NREAC Meeting
July 25, 2013

Attendees: Scott Turney, Ray Patrick, John Hill, Jerry White, Phil Gerik, Jon Habben, Jimmy Cunningham, Noelle Ellerson, Sasha Pudelski

ESEA

Last month, this update provided an overview of the House and Senate ESEA proposals which, at that time, had been passed by each chamber’s respective education authorizing committee. Since then, the House bill was considered—and ultimately adopted—by the full House of representatives.

The House adopted HR 5, the Student Success Act, to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), currently known as No Child Left Behind. AASA endorsed the legislation, and our advocacy team was busy tracking all the moving pieces, but not nearly as busy as AASA members, who made hundreds of calls and sent just as many emails to communicate AASA’s ESEA priorities. Here’s a quick recap of the information and talking points we relayed:

  • AASA Response to House Adoption of HR 5, the Student Success Act
  • AASA Letter of Support for HR5, sent to full House Membership, and includes AASA’s amendment priorities
  • AASA Letter to the House Rules Committee, outlining our position on the amendments being considered for ESEA
  • AASA Letter of Support for HR5, sent to the Full House, focused on the base bill.
  • AASA ESEA Talking Points, which include a side-by-side analysis of the various ESEA proposals

The House passed HR5 221-207. The bill had zero Democrat support, and 12 Republicans crossed party lines to oppose the bill. The Democrats had offered a substitute in the nature of an amendment. Sponsored by Rep. George Miller, that amendment was defeated 193-233.Of the 76 amendments that were filed and potentially put before the House Rules Committee, 27 were ‘made in order’. That is, 27 had the opportunity to be considered on the House floor. Of the 27, 19 were adopted, 3 were defeated, and 5 were withdrawn: (Further detail, see chart here). Quick and dirty: The House failed to adopt the ACE (All Children Are Equal) Act, which would have corrected a flaw in the Title I formula. The House Rules committee did not rule any of the amendments that would have restored maintenance of effort 'germane', meaning there was never even a chance for the full House to consider maintenance of effort and the House adopted the Cantor portability amendment. More on that in a subsequent blog post!

Now that the House has passed its bill, it is up to the Senate to take action. The Senate has a bill it passed out of committee in June. It could come to the floor this fall, as early as September. There is a significant difference between the Senate bill and the House bill. While both are partisan in nature, the philosophical approaches (as we’ve touched on before) are significant. Further, AASA endorses the House bill, does not support the Harkin Senate bill and believes the Senate should start with Senator Alexander’s Republican bill.

Complicating matters? The White House has already weighed in with a veto threat for HR5, meaning anything done in conference—if we even get to the point where both the House and Senate have passed bills through their respective chamber—will likely mean changes to the base House bill. What those changes look like, and what changes the administration would ‘need’ to not issue a veto, are unclear. Their ESEA blueprint is essentially dead in the water and they are keeping busy with their ESEA waivers. It is hard to see them supporting anything that looks at all like what passed out of the House last week.

Looking forward, while HR 5 (As passed out of the House) was something AASA supported, an unchanged HR 5 to the President’s desk is something AASA would oppose. AASA could support the bill out of the House as the core of the bill (state and local control of standards, accountability and assessment) is spot on and the bill had to move forward if there is to be serious conversation about getting to conference. The defeat of HR5 in the House would have been a premature death to ESEA in this Congress. Looking to the possible day where the Senate passes a bill and both versions are in Congress, AASA will be looking to reinstate MoE, eliminate portability and to rescind the funding caps.

ESEA Amendments

More than 74 amendments were filed for possible consideration as part of the ESEA vote in the House. AASA focused on three in particular, listed here with a decription of how they fared.

  • All Children Are Equal Act: In a frustrating turn of events, the ACE Act (something AASA had been very active in advocating for over the last two years), did not make it out of the rules committee, meaning the full House of Representatives did not have the opportunity to vote on the measure. If there is a silver lining, it is that even if the bill had made it to the full floor, we were not 100% certain we had the votes to pass it. There had been consideration to offering the amendment and withdrawing it, so as to advance the dialogue without undermining all the good work of educating members to the broken nature of the weighted formulas in Title I. There are two tracks as it relates to next steps: continuing education and awareness in both the House and Senate in terms of what is currently happening in their districts because of number weighting AND working with our colleagues and opponents on working out a path forward to right this wrong without penalizing schools.
  • You can read a more detailed overview of what happened with ACE in this blog post by Marty Strange.
  • Maintenance of Effort: I was very surprised to see that NONE of the three amendments related to maintenance of effort made it out of the rules committee. In following up over the weekend, I did not receive a satisfactory response. Regardless, the fact remains that the bill as written does NOT include maintenance of effort. Going forward, the strategy is to ensure that any Senate version of ESEA retain MoE and then work in conference to have the final version overlook the House change and keep MoE.
  • Portability: Rep. Cantor's Title I Portability amendment was adopted. You will recall that AASA was strongly opposed to the proposal. For reasons that appear to be more of a 'political calculus' than anything else, the amendment was a voice vote. AASA would have preferred a roll call vote for two reasons: One, it allows us to see exactly where members of Congress are on an issue and Two, we think we were close to defeating the amendment. It was, obviously, doubly frustrating to be denied both the voice vote AND to have it adopted. Moving forward, we have to work to ensure that portability does NOT make its way in to the Harkin bill or, if the Alexander proposals gain more traction, to ensure that portability is not a part of that discussion.
  • Clarifying Point: When we have talked about portability, we have described it as 'backpack' portability, or funding to follow the student. Cantor's amendment is a tangent of that idea, but has alarming implications related to the original intent of Title I (targeting funds to concentrations of poverty). The amendment as adopted says that a state can allocation its Title I funds to LEAs based on the number of students in poverty. This is an explicit exclusion of current Title I formulas that have weighting mechanisms more closely aligned to concentrations of poverty (namely, Targeted and EFIG). See first bullet on ACE Act. If an SEA utilizes the Cantor provision, than any school receiving the funds has to distribute the funds to ANY public school serving an eligible child, even if it is only one. This runs counter to current allocation requirements and ignores the current requirements that LEAs must serve schools in rank order of poverty.

Appropriations

The Senate has adopted an above-sequester funding level for the LHHS appropriations bill for FY14. The House has yet to mark up its stand alone LHHS appropriation (the bill that funds education). Though that mark up was scheduled for mid-July, that event was cancelled and has yet to be rescheduled. At this point, it is all but certain that Congress is on track for yet another continuing resolution. Between the philosophical differences in the House and Senate budgets (namely, the Senate resolves sequestration while the House does NOT and cuts further) and the fact that Congress almost never wraps its appropriations work on time, yet another CR is not surprising.

Sequestration

No substantive updates. At this point, the 2013-14 school year is starting in parts of the country, meaning schools are opening their doors with budgets that reflect the sequestration cuts. It is important to keep in mind that the cuts realized in FY13 are but a sliver of the overall savings that need to be realized as required by law (the Budget Control Act requires savings totaling $1.2 trillion over ten years, either through a blended approach or sequestration). That means FY13 is but one part and, as a result, that we must be prepared for yet another round of cuts (potentially as deep as 8 or 9 percent) for FY14. Also, at this point, we do not yet have assurances that the forward-funded programs that were exempt from the immediate cuts of sequestration in FY13—including Title I, IDEA, Title II and Perkins—will once again be exempted. Stay tuned!

E-Rate

Earlier this summer, President Obama announced ConnecEd, his proposal to connect 99% of the nation’s students to hig-speed broadband within 5 years. The proposal relies heavily on the existing construct within E-Rate and is a strong parallel to a recent Notice of Proposed Rule Making (NPRM) by the FCC pertaining to the E-Rate program in the NPRM, the FCC inquires about—and asks for feedback on—a variety of questions related to the E-Rate program, east in applying, flexibility in uses, funding, and more.

NPRM Summary: This NPRM is a thorough review and update of the E-Rate program is written so as to build on various reforms and updates in previous FCC efforts. The catalyst for the NPRM is a well recognized need to modernize the program to ensure that the nation’s students and communities have access to high-capacity broadband connections that support digital learning while making sure that the program remains fiscally responsible and fair to the consumers and businesses that pay into the Universal Service Fund (USF).

The NPRM represents policy changes that will be considered, adopted and implemented by the FCC, outside of Congressional involvement or that of the administration. That said, it should be noted that the Commissioners are aware of, and the FCC final decisions will likely be made in the context of, President Obama’s ConnectEd proposal (connecting 99% of the nation’s students to high-speed broadband within 5 years). Read AASA’s response to the NPRM and ConnectEd.

The NPRM itself is an overview of the various proposals, considerations and changes the FCC is considering for E-Rate, and the NPRM process is our chance to weigh in on the changes, to reflect their feasibility , and the impact it would have in the nation’s schools and libraries. The NPRM is broken into distinct sections, bulleted below:

  • Establishing three goals for the E-Rate Program
  • Ensuring schools and libraries have affordable access to 21st Century broadband that supports digital learning
  • Maximizing the cost-effectiveness of E-Rate funds
  • Streamlining the administration of the E-Rate program
  • Modernizing and Reforming the E-Rate program
  • Proposal to focus E-Rate funds on supporting high-capacity broadband, including comment on updates the eligible services list
  • Options for ensuring equitable access to E-Rate funding
  • Options to focus additional state, local and federal funding on school connectivity and to lower the costs of new high-capacity broadband deployment to schools and libraries
  • Maximizing the cost-effectiveness of E-Rate purchases
  • Encouraging increased consortium purchasing
  • Creating bulk buying opportunities
  • Increased transparency re: spending and prices
  • Considering a pilot program to incent and test more efficient purchasing practices
  • Streamlining the effectiveness of E-Rate administration
  • Requiring electronic filing of all documents
  • Increasing transparency of USAC’s processes
  • Speeding USAC processing of E-Rate applications
  • Simplifying eligible services list
  • E-Rate funding: increasing efficiency of fund disbursement, addressing unused funds, and streamlining appeals process
  • Miscellaneous topics (including issues related to Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA), identifying rural schools and libraries, changes to the National School Lunch Program, fraud application measures, use of E-Rate supported services for wider community use, and procedures for dealing with national emergencies

Forest Counties

The House Natural Resources Committee will mark up the Restoring Healthy Forests for Healthy Communities Act, which directs the Secretary of Agriculture to create/establish a forest reserve revenue area in each unit of the national forest system for sustainable forest management. More simply, this opens forested land for increased timber activity as a way to increase forest revenues for these areas and--of importance to AASA- requires that a portion of these revenues be made available through the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self Determination Act. While AASA does not take a position on foresting policy, we do support this mark up and this bill as a vehicle for a broader conversation about SRS, as well as its inclusion of bridge funding for SRS. Read AASA's letter.

Epinephrine Pens

The House passed HR 2094, the the School Access to Emergency Epinephrine Act. The bill modifies an existing asthma grant program to provide a competitive advantage to states that have a policy that requires schools to identify and train an individual to administer epinephrine to a child perceived to be in anaphylactic shock. AASA opposed the legislation, expressing concern over the costs associated with the program, redundancy in the federal role (especially when a growing number of states are implementing the policy on their own, already), and the expansion of authoring the administration of a controlled prescription medication to children without a prescription. The National Rural Education Association, the National Rural Education Advocacy Coalition and the Association of Education Service Agencies also opposed. At this point, the bill does not have a Senate counterpart, meaning there is a very limited prospect of further action at this point.

Perkins

We are anticipating the House will begin work on the re-authorization of Perkins CTE Act later this Fall or early in 2014. AASA is concerned that the House will want to remove the MOE provisions from Perkins (similar to ESEA) and that they will try to narrow the program and its funding substantially.