Scoop: Common Core sticker shock - Student loan vote a done deal - What's next for No Child Left Behind - FCC approves ConnectED - POLITICO Morning Education - POLITICO.com

Scoop: Common Core sticker shock - Student loan vote a done deal - What's next for No Child Left Behind - FCC approves ConnectED

GOOD MORNING and welcome to the inaugural edition of Morning Education. I’m Libby A. Nelson, an education reporter at POLITICO Pro, and I’ll be greeting you early every morning with the most important education policy news of the day.

Education Pro’s focus is “cradle to career”: pre-K through higher ed, featuring policy news from Congress, the Education Department, the White House and the states. Our promise here at Morning Education is to cut through the clutter and the rhetoric and offer you exclusive reporting and incisive analysis on education policy, while making sure we share all the “must reads” from our fellow education reporters around the country.

MORNING EDUCATION SCOOP: COMMON CORE STICKER SHOCK — The tests for Common Core standards are almost guaranteed to be more expensive than most existing state tests, according to a report from the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers due for release on Monday. That’s for good reason, a PARCC staffer tells POLITICO Pro: Computer-based tests include plenty of “show your work” questions on the math and English/language arts exam. Answers that require human scoring are more expensive to grade than their multiple-choice counterparts.

The higher costs for this testing will undoubtedly be fodder for tea party activists who are engaged in a state by state fight against Common Core, railing against more federal government involvement in state education standards.

The conundrum for states that might choose to bail: Going their own way could still be more expensive. POLITICO Pro will have the full story with more details on the PARCC estimates later today.

CONTINUED:  http://www.politico.com/morningeducation/0713/morningeducation11203.html

Obama Bribes States to Adopt National Education Curriculum

The Obama administration is using taxpayer money to bribe state governments into accepting a national education curriculum known as “Common Core,” and the campaign has flown largely under the radar, though resistance is growing.


Incredibly, even with the backing of billionaire Bill Gates and the Obama administration’s Department of Education, the entire “Common Core State Standards Initiative” was developed and rolled out with almost no serious media attention. The eerie silence, of course, helped proponents avoid scrutiny in the early phases, when it would have been much easier for critics to derail the scheme that will essentially nationalize the school curriculum.

With the federal government handing out massive grants to state governments that comply, some 45 states and Washington, D.C., have already signed up to implement the plan. Widespread acceptance of the scheme thus far has been attributed to the taxpayer largesse offered under Obama’s controversial and unconstitutional “Race to the Top” program. To be eligible, states were forced to adopt the Common Core or other "internationally benchmarked standards.”

The administration is also requiring states to sign up for the Common Core to obtain so-called “No Child Left Behind” waivers. And in an effort to ensure that all students are learning the same material, the Common Core will also roll out national tests, making it even harder to avoid the scheme. “We’ve convinced nearly every state in the country to raise their standards,” Obama claimed during his 2012 State of the Union address, failing to mention that he was using taxpayer money to “convince” states and that the new “standards” have already come under severe criticism.

CONTINUED:  http://www.thenewamerican.com/culture/education/item/14036-obama-bribes-states-to-adopt-national-education-curriculum

AP News Break: Official: 10 states get ed waiver (No Child Left Behind)

President Barack Obama on Thursday will free 10 states from the strict and sweeping requirements of the No Child Left Behind law, giving leeway to states that promise to improve how they prepare and evaluate students, The Associated Press has learned.

The first 10 states to receive the waivers are Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, Oklahoma and Tennessee. The only state that applied for the flexibility and did not get it, New Mexico, is working with the administration to get approval, a White House official told the AP.

The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the states had not yet been announced. A total of 28 other states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico have signaled that they, too, plan to seek waivers — a sign of just how vast the law's burdens have become as a big deadline nears.


No Child Left Behind requires all students to be proficient in reading and math by 2014. Obama's action strips away that fundamental requirement for those approved for flexibility, provided they offer a viable plan instead. Under the deal, the states must show they will prepare children for college and careers, set new targets for improving achievement among all students, reward the best performing schools and focus help on the ones doing the worst.

In September, Obama called President George W. Bush's most hyped domestic accomplishment an admirable but flawed effort that hurt students instead of helping them. He said action was necessary because Congress failed to update the law despite widespread bipartisan agreement that it needs fixing. Republicans have charged that by granting waivers, Obama was overreaching his authority.

The executive action by Obama is one of his most prominent in an ongoing campaign to act on his own where Congress is rebuffing him. No Child Left Behind was primarily designed to help the nation's poor and minority children and was passed a decade ago with widespread bipartisan support. It has been up for renewal since 2007. But lawmakers have been stymied for years by competing priorities, disagreements over how much of a federal role there should be in schools and, in the recent Congress, partisan gridlock.

For all the cheers that states may have about the changes, the move also reflects the sobering reality that the United States is not close to the law's original goal: getting children to grade level in reading and math.

CONTINUED:
http://news.yahoo.com/apnewsbreak-official-10-states-ed-waiver-110202341.html

US To Grant Waivers On NCLB

The Administration of President Barack Obama said it will grant waivers to U.S. States saying they can’t meet the requirements of the No Child Left Behind law.


Efforts to reform the signature education legislation of President George W. Bush have stalled in Congress.


U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said he decided to grant waivers because of “universal clamoring” from education officials in nearly every State who say they can’t meet the unrealistic requirements of the Federal law, The Washington Post reported Sunday.
CONTINUED:  http://www.personalliberty.com/news/us-to-grant-waivers-on-nclb-34154/?eiid=&rmid=2011_08_09_PLA_[E11343050]&rrid=243405105

How Conservatives Can Limit the Scope and Size of Government

By Chris Gacek
Published January 18, 2011, FoxNews.com

With a new, conservative House of Representatives and a legislatively checked Senate, the question is no longer whether to scale back the size and scope of government, but how. Yet even if the era of big government is on a downward trajectory, reducing the size of government will require a long, dogged and savvy effort. “Abolish the Department of Education” has been a rallying cry for conservatives since the Reagan administration, but simply eliminating the Department of Education (DoE), and other agencies, is not enough.

To stop big government, the laws that empower agencies must also be eliminated.

The Department of Education was created in 1980. Before that, a Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW), managed the federal education functions the U.S. Congress enacted. Interestingly, DoE has the fewest employees of any cabinet department (4,200), yet its reach is huge, touching “approximately 56 million students attending some 97,000 schools and 28,000 private schools,” and its programs “also provide grant, loan and work-study assistance to about 11 million postsecondary students.”

Laws make a bureaucracy. If a conservative Congress “abolished the Department of Education,” the only thing that effectively would change is the name on the building and stationary. Federal education laws and regulations would still have to be enforced – somewhere.

DoE is governed by a mesh of laws that includes: Elementary and Secondary Education Act (1965); Higher Education Act of 1965; Education for All Handicapped Children Act (1975); Equal Access Act (1984); No Child Left Behind Act (2001); the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (2004); and, Race to the Top (2009). Each one of these laws permits the lawyers amongst those 4,200 DoE employees to write regulations that have the force of law.

Consider No Child Left Behind: As noted by education analyst Lindsay Burke, “As a result of No Child Left Behind, states were burdened with nearly seven million man-hours of paperwork in order to comply with new federal mandates, costing states an estimated $141 million. And while the federal government provides just nine percent of funding for public education, it is the source of an estimated 41 percent of the administrative compliance burden for states.”

After a while the statutes and regulations become so arcane that only legal specialists can hope to understand them. Medicare regulations are a great example. Eventually, the government employees enforcing laws and writing regulations become special interests dedicated to fighting any simplification that would limit their Gnostic powers and high-paying legal jobs.

The result of this blizzard of law and rules has been a major cause of federal and state government employment – stretching across states and agencies and burdening Americans.

As a statute’s support industry and special interest beneficiaries accumulate, changing government becomes increasingly difficult. And attempts to provide corrective regulations by conservative administrations have generally failed.

First, regulations cannot override statutes, so they cannot eliminate a statute-created program or mandate.

Second, agency bureaucrats who know the law better than the political appointees will draft the regulations and implement them to impede deregulation.

Third, regulations can be reversed or rescinded by the next liberal president.

Thus, the only effective way to eliminate programs or reduce government is to repeal the statutory language that creates agency power.

In many cases, the statutes would not be hard to identify. Take the EPA for example: Amend the statute that has allowed the EPA to run amok regulating that “pollutant” carbon dioxide. With one stroke, EPA’s economy-strangling global warming regulations would be nullified. As the Obama administration moves to govern by regulatory fiat, conservatives will have to limit government by using the new weapons of statutory fixes and eliminating agency funds for specific actions.

Repealing existing laws will be difficult. President Obama will veto such legislation, which requires a two-thirds majority in the House and Senate for an override. That won’t happen often. Thus, it is critical to elect a president dedicated to limited government, and senators who will give conservatives a 60-vote majority to overcome filibusters.

Finally, those dedicated to limited government – especially law students, lawyers and administrative experts – must lay the groundwork for such actions by learning what key provisions in various laws, if removed, would cut the heads off these various regulatory snakes.

This will take years of effort and innovative thinking. Public policy organizations and their donors will need to devote substantial resources to laying the groundwork for limited government by producing leaders who know how to bring it about. Our Bunker Hill will be Capitol Hill.

Conservatives are generally uninterested in the nitty-gritty aspects of government. This is understandable, given how aggravating the study of such minutiae can be. However, that must change if we are to win this long war against entrenched statism and preserve liberty in America.

Chris Gacek is Senior Fellow at the Family Research Council.

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2011/01/18/conservatives-limit-scope-size-government/