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Bush Education Plan Goes to Congress |
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Summary: Bush Education Budget
President Bush's budget makes improving public education and closing the achievement gap a clear priority. It also cuts corporate subsidies and eliminates duplicative programs, paving the way for a significant, responsible increase in education funding.
· The U.S. Department of Education receives a major increase in funding from to $44.5 billion in FY 2002, an increase of $2.5 billion or 5.9 percent more than last year.
· Federal funding for the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) -- the principal federal law to aid disadvantaged students -- is increased by $4.6 billion, an eight percent increase.
· The President triples funding for reading programs. Following through on his pledge to launch a national reading initiative to ensure that every child can read by the third grade, the President has proposed an extra $600 million next year for reading programs -- tripling federal literacy funding from the present $300 million to $900 million in 2002. The President would spend $5 billion over the next five years on reading programs for pupils between kindergarten and 3rd grade.
· President Bush is also making good on the pledge he made last August to place a special emphasis on the needs of our nation's Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs), increasing aid to these schools by 6.4 percent over last year's level.
Providing a reasonable increase in education spending -- along with enhancing flexibility for states and schools while holding them accountable for improving student achievement -- is the right approach to education reform.
· Put simply: Let's increase our investment in education, but increase accountability, too.
· The Bush plan enhances state and local decision-making flexibility, establishes a rigorous accountability system, including asking states to design and implement annual math and reading tests for students in grades three through eight, and allows parents to remove their children from chronically failing schools.
Until we have a system of real accountability in place, it is irresponsible and unfair to our children to enact massive increases in federal education spending.
· Despite spending more than $125 billion in federal education dollars over the past 25 years, poor students still lag behind their peers by an average of 20 percentage points on national achievement tests.
· Money alone cannot be the catalyst for change, and America's commitment to education reform should not be measured solely on the basis of how many taxpayer dollars we throw at a problem.
· That is the approach Washington has followed in the past -- and as a tragic consequence, many children have been trapped in chronically failing schools and have been denied the opportunity to realize the American Dream.
· Public schools must educate our children, and we will hold them accountable for how well they perform that job -- not merely for how quickly they spend taxpayer money.
