From the Editor
A Calm 2012?
Anne Wujcik — Friday, January 06, 2012
Happy New Year everyone! It's hard to believe that we are already a week into 2012. It is possible that the first part of this year will be relatively calm, with the school finishing out the 2011-12 school year without too much more disruption. There was a flurry of activity in Washington at the end of the year. Congress passed an omnibus appropriations bill that finalized the FY 2012 federal budget. The Department of Education also announced its Round III Race to the Top awards, along with Promise Neighborhoods grants and the 23 highest rated projects in the 2011 Investing in Innovation (i3) Fund competition secured their required private funding, qualifying them to receive their i3 grants. Much of ED's energy in 2012 will be devoted to monitoring the progress of the various RTTT grantees, applying pressure where needed and help where requested and managing the ongoing NCLB waivers process.
As expected, the FY 2012 Education Department budget fared pretty well. The total budget of $68.1 billion is down just $233 million from the prior year. This is, however, the first year since 2007 in which there was no increase in the Department's total appropriation. The final 2012 omnibus bill provides $14.5 billion for Title I grants, and $11.6 billion for IDEA state grants, slight increases over the prior year funding levels. Title I School Improvement Grants received $534 million, just below 2011 funding. This is something of a victory, since the House had proposed cutting all SIG funding.
Some of the Obama administration's favorite programs fared well. Despite frequent Congressional attacks on Race to the Top, Congress once again funded the program, appropriating $550 million, down from $700 million, and opening the competition to districts as well as states. Investing in Innovation was level funded at $150 million. Promise Neighborhoods received $60 million, a $30 million increase over 2011 levels.
The 2012 omnibus restored funding - $160 million - for Striving Readers, which was not funded in FY 2011. Congress did not provide the program with funding in 2011.
The increases were balanced by a number of cuts. A number of small programs - Foreign Language Assistance ($27 million in 2011), Teaching of Traditional American History ($46 million in 2011), Voluntary Public School Choice ($26 million in 2011), and Javits Fellowships ($8 million in 2011) - were zeroed out. The Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF) was cut by $100 million, receiving $299 million in FY 3012 and the Safe and Drug-Free Schools national programs was cut in half to $60 million.
I hesitate to speculate on the FY 2013 budget process. For one thing it will take place in the shadow of the mandated cuts that are scheduled to take effect in January 2013. These automatic across-the-board spending cuts are a consequence of Congress having failed to deliver a deficit-reduction plan as required under the Budget Control Act enacted in August 2011. The picture is even murkier in this election year. A new Congress could either abrogate the Budget Control Act or move aggressively to enact budget cuts. It's all up in the air right now and not likely to become much clearer until after the election, if then.
At the state level, it looks like the economy is slowly improving or at least not continuing to worsen. Progress is uneven, however, with some states feeling pretty good and others hitting new bumps in the road. Pennsylvania, for example, is now projecting a $500 million revenue shortfall and the Governor has proposed $160 million in mid-year budget cuts. By early spring we'll have some idea of how education will fare in the states, as state legislatures work to balance and pass their FY 2013 budgets. Those budgets will tell us a lot about what schools can expect as they gear up for the 2012-13 school year.
Locally, districts are in various stages of preparing for the Common Core. Lots of professional development going on and major efforts directed to evaluating, selecting and adapting instructional materials aligned to the Core. The recent announcement from the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC), one of the Common Core Assessment Consortia, of the release of its Item Development Invitation to Negotiate (ITN) will add fuel to the fire. The ITN will procure the development of English language arts/literacy and mathematics items, tasks and related materials for PARCC's mid-year, performance-based, and end-of-year assessments. As work begins on developing actual items that will be used in the administration of the first Common Core assessment in 2014-15, it all gets more real. The process PARCC has outlined involves a two-phase contract that could be awarded to multiple companies in each subject area. Multiple contractors will develop 50% of the test items in the first phase. The second phase will include contractors from the first phase who have shown the ability to work collaboratively and deliver high quality, innovative assessment items and tasks on deadline. I presume news on item development from the SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium will be coming soon, since both groups plan pilots of their tests over the next two school years. Once again, stay tuned.
