Education Week - September 23, 2015 - 13

GOVERNMENT & POLITICS

From Pre-K to Higher Ed., Duncan Tour Touts Priorities
By Alyson Klein
Champaign, Ill.

U.S. Secretary of Education
Arne Duncan used his annual
back-to-school bus tour last week
to prod Congress to invest in early
education and tout the Obama
administration's latest fix to the
notoriously mind-boggling federal
financial aid process.
But along the way, he was
dogged by questions about some
of his administration's controversial moves on K-12: championing teacher evaluations tied to
student performance, expanding
charter schools, and of course,
standardized testing.
The secretary's sixth annual
trek-which sought to touch on
every part of the education spectrum, from early childhood to career development-took Duncan
through Iowa, Illinois, Indiana,
Kentucky, Ohio, and western Pennsylvania.

He kicked off the five-day tour
in Iowa, where he and President
Barack Obama held an event at
a high school in Des Moines that
touched on the topic of college
aid.
The federal government has already taken some of the pain out
of completing the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or
FAFSA, by giving students the
chance to have a portion of their
forms filled out automatically, and
using their families' tax information already on file at the Internal
Revenue Service.
But that hasn't solved the whole
problem, in part because students
now begin filling out financial-aid
forms in January, when not everyone has done their taxes for the
year. The White House wants to
allow students to get started much
sooner, beginning in October, and

Charlie Neibergall/AP

FAFSA Changes

to use tax information from the
year before to automatically fill out
the form.
The change, which will kick in as
of October 2016, will likely mean
that more students will be eligible
for Pell Grants and other assistance. In fact, the White House
estimates that 2 million current
college students could have had
access to Pell Grants-which help
low-income students pay for college-but didn't because they
never filed the proper forms.
Duncan told reporters in a conference call last week that he believes the new rules will increase
financial aid and college access for
"literally hundreds of thousands"

more students, particularly those
from low-income backgrounds and
those who are the first in their
families to go to college. Those students, he said, have long experienced the 108-question FAFSA as
a "barrier to financial aid."
"This shift in the time frame may
not seem like a big deal, but it's a
huge deal," he said. It will "open
the door to a new world of opportunity" for many students and families "who historically have been
locked out."
Handing out more federal aid
to students, however, comes with
a price tag, though Duncan said
that the cost would be "very, very
minor." When pressed, he said

the government projects that the
change would cost about 1 percent
of the total annual cost of the Pell
Grant program, which was an estimated $31.4 billion in fiscal year
2015.
Top Republicans in Congress
on education policy, including
Rep. John Kline of Minnesota and
Virginia Foxx of North Carolina,
say the policy goes in the right
direction, but they worry that the
administration doesn't have a "responsible" plan to cover the cost.
But at a bus tour stop at Purdue University in West Lafeyette,
Ind., Duncan got kudos from Ted
Malone, the school's executive di-

Joined by President
Barack Obama, U.S.
Secretary of Education
Arne Duncan speaks
during a town hall
meeting at North High
School in Des Moines,
Iowa. The first stop on
the secretary's annual
back-to-school bus tour
focused on college aid.

PAGE 15 >

GOP Presidential Debaters Give Glancing Mention to Education
By Andrew Ujifusa
Despite roughly five hours of debate between Republican presidential hopefuls at their latest
two-tiered showdown last week,
discussion of education amounted
to little more than a few offhand
references.
Unlike the August GOP debate,
which featured a substantive exchange about the Common Core
State Standards between two candidates, there was no such interplay about the standards-or any
other K-12 topic.
That was true both of the main
event, featuring the 11 candidates with the best poll numbers,
and the undercard, featuring four

lower-polling candidates. And none
of the CNN moderators asked a direct question about education, in a
debate that skewed heavily toward
subjects such as foreign policy.

paign trail in recent weeks.
The one prominent exception
was last month, when six Republican candidates, including former
Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, former

The latest face-off among Republicans running
for the White House included allusions to federal
overreach, but little of substance on K-12 issues.
Although the Democratic candidates' debate on Oct. 13 provides a
fresh opportunity for schools to get
more attention, education hasn't
gotten much notice from the candidates in either party on the cam-

Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, and Wisconsin Gov. Scott
Walker, focused on K-12 policy at
a New Hampshire forum hosted
by The Seventy Four, an education
news and opinion website.

When public school policy did
come up at the Sept. 16 debate-
held at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, in Simi Valley,
Calif.-it did so as part of attacks
against alleged overregulation by
Washington and policies backed by
President Barack Obama and his
administration.

Common Core Mentioned
In the main event, developer Donald Trump was the only candidate to
directly mention the common core.
In an exchange with Bush, Trump
mentioned tangentially that the former governor supports the common
core, which the business executive
deemed "is also a disaster."

It's an attack Trump has lodged
against Bush before-among the
16 GOP candidates, only Bush and
Ohio Gov. John Kasich support the
common core. (All but three of the
46 states that adopted the common core along with the District of
Columbia have officially kept the
standards, though the pace and
nature of their implementation of
it has varied.)
Bush did not respond to Trump's
gibe. But Bush did subsequently
highlight one of his signature education policy accomplishments
during his tenure in Florida: the
creation of what he called in the
debate "the largest voucher program in the country." The state's
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Education Week - September 23, 2015

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