Curriculum

Budget Pact Cuts Aid for Teaching Foreign Languages

By Erik W. Robelen — June 01, 2011 1 min read
  • Save to favorites
  • Print

You may have missed this recent reduction in federal dollars for education (I sure did), but it turns out that another casualty of the recent round of budget cutting in Washington was for teaching foreign languages.

A pot of money that underwrites the cost of 14 higher education programs focused on foreign languages and international education—some of which support K-12 educators—was cut by 40 percent, my colleague Mary Ann Zehr reports. Funding for the current fiscal year was reduced to $76 million.

At the same time, another program for teaching foreign languages somehow escaped unscathed. The Foreign Language Assistance program saw its budget remain flat at $27 million. That program provides grants directly for K-12 programs that teach languages deemed critical to U.S. security and economic needs.

For more on other Education Department programs that did see cuts (or were outright eliminated), check out this blog post.

Related Tags:

A version of this news article first appeared in the Curriculum Matters blog.