Congress adjourned for a two-week recess on April 3 after a contentious week of long debates in both the House and Senate regarding a fiscal year 2010 budget resolution. At the end of the week, the resolutions adopted were similar but not identical. The House expressed a willingness to spend approximately $8 billion more on domestic discretionary programs in FY 2010 than the Senate. The House also appeared more willing to set bi-partisanship aside to enact health care and student loan reform legislation via the budget process. Final details of the FY 2010 budget resolution will be decided during the week of April 20, when members return to Capitol Hill.

The adoption of a budget resolution clears the way for the appropriations committees to meet and distribute what are called the "302 B allocations" to each subcommittee. It is anticipated that the Labor, Health and Human Services and Education Appropriations Subcommittee will receive a relatively generous allocation, perhaps as much as an 8 percent increase over FY 2009. Once allocations are decided, the hard work of dividing up funding among programs at the departments of Education, Labor, and Health and Human Services begins. Congress will wait for budget details from the administration before those details are made public or finalized. That information should reach Capitol Hill by mid May.

Congressional leaders have made it clear that the goal is to finish the budget and appropriations process by Sept. 30, the last day of the current fiscal year. That means mark-ups and floor debates will be held during June and July, and final conferencing and adoption of spending bills will take place in the early fall. It is an ambitious schedule given all the other legislative priorities that have been announced, such as reforming the health care system, reinventing the student loan program, enacting climate change and other energy-related policies, plus a long list of tax considerations. The backdrop to all this activity is the effort from government agencies to distribute, and states to spend, the funding made available through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The next recess period comes at the end of May, and for many that won't be soon enough.

NCTAF Holds Briefing to Release New Report on Learning Teams: The National Commission on Teaching and America's Future (NCTAF) held a briefing April 7 to release its new report, "Learning Teams: Creating What's Next." Stating that the nation stands to lose half of its teachers to retirement over the next decade, Tom Carroll, president of the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, said states and districts will have an opportunity to avert this crisis by creating "learning teams" in schools. Elizabeth Foster from NCTAF presented the findings from the new report, which shows that more than 50 percent of the nation's teachers and principals are Baby Boomers and will retire within the next four years. The peak in departures will be during the 2010-2011 school year, when more than 100,000 teachers may leave the profession. The report urges the development and adoption of a new approach to teacher deployment that mobilizes learning teams composed of new teachers, teacher mentors and teacher retirees in new roles to better prepare students for college and the workforce. The report states that the development of collaborative learning teams will leverage the best of each generation's skills and knowledge to achieve the goal of schools: improving student learning. In addition to enabling veteran teachers to share their expertise, these teams will provide the opportunity for veteran teachers phasing out of full-time teaching to give back to their schools and students in a different kind of "retirement," while helping new teachers accelerate their progress toward effective teaching. Read the full report.

CAP Holds Briefing on Early Literacy and the Achievement Gap: On April 7, the Center for American Progress (CAP) and the Century Foundation held a briefing, "Closing the Achievement Gap Through Additional Funding, High-Quality Instruction and a Focus on Early Literacy: Lessons from New Jersey Districts." The briefing focused on the New Jersey Department of Education's efforts to close the achievement gap by providing increased funding to the state's poorest school districts. In his new book, "In Plain Sight, Simple Difficult Lessons from New Jersey's Expensive Effort to Close the Achievement Gap," Gordon A. MacInnes documents the state's success in improving the educational outcomes in disadvantaged districts. According to MacInnes, high-quality pre-kindergarten programs for all three- and four-year-old children, when combined with early literacy initiatives, has a dramatic impact on the academic achievement of students in some of the poorest and most diverse New Jersey school districts. "The lesson learned in New Jersey is that if educational policy is to close the achievement gap it must focus on what works in the classroom," MacInnes writes. Specifically, he says academic achievement should trump other objectives, that priority must go to teaching primary-grade students to read and write, that when students fall behind there should be a system for helping them and that teachers must be treated as "front-line professionals" and be given continuous support. More info.

Cato Institute Holds Briefing on Assessing the Administration's Policies on Higher Education: The Cato Institute held a briefing titled, "What the Administration's College Proposals Would Do for America," on April 7. The briefing featuring Andrew Gillen, research director for the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, and Neal McCluskey, associate director for the Center for Educational Freedom at the Cato Institute. Gillen presented information from his latest report, "Financial Aid in Theory and Practice: Why It Is Ineffective and What Can Be Done About It," which compares the costs and benefits of a college education. According to Gillen, there is not a shortage of college graduates, and President Obama's call for all U.S. citizens to pursue at least one year of post-secondary education could push students who are not prepared for, interested in or who need a higher education to go to college. Gillen argues that the result is more Americans taking out student loans that they would not otherwise need. Additionally, Gillen believes that the increases in available federal student financial aid is "fueling an arms race" and causing higher education institutions to grossly increase the costs of education. Gillen and McCluskey both recommended that rather than focus on increasing the quantity of college students, experts focus on increasing the quality and equity of higher education. More info.

Fordham Institute Hosts Discussion on Budget and Education Reform: On April 9, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute sponsored a discussion titled "Can Budget Cuts Catalyze Education Reform?" Marguerite Roza, a research associate professor at the University of Washington, presented her latest work on budget cuts and their effect on education reform. "The vast majority of education expenditures pay for salaries, so where districts face budget cuts, they often have little choice but to resort to eliminating jobs," she said. Roza estimates that 9.4 percent of all K-12 education jobs will be eliminated between now and FY 2011. "In raw numbers, the implication is that 574,277 jobs would be eliminated during the three school years, many via attrition." More info.

ED Hosts Briefing on ARRA Guidance: On April 3, more than 150 representatives from various education and community groups, including ASCA, gathered at the Department of Education for a briefing on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) guidance. During the briefing, Arne Duncan, secretary of education, explained how the stimulus funds present a huge opportunity for reform. "We see an extraordinary opportunity to change students' lives," he said. "We want to save hundreds of thousands of teacher's jobs. But if all we do is save jobs, then we have missed a huge opportunity. We want to push a dramatic reform agenda. We want to use an unprecedented investment in education to change outcomes and dramatically improve achievement." Watch an archived webcast of the briefing or view an expanded version of the PowerPoint presentation used at the briefing.