The Department of Education released a proposed regulation on education funding while Congress was on recess. Some in Congress aren’t happy about it.
Senate education committee Chair Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., said in response to the proposed rule that Secretary of Education John King “must think he is the U.S. Congress as well as chairman of a National School Board.”
“His proposed regulation would give Washington, D.C., control over state and local education dollars that it has never had before,” Alexander said. “Federal law gives him zero authority to do this. In fact, our new law specifically prohibits his doing this.”
Alexander was referring to the Every Student Succeeds Act, signed in December 2015, which was the first major K-12 education reform at the federal level since No Child Left Behind was signed in 2002.
House education committee Chair John Kline, R-Minn., said the rule would “impose a multi-billion dollar regulatory tax on our nation’s schools.”
The big debate is over what’s called, “supplement-not-supplant.” The idea is that federal aid to schools and districts should be in addition to what they already get from state and local funding, not a substitute for other aid.
The concept is widely supported, the debate is over how to implement it. “This is a concrete step forward to help level the playing field and ensure compliance with the law,” King said in a statement.
King and Alexander have sparred over the proposed rule several times in the past year, including in an April hearing in which Alexander said King was “ignoring the law.” King claimed the department only set up criteria that districts have to follow, while Alexander said the criteria were acting as a definition for districts to follow.
“If anything resembling [the proposed regulation] becomes final, I will do everything within my power to overturn it,” Alexander said in his latest statement.
Doing so would probably take the same kind of bipartisan support that got the Every Student Succeeds Act through Congress. The bill passed Congress with bipartisan majorities in both chambers, backed by support from conservatives and teachers’ unions.
Fortunately for Alexander, teachers’ unions are skeptical of the proposed regulation, though not outrightly opposed.
“As much as we agree with the intent, the proposed regulations, as drafted, are an unfunded mandate from Washington that exhorts districts to boost their investment in schools with disadvantaged children without identifying or compelling the resources to do so,” Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers, said in a press release.
She added that the proposal’s compliance timeline is too brief for districts to adapt. At the same time, Weingarten praised the proposal for prohibiting districts from forcing teacher transfers or canceling collective bargaining agreements in order to comply with the regulations.
Lily Eskelsen Garcia, head of the National Education Association, is similarly skeptical.
“The proposal does not address all of our concerns,” Eskelsen Garcia said in a statement. “The proposed regulatory language, as compared to the original proposal, minimizes but does not eliminate the practical limitations and unintended consequences that may arise during implementation.”
Jason Russell is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
