Politics K-12’s Alyson Klein has the latest for you on the fiscal 2011 budget bill. Here’s an interesting teacher-policy tidbit: Under the finalized agreement, which Congress will vote on in short order, 1 percent of the $2.5 billion Title II-A State Teacher Quality Grants would be reserved for a competitive program.
Groups eligible for such a competition include national teacher programs that have been cut under stop-gap funding measures, such as the National Writing Project, the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, and Teach For America, among others.
Based on the budget figures, one percent would amount to $25 million at the most. That’s not a whole lot of cash for all these groups to fight over, when you consider that the three groups I named above had earmarks totaling $54 million.
Still, one of the reasons this is important to follow is because the Obama administration, in two successive budget proposals, has already proposed consolidating this funding into competitive grants, supplemented by some $500 million from Title II.
In other words, we’re likely to get some signals from the administration about how it would like to run a competitive teacher-quality grant programs. Stay tuned.