We congratulate Congress for advancing legislation to fund governmental programs through the end of the FY 2023. We’re pleased to see, in most cases, modest but nonetheless significant overall increases in federal education funding including:
- Title I. $18.387 billion, an increase of $850 million or 5% more than the fiscal year 2022 level, for Title I-A grants to local educational agencies. Also notably, the bill targets Title I to the highest poverty school districts by allocating funding through the Targeted Assistance Grant and Education Finance Incentive Grant (EFIG) formulas.
- Title III. $890 million, an increase of $59 million or 7%, for English Language Acquisition State Grants under Title III of ESEA, a critical investment needed to improve educational opportunities and outcomes for more than 5 million English learners.
- IDEA. $15.154 billion, an increase of $904 million or 6%, for Special Education State Grant programs under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act that support services to an estimated 9 million students and children with a disability, including those participating in early intervention and preschool programs.
- Charter Schools Program. $440 million for the federal Charter Schools Program, on par with FY 2022 funding and reversing the cut in the House Appropriations bill. A 2021 analysis of research on charter schools by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) found that charter schools located in urban areas boost student test scores, particularly for Black, Hispanic, and low-income students and that attending urban charter schools increases college enrollment and voting.
- Augustus Hawkins Centers of Excellence. $15,000,000 for Augustus Hawkins Centers of Excellence, an increase of 88% (!) over FY 2022 to support comprehensive teacher preparation programs at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs), Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs) and other minority-serving institutions (MSIs). HBCUs, TCUs, HSIs, and other MSIs, collectively, award only 11% of the nation’s bachelor’s degrees in education, yet they produce more than 50% of the bachelor’s degrees earned in education by students of color.
- Institute for Education Sciences. $807.6 million for the Institute for Education Sciences, an increase of more than 10% (!) over FY 2022. IES is currently conducting multiple, important efforts to understand and address the impacts of COVID on learning, among other projects. IES is directed to use a portion of its fiscal year 2023 funding to support a new funding opportunity for quick turnaround, high-reward scalable solutions intended to significantly improve outcomes for students, a critical foothold to establish the National Center for Advanced Development in Education (NCADE);
- ·EIR. $284 million for ED’s Office of Elementary and Secondary Education’s Education Innovation and Research (EIR) program, an increase of more than 20% (!) over FY 2022. The EIR program funds the development, implementation, evaluation, and scaling of innovative and evidence-based programs to improve student outcomes.
- Postsecondary Student Success Grants. $45 million for Postsecondary Student Success Grants, which will support activities to improve postsecondary retention and completion rates and be structured to emphasize evidence-based practices at early-phase, mid-phase, and expansion levels. It is a good first step to improve low graduation rates and graduation rate gaps, but it is a far cry from what is needed.