Democrats Push for Stimulus Package to Include Education Spending
Lawmakers urged to include college tuition tax credits and grants to states and local schools
As Barack Obama's roughly $800 billion stimulus package comes together on Capitol Hill, Democratic lawmakers are pushing to include provisions for education, from college tuition tax credits to block grants for state and local education budgets.
As Congress firms up the package's outlines, spurred on by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's deadline of Presidents Day, the bill seems likely to include a "handful" of measures for education, says New York Sen. Charles Schumer. Meanwhile, recent plans to provide more than $160 billion to state and local governments seem certain to use education as a primary venue for the funding.
Specific components will include infrastructural spending on building and renovating schools, Schumer says. Another likely provision in the bill will be expanding college tuition tax credits, a cause Schumer has been promoting.
"Every time the economy prevents one young man or young woman from going to college because they can't afford it even though they deserve to get in, it hurts them, it hurts their families, and it hurts America," he says. "We all know that while college is priced like a luxury, it has become a necessity."
The proposed measure, he says, would at least double—and in some cases quadruple—current college tuition tax benefits to middle-class families. Some reports say that the stimulus could provide $140 billion more for education than the federal government currently provides, including an additional $15 billion in Pell grants for low-income students.
Along with those components, Schumer has been pushing for $80 billion in block grants for schools as part of the package. That federal money would be granted to states and localities to help them stabilize their budgets and would be a temporary measure, ending after two years.
"An immediate infusion of dollars from Congress will help prevent the kinds of draconian cuts at the state level from which it takes years to recover," says Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers.
Meanwhile, by helping localities with their budgets, Schumer says, the grants would help stave off property tax increases around the nation.
"It makes no sense for the federal government to be pushing money into the economy while the state and local governments are taking money out of the economy by raising taxes or laying people off," he says. "This is supposed to mitigate that."
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Reader Comments
Re: More Money
We actually do not spend the most money on education as a nation. Don't just look at how much money we spend as a nation, look at how much we spend on each student. Of course we are going to spend more money that Nigeria, we have a few more students. If you look at how much we spend per student we are below 50th. Think about that!!! Fifty other countries spend more money on education than we do and yet we wonder why we are in trouble. Think about whats going to happen to the next generation, we are getting left behind. We are no longer the SuperPower we once were. Here's a link to show how we rank. Check out all the information before you make false claims. http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/edu_pub_spe_per_stu_sec_lev-spending-per-student-secondary-level
Money
I agree that there is something disturbing about the fact that we spend so much money on education and get so little in way of a result. As a teacher for only 9 years, I can only offer the following. I think that all countries put a great deal of money into education, even if it isn't all public funds or on the books, or for public education but also private after school "school". Teachers have recently been told, through NCLB and other research, that they can make the difference. Really? The 40 to 80 minutes a day I have with 100 or more students can compete with the time and influence of birth parents? That would not seem to make sense unless those birth parents were somehow missing, but every year I observe more and more parents abandoning their children at school every morning and throughout the year asking why I can't teach their children to be self-sufficient and leave the parents alone to their "lives" as if, as parents, they had anything better to do. That is to say, I am not sure education is a black hole of money, but that we are trying to do more for kids than before due to the state of the family. For many parents, like it or not, if parenting is not speedy or convenient, it doesn't happen, leaving children wanting adult contact, positive or negative, from a teacher who obviously has an agenda, otherwise known as a lesson plan. If those other needs are not being fulfilled by the adults in their lives, can we seriously expect them to stay focused for a standardized test in which they have no personal stake, where they rarely see the results and are told that the results are not really about them, but about the school district? Education was how the newly created nation of the United States of America told the world that they were sophisticated enough to be a nation of the world, that we could raise our own children without the help of a colonial power. Education is how one becomes an adult. Is that what we are saying to the world? We talk much about how important our children are to us. But is any of it actually, and I mean actually, true?
More Money?
Doesn't anyone else find it strange that as a country we spend more money on education than any other nation on the face of the earth and yet we consistantly fall lower and lower in the standards of education that our children receive? Is it a black hole or some sort of siphon? I guess I would like to how those countries that spend less turn out brighter kids. It seems to me we also have higher infant mortality rates than alot of nations and it looks like we are being led down the path to trusting our health care to the government. It doesn't look good for the Republic!
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