Ed Week on What the Financial Crisis Means for Education

With Congress meeting for the fourth day tomorrow to work on a bail-out for Wall Street, Alyson Klein from Education Week wrote a good article on how the bail-out can affect the future of the U.S. Government Education Budget.

Congress was expected to approve an expanded budget for education funding late last week that would have been in existence through March 6 of next year, but the financial crisis delayed things.  Klein writes:

If Congress agreed on a fiscal 2009 appropriations bill financing the Department of Education by March 6, it would be up to the new president to sign it.

But the new administration of either John McCain or Barack Obama may not have much leeway to increase spending on education or any other federal program significantly. Congress and the Bush administration last week were hashing out an estimated $700 billion assistance plan for the financial sector. Some advocates are worried that such an enormous unplanned expenditure could squeeze domestic spending for a long time.

Even though McCain and Obama may have both talked about how they wanted to improve education in the United States during Friday’s debate, we may have heard some false promises considering the financial problems they’ll be dealing with.

Should education take a back seat to the bail out?