The Obama Administration released its 2013 budget today. The U.S. Department of Education is requesting $69.8 billion in discretionary funding for 2013, an increase of $1.7 billion or 2.5 percent from 2012. The President is proposing a $14 billion one-time strategic investment in key reform areas, including aligning education programs with workforce demands, raising the teaching profession, and increasing college affordability and quality. 

“In these tough budget times, the Obama Administration is making a clear statement that high-quality education is absolutely critical to rebuilding our economy,” U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said. “If we want to strengthen the American workforce, we must continue to invest in education.”

The Department of Education has proposed investing $850 million for the 2013 Race to the Top competition to support comprehensive state and local reforms and innovations designed to close achievement gaps and increase student achievement. A significant portion of the funds would be dedicated for early learning. 

To further support innovation at the local level, the Department is proposing $150 million for the Investing in Innovation fund to develop, evaluate, and scale-up evidence-based approaches to improve student achievement, raise graduation rates, and increase teacher and school leader effectiveness. A portion of these funds will be used to support the development of breakthrough learning technologies through the Advanced Research Projects Agency - Education (ARPA-ED). In addition, the Department would boost funding for Promise Neighborhoods – up to $100 million in total – to support the development and implementation of comprehensive community projects designed to combat the effects of poverty and improve education and life outcomes for disadvantaged students.

Also, the Department is proposing $5 billion in competitive funding to provide support to states and districts as they pursue bold reforms that can help better prepare, support and compensate teachers. 

This budget also establishes a new 25 percent set aside in Title II funds, about $620 million, within Effective Teachers and Leaders state grants that would go toward creating and expanding high-performing pathways into teaching and school leadership, reducing shortages of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) teachers, and investing in efforts to enhance the profession. In addition, the Department would invest $400 million for the Teacher and Leader Innovation Fund – an increase of $100 million over the current level – to support states and districts that want to implement bold approaches to improve the effectiveness of the education workforce in high-need schools.

The Department would also invest $190 million in mandatory funding for Presidential Teaching Fellows to provide scholarships to talented students who attend top-tier teacher preparation programs and commit to working in high-need schools.

The Administration is proposing $8 billion in mandatory funding for a Community College to Career Fund. Jointly administered with the U.S. Department of Labor, this competitive program would provide funding to develop new partnerships between community colleges and businesses in order to train and place two million workers in high-growth industries. 

These funds would give more community colleges the resources they need to become community career centers where people learn skills that local businesses are looking for right now. In addition, employers would offer paid internships for low-income students so they could simultaneously earn credit for work-based learning and gain relevant employment experience. The fund will also support new pay-for-performance strategies to provide incentives to ensure trainees find permanent jobs and encourage companies to locate in the U.S.

In addition, the Department is proposing to invest $1.1 billion to support the reauthorization and reform of the Career and Technical Education program so what students learn is more closely aligned with the demands of the workforce, and partnerships with postsecondary education are strengthened.

The Department would invest $1 billion for the first year of a Race to the Top: College Affordability and Completion to drive reform on the state level and help students finish faster, and it would expand and reform campus-based aid programs to provide more than $10 billion in student financial aid for colleges that restrain cost increases and provide a good value, especially to disadvantaged students. As part of that package, the Department would invest $735 million in Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grants, and increase aid to $1.1 billion in federal work study and $8.5 billion in Perkins loans – up from about $1 billion currently available in Perkins loans.

The Department is also proposing $55 million for a First in the World competition to drive innovation among postsecondary institutions, including minority-serving institutions, and help them scale up practices that work to increase college completion.

In addition, the Administration is continuing key investments in Pell grants by increasing the maximum award amount to $5,635 to support nearly 10 million students as they pursue higher education. Following up on the President's State of the Union address, the Department is proposing to freeze the interest rate on subsidized student loans at 3.4 percent – instead of allowing it to double to 6.8 percent this summer – and make the American Opportunity Tax Credit permanent. The AOTC provides taxpayers up to $10,000 over four years to cover expenses like tuition, fees and textbook costs.

These proposals come on top of other continued investments, including $14.5 billion for Title I College and Career Ready Students, $534 million for School Improvement Grants and $11.6 billion for IDEA Part B Grants to states. 

Read the President's speech on the White House website, and read more information about the budget on U.S. Department of Education website. 

President Barack Obama announced on Thursday, February 9, that ten states that have agreed to implement bold reforms around standards and accountability will receive flexibility from the burdensome mandates of the federal education law known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB). In exchange for this flexibility, these states have agreed to raise standards, improve accountability, and undertake essential reforms to improve teacher effectiveness. The ten states approved for flexibility are Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, Oklahoma, and Tennessee.

In a White House announcement attended by state education officials, teachers, civil rights, and business leaders, the President said that NCLB, which is five years overdue for a rewrite, is driving the wrong behaviors, from teaching to the test to federally determined, one-size-fits-all interventions. The President called on Congress to work across the aisle to fix the law even as his administration offers solutions for states to help prepare all students for college and career readiness.

"After waiting far too long for Congress to reform No Child Left Behind, my Administration is giving states the opportunity to set higher, more honest standards in exchange for more flexibility," said President Obama. "Today, we're giving 10 states the green light to continue making reforms that are best for them. Because if we're serious about helping our children reach their potential, the best ideas aren't going to come from Washington alone. Our job is to harness those ideas, and to hold states and schools accountable for making them work."

The administration is continuing to work closely with New Mexico, the eleventh state that requested flexibility in the first round. Twenty-eight other states along with D.C. and Puerto Rico have indicated their intent to seek waivers.

The administration's decision to provide waivers followed extensive efforts to work with Congress to rewrite NCLB. In March 2010, the administration submitted a "blueprint for reform" to Congress and has met extensively with Republican and Democratic legislators.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan said that current law drives down standards, weakens accountability, causes narrowing of the curriculum and labels too many schools as failing. Moreover, the law mandates unworkable remedies at the federal level instead of allowing local educators to make spending decisions.

"Rather than dictating educational decisions from Washington, we want state and local educators to decide how to best meet the individual needs of students," said Duncan.

To get flexibility from NCLB, states must adopt and have a plan to implement college and career-ready standards. They must also create comprehensive systems of teacher and principal development, evaluation and support that include factors beyond test scores, such as principal observation, peer review, student work, or parent and student feedback.

States receiving waivers no longer have to meet 2014 targets set by NCLB but they must set new performance targets for improving student achievement and closing achievement gaps. They also must have accountability systems that recognize and reward high-performing schools and those that are making significant gains, while targeting rigorous and comprehensive interventions for the lowest-performing schools. Under the state-developed plans, all schools will develop and implement plans for improving educational outcomes for underperforming subgroups of students. State plans will require continued transparency around achievement gaps, but will provide schools and districts greater flexibility in how they spend Title I federal dollars.

Visit the Department of Education website for more information. 

The GE Foundation, the philanthropic arm of GE, announces an $18 million grant to Student Achievement Partners, a nonprofit organization to provide critical implementation support for Common Core State Standards across the U.S. The four-year grant is the largest corporate commitment to date for the Common Core State Standards and reflects GE’s longstanding dedication to preparing American students for an increasingly competitive workforce. 

“Our economy is facing an undeniable challenge—good paying jobs are going unfilled because U.S. workers don’t have the skills to fill the positions. We must cultivate a highly educated workforce and we see the Standards as a key component to answering this challenge,” says Robert Corcoran, Vice President, GE Corporate Citizenship, and President and Chair, GE Foundation.

The grant will allow Student Achievement Partners to offer national support to teachers. Student Achievement Partners helped in the development of the Core Standards, a process that drew on the input of teachers, business leaders, researchers, and policymakers. As contributing authors of the Core Standards, Student Achievement Partners integrated 10,000 public comments from teachers and other stakeholders as the Standards were being developed. Student Achievement Partners also helped ensure that the Standards were based on the best available evidence of what students need to master in order to be ready for the demands of college and career. 

“This is a great day for the education reform movement and specifically for the momentum behind the Common Core State Standards. The GE Foundation is going deep in this work and its commitment to improving public education for all students is exactly what it is going to take to seed real and lasting change, especially during these tough economic times,” says David Coleman, Founding Partner, Student Achievement Partners.

The grant from GE Foundation will support several related efforts to help educators achieve the Core Standards:

• Direct collaboration with teachers to produce and share examples and best practices of excellent instruction aligned with the Standards; 
• A website, www.achievethecore.org, to distribute free resources designed to support teacher understanding and implementation; 
• Standards Immersion Institutes designed to cultivate teacher experts who can build knowledge in their districts and states; 
• The development of tools to track implementation and evaluate the quality of student work; and
• Partnerships with a network of non-profits to provide ongoing technical support to district and state leaders guiding implementation.

“This is a win for the youth of America and the companies that hope to employ them in the future,” says former Governor John Engler, President, the Business Roundtable, an organization comprised of the chief executive officers from leading U.S. companies. “The Core Standards movement can help our nation prepare a highly trained, internationally competitive workforce so we can continue to lead the world. The GE Foundation has demonstrated real leadership by stepping up and supporting this work.”

“Our members came together from states across the country to develop the Common Core and are now focused on implementing these new standards,” says Gene Wilhoit, Executive Director, Council of Chief State School Officers. “Teachers are on the frontlines of this work and supporting them as they bring the standards to life for their students is our top priority. We are thrilled that Student Achievement Partners in partnership with the GE Foundation will be providing such a strong resource for teachers.”

For more information, visit the GE website’s newsroom. 

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan will engage with the Hispanic community through a twitter town hall at 3 p.m. ET on February 8 (today). The conversation will be conducted in both English and Spanish.

José Rico, executive director of the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanics, will join Duncan for the virtual town hall. As head of the initiative, Rico helps carry out President Obama’s efforts to improve the academic achievement of Hispanic students. Duncan and Rico will discuss how Hispanic success in education is important to the country and respond to questions submitted on Twitter. The town hall will be moderated by Elianne Ramos and Cheryl Aguilar from LATISM, a nonprofit social media outlet aimed at advancing the social, economic and educational status of the Latino community. 

The event will be streamed live online at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/education-department. Twitter users can ask questions in advance and during the forum using the hashtag #HispanicEd. Community leaders and Education Department staff will help flag questions through retweets on Twitter. 

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) will be more rigorous than previous state academic standards, but most states do not expect to have them in place until the 2014-15 school year or later, according to a new report by the Center on Education Policy (CEP). 

The report also finds that while state education agencies are taking steps to familiarize state and district officials with the new standards and are aligning curriculum and assessments, they caution that adequate resources and technology related to test administration remain major challenges to full implementation of the CCSS.

The report entitled “Year Two of Implementing the Common Core State Standards: States' Progress and Challenges” is the second in a series by CEP about state implementation of the CCSS. It is based on a survey of state education agencies conducted from October through December of 2011 to get updated information on state strategies, policies and challenges in the second year of transition to the CCSS. As of January 2012, 45 states and the District of Columbia have adopted the CCSS in English language arts and mathematics. The survey data included in this report is based on 35 states and D.C. that both adopted the CCSS and responded to the survey.

When asked about the rigor of the CCSS compared with current academic standards in their states, 32 of the responding CCSS-adopting states agreed that implementing CCSS will lead to improved student skills in English language arts and in math. Thirty of these states agreed that the CCSS will be more rigorous than current standards in English language arts while 29 states echoed that view for mathematics.

Survey states that have adopted the CCSS are taking actions to help teachers master the new standards and use them to guide instruction. Among the findings in this area:
• All of the states that responded to survey items about teacher strategies are creating professional
development materials to help teachers master the CCSS (34 states) and are conducting statewide
professional development initiatives (33 states);
• 27 states are aligning the content of teacher preparation programs with the CCSS, while five do not
intend to do so;
• 25 states are modifying or creating educator evaluation systems that hold educators accountable for
student mastery of the CCSS, while six do not plan to do so; and
• 23 states are developing and implementing new teacher induction programs to help new teachers
master the CCSS, while nine do not plan to do so.

When it comes to working with districts, 28 of the adopting survey states are requiring districts to implement the CCSS, but only 15 states intend to require districts to develop long-term, comprehensive plans for local implementation. In addition, 27 states plan special initiatives to ensure that the lowest-performing schools fully implement the CCSS.

The state K-12 education agencies in 26 of the CCSS-adopting states in the survey are establishing partnerships with the state higher education agency or with postsecondary institutions to implement the standards. But just 16 states plan to align undergraduate admissions requirements or the first-year undergraduate core curriculum with the CCSS.

Reflecting the complex nature of the transition to the CCSS, implementation is moving at different rates in different states. Six states in the survey expect to fully implement these standards before or during school year 2012-13. Nine states anticipate full implementation in 2013-14, 16 in 2014-15, and one in 2015-16. These state timelines are affected somewhat by the work of two state-led consortia, which are developing assessments aligned to the CCSS and do not expect their tests to be ready until 2014-15. 

At the same time, several challenges remain. Twenty-one survey states said that finding adequate resources to fully implement the standards will be a major challenge. Other major challenges include providing sufficient professional development (20 states), aligning the content of teacher preparation programs with the CCSS (18 states) and developing CCSS-aligned educator evaluation systems for teachers and principals (18 states).

States do not expect strong resistance to the CCSS to be a major challenge in 2011-12, though several states foresee minor challenges in the form of resistance from inside the K-12 system (14 states), from higher education (10 states), and from outside the K-12 system (nine states).

Technology related to the administration of aligned assessments is one final area of concern for many states. The CCSS-aligned assessments being developed by the two state consortia could be administered online, but many of the states planning to use these assessments do not currently administer their state tests online. When asked about technology related to the administration of assessments, 20 survey states said that the availability of sufficient numbers of computers in schools is a major challenge, while 15 states cited adequate internet access and bandwidth in schools as a major challenge. Of the states that cited technology as a major challenge, 10 states have plans in place to address these challenges and 16 do not.

Visit the CEP website to view the report.