On Wednesday, the House passed H.R. 2740, the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act of 2020, by a party-line vote of 226-203. This legislation provides funding for the Department of Education (ED), among other agencies, for fiscal year (FY) 2020. Overall, it provides a significant increase, $11.7 billion, to ED, with the majority of programs in the department seeing an increase in funding.
Most important to the CTE community, the Perkins Basic State Grant program received an increase of $47 million over its FY2019 enacted level, bringing the total proposed funding for FY2020 to $1.31 billion. Although this falls short of our request that would ensure funding keeps pace with demand, we are encouraged by the House of Representatives acknowledgement of the important role CTE plays in preparing learners for education and career success, particularly as labor market shortages impact virtually every sector of today's economy.
Another important issue to the CTE community, teacher preparation and development programs, was prominently addressed in H.R. 2740. Title II-A, the only federal funding source that is solely reserved for teacher preparation and training programs, received a $500 million increase, bringing its new total for FY2020 to $2.6 billion. A 2017 Pew study revealed that 2/3rds of all State CTE Directors reported having a CTE teacher shortage in one or more career clusters. In the current environment surrounding the recruitment and retention of quality CTE educators, these additional funds are critical to ensuring that school districts are able to continue to produce high-quality CTE programs for their students. You can find more info on funding for other programs related to CTE in our recent blog here.
What’s next?
Now action will need to take place in the Senate before the two chambers can “go to conference,” and reach a final agreement to send to the President for his signature. Complicating the introduction and passage in the Senate are the statutory budget caps currently in place on discretionary spending—both for defense and nondefense programs. If Congress does not come up with an agreement to raise the budget caps, they go into effect October 1 and will trigger across the board cuts, or sequestration, totaling roughly $120 trillion.
Congressional leaders and the White House are currently in the process of negotiating an increase in these caps, which will be necessary to avoid the steep cuts previously mentioned and to provide any of the increases suggested by the House. The exact cap agreement will have tremendous influence on the final funding numbers for education programs like Perkins, WIOA and Title II-A and other critical programs in ESSA.
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