What will Congress do on Education this year?

Education Week recently conducted two very helpful interviews with prominent members of Congress who deal with education, one from each side of the aisle.  These interviews allow Rep. George Miller, D-California and Rep. John Kline, R-Minnesota to offer their predictions on the education agenda for Congress in 2014.  Although Kline, the Republican, is more optimistic than is his counterpart, he is still vague about what education legislation he realistically thinks might get done. Miller, the Democrat, has trouble seeing how Congress will push through ESEA reauthorization or other needed education legislation because 2014 is an election year and then it will be moving close to the end of the Obama Administration.

Following are some highlights from their interviews:

Kline (Republican):

I think it’s not insignificant that we moved legislation, not only through committee but through the floor of the House. As you know, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act is way overdue. … We passed it on the floor of the House, it’s now given the Senate something to do, and we’ve done that sort of, again and again. …

Now we are in some conversations, at the staff level and at the principal level with some folks in the Senate to see, can they get something to the floor? I’ve talked to [Sen.] Johnny Isakson [a Republican from Georgia] quite a bit about it, and [Sen.] Lamar Alexander [a Republican from Tennessee] as recently as [last week] about it…We’re not stepping back. We want to keep pushing forward. … Right now the Senate needs to move on some of these things.

We’re pressing on with higher education reauthorization. We’ve already had about 11 hearings…

We’ve come really close to getting agreement on ESRA,  [referring to the Education Sciences Reform Act], as you know, and we’re not going to let up on that. We’ve got some discussions about what the funding line will be … but I would have to say, that these things aren’t happening easily, and quickly, but it doesn’t mean we’re not continuing to work on it. …

There’s a growing discussion about the Child Care and Development Block Grant, Head Start, in light of the president’s proposal for universal pre-K  … He’s not gotten support [for that] here. This is a hugely expensive program that’s a gigantic cost shift to the states, and it doesn’t make sense from my perspective … to be moving forward with legislation like that when we haven’t even looked at programs like Head Start to see if they’re working the way they’re supposed to be working.

So we have lots of oversight to do. We’re going to continue to have hearings, we’re going to continue to try to move towards getting the big pieces done like the Higher Education Act, see where we can get some bipartisan support.

Miller (Democrat):

I think, given the constraints that exist within the Republican caucus on legislation, it’s pretty difficult to find a clear path for this legislation…

A good chunk of their caucus doesn’t think that the federal government should be involved [in education]  at all. … I understand that, and that’s their viewpoint.  When you talk about what it really takes to get a piece of legislation to the president’s desk and to become law, a lot of this is inconsistent with that. That’s just the reality on the ground.

I have a pretty good legislative history and a pretty good legislative history on bipartisan [measures] on tough issues. It’s very hard to see the path forward to the president’s desk. … 

We’re now entering the election year, so this year has been lost … This is not really a legislating Congress.

To read the full interviews, go to:  

http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/campaign-k-12/2013/12/kline_talks_esea_spending_and_.html?cmp=ENL-EU-NEWS2

and

http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/campaign-k-12/2013/12/miller_on_prospects_for_esea_t.html

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