Education

Next year, we're hoping to make some changes to our website and communications so our readers can more easily find all the work we're doing, from early childhood up through postsecondary education. We're going to be offline until the new year, taking stock and getting ready for 2013. But we need your help -- what do you like about our website? What could we improve? 

Please take a second before the New Year to share your thoughts with us by taking the survey below. Happy holidays!

N. Gregory Mankiw is one of the most well-known economists in American politics. A Harvard professor, he chaired George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers from 2003 to 2005 and served as a senior adviser for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign. Many observers saw him among the top contenders to replace Ben Bernanke as chair of the Federal Reserve in a Romney administration.

Rumors swirling around Washington, D.C. suggest President Obama and Speaker of the House John Boehner are close to reaching a deal to head off the expiration of current income tax rates and across-the-board spending cuts scheduled for January 2013. This is the dreaded “fiscal cliff.” But if they can’t reach a deal soon, the effects will be felt at public schools across the country – particularly at so-called “federally impacted” schools. Using data published annually by the National Association of Federally Impacted Schools (NAFIS), we calculated the anticipated effects of the across-the-board cut on those 1,238 school districts. (Click here to download our calculations.)

Before diving into those figures, let’s review how we got to the fiscal cliff. Under the Budget Control Act (BCA), which lawmakers passed in August 2011 as part of a bipartisan deal to increase the federal debt limit, a Congressional supercommittee was charged with developing policies that would reduce the budget deficit by more than $1 trillion over ten years. Predictably, they failed to reach an agreement on what those policies would be. So the BCA’s backup plan was triggered.

The first part of the backup plan reduced annual spending caps for appropriations funding for the next ten years. The caps effectively reset that portion of the federal budget about 2008 levels. And because of a timing quirk (fiscal year 2013 began in October, but the caps aren’t put in place until January 2, 2013), 2013 appropriations are to be reduced retroactively by across-the-board mid-year rescissions, known as sequestration. The Office of Management and Budget estimates that the sequesters will reduce funding by 8.2 percent per domestic discretionary program, compared to prior year funding.  (Pell Grants and school nutrition programs are exempt). For schools, this means an 8.2 percent cut to virtually every federal program (Race to the Top, Title I, special education grants) from which they receive funds. 

Another timing quirk will, however, delay the cuts until early 2014 for most schools. Big federal education programs like Title I grants to school districts for economically disadvantaged students ($14.5 billion in FY2012) and special education state grants ($11.6 billion in FY2012) are mostly funded a year ahead of time through advance appropriations, which means they were allocated their 2013 funds too early for the sequester to rescind them. So the sequester will apply mostly to funds they would use in 2014. That buys school districts extra time to plan for those cuts, or Congress additional time to cancel the cuts before they happen.

Still, some school districts will be harder hit than others because they receive a larger portion of their budgets from federal monies. Some of those districts receive most of their funding from the federal Impact Aid program, which helps districts that lose out on property taxes because of federally advantaged property or personnel within their borders (like military bases or Native American reservations).

The Impact Aid program, funded in fiscal year 2012 at $1.153 billion, will drop to about $1.065 billion post-sequester. At about 75 of the school districts, the cuts to Impact Aid will be more than $500 per pupil. A dozen school districts will receive at least $1 million less in Impact Aid than under the 2013 continuing resolution – and that leaves aside other federal dollars those districts receive, like Title I and special education money.

And the schools seeing these significant, mid-year cuts are among the neediest schools in the nation. Nearly 350 Impact Aid districts have a reported poverty rate of at least 30 percent, according to the Census Bureau. In 2010, 87 percent of the schools had at least 30 percent of their students enrolled in the free- and reduced-price lunch program, a proxy for measuring the concentration of low-income students. More than sixty percent of districts had over half of their students in the program.

The most severely affected school districts, though, are likely to be the twenty percent that received more than a quarter of their revenue from the federal government in 2009.  Eighty-six of those school districts were funded more than half by federal dollars.

The costs of an 8.2 percent cut to every federal program are far more concentrated in schools with significant amounts of federal money at stake. Meanwhile, those schools are some of the most vulnerable in the nation. We anticipate the “fiscal cliff” agreement between Congress and the President will include more spending cuts – but we hope they are targeted to protect the students who most need the extra boost. 

Click here to download these data for every Impact Aid recipient in the country. To view other federal funding, demographic, and achievement data for every school district in the U.S., visit the Federal Education Budget Project’s database.

As research continues to highlight the benefits of early childhood education, the Obama administration’s reforms to Head Start are shaking up the 45-year-old preschool program for children in poverty. This issue brief explains why some Head Start programs are competing for funding for the first time, how quality teaching is emphasized in future grant awards, and what to watch for in 2013.

Indiana higher ed commission wants tuition increase held at inflation

Louisiana’s Jindal administration to announce $129 million in cuts; colleges and health care expected to take big hits

Alabama’s two-year college system seeks $478 million in state funds for next year

Missouri lawmakers consider higher ed funding formula

Indiana higher ed commission wants tuition increase held at inflation
The Indiana Commission for Higher Education this week recommended that the state’s seven public universities hold their increases in tuition and fee costs at or below the rate of inflation over the next two years. The minimal increases in tuition would be a shift for the state university system – one school, Purdue, increased its tuition for in-state students by 4.5 percent  in each of its two most recent two-year tuition hikes. The commission’s recommendation was made in the context of its request for a 7.5 percent, or $128 million, increase in state funding for colleges, financial aid, and capital spending in the forthcoming biennial budget, which will cover fiscal years 2014 and 2015. The commission members are requesting the increase because Indiana lawmakers have cut spending in recent years. A 7.5 percent increase would restore higher education spending to fiscal year 2010 levels. More here…

Louisiana’s Jindal administration to announce $129 million in cuts; colleges and health care expected to take big hits
Because of a budget shortfall that has arisen over the past six months of the current 2013 fiscal year, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal is preparing to announce and implement mid-year spending cuts. According to the Louisiana Revenue Estimating Conference, the shortfall totals $129.2 million this year. Governor Jindal has the authority to make mid-year cuts without lawmakers’ input, provided he does not cross a certain threshold amount, so state legislators will not be able to target the cuts to specific programs. The state’s colleges and health care programs are the largest programs not protected by law from spending reductions, making them the ripest areas for savings and, therefore, cuts. This is the fifth consecutive year in which Jindal has instituted mid-year budget cuts. More here…

Alabama’s two-year college system seeks $478 million in state funds for next year
This week, newly-appointed Chancellor of the two-year college system in Alabama Mark Heinrich requested a 29 percent funding increase from the state for fiscal year 2014, a total of $478.3 million. The request includes $410.7 million for operations, as well as additional funding for capital expenses and maintenance costs. The system has seen significant budget cuts in recent years, so the 29 percent funding bump would restore spending levels for the system to pre-2008 levels, according to the chancellor. A large portion of the budget request would go to a workforce program that provides financial incentives to employers who hire students while they are attending community college. More here…

Missouri lawmakers consider higher ed funding formula
A plan presented this week by staff to the Missouri Legislature’s Joint Committee on Education would reformulate higher education spending and allocate a segment of it according to colleges’ and universities’ performance. The proposal is designed to provide incentives for colleges to improve their performances, much as the state does for a portion of K-12 education funding, rather than base funding exclusively on past allocations and the total available dollars, which is how money is currently allocated to postsecondary institutions. Under the new proposal, the state would fund 35 percent of schools’ operating costs. Of the remaining amount, 90 percent would be allocated automatically, and 10 percent by performance goals. Performance metrics may include student retention, graduation rates, and job placement records. The committee has an official mandate to redesign the funding formula by the end of 2013, but the proposal unveiled this week is only one option under consideration. More here…

As touchscreen tablets become the hot holiday gift for children—even for tots still learning to walk and talk—parents can be forgiven for feeling a little confused and skeptical about this new trend, especially when it comes to claims about education. The iTunes App Store boasts more than 700,000 apps and, as the Joan Ganz Cooney Center discovered earlier this year, nearly 80 percent of the top-selling paid apps in the education category are aimed at children. Many of these apps make claims about helping children learn to read.

Yesterday the Early Education Initiative issued a new report by Maggie Severns, “Reforming Head Start.” In addition to this issue brief on Head Start “recompetition,” readers can also access our new Head Start background and analysis page, which was released in September as part of our pre-K expansion of the Federal Education Budget Project.

The results from our sixth annual Academic BCS are in, and we have a Cinderella story that rivals any BCS bowl game. If Academic BCS had a title game, Northwestern University would match up against… Northern Illinois University. Talk about an upset.

The Bowl Championship Series games, which pit the top-ranked football schools against one another, are great to watch. But it’s worth taking a step back to examine the darker side of NCAA football: too many elite football schools are doing a dismal job of graduating their players. Most of these players won’t make it to the NFL, which means that while the school has profited from them, all they can walk away with is a college degree. The trouble is that the graduation rate for football players is often much lower than it is for the rest of the school.

To focus on the student side of collegiate sports, the Education Policy team at the New America Foundation developed the Academic Bowl Championship Series rankings for Higher Ed Watch. Here’s how our formula works:  We calculate the difference between the entire football team’s graduation rate versus that of the male students at the university; the graduation gap between black and white students on the team versus the same gap among the overall school’s male population; and the gap between the graduation rate of black football players versus the black males at the school.* We also factor in the NCAA’s Academic Progress Rate (APR).**

We only rank the top 25 BCS teams, thus the winners of our Academic BCS have displayed prominence both on and off the field. For a full explanation of the formula, click here. For the full breakdown of scoring for this year and past years, click here.

With news last week of federal grants for early education, Lisa Guernsey of New America talks about a forthcoming paper by Maggie Severns on big reforms underway in Head Start. Laura Bornfreund points out problems with half-day kindergarten and the Common Core standards. Laura and Lisa discuss new findings in a report on early literacy and technology.