A coalition of education organizations is pushing Congress “to waive a provision in federal law that requires school districts to maintain consistent funding levels for special education from year to year.” The “maintenance of effort” provision, part of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, is...
In a piece published by the Brookings Instition, Sarah Reber and Nora Gordon argue for as much flexibility as possible for states to allocate COVID-19 relief funding for K-12 schools. The authors assert that sending “most federal aid to states and school districts through a...
Senator Lamar Alexander—the chairman of the U.S. Senate Education Committee and co-author of the Every Student Succeeds Act—“has a different interpretation than the head of the U.S. Department of Education of how much federal coronavirus aid should be available to private school students.” In her...
Democratic lawmakers in Congress did not hold back in expressing their opposition to U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’s guidance about federal COVID-19 relief for K-12 schools, calling it “way out of bounds” and urging her to abandon it. In a letter sent to DeVos,...
Legislation introduced by House Democrats “would provide nearly $60 billion to K-12 school districts to help them address the coronavirus pandemic,” according to Education Week. The total “falls short of public demands from education advocacy groups,” yet will likely not make it past the Republican-controlled...
An editorial in the Richmond Times-Dispatch outlines a problem educators nationwide are grappling with: how to most effectively measure student progress in a post-pandemic world. In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, all 50 states have asked the U.S. Department of Education to waive standardized...
Recently, “dozens of groups sent a new request to Congress” that calls for “at least $250 billion in new federal aid for K-12 schools and higher education as part of a broader push to shore up state and local government funding.” The request also urges Congress to...
A recent blog post outlines the information that states and districts receiving emergency coronavirus relief funding must report. Within 60 days of receiving funding, state education departments must “tell the U.S. Department of Education their budgets for their ‘reserve’ of the money,” including “dollar-by-dollar details...
A “sleeper provision” in ESSA “requiring states to publish annually on their report cards the per-student spending data for every public school in their borders” is “finally bearing fruit,” according to an article in Education Next. “As of March 2020, more than half of the...
As Andrew Ujifusa writes for Education Week, there are more ways for states to take advantage of ESSA than just the waivers provided by the Department of Education. According to the Center on Reinventing Public Education, there are “millions of dollars states can use outside...
