The new federal education reform law is barely five months old, but congressional Republicans are already fighting the Department of Education over its implementation.
Senate and House Republicans are threatening to step in and block an Education Department regulation on Title I spending for low income students that lawmakers say would result in federal overreach. The GOP says the rule goes far beyond the confines of the law Congress passed.
“Already we are seeing disturbing evidence of an Education Department that is ignoring the law that each of this committee’s 22 members worked so hard to craft,” Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said at a recent hearing. “This is the very first opportunity the administration has to write regulations on the Every Student Succeeds Act. In my view, they earned an ‘F.'”
The House and Senate last year passed the Every Student Succeeds Act, which is the most extensive update of public education policy in more than a decade.
The bill passed both chambers by overwhelming margins after months of extensive bipartisan collaboration and tradeoffs. The end result was legislation that lessened federal control over local and state schools, while providing new funding for pre-kindergarten programs and for low-income students. President Obama signed the bill into law in December 2015, calling it “a Christmas miracle. A bipartisan bill signing right here.”
But now, Alexander and other GOP lawmakers said the Education Department is trying to reassert federal control by exceeding its authority with a rule that would require state and local spending in low-income schools receiving Title I funds to be equal or greater than non-Title I schools.
Another proposed Education Department rule that GOP lawmakers oppose would force schools to include teacher salaries when measuring spending between Title I and non-Title I schools, which Republicans say is an inaccurate way of comparing spending.
“The plain fact of the matter is that the law specifically says you cannot do it,” Alexander told Education Secretary John B. King at a recent hearing.
King is facing pressure from civil rights groups who want to ensure the new education law does not deprive low-income students of equal funding.
In a letter sent recently to King, 30 civil rights and other advocacy groups urged the department to provide “robust clarity in regulations for the oversight of this provision of the law.” The concept is known as “supplement not supplant,” because it aims to ensure school districts are using Title I dollars in addition to local funding and not in place of them.
The groups who signed the letter, including the NAACP, the Children’s Defense Fund and the American Civil Liberties Union, say the Education Department should “measure compliance by examining actual school-level expenditures,” which they said “build upon the law’s new reporting requirements.”
Alexander and other GOP lawmakers disagree and say the reform law specifically excludes a requirement that school-level funding be equal or greater in Title I schools or that compliance is to be measured.
Alexander added that lawmakers also excluded a provision that would have calculated teacher salaries into the equation.
Earlier this month, the non-partisan Congressional Research Service weighed in on the side of GOP lawmakers when it concluded “a legal argument could be raised that [the Education Department] exceeded its statutory authority if it promulgates the proposed ‘supplement not supplant’ rules in their current form.”
