Senate backs funding increase for higher education

Congress is poised to vote on a 2006 fiscal year budget resolution that includes a $5.4 billion amendment that would raise Pell Grant funding and mantain other federal student aid programs.  Proposed by Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), the amendment narrowly passed the U.S. Senate by a 51-49 vote on March 17 when six Republican senators—Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, Norman Coleman of Minnesota, Mike DeWine of Ohio, Olympia Snowe of Maine, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and Susan Collins of Maine—crossed party lines to support it.

Sen. Kennedy noted in introducing the amendment that it reinstates proposals made by the Student Aid Alliance, of which the AFT is a member.  Its adoption was a tremendous victory.  “We really appreciate Sen. Kennedy’s leadership on this issue and the bipartisan support of his colleagues,” said AFT lobbyist Jodie Fingland.

The amendment is a three-part strategy to improve America’s competitiveness. The first calls for $1.4 billion to raise the maximum Pell Grant by $450 to $4,500 in fiscal year 2006. It also seeks to provide $2 billion to stop the Bush administration’s plan to eliminate important programs for disadvantaged students, such as the Perkins Loan Program, Upward Bound and Talent Search.

The second part provides new math, science and special education teachers in high-need schools a guarantee of student loan forgiveness in exchange for teaching for four years. The third restores Bush’s budget cuts to job training, adult literacy and vocational education. The amendment’s cost of $5.4 billion is paid for by eliminating tax loopholes. With its passage, the grand total of discretionary spending reached $848.8 billion.

As AFT On Campus went to press, the Student Aid Alliance and the higher education community were pulling out all the stops to ensure that the amendment remained in the final budget resolution.  Working jointly, the AFT and the National Education Association declared April 19 and 20 as national call-in days and distributed a toll-free number for members to flood Congress with calls. In addition, people attending the AFT Higher Education and Civil, Human & Women’s Rights Conference in Minneapolis April 15-17, fired off hundreds of letters in support.

Kennedy leads effort to fix NCLB

Leading Senate Democrats once again will try to make critical changes in the No Child Left Behind Act that will help address shortcomings in the law’s implementation and refocus NCLB on its mission of helping all children reach high academic standards in quality educational settings.

Provisions of the No Child Left Behind Improvement Act, originally introduced last year by Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and other Democrats on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, have been incorporated into the Quality Education for All bill proposed by Democratic leaders. Kennedy also intends to offer the No Child Left Behind Improvement Act as a separate bill in an effort to remedy problems with the implementation of NCLB.

“The No Child Left Behind Act contains essential reforms for the nation’s schools. It’s time to keep the promise of those reforms for all students across the country,” Kennedy said when introducing his bill last year. “The administration’s implementation of the reforms has been inadequate and ideological. It has refused to support full funding as promised, and its ineffective implementation has undermined the reforms it said were so important.”