This is funny. The Republicans control both houses of Congress. Trump asked them to slash the federal education budget by billions and to create a multi-billion fund to support school choice. The new budget for education ignores both requests.
According to Education Week, there will be increases for Title I and special education. There will be no new spending on school choice.
The only federal program that takes a budget hit is Title II, which helps keep down class sizes.
Lawmakers appear to be sending early signals of independence from the Trump administration on education budget issues. For example, in the fiscal 2018 budget proposal Turmp released several weeks ago, the president also sought to eliminate just over $1 billion in support for 21st Century Community Learning Centers in fiscal 2018. However, this budget deal for fiscal 2017 would give the program a relatively small boost of $25 million up to nearly $1.2 billion. Trump had also wanted to cut Title II funding in half in fiscal 2017, far more than this agreement, before eliminating it entirely in fiscal 2018.
And programs designed to serve needy students like TRIO and GEAR UP would also get small increases in this fiscal 2017 deal. Several of Trump’s proposed fiscal 2017 cuts were to programs that had already been consolidated under ESSA.
The budget deal doesn’t appear to include a new federal school choice program, a top K-12 priority for the Trump administration, although Trump’s request for such a program appears in his fiscal 2018 proposal and not his fiscal 2017 blueprint.
The budget deal also includes an increase (instead of elimination) for the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Shhhhhhh. He might hear you.
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Diane: “Go figure” on that one. Maybe we shouldn’t tell anyone. But the first thing I thought of upon reading your note is how many children can be “taught” using computers, as in: from home or anywhere. What a savings! One canned teacher and thousands of kids! Sort of like Sesame Street only for K-12 education.
The monetary attraction is clear, even though strange and “funny” forces are at work presently in the budget. The problem is, of course, that such an attractive student-teacher ratio (per the money) flies in the face of years of research about what is needed for a whole-child education (per a full and long term education in a democracy).
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More than anything else, this deal shows the true weakness of this administration. Remember that this omnibus appropriations is a packages of bills that should have been passed by Sept. 30, 2016(!). Congressional Republicans tried to steal this just like they did the Supreme Court nomination.
When Trump FY 2018 budget came out, I speculated that Congress would use this omnibus bill to act as bridge to that budget. It would have been if the Trump administration was was strong. When the 2018 budget proposal called for a 20% cut to the National Institutes of Health, I speculated that the $2 billion increase for NIH in the FY 2017 bill was likely at risk because why would they increase funding this year only to dramatically lower it in the next? Now we have a bit of an inkling that many parts of the Trump budget truly are close to dead on arrival. The education funding story tells the same story. Rather than a comprehensive overhaul, they will seek tactical victories and, if they win those, they will claim strategic conquest.
At first glance, this tells me that the 2018 mid-terms will be even more important than they already are. Now that Republicans have set the precedent that the final year of a two-term presidency is for all purposes a lame duck year to be controlled by a congressional majority, a Democratic majority in January 2019 would mean that the the final two years of a Trump presidency would be an even longer, earlier lame duck period. Now we just have to get to work and convince enough voters that their votes for congressional representation is a national vote. Not an easy task.
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Greg,
Not an easy task but a necessary one if we are to protect our democracy and our citizens.
By the way, public television –the Corporation for Public Broadcasting–was not cut. It was level funded.
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GregB: Thank you for reminding me of how truly and ONLY-political the Republican party is. They’ll do and say anything to hoodwink the voter and get their aynrandian way. I am sickened by it.
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Oh, that your well-stated goals become reality.
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Well, this is interesting news….
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No new money for choice? What about charter school funding?
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Since public education at the K-12 level, is over 90% funded at the state/municipal level, that is where the funding should come from. Local control, with local government running the show, is the way to go. Instead of sending your federal tax dollars, off to Washington, and then having some nameless, faceless bureaucrat determining education policy, the local community and the state government can run things just fine.
There is no mandate for the federal government to get involved in education at all. I have read the US Constitution front to back, and I cannot lay my finger on any specific authorization for education.
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Charles Education of “the people” is implicit in the very idea of democracy (small d) on the point that democracy cannot hold strong for very long when the people are ignorant, especially of the very democratic principles that control the movement of power and that are stated in the Constitution, namely, in the First Amendment. (Jefferson writes about this and its been posted here before.)
For example, freedom of speech becomes relatively pointless if a person has little or no education and nothing to base their political opinions on–while they do have the power to choose. Without an education, we are prone to follow the pied pipers and tricksters who would deprive us of our freedoms, with our starry-eyed endorsement and willingness to look away.
It’s one of the greatest ironies of history that so many across the world admire the US, and are entirely jealous of our successes, while at the same time doing their best to undermine the very principles that make us truly great, insofar as we are.
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I am not saying that government cannot provide the means to public education. I am just saying that the states/municipalities can run local education policies, much better and more efficiently than the feds. Local dollars, local school boards, local education policy, this is the way to go.
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Charles: In answer to your note to me–I have answered it in part in my response to your note to GregB. However, I agree with you about “local control”–for well-meaning people. But that’s not why people like Betsy DeVos and organizations like ALEC want to “return” to state and local control.<–that’s just the lipstick they put on their pig. In the local arena is where they know they can gain their factional power “back” from the federal government where, though battered and misunderstood by both parties, education still is connected to the IDEA of democracy and of serving “the people” who will be responsible for maintaining that same IDEA as we go forward. They are made their sophistry systematic now–it hides their hatefulness and arrogance well.
BTW, the freedoms we still have are only weaknesses in the presence of the truly weak whose own weaknesses are covered over by self-aggrandizement and a lowlife view of power. If local control is where we actually go, then local people who have the right idea about education will have to wrest it from the corporate powers who want it ever-so-badly and who are willing to do pretty much anything to keep it.
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OK, here we go again. Article I, section 1 states “All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States.”
Article I, section 8, paragraph 18 gives Congress the authority “To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.”
Article II, section 3 gives the president the authority to “recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient” and “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed”.
Article V outlines a process to make “Amendments to this Constitution”, therefore implying the idea, which has been broadly understood and accepted throughout our history, that the constitution is a living, not a static, document. The fact that Article I, section 1 “granted” “Legislative Powers” “in a Congress of the United States” also supports that concept.
Article VI clearly states that “the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof…shall be the supreme Law of the Land…”
Article VII provided the framework of “Ratification” that would “be sufficient for the Establishment of this Constitution.”
Chief Justice Marshall asserted the authority of Article III in the decision of Marbury vs. Madison which the governing concept of judicial review, which gives the Supreme Court the power to interpret the final meaning of legislation that is signed into law and executive administration action.
When Congress passed bills about education policy and appropriations, including the establishment of the Department of Education, when they were signed into law by the president (whoever he might have been), and when the Supreme Court did not explicitly strike them down when cases were before it, taken together with the various items I cited above, it established the constitutionality of the federal role in education. The fact that you “cannot lay [your] finger on any specific authorization for education” is not, thankfully, the standard by which things are deemed to be constitutional or not.
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All of this is very interesting. And it proves my point. Nowhere in the constitution, is there any specific, enumerated authority for the federal government to become involved in education at all. For the first 150+ years of our republic, the states/municipalities ran education, with no input at all from the federal government.
You should read Amendment 10, which reserves all powers to the states or to the people.
Bottom line, the powers of the federal government are specific and clearly defined. The powers reserved to the states and the people are unspecific and without limit.
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Charles: I want to hear what GregB says, but in the interim, I’m sure your argument will go down well with those who support organizations like ALEC, who look for “weaknesses” in the absences that come from the presence of freedoms, and where the horrors of “big government” are the mantra–as are the horrors of “bad teachers,” public schools, and anything that is fundamentally to the public good.
For these kleptomaniac-oligarch/fake-republicans a “return to the states,” which has a good sound at first glance to well-meaning people, is the same kind of argument that the South used to say that it wasn’t really about slavery, but about “states rights.” How dare you take away our states rights. Once they get to the state level, however, the factions can gain their strength again.
“The government” has become “too liberal” anyway, as the the First Amendment has always been.
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Charles, four essay questions for you:
Why did the framers include the words “necessary and proper” in Article I, section 8 of the constitution?
Why did the framers include the “privileges and immunities” clause in Article IV, section 2 and how can it be reconciled with the 10th amendment?
Is judicial review constitutional?
Does the experience and history of constitutional law inform our understanding of the constitution or is it irrelevant?
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Extra credit:
Is the creation and maintenance of national parks constitutional?
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The necessary and proper clause, see
http://www.heritage.org/constitution/#!/articles/1/essays/59/necessary-and-proper-clause
The “why” is so the federal government can execute the powers set forth in Art1Sec8
Privileges and immunities
http://www.heritage.org/constitution/#!/articles/4/essays/122/privileges-and-immunities-clause
The states rights and powers are set forth in the 10th amendment.
Is judicial review constitutional?
Although not specifically set forth in the constitution, the Supreme Court postulated the concept in Marbury v. Madison (1803).
The “supremacy clause”
As to the experience and history of constitutional law, it informs the people who choose to be informed by it. To many people, it is irrelevant.
And the creation of national parks, although not specifically set forth in the constitution, is constitutional under the property clause in Art IV
The Congress shall have Power to dispose of and make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory or other Property belonging to the United States….
ARTICLE IV, SECTION 3, CLAUSE 2
The federal government owns about 30% of the land in these United States, including the parks, military bases, etc.
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Whoops, explanation of grade below.
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For questions one and two you do not make the effort required to express your views. Copying dubious, deliberately ideological sources is not a substitute for making a balanced, historically accurate argument.
You do not answer the question if judicial review is constitutional.
“To many people, it is irrelevant” is not reasoning by which this nation makes laws or public policy. It is a weak, disingenuous attempt to rationalize a preconceived belief.
You also get no extra credit because you are too obtuse to see the logical and intellectual hypocrisy and inconsistency of reading an expansive view into one section of the Constitution with which you agree and denying it for parts with which you disagree.
In sum, your answers reveal a deliberately cultivated intellectual laziness and incurious ideology based on assumptions that do not respect or acknowledge a long-standing history and tradition of American pragmatism. The American tradition is not ideological; for most of our history, with few, especially in recent history, this is a fundamental trait that differentiates this nation from other historical traditions throughout the world.
You get F (minus, if there is such a thing).
This is a perfect example of the truism that it is better to keep silent and have others think you a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.
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