Education Week - April 17, 2013 - 22

EDUCATION WEEK

APRIL 17, 2013

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Obama Budget Boosts Pre-K, Competitive Grant Programs
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

money for charter schools, turnarounds, and principal training.
The proposed increases largely
sidestep fiscal realities, said Jason
Delisle, a former aide to Republicans on the Senate Budget Committee, who now serves as the
director of the federal education
budget project at the New America
Foundation, in Washington.
“One major theme [in the budget] is, ‘Let’s just say sequestration
never happened,’ but it did,” he
said. “Sequestration did happen,
and we do have spending caps that
[President Obama] signed into law,

so it seems a little bit abstract to
sort of assume those things away.”

Early-Years Push
As announced in the State of the
Union address, President Obama
is seeking $1.3 billion—and a total
of $75 billion during the next 10
years—to expand preschool programs for 4-year-olds from low- and
moderate-income families.
The prekindergarten push would
also include $750 million for preschool development grants to help
states bolster the quality of their
to early-childhood-education programs. It would be paid for through

a new tax on tobacco products—94
cents per pack of cigarettes, bringing the total federal tax to nearly
$2. To help even younger children,
the budget plan seeks $1.4 billion
for Early Head Start-Child Care
Partnerships.
States would be expected to kick
in a portion of the prekindergarten
funding, as much as 10 percent in
the first year, gradually increasing
to roughly 75 percent after a decade. The administration doesn’t
expect all states to participate in
the first year, since they would have
to meet quality standards for their
programs in areas such as learning
standards and teacher quality in

order to tap the aid.
The money could be used to offer
prekindergarten to children of lowincome families, defined as those
making at or below 200 percent
of the federal poverty level. States
that wanted to go beyond serving
those children—expanding the program to middle-income families, for
example, or offering full-day kindergarten—would get additional
federal help.
State officials appear optimistic
about the general direction of the
program, even as they pinpoint possible pitfalls.
For instance, Georgia already
has one of the most robust pre-

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kindergarten programs in the nation, serving roughly 60 percent of
4-year-olds. The federal funding
could allow the Peach State to extend its program, said Bobby Cagle,
the commissioner of Bright From
the Start: Georgia Department of
Early Care and Learning.
But Mr. Cagle is cautious about
some of the details, including the
decrease in federal aid over time,
and the funding mechanism, a new
tax. “The financing of the plan is our
greatest concern,” he said.
The tobacco industry has begun
mobilizing against the proposed
tax hike. David Sutton, a spokesman for the Altria Group, the parent company of Philip Morris USA
Inc., said in an email that tobacco
taxes soared by 158 percent four
years ago.
“We think it is patently unfair to
single out adult tobacco consumers
with another federal tobacco-tax increase to pay for a broad, new government spending program claimed
to have benefits for everyone,” he
said.
Meanwhile, Democratic leaders
in Congress—including Sen. Tom
Harkin of Iowa, the chairman of the
Senate education committee—immediately issued supportive statements.
But Republicans have been less
enthusiastic. For instance, Rep.
Todd Rokita of Indiana, the chairman of the House subcommittee
overseeing K-12 policy, raised big
questions about pieces of the prekindergarten proposal and said it
could amount to “an alarming expansion of government power.”

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Lawmakers in both parties
frowned on the administration’s
move to provide level funding for
key formula programs that go out to
nearly every school district, including the $14.5 billion Title I grants to
districts, and the $11.6 billion special education state grants, while
bolstering funding for competitive
grants.
“Competitive funding seems to reward a state’s grant writing rather
than the actual [school] system,”
Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut,
the top Democrat on the House
subcommittee that oversees education spending, told U.S. Secretary of
Education Arne Duncan at an April
11 hearing on the budget.
The administration is asking for
$300 million for a competitive-grant
program aimed at helping high
schools better prepare students for
postsecondary education and the
workplace, with a particular focus
on science, technology, engineering,
and math. Districts would partner
with nonprofits, higher education
institutions, or businesses; rural
districts and those serving highpoverty students would be given
priority.
Big increases under the budget plan would also go to a host
of the administration’s marquee
programs, including $1 billion for
a new iteration of the Race to the
Top competitive-grant franchise.
This round would reward states for
revamping their higher education
systems to help colleges improve

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Education Week - April 17, 2013

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