Education Spending to See Reductions in Fiscal 2006 Federal Budget

Precollegiate education got a lump of coal from Congress a few days before Christmas, as lawmakers essentially froze all discretionary spending and then heaped a 1 percent cut on top of that as they scrambled to approve an overdue school spending measure.

Late Wednesday night, the Senate approved by voice vote the $142.5 billion fiscal 2006 spending bill for the departments of Education, Labor, and Health and Human Services. The bill narrowly passed the House on Dec. 14 by a vote of 215-213. The measure contains essentially the same plan for education spending as an earlier House-Senate conference agreement, which was unexpectedly defeated in the House in late November, but resuscitated this month.

A separate defense spending bill, which passed the Senate on a vote of 93-0 late Wednesday and was approved by the House by unanimous consent on Thursday, contained a 1 percent, across-the-board spending cut to all federal programs with the exception of veterans’ programs. The 1 percent slice eliminated what had been very slight increases to K-12 education’s two largest programs—Title I and special education—and...