By Della B. Cronin

Congress returned to Washington on September 6 after one of their longest breaks in the past 50 years.  They face what is expected to be a busy September, and then will hit the campaign trail at the end of the month and won’t return until after Election Day.  So, what will they be doing in September?  Lots of math.  Federal budget math. Calendar math.  Polling math.  Election math.  And other calculations.

At the end of August, House and Senate leadership started talking about their plan for addressing FY 2017 spending.  Fiscal Year 2016 will end on September 30, and no one wants a government shutdown.  As a result, they have to decide what kind of continuing resolution (CR) they want their members to debate and pass before the month’s end.  Will it be a so-called “straight” or “clean” CR that will simply continue funding federal programs at current levels for a defined period of time?  That would seem like the simplest approach, but it may not be possible—particularly since the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) completely reworked federal K-12 education programs.  That means funding current programs and FY 2016 levels won’t really work at the Department of Education.  So, there will have to be some anomalies in the CR.  Another consideration is how long the would-be CR will last.  And that question could be even trickier than the one about anomalies.

As House and Senate leadership consider how long a CR would last they have to consider some unknowns.  If a CR lasts through November or December, a lame duck session could decide how to resolve funding for the rest of the year.  That would be Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) preference, since he could be a Minority Leader in 2017.  The House Freedom Caucus—the group of conservatives who often make trouble for House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) would like to see a CR last through at least March (they originally wanted one to last for two years!).  And, they’d like to skip any lame duck session at all.  They are fearful that a post-election lame duck would pass a resolution that gives President Barack Obama a final victory by raising spending. They say no one pays attention to a lame duck, and certainly won’t in the wake of a presidential election, allowing all sorts of federal spending mischief.  In an odd turn of events, that puts the Freedom Caucus’s desire for a long-term spending package at odds with the Senate Republicans’ desire to retain influence. For the education community, the whole situation raises more questions than it answers.

So, what is going on with education spending?  Right before the House and Senate left town, the Appropriations Committees passed bills that would outline spending for the Department of Education.  Neither the House nor Senate proposal are particularly good for education, since the same bill is making room for increased investments at the National Institutes of Health and opioid addiction and cancer spending while dealing with an overall restricted budget.  Title I, Title II and the new Title IV Student Support and Academic Achievement grant (Title IV, part A) are particularly concerning, as they all are slated for cuts.  (In the case of Title IV, part A, the new program would receive much less than the $1.65 billion proposed in ESSA, prompting concerns about the program viability from the STEM education community.) NCTM will be watching this process as it unfolds and weighing in on Capitol Hill.

Meanwhile, the Department of Education continues to churn out regulations.  On September 6, they released the long-awaited draft “Supplement Not Supplant” regulations.  This guidance governs the requirement that federal funds be used to supplement state and local education expenditures versus being used to fill local funding gaps.  The debate of the provisions has provoked discussions around equity versus comparability, the appropriate consideration of teacher salaries in certain calculations and other thorny issues.  Congressional Republicans have summoned Secretary of Education John King to Capitol Hill numerous times to warn him that they do not think the federal government should be tying too many strings to Title I funds.  In fact, House Education and the Workforce Committee Chairman John Kline (R-Minn.) said of the proposed guidance, in part, “The Department of Education is threatening to unilaterally impose a multibillion dollar regulatory tax on our nation’s schools. This punitive policy will unleash havoc on schools and their students at a time when education leaders should be focused on helping children succeed in the classroom...The only way to make this right is to scrap this convoluted regulatory scheme immediately.” So, Department of Education officials will be dealing with that response while they continue to sift through the over 20,000 comments they received from stakeholders (including NCTM) on the assessment proposed regulations published earlier this year. 

There will be lots of work for NCTM and other education advocates before the end of the year, although it may not be on the front page of local newspapers.  There is a lot of work going on in Washington.

Della B. Cronin is a principal at Washington Partners, LLC.