Eisenhower Education Funds Still Under Threat
The Eisenhower Professional Development Grants that provide federal funding to train teachers, primarily in math and science, continue to be caught up in a philosophical debate over education funding in Congress. Two House bills - one authorization and one appropriations - call for rolling the Eisenhower funds into block grants that states can use as they wish. Disagreement over the concept falls mainly along party lines; generally, Democrats feel federal funds should be targeted to national education priorities, while Republicans believe state and local authorities should be able to use the federal money as they see fit.
On June 23, the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, HHS, and Education passed its funding bill for FY 1999. It would allow states to combine the Eisenhower program and President Clinton’s Goals 2000 funding into an “Education Block Grant.” It would also reduce the Eisenhower funding from the FY 1998 appropriation of $335 million to an FY 1999 level of $285 million. The subcommittee bill, which is as yet unnumbered, now has to go to the full Appropriations Committee. No companion bill has yet been introduced in the Senate.
At the same time, the House Education and the Workforce Committee, on June 24, passed a bill (H.R. 3248) which would authorize the aggregation of more than 30 federal education programs into a single block grant. (See FYI #83 for a hearing on an earlier version of this bill.) The legislation would enable states to target this funding, totaling $2.7 billion, for their own education priorities, rather than the purposes the federal programs were designed for. The bill would require states to certify that 95 percent of the funds are used for classroom activities rather than administrative expenses. Education Secretary Richard Riley has stated that President Clinton will veto this legislation if passed. Similar legislation has been introduced in the Senate (S. 1589) and awaits action by the Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources.
The block grant concept was recently defeated in another education-related bill. In coming to agreement on H.R. 2646, a bill to expand authorization of tax-free education savings accounts, House and Senate conferees dropped a proposal to block grant a number of federal education programs in order to placate Democrats. The block grant proposal in this bill did not include the Eisenhower program.
The House is currently out for its Fourth of July recess, and will return on July 13. No action will be taken on any of these bills before then.
