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It may become harder to keep up with all of the proposals floating around about what to do with the federal budget, but my colleagues here at Education Week are managing to keep things straight.

The big news so far (which could presumably change at any moment) is that the U.S. House of Representatives voted to restore the $557.7 million cut to special education state grants in the fiscal year 2011 spending bill they are considering. This is the bill that would finance the government through Sept. 30 and overall, still cuts nearly $5 billion from the education budget. This would keep special education spending at $11.5 billion.

Rep.

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With the Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives calling for a $557.7 million cut to special education spending in the current year, it’s hard to complain about President Barack Obama’s modest $250 million boost to the program in his fiscal year 2012 budget proposal.

The President’s plans include adding about $200 million to IDEA Part B, which serves students age 3 to 21. That would fund IDEA at about 17 percent, according to the Council for Exceptional Children. Building toward funding IDEA fully, i.e., with 40 percent of the contribution coming from the federal government, would mean increases of a few billion dollars a year, Deborah Ziegler, the Council’s associate executive director for policy and advocacy services, told me.

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A confession: releasing an article out into the world can sometimes be a little nerve-wracking. That’s especially true when the topic is special education funding, which I wrote about for this year’s edition of Quality Counts, Education Week‘s fine analysis of education nationwide. (The full table of contents can be found here, and I encourage everyone to read these articles.)

Special education funding is a particularly touchy subject. Advocates have argued for a long time that special education is underfunded by the federal government, and that their children are taking the blame for straining school budgets.

That’s not such a crazy fear to have.

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Rio Salado College is trying to eliminate cheating in higher education. And for its efforts the Tempe-based college was named one of four colleges throughout the country to win a 2010 WCET Outstanding Work (WOW) award from the WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies (WCET) in Boulder, CO.

In November, college representatives accepted the award for the colleges Peer-to Peer Plagiarism Detection System during a conference in La Jolla, CA.

“At Rio Salado we promote the values of academic integrity among students, faculty, teachers and administrators,” said Vernon Smith, the vice president of Academic Affairs at Rio Salado College. “On Read more…

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For years, the only funding at the federal level for gifted education has come through the Jacob Javits Gifted and Talented Education Act, funded at $7.5 milion for the past few fiscal years (compared to the approximately $11.5 billion spent in fiscal 2010 on school-aged children with disabilities under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.)

Now, that money, once again, is on the verge of being cut, as happened repeatedly during the Bush administration. Advocates for gifted education are scrambling to preserve a program they say is focused on developing gifted programs for underserved students.

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