The President Proposes His First Budget
Through the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), President Obama released an outline for the FY10 budget titled A New Era of Responsibility, Renewing America’s Promise. Despite the lack of many specific numbers, education appears to be funded prominently. In fact, the budget outlines the President’s broad educational priorities listed for the Department of Education.
For actual numbers, the budget projects discretionary budgets of $46.2 billion for FY09 and $46.7 billion for FY10 at the Department of Education. The discretionary budgets for the Department of Education have increased since 2006 when it was $43.5 billion.
(click on graph to enlarge)Goals for the teaching profession are also summarized. In what some might consider controversial, “the budget supports additional investments in State and local efforts, developed in consultation with teachers and stakeholders, to implement systems that reward strong teacher performance and help less effective teachers improve or, if they do not improve, exit the classroom.” Determining which systems will be used to evaluate teachers might prove to be difficult.
In addition to evaluating teachers, there are proposals to focus on evaluating and fixing lower performing schools. There is also support for charter schools. “The budget increases funding for the Charter School program to support the expansion of successful charter school models, while increasing State oversight to monitor and shut down low-performing charter schools.”
These are a few of the priorities President Obama has set for education in his proposed budget. Right now he has proposed an initial framework. More detailed numbers are expected in April.
