Afton Partners

ESSA’s Student Support and Academic Enrichment Grants, better known as Title IV of the law, just got a huge boost, from $400 million to $1.1 billion. So what are districts going to do with those grants? Forty-one percent of district leaders surveyed said they were interested in spending the funding on professional development. Curriculum was also a big priority…and social-emotional learning and workforce preparation were other big areas of interest. But there are some differences in regional priorities. For instance, districts in the South are more interested in college-and-career readiness than districts elsewhere.

In total, the bill Trump signed into law sets the department’s budget at $71.5 billion for fiscal 2019, an increase over fiscal 2018 of $581 million, although that figure doesn’t include a rescission of $500 million from Pell Grant reserves. The spending package largely ignores the push from Trump and DeVos to create new school choice programs, as well as their proposals to cut the Education Department’s overall budget. Not adjusting for inflation, the $71.5 billion budget is the largest-ever appropriation from Congress for the Education Department.

After months of wrangling, top lawmakers for the education budget struck a deal to fund the U.S. Department of Education for the upcoming fiscal year. It’s not a done deal, because it still needs to pass the House and Senate, and President Donald Trump then has to sign it. Is there any general theme for how various programs and their constituencies made out in the deal? We’ve identified a few of them below. Spending deal winners: Title IV Part A block grant, Title II aid for educator preparation, and 21st Century Community Learning Centers (programs Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos wanted to cut), and Career and Technical Education. Spending deal losers: Lawmakers completely ignored the administration’s signature school choice proposal for next year, a $1 billion “opportunity grants” program to promote choice. The deal also rescinds $600 million that Congress previously appropriated for Pell Grants but which hasn’t been spent yet.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos says she has “no intention of taking any action” regarding any possible use of federal funds to arm teachers or provide them with firearms training. DeVos’ comments came Friday after a top official in her department, asked about arming teachers, said states and local jurisdictions always “had the flexibility” to decide how to use federal education funds. DeVos said Friday that “Congress did not authorize me or the Department to make those decisions” about arming teachers or training them on the use of firearms.

Back-to-back school shootings this year and inquiries from the state of Texas have prompted the education secretary, Betsy DeVos, to examine whether to allow states to tap the school enrichment fund for another purpose: guns. Such a move would reverse a longstanding position taken by the federal government that it should not pay to outfit schools with weaponry. As recently as March, Congress passed a school safety bill that allocated $50 million a year to local school districts, but expressly prohibited the use of the money for firearms. The Every Student Succeeds Act, signed into law in 2015, is silent on weapons purchases, and that omission would allow Ms. DeVos to use her discretion to approve or deny any state or district plans to use the enrichment grants under the measure for firearms and firearm training, unless Congress clarifies the law or bans such funding through legislative action.

The legislation is a reauthorization of the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act, a $1.2 billion program last overhauled by Congress in 2006. The new law allows states to set their own goals for career and technical education programs without the education secretary’s approval, requires them to make progress toward those goals, and makes other changes to federal CTE law.

The spending bill would provide about $71 billion to the Education Department for fiscal 2019, an increase of nearly $100 million from current spending levels in fiscal 2018. It rejects President Donald Trump’s push to make a significant overall cut to the department, shrink or eliminate several education programs, and direct more money to school choice initiatives.  Committee lawmakers adopted an amendment…that maintained current funding levels of $90 million for the School Safety National Activities program. The original House bill introduced last month would have cut the program by $47 million.