54-46. Previously, Perez served as Assistant Attorney General
for the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice.
No Child Left
Behind
On July 19, the House
passed the Student Success Act (H.R. 5), the
reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA).
The measure passed mainly along party lines 221-207, with 12
Republicans voting no and no Democrats supporting it's passage. The
National Education Association (NEA), representing more than 3
million public school educators, opposed the bill. Dennis Van Roekel,
Arizona math teacher and NEA president stated, "While H.R. 5
contains some positive provisions, as a whole it erodes the
historical federal role in public education-to be an enforcer of
equity of opportunities, tools and resources so that we can level the
playing field. Yet this House bill walks away from creating equity in
education-and at a time when poor and disadvantage students and their
families need it the most." The American Association of School
Administrations, The National School Boards Association, Americans
for Tax Reform, The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, and
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops support the bill.
The Senate
education committee approved its version of the ESEA.
The bill is radically different from the House version. The Senate
version, supported only by Democrats in committee, is similar to the
Administration's vision for No Child Left Behind. Key pieces include:
(1) directing states to set goals to help all students to achieve;
(2) including Race to the Top; (3) and requiring states to craft
educator evaluations based on student outcomes and use them for
professional development and teacher distribution.
Fiscal Year
2014 Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Appropriations
Bill
On July 11, the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health
and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies (LHHS) passed a
bill along party lines. The bill
will continue funding for programs aimed at helping
low-income students to access and succeed in postsecondary education
by reducing college costs and increasing college completion rates.
Specific provisions include:
- Providing
$250 million for competitive grants under the Race to the
Top-College Affordability and Completion fund.
- Increasing
the maximum Pell Grant to $5,785 (from its current level of
$5,645) for the FY14-15 academic year.
- Prohibiting
colleges and universities from spending federal funding received
through the Higher Education Act (HEA) on advertising,
marketing, and recruitment.
- Ensuring
that students who are in programs that require licensing or
other credentials are well equipped to obtain gainful employment
upon completion of their program.
- Expressing
support for the principle of reforming the allocation formulas
for the Federal Work Study and the Supplemental Educational
Opportunity Grant (SEOG) programs.
Other
News
On July 31, the
House Budget Committee held a hearing, "The
War on Poverty: A Progress Report." On the same
day, the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Human Resources held a
similar hearing, "Improving
the Safety Net: Better Coordinating Today's Maze of Programs to
Ensure Families Receive Real Help." Both hearings
focused on examining the success and efficiency of welfare programs
on reducing poverty.
Congress is now on recess until September 8, 2013.
Administration
On August 1, Catherine
Lhamon was confirmed as Assistant Secretary of
Education for Civil Rights at ED. Lhamon spent a number of years at
the ACLU of Southern California and was most recently Director of
Impact Litigation at Public Counsel. See:
On
July 1, Saba
Bireda, formerly of the Poverty and Race Research
Action Counsel (PRRAC) and most recently EducationCounsel LLC,
started as a Senior Counsel at OCR.
On July 24, five
young women who are past winners or current finalists of the Google
Science Fair met with Senior Obama Administration
officials to discuss issues related to girls in STEM. The girls were Brittany Wenger,
who talked about her groundbreaking "Global Neural Network Cloud
Service for Breast Cancer," which supports a data-driven
platform for breast cancer diagnosis based on information from
minimally invasive biopsies; Valerie
Ding, who created new algorithms to dramatically
increase the efficiency of high-tech quantum dot solar cells --
nearly doubling their efficiency and showing tremendous promise for
the future of harnessing renewable energy from the sun; Naomi Shah,
who launched a project to explore the effects of indoor air quality
on lung health and developed a mathematical algorithm that can
predict lung health based on certain indoor air quality parameters; Lizzie Zhao,
who developed an algorithm for diagnosing melanoma with 80% accuracy,
based on uploaded images of moles and other skin lesions; and Lauren Hodge,
whose research examined the effect of five different common marinade
ingredients on the level of the potentially harmful chemicals in the
resulting meal and demonstrated that using more acidic marinades-like
lemon juice-when grilling chicken reduced the formation of
carcinogens by up to 97%.
Since President Barack Obama's remarks about the verdict in the Trayvon
Martin case, there has been discussion about
"bolstering and reinforcing" African-American boys and
helping them find paths to success. Troubling statistics for African
American young men such as dropout rates, discipline rates, test
scores, and the likelihood of being in under resourced schools
surfaced as areas of concern. Learn More from Education
Week and The
Urgency of Now.
Federal
Officials Protect Transgender Student Against Discrimination
On July 24, Education and Justice department officials stated, "Transgender
students ... are protected from sex-based discrimination under Title
IX." School districts cannot discriminate against transgender
students without violating federal law. The statement relates to
settlement of a complaint filed on behalf of a transgender student
who faced discrimination in middle school. The agreement is the
latest mark of a growing legal and administrative trend to interpret
bans on sex discrimination as including discrimination based on
gender identity and transgender status. Learn
More
NAPE
Partners
Publications
and Resources
The National Skills Coalition released a new report, Undoing
Success: The Real Cost of Federal Workforce Development Cuts to
Jobseekers and Employers, which discusses both the
success stories of people who have reentered the job market and the
impact that Congress' dismantling of the federal workforce
development system through drastic federal funding cuts. According to
the report, 93% of survey respondents saw federal funding cuts to
their programs, even though 75% reported an increase in workers
seeking employment and job training assistance, with more than half
seeing a 25% or greater increase in demand. As a result of these
cuts, nearly 60% percent of respondents laid off staff; 67% percent
of respondents reduced the number of clients they have enrolled in
job training programs; and more than 20% of respondents have
eliminated job training programs.
The Georgetown Public Policy Institute Center on
Education and the Workforce recently released Recovery:
Job Growth and Education Requirements through 2020.
This report predicts the state of the economy in the year 2020 and
provides vital labor market information-- such as which fields are
expected to create the most jobs, the education requirements required
to gain employment, and the skills most coveted by employers.
Know
Your IX was created as a campaign that aims to
educate all college students in the U.S. about their rights under
Title IX. Armed with information, sexual violence survivors will be
able to advocate for themselves during their schools' grievance
proceedings and, if Title IX guarantees are not respected, file a
complaint against their colleges with the Department of Education's
Office for Civil Rights. Organizational support comes from The IX
Network, American Association of University Women, the Harvard Law
School Gender Violence Clinic, the Clery Center for Security on
Campus, the National Women's Law Center, the American Civil Liberties
Union, SurvJustice, Futures Without Violence, OSAC, SCAR, Circle of
6, One Billion Rising, Feministing.
The National
Alliance for Partnerships in Equity (NAPE) is a
national, nonprofit consortium of state and local agencies,
corporations, and national organizations that collaborate to create
equitable and diverse classrooms and workplaces where there are no
barriers to opportunities. Through its Education Foundation, NAPE has
been involved in a number of initiatives to increase diversity in
America's workforce and to increase opportunities in high-skill,
high-wage, high-demand careers. Among these is the National Science
Foundation-funded STEM
Equity Pipeline Project, which works with educational
systems to increase the participation of underrepresented populations
in STEM education.
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