President Barack Obama released his budget proposal for the next fiscal year today, and once again his plan contains new, if still vague, investments in early education.
The president’s blueprint for federal spending would invest another $850 million in Race to the Top, the competitive grant program designed to spur innovation in education, with a portion going to early learning, according to Politics K-12. The plan also would increase spending on child care by $825 million and boost spending on early intervention for infants and toddlers by $20 million in fiscal 2013, CLASP’s Hannah Mathews reports on Twitter (@HNMatthews).
Head Start would get an $85 million boost under Obama’s plan, Mathews adds.
The Budget includes over $8 billion for Head Start and Early Head Start to serve approximately 962,000 children and families, maintaining the historic expansion undertaken in 2009–2010. …
Additional resources will be provided for the Race to the Top: Early
Learning Challenge, to be paired with new investments by the Department
of Health and Human Services in improving child care quality and
preparing children for success in school. (Check out sections on the
departments of Health and Human Services and Education.)
-- “Fiscal Year 2013 Budget of the U.S. Government.”
While this is all good news, the Obama administration’s budget is only the first move in a high-stakes game that will be complicated this year by presidential and congressional politics. It is worth noting that the president remains committed to early learning. But, now we will see what can be accomplished in the increasingly partisan environment on Capitol Hill.
Stay tuned and check out Politics K-12 and the First Five Years Fund (@firstfiveyears on Twitter) for comprehensive coverage of education funding in the new budget.
(Thanks to Megan Carolan, @MeganCarolan, of the National Institute for Early Education Research for tweeting great links to breaking early education news in the administration’s budget.)