The President's Proposed Budget: Workforce-related funding

Establish a Competitive Early Learning Challenge Fund. $350 million to establish a new, competitive Early Learning Challenge Fund, administered by the Depart­ment of Education and the Department of Health and Human Services, for States that are ready to take dramatic steps to improve the quality of their early childhood programs. The Early Learning Challenge Fund builds on the Administration’s initiatives to expand Head Start and improve its quality through competition.

Reform Elementary and Secondary School Funding by Setting High Standards, Encouraging Innovation, and Rewarding Success.

• Bringing the Race to the Top (RTT) reform to school districts, with a focus on cost-effective reforms that improve student achievement in an era of tight budgets.

• Continuing the Investing in Innovation program to test, validate, and expand ef­fective approaches to student learning and launching the new “pay for success” bonds that provide funding only after results are achieved.

• Expanding educational options by helping to grow effective charter schools and other autonomous public schools that achieve posi­tive results and give parents more choices.

• Providing significant funding for School Turnaround Grants to help States and school districts turn around our Nation’s lowest performing schools.

• Eliminating 13 discretionary programs and consolidating 38 K-12 programs into 11 new programs that emphasize using competition to allocate funds.

Prepare 100,000 STEM Teachers Over the Next Decade.

$80 million from the Department of Education to expand promising and effective models of teacher preparation in STEM

$20 million from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to launch a new teacher-training research program called Teacher Learning for the Future

$20 million for an overarching, comprehensive science and technol­ogy workforce program at NSF

Open the Doors of College to More Ameri­cans.

Introduce into the Fund for Improve­ment of Postsecondary Education an evidence-based framework, enabling the Fund to become a postsecondary “Investing in Innovation” program that will test, validate, and expand effective ap­proaches to improving college access and comple­tion and educational productivity.

In addition, $50 million in 2012 and a total of $1.3 billion over five years in performance-based funding to institutions that successfully enroll and gradu­ate high-need students and enable them to enter successful employment.

Bring Competition to and Encourage New Approaches for Job Training.

Nearly $10 billion for Workforce Investment Act programs, which match unemployed people with jobs and give individuals with skill gaps the training they need to secure family-sustaining employment. The Administration will work with the Congress on a reauthorization bill that streamlines service delivery and breaks down program silos, better meets the needs of employers and regional econo­mies, holds the system accountable for serving all workers and job-seekers well, learns more easily from experience, and promotes innovation and reform based on what works. Recognizing that the best ideas often come from the bottom up, the Budget establishes a Workforce Innovation Fund that, paired with broader waiver authority, will encourage States, regions, and localities to break down barriers among programs, test new ideas, and replicate proven strategies for delivering bet­ter employment and education results in a more cost-effective way.

Establish New Economic Growth Zones. To bolster economic rejuvenation in hard-hit ar­eas of our country, the Administration proposes a new Growth Zone program that will deliver ex­panded tax incentives for investment and employ­ment and a more streamlined access to Federal assistance to 20 areas facing economic distress, but showing clear growth potential. Replacing the Empowerment Zone program, the Growth Zones will include a mix of rural and urban areas that will be selected through a national competi­tion that will judge their competitive strategies and their need and ability to attract investment and growth.

Unemployment Insurance (UI). The eco­nomic downturn has severely tested the ad­equacy of States’ UI systems, forcing States to levy additional taxes on employers, which undermines much-needed job creation. To provide short-term relief in these States, the 2012 Budget provides a two-year suspension of State interest payments on their debt and automatic increases in Federal unemploy­ment insurance taxes. At the same time, to encourage States to put their UI systems on firmer financial footing so they can better re­spond to future economic conditions, begin­ning in 2014 the Budget increases the maxi­mum wages subject to unemployment taxes to $15,000, a level then indexed to average wages.

REDUCTIONS

--Reducing funding for the Senior Community Service Employment Program and moving its function to the Administration on Aging to consolidate senior services and provide them more effectively.

--Cutting funding for the Teacher Quality Block Grant by close to $500 million and the Career and Technical Education (CTE) program by more than $280 million, shifting resources to initiatives more focused on re­sults.

--Eliminating 13 discretionary Department of Education programs and consolidating 38 K-12 programs into 11 new programs that emphasize using competition to allocate funds, giving communities more choic­es around activities, and using rigorous evidence to fund what works.

--Reducing funding for the Community Devel­opment Block Grant by 7.5 percent or $300 million.

--Cutting the Community Services Block Grant program (CSBG) in half and transforming it from a formula-based program to a competi­tive grant program for Community Action Agencies.

To see the President's full budget proposal click here.