- The ink is dry on the bill, the interest groups are mollified, and the lobbyists have made the first payments on their tastefully appointed condominiums. Now that the Every Student Achieves Act has become the law of the land, it’s time to examine its implications for our federal education bureaucracy. Ace Fordham policy fellow Andy Smarick has identified the shrinking classroom influence of Uncle Sam as the top media takeaway from ESSA’s passage, and there’s no denying that Congress acted decisively to roll back the Department of Education’s Obama-era authority. But just how much has the agency—and John King, who will act as its leader regardless of whether he ever gets a confirmation hearing—seen its prerogatives narrowed? This recap from Education Week offers a good primer, consulting aides from both parties along with education superlawyer Reg Leichty. Shockingly, the sources don’t agree on whether future secretaries of education will be “handcuffed” in their dealings with state accountability schemes. But as Leichty happily observes, those differences in opinion will likely be resolved in the courts.
- Now that it’s the second week of January, you’ve probably received your W-2 tax form. And as the old saying goes, there are only two certainties in life: the opposition of teachers’ unions to the promise of public support for religious schools, and taxes. With the new year comes a revived effort on the part of the New York Catholic Conference to pass a bill through the Empire State legislature to create such an incentive, though their foes remain recalcitrant. (Ninety thousand students attend schools operated by the Archdiocese of New York, which should add some political heft to the pleas of Big Apple believers.) The ground for legislative progress is fertile in New York: Governor Cuomo is on record supporting the tax credit bill, and even Mayor Bill de Blasio has proven surprisingly amenable to collaboration with religious partners. Cardinal Timothy Dolan, perhaps the most eloquent advocate of religious education, put it nicely: “This is about our kids, where they go is second to their getting a quality education wherever they happen to be.”
- The reading of judicial tea leaves isn’t the Gadfly’s specialty, no matter how many Perry Mason reruns he screens nightly. Still, Monday’s oral arguments in the Supreme Court case Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association certainly seemed to point in a clear direction—and one that friends of public employee unions might find ominous. For the uninitiated: The case was brought by California teachers who objected to paying “agency fees,” which finance union work in the (ostensibly apolitical) collective bargaining realm. If the court finds that the fees infringe on the plaintiffs’ First Amendment rights—as they seemed disposed to do, if their public remarks were any indication—they could act to deprive public unions of an important source of revenue and effectively make the United States a “right-to-work” nation. It may be the most important case decided in this term, but don’t assume that the court watchers have their ruling figured out already.
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