Winners and Losers (So Far) in House Appropriations

From the House Appropriations Committee work of last week, comes these results (via Ed Week):

Winners:
Extension of allowing teachers in alternative certification programs to count as "highly qualified" through the 2014-2015 school year.  This would include those "higly qualified" TFA 5-week trained teachers. 

Losers:  organizations, many of whom support disabled/Special Ed students, like the council for Exceptional Children, National Center for Learning Disabilities and the NAACP who do not want the provision extended.  Here's what they said:

Absent expiration of the problematic provision ... low-income students, students with disabilities and English-learners will continue to be disproportionately taught by teachers-in-training and that fact will be masked from parents and local communities.

Yes, because while TFA thinks the world of their teachers, they don't feel districts have any obligation to tell their parents where their teacher came from.

Middle ground (and this is interesting):  This is an interesting debate, but soon, it might not matter quite as much in many states, at least as long as the department's NCLB waiver plan is in place. The conditional waivers allow states to move away from many of the highly qualified teacher requirements, as long as they adopt a system of teacher evaluations that takes student achievement into account. So far, more than half of the states have been approved for waivers. 

Well, Washington State has a waiver so does that mean we no longer have to consider TFA teachers "highly qualified"?  It would seem so.

But in other parts of K-12 spending, other winners and losers:

Winner: Special education grants would go up by $500M to $12.1B.  Title One would not change.   (Obama had proposed no changes to either.)

Winner:  Head Start, up $45M raising their total to $8B.

Winner: A head scratcher - abstinence education up by $15M (from $5M).  Yes, that'll work just like Tennessee saying hand-holding is a "gateway activity" to sex.

Winners: Promise Neighborhoods (wraparound services for ed programs) and Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF).  

Losers:  Race to the Top, axed totally.  Ditto on School Improvement Grants and Investing in Innovation grants.

From Ed Week:


The Senate Appropriations Committee has already approved its own version of the fiscal year 2013 spending bill. And there are some big differences. The Senate version would keep Race to the Top, Investing in Innovation, SIG, and other key Obama initiatives, while providing some very modest boosts for Title I and special education. 
 
This isn't the first time House Republicans have attempted to jettison many of the programs on the Obama administration education-redesign hit parade. Last year, the committee also proposed scrapping Race to the Top, Investing in Innovation, SIG, and other programs. But, the Democratically-controlled Senate—and the administration—ultimately won out in budget negotiations.

So when we will know the outcome this year? Probably not until after the presidential election. It's unlikely that Congress will actually finish its work on the bills before that deadline—it's become tradition for them to pass stop-gap measures extending funding until they can work out a deal.