The Senate has passed a budget resolution that calls for about $500 million more in discretionary funds for education, job training, and social services than President Clinton proposed in his fiscal 1995 budget.
After lengthy debate shortly before the Congressional spring recess, senators voted 57 to 40 on March 25 to pass S Con Res 63.
The blueprint recommends $44.5 billion in discretionary spending and $13.4 billion in entitlement funding, for a total of $57.9 billion for the broad spending category that includes education.
The President had proposed about $58 billion, including about $44 billion in discretionary spending. The House in February approved a companion bill that calls for about $57 billion in total spending for the category.
A provision--added at the committee level by Sen. Charles E. Grassley, R-Iowa, and Sen. Jim Exon, D-Neb.--that would reduce existing spending caps by about $43 billion in budget authority over the next five years survived the floor debate. The measure would constrain spending on education and other discretionary programs.
But Congressional aides said the provision may be dropped when a conference committee meets to reconcile the House and Senate budget resolutions.
Goals Report: The National Education Goals Panel has released its third annual report on the nation’s progress toward meeting the national education goals.
For the first time, the report is split into separate sections presenting national and state-level data, and contains more information than its predecessors.
Most notably, the first two reports simply stated that no data were available to measure progress toward the first goal, which calls for every child to enter school ready to learn. But the 1993 report provides 20 pages of national data on such topics as prenatal care and preschool enrollment.
The new report also includes new data from adult-literacy surveys, an international comparison of mathematics-test results, course-completion surveys, and surveys of high school dropouts.
Civil-Rights Post: The Senate last month approved the nomination of Deval Patrick as the assistant attorney general for civil rights.
Approval of Mr. Patrick came on a voice vote.
Mr. Patrick, 37, served as legal counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, where he focused his work on capital-punishment and voting-rights cases.
Clinton Administration officials spent more than a year trying to fill the highest Justice Department post for civil rights.
