In the fiscal year (FY) 2024 appropriations process, Congress has an opportunity to restore fiscal sanity to federal education spending. President Joe Biden launched the FY 2024 appropriations process recklessly, calling for $90 billion in discretionary spending for the Department of Education, a $10.8 billion (13.6 percent) increase from FY 2023.…

Providing high-quality Career Technical Education (CTE) requires robust, sustained funding designed to be responsive to both the rapidly evolving needs of industry and the diverse needs of learners. Advance CTE embarked on an analysis of states' secondary CTE funding models. In 2014, RTI International, with the support of Advance CTE, conducted…

Fifty years after the Supreme Court issued its ruling in "San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez," the trajectory of school finance desegregation has shifted from expansive federal hopes to narrower state efforts. Attempts to address many of the disparities continue to be constrained by the complex and intersecting nature…

Over the past several years, schools across the nation have seen historic declines in student performance in reading, math, and other academic subjects due to the COVID-19 Pandemic. School closures adversely affected student groups at different rates and further exacerbated long-standing learning gaps. There has been a debate among scholars for…

This study creates a measurement of Title IV funding influence on the institutional financial health of religious higher education institutions. It justifies a method, grounded in financial accounting standards, of using publically available data sources for calculating the Composite Financial Index metric to gauge institutional financial health;…

In early 2020, the global COVID-19 pandemic closed schools for the rest of the 2019-20 school year (fiscal year 2020 or FY20). The United States Congress deployed funds to help K-12 schools adjust and plan for reopening via the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, including the initial $13.2 billion installment through the…

IDEA is the cornerstone federal law that safeguards and promotes the educational rights of children with disabilities. It was enacted in 1975 as the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (EHA), which established a right to a free appropriate public education (FAPE) for all children with disabilities for the first time. Before the EHA, there…

This book offers a novel and up-to-date exploration of the common belief that increasing conventional school resources will increase academic achievement and help close gaps between various advantaged and disadvantaged students. Taking the scholarship around this question, such as James S. Coleman's 1965 report on the Equality of Educational…

Regional accreditation, seen as a necessary hurdle by many in higher education, is required to participate in Title IV funding. However, several studies indicate that the current accreditation process is broken. Institutions with more resources, both in staffing and funding, and more academically ready students are at an advantage for favorable…

Protecting Hunting Heritage and Education Act was put in place to amend the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 to clarify that the prohibition on the use of Federal education funds for certain weapons does not apply to the use of such weapons for training in archery, hunting, or other shooting sports. The Act includes the following…

Research and development spending by academic institutions totaled $89.9 billion in FY 2021, an increase of $3.4 billion (4.0%) from FY 2020 (table 1). R&D expenditures funded from federal sources accounted for $3.0 billion of the total increase. Federally funded R&D expenditures had not increased by $3 billion or more since FY 2011, when…

To provide fast and direct economic aid to the American people negatively impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, Congress enacted a series of laws and injected about $4.6 trillion into the U.S. economy. Of this amount, over $75 billion was directed to institutions of higher education through the Higher Education Emergency Relief (HEER) Funds. This…

Background: The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA; 2015) constituted a reauthorization of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) and replaced the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) of 2001. ESSA, although still recognizing the need of standardized testing, diverged from NCLB by transferring a significant amount of power over…

This letter is written by Roberto J. Rodriguez, Assistant Secretary, Office of Planning, Evaluation and Policy Development, U.S. Department of Education. The letter is in response to questions brought to the U.S. Department of Education (Department) regarding the permissibility of Department grantees and subgrantees using Federal funds granted by…

The purpose of this study was to examine and analyze the decision-making and policy development of local governing boards acting in response to the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. Quantitative and qualitative data was gathered through open-ended items in a mixed-methods survey and through a focus group interview. This research sought to…