Federal Policy

Poll: 60% of Americans Say Balancing Federal Budget More Important Than Improving Quality of Education

/ The Old Crank

In a recent Phi Delta Kappan/Gallup Poll, (as reported in Education Week) a majority of respondents (60%) said that balancing the federal budget was more important than improving the quality of education, “even though they said funding [was] the biggest problem facing public schools.”

The deficit issue gets a lot of attention in the media, so it would not surprise me if it’s true that many people fear the budget deficit to the point where they are willing to sacrifice federal investments in public education to reduce it. While it’s not actually necessary to sacrifice those investments any further in order to do so, it would also not surprise me to learn that it is a widely shared belief that deficit reduction must involve sacrifices  in every area of federal spending—even among people who are not, in general, hostile to a federal role in education, or to education spending in general.

These are a big hurdles for education advocates to overcome.

More on the poll in Education Week: PDK/Gallup Poll Offers Glimpse into Americans Views of Public Education – K-12 Talent Manager – Education Week.

h/t Committee for Education Funding for the pointer to the article

Handy Flyer from USCIS on New Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) Immigration Policy

/ The Old Crank

This new one-page flyer on the new Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) Immigration Policy, published by the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), does a pretty good job explaining, in a visual way, how the new policy works, although it’s a little odd to me that they did not include the acronym for “general education development”—the GED—in this flyer, since it’s a much more well-known term.

Remember, as I noted yesterday, it appears that a person who is without a diploma or GED and not in school now—but who otherwise meets the eligibility requirements—may qualify by returning to school or by enrolling in a GED program before applying.

More information available at the USCIS site. (h/t Save Adult Ed!)

Will New Administration Immigration Policy Increase Demand for GED Classes?

/ The Old Crank / 1 Comment

(Updated Below)

The Migration Policy Institute has increased their estimate of the number of unauthorized immigrants who may be eligible for temporary relief from the threat of deportation under the new Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) initiative. After taking a look at the more detailed eligibility guidelines released by the Department of Homeland Security on August 3rd, they now think that as many as 1.76 million unauthorized immigrants may be eligible (up from 1.39 million).

The DACA initiative will offer, on a case-by-case basis, a two-year grant of reprieve from deportation as well as work authorization for unauthorized immigrants who were under the age of 31 as of June 15, 2012, who entered the U.S. as children, and who can demonstrate that they meet certain other criteria, which you can read about here.

What changed? Among the list of eligibility requirements first released in June, when the policy was announced, was the requirement that applicants had to have a high school degree or have earned a GED—or be enrolled in school now. Last week, DHS clarified that those under 31 years of age lacking a high school diploma or a GED not currently enrolled in school will also be eligible, as long as they have re-enrolled by the date of their application. MPI estimates that this adds as many as 350,000 unauthorized young adult immigrants (ages 16 and older) without a high school degree or GED to the list of potential beneficiaries of this program, provided they meet the rest of the eligibility requirements.

It will be interesting to see if this results in an uptick in demand for GED and adult ESL services in the coming months.

UPDATE 8/28/12: While researching a post for D.C. LEARNs today, I read through the DACA guidelines a little more carefully. As noted above, to meet the DACA education requirements, an applicant must have graduated from high school or obtained a GED certificate, or must be “currently in school” on the date of application. The USCIS guidelines published here make it clear that their definition of “school” is fairly broad and includes most kinds of adult education programs. I’m planning to write a separate post about this in the near future.

UPDATE 8/29/12: This article from New America Media (NAM) notes that in Arizona, Proposition 300 bars state-funded schools from offering free GED classes to undocumented immigrants, so meeting the educational requirements of DACA by enrolling in a free GED program will not be an option for those living in that state.

What Would Sequestration Mean for the District of Columbia’s Most Vulnerable Residents?

/ The Old Crank / 3 Comments

Yesterday one of our local public radio stations here in the District (WAMU) broadcast a story on the potential local impact of sequestration, the across-the-board federal spending cuts that are set to go into effect in January—unless Congress passes some kind of legislation to avoid it. Right now these cuts are required by a law that this same Congress passed last summer, the Budget Control Act (BCA).

Stephen Fuller, director of George Mason University’s Center for Regional Analysis, told WAMU that federal spending accounts for roughly 40% of the D.C. metro area’s economy. Federal employees and contractors spend their paychecks here, and so businesses that rely on those dollars (and the housing market) are likely to suffer if that spending is cut back significantly:

“Federal payroll supports a lot of jobs at Giant and Safeway and CVS and other retail establishments,” he says, citing some examples. “There will be fewer high-income households that can afford big houses.  So we could see a rollback on housing values.”

In D.C. itself, the District’s chief financial officer, Natwar Gandhi, told WAMU that federal spending accounts for 60% (!) of the city’s annual economic output. He said that cuts to federal spending would likely result in reduced local tax revenue, which could lead to reductions in services for the city’s most vulnerable residents.

(Fun fact: the legislation that created sequestration was enacted by a Congress in which we do not have a vote, yet it sound like the pain associated with these cuts will likely be more painful here in this city than it will be in other parts of the country.)

Alternatives to sequestration may still include federal workforce reductions and pay freezes, so even if sequestration is scrapped, it’s replacement might not be so great for the local economy either. I recently attended a meeting with some Republican staffers who were still enthusiastically pitching S. 2065, a Senate bill that was introduced in February that would delay the first installment of the sequestration cuts by extending the current federal employee pay freeze though June 2014, and restricting federal hiring to only two employees for every three who leave. While I don’t think this specific bill is going anywhere at the moment, elements of this proposal could make their way into a sequestration-scrapping plan somewhere down the road.

Fuller told WAMU that federal contracting “has been a welfare program for the Washington metropolitan area. Taxpayers around the country send us their money, and we’ve been living well off of this, and now we have to face the music.” Sequestration alternatives that protect this long-standing corporate welfare program via reductions in federal hiring and pay freezes will likely have the same kind of depressive effects on the local economy as the across-the-board cuts required by sequestration.