Congress has now given final approval to the long-delayed education spending bill for fiscal year 2010. If you leave out the stimulus, there was basically flat funding for most education programs, plus a huge boost for some Obama administration priorities. (School districts that want to try out merit pay will be especially psyched about a huge increase for the Teacher Incentive Fund, bringing the program to $400 million, up from just under $100 million last year). But most of the major work, including huge increases for Title I and students in special education, was taken care of in the stimulus. ...

After listening to the second half of the U.S. Department of Education's Race to the Top technical seminar, it's clear that there are many, many state-specific circumstances for which state teams want answers. South Dakota asked if Indian-chartered schools count as charter schools. Hawaii officials had a few questions about how the application applies to them since they have a single state-run school district. New Hampshire wanted to know if its existing New England consortium on common standards counts as much in earning points toward a grant as the larger Common Core effort. Such are the challenges for Race ...

I spent the morning in a U.S. Department of Education technical-assistance planning seminar on Race to the Top, and have picked up a lot of interesting tidbits. Many states are in attendance—including Hawaii, Mississippi, New Mexico, North Dakota, and Tennessee (including education commissioner Tim Webb), just to name a few. Interestingly, Texas is also in attendance, I'm told. The seminar will continue well into the afternoon, but so far, here are the insights I've picked up about this $4 billion competition: Race to the Top Director Joanne Weiss emphasized that there will be a lot of losers in Phase...

Remember that long-delayed fiscal year 2010 spending bill, which was approved by the House of Representatives, and by the Senate Appropriations Committee, both in July? The measure was never considered by the full Senate, but December is crunch time, so a House and Senate conference committee decided to skip that step last night and approved a compromise version of the bill. Now the measure is expected to be voted on by the full House and full Senate so it can go to President Obama for his signature. If you've been following our coverage, you probably know that one of the ...

I'm sure you've heard by now that many states are still having to lay off teachers and cut programs, despite $48.6 billion in aid to help shore up state budgets in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Well, there may be more federal relief coming down the pike. Congressional leaders and the Obama administration are considering increasing aid to states and localities to prevent layoffs as part of a new "jobs package". (They're not using the term "second stimulus," but it sounds kinda like that to me.) Obama laid out the plan in a speech today. He also highlighted ...

He only wrote once for Politics K-12 that I can dig up, but Sean Cavanagh's departure from Education Week is a big loss. He may have been the newspaper's specialist in covering math and science, and its prolific Curriculum Matters blogger, but he had a knack for politics, too. After all, who could argue that there aren't politics involved in the common-standards movement, which Sean has been faithfully tracking. Think squabbles between education advocacy groups, and questions about the openness of the process. That's not even factoring in the politics involved in states' own standards setting process. Think of Texas ...

Earlier this year, the House Committee on Education and Labor held a hearing on the common standards effort being led by the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association, during which members from both parties basically agreed that: a) common academic standards could be a good thing for students and U.S. competitiveness, and b) the feds should stay out of the way and let states lead the effort. That was, of course, before the final regulations for the $4.35 billion Race to the Top Fund came out. Based on the scoring system, it is ...

Are the methods to use to try to improve low-achieving schools driven more by hunches than research?

As January approaches, education organizations in Washington are starting to lay the groundwork for reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, whose current version is the No Child Left Behind law. And that includes the contingent of Democrats who are skeptical of standardized testing. One of the groups on that side of the debate is the Forum for Education and Democracy, which held an event on Capitol Hill this morning to draw policymakers' attention to schools that have embraced project-based learning and other methods that proponents say help develop higher-order thinking skills, like the ability to research, analyze, and ...

Texas Education Commission Robert Scott, who objects to the common standards effort, accuses the U.S. Department of Education of 'coercion' and a 'federal takeover' of schools.