John Kline Takes Arne Duncan To Task Over Special Education Funding
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Educational funding for students with disabilities became the subject of yet another heated partisan argument with no resolution at a budget hearing Tuesday, after Rep. John Kline (R-Minn.) attacked Secretary of Education Arne Duncan on the subject.
"What I've been asking for is a commitment to increase funding for special education," said Kline, who chairs the House Education & the Workforce Committee. "It's a shortcoming that Republicans and Democrats have had … and we need to work together to increase that funding. When I travel to schools … the thing they want most … is for the feds to step up and increase [their] commitment to that increased funding."
"You've got over a dozen new programs ... but you don't have any increased funding that's available for special education?" continued Kline, who has repeatedly attacked the Obama administration on this point.
Duncan disagreed with Kline's characterization of the administration's 2015 budget request, saying that it increases special education funding by $100 million. The budget proposal calls for a spending increase of 2 percent for education compared to the previous year. Overall, the request, released in March, highlights measures favored by President Barack Obama, such as a much-touted preschool expansion and a competition to "redesign" high schools. It also includes a revamped "Race to the Top" competition with a specific focus on educational equity.
But some key programs -- including Title I, the main source of federal money for educating students who live in poverty, and most pieces of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA -- would get no new money under the proposed budget.
The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which was enacted in 1990, specifies that Congress pay states up to 40 percent of the average amount, beyond average public school expenditures, that the states spend on each student with disabilities. However, the closest Congress got to this funding level was in 2005, when it hit 18.5 percent of the average, and in 2009, when the one-time economic stimulus boosted payments. Sequestration worsened the situation, leading some parents to wonder John Kline Takes Arne Duncan To Task Over Special Education Funding: