The White House has announced an initiative to bring internet connectivity to 99% of America’s students. Detailed on the WhiteHouse.gov website, the initiative, called ConnectED, would achieve this goal in 5 years thanks to the expansion of the existing E-Rate program run by the FCC.

President Obama said that funding for the expansion should come from better, more efficient use of existing money allocated for putting high-speed broadband connections into schools. He also said that he was looking for support among not only government agencies, but educators, faculty, parents, and business leaders to make the goal a reality.

According to the announcement, ConnectED will require no input from Congress.

“We are living in a digital age, and to help our students get ahead, we must make sure they have access to cutting-edge technology,” said President Obama. “So today, I’m issuing a new challenge for America – one that families, businesses, school districts and the federal government can rally around together – to connect virtually every student in America’s classrooms to high-speed broadband internet within five years, and equip them with the tools to make the most of it.”

Internet connectivity could be key to preparing students for academic and professional life beyond high school. Digital spaces are being increasingly utilized by the education sector to craft a more individualized and customized learning experience for each child, and schools that cannot realize this promise will be shortchanging kids who need preparation for college and to contribute to the nation’s economy.

Even though progress has been made to connect schools to the internet, as many as 20% of teachers feel that the technology infrastructure currently in place in their schools is not adequate to meet their needs. This was especially true in rural schools where internet connectivity rates lag behind the suburbs and urban centers.

In addition to connecting America’s students, ConnectED harnesses the ingenuity of the American private sector get new technologies into students’ hands and support digital learning content.

ConnectED also better invests existing federal funds to ensure that every educator in America receives support and training in using education technology tools to improve student learning. The ambitious new vision for digital, connected learning builds on work the Administration has done over the past four years to increase broadband access across the country.

The ConnectED initiative will include an internet connectivity upgrade and a training component for teachers and administrators on how best to make use of interactive and digital media to improve academic outcomes.

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In a political environment that has seen growing conflict between Republican opposition and President Barack Obama — from the September 11, 2012 Benghazi terrorism scandal to last week’s revelation that the IRS targeted Conservative non-profits for special scrutiny — Republicans have signed on to the Obama administration’s plan to keep student loan interest rates from going up.

Philip Elliot writes for the Associated Press that this “rare win” for Obama depends on the GOP-led Education and Workforce Committee’s endorsement of a plan that would tie student loan interest rates to market rates. As student loan rates are set to double on July 1, this will provide significant relief for borrowers.

But there’s more to the plan including an adjustment of subsidized and unsubsidized loan rates as Republican John Kline has brought forth:

Kline’s proposal also would end different interest rates for subsidized and unsubsidized undergraduate loans. Both would pay the same rates, which would be linked to 10-year Treasury notes.

There is popular confusion about student loan interest rates ‘doubling.’ In December, 2007 Congress lowered student loan interest rates to 3.4% in the beginning of the United States’ economic recession. That rate is set to return to its previous level of 6.8% in July, 2013 — which doubles a rate that was halved.

Both Democrats and Republicans have proposed a plan that would tie interest rates to the market rather than setting a hard value independent of the financial sector’s ebbs and flows. It’s a double-edged sword, though; as the US Treasury increases its rates, variable student loan rates would rise, too.

Rep. George Miller, a frequent player in education policy and the ranking Democrat on the Education and Workforce Committee, isn’t sold:

“This is just another classic bait-and-switch scheme: lure you in with a short-term lower rate but then charge you higher rates in the long-term. A lot more,” said Rep. George Miller, the top Democrat on the House Education and Workforce Committee.

According to the US Department of Education, there are ~36 million borrowers with student loans, with individual student debt averaging ~$26,000 and the nation’s combined student loan debt topping $1 trillion — a total that has for the first time overtaken consumer credit card debt.

Proposals will be analyzed and discussed by the Committee some time next week and a vote is expected shortly after.

Kline, a Republican Representative from Minnesota who has served since 2003, is pleased to find common ground with the Obama administration and Democrats:

“This coming up with a market-based student loan interest rate for the long term, I like it. I am very happy for the president on this one.”

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Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa is asking his Senate colleagues to co-sign a letter to the Senate Appropriations Committee asking it not to allocate funds to any program that would allow the Obama Administration to encourage adoption of the Common Core State Standards. In an email sent from his office, Grassley listed a number of such policies adopted by the administration and expressed hopes that the committee will put a stop to them in the future.

We ask that the Fiscal Year 2014 Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Appropriations Bill include language to restore state decision-making and accountability with respect to state academic content standards. The decision about what students should be taught and when it should be taught has enormous consequences for our children. Therefore, parents ought to have a straight line of accountability to those who are making such decisions. State legislatures, which are directly accountable to the citizens of their states, are the appropriate place for those decisions to be made, free from any pressure from the U.S. Department of Education.

The letter specifically mentions measures such as requiring the adoption of Common Core as a prerequisite for Race to the Top funding and allocating funding for research consortia that would study and develop tests that would align with Common Core Standards.

In addition, Grassley wants committee members to assure states that their No Child Left Behind waivers granted by the Department of Education won’t be jeopardized if they choose not to adopt CCS.

While the Common Core State Standards Initiative was initially billed as a voluntary effort between states, federal incentives have clouded the picture. Current federal law makes clear that the U.S. Department of Education may not be involved in setting specific content standards or determining the content of state assessments. Nevertheless, the selection criteria designed by the U.S. Department of Education for the Race to the Top Program provided that for a state to have any chance to compete for funding, it must commit to adopting a “common set of K-12 standards” matching the description of the Common Core. The U.S. Department of Education also made adoption of “college- and career-ready standards” meeting the description of the Common Core a condition to receive a state waiver under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Race to the Top funds were also used to fund two consortiums to develop assessments aligned to the Common Core and the Department is now in the process of evaluating these assessments.

Grassley lists April 25th as the deadline for co-signers in order to give committee members enough time to consider the request.

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One of the goals of the Obama administration’s budget released earlier this week is to encourage affordability in higher education. Nearly $1 billion of the total education budget will go towards funding programs that would contain college costs and expand research initiatives.

In addition, the budget would take away the power of Congress to regulate interest rates on student loans and instead tying them to the market. Although supporters of the move believe that this will ensure that this week keep interest rates low and prevent them from swinging wildly, opponents think that the market will push the rates higher in the future — a move that risks sticking students with unexpectedly high payments.

The budget calls for using 10-year Treasury bills as the student loan interest marker.

The interest rate provision isn’t the only part of the budget that deals with student loans. Another proposal calls for expanding the options for student loan repayments while also capping monthly payments at 10% of discretionary income.

The current rate for subsidized Stafford loans, which go mainly to low- and middle-income students, is 3.4 percent; that rate is due to double this summer. This week, Republican Senators Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, and Richard Burr of North Carolina proposed legislation that would have set new student loan rates at the yield on 10-year treasury notes, plus 3 percent. Right now, that would mean an interest rate of 4.75 percent — higher than the 3.4 percent rate on subsidized Stafford loans but substantially lower than the rates on other student loans, all of which are at least 6.8 percent.

Although some lawmakers, especially those on the Democratic side of the aisle, have gone on record praising the budget, the reaction has not been universally positive. Wisconsin Representative and former Vice Presidential nominee Paul Ryan panned the proposal, saying that adopting the President’s budget would grow the deficit while doing nothing to shore up the country’s long-term economic health.

The president’s budget is such a disappointment because it’s a missed opportunity,” Ryan said. “We need a new approach to meet our generation’s most pressing challenges. I hope the other side will join us in proposing real reforms … [b]ut until then, we need to take steps in the right direction.”

Additionally, U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., said Obama’s budget did not accurately address the depth of the country’s problems, such as health-care and social-security spending.

The President’s proposal is not expected to be final and the budget is expected to undergo a number of revision before eventual adoption by both houses of Congress and certified with the President’s signature.

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As part of the new federal budget proposal the Obama Administration submitted to Congress, pre-K programs as well as high school improvement plans would get a big funding boost — but the proposal also calls for something similar to Race to the Top grants that would award programs that propose innovative reform measures for higher education.

The budget calls for a substantial funding boost for the U.S. Department of Education, with nearly $72 billion out of a total federal budget for nearly $4 trillion. Disregarding sequestration, this would represent a nearly 5% increase over the budget for the fiscal year 2012.

As announced in the State of the Union Address, the president is seeking $75 billion over the next 10 years for a major expansion of preschool programs for low- and moderate-income 4-year-olds. The program would be paid for through a new tax on tobacco products of 94 cents bringing the total federal tax to nearly $2 per pack. The initiative also would include a $750 million investment in preschool development grants to help states expand access to such services and improve program quality.

“This would constitute the largest expansion of educational opportunity in the 21st century,” U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan told reporters in an afternoon press call.

Although the federal government will cover up to 90% of the expense for the first year, its contribution is slated to decline gradually to about a quarter of the total cost. In order to participate, states would have to meet a number of criteria to be eligible for the program — something that the administration expects will limit participation in the first year.

The grant money could be used to expand pre-K programs targeted at low-income families as well as to offer similar programs to children from the middle class.

The entire price-tag of the program would be paid for using the tobacco tax, and the industry is not particularly happy about it. David Sutton, a spokesman for Altria Group, the parent company of Philip Morris USA Inc., said in email that tobacco taxes soared by 158 percent four years ago, making another tax difficult to weather. And he added, “We think it is patently unfair to single out adult tobacco consumers with another federal tobacco tax increase to pay for a broad, new government spending program claimed to have benefits for everyone.”

The recent findings regarding discipline programs must have played a part in the budget design as $50 million of the total allocated to the DOE is to go towards the School Climate Transformation Grants to fund programs that will reduce bullying as well as handle chronic discipline and behavior problems among students.

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Although homeschooling is increasingly common in the United States, in Germany the number of homeschooling families remains very small. Chiefly, this is because the German government, backed by the courts, doesn’t look kindly on families that homeschool, making it illegal for students not to attend in traditional schools.

In extreme cases, parents who fail to enroll their kids in classes, risk losing custody completely.

That was the rock and a hard place the Romeike family found themselves between. Their Evangelical Christian faith, which is out of step with the religious life of Germany, made homeschooling the only viable option for giving their kids religious instruction. As a result Hannelore Romeike and her husband Uwe moved to the United States where parents teaching children wasn’t discouraged with nearly the same enthusiasm.

The Romeikes’ fight began in 2006, when they took over the education of their three eldest children. In retaliation, the German government charged them more than $9,000 in fines. One day, authorities showed up and forcibly took the children to public school. Fearing they’d lose custody altogether after the 2007 ruling, the Romeikes left their home in Baden-Württemberg and moved to a small town in eastern Tennessee best known for being the childhood home of Davy Crockett.

As soon as they moved, the Homeschool Legal Defense Association offered its services to the family in order to help with their asylum application. Although the immigration judge ruled on favor of granting asylum, after the Obama administration appealed in 2012, the Board of Immigration Appeals overturned the ruling.

Michael Farris, the head of HLDA, said that the administration’s insistence that asylum is not appropriate in this case seems to go against President Obama’s repeated calls for amnesty for over 11 million illegal immigrants residing in the United States today.

While there are few homeschoolers in Germany, there are many in the United States—1.5 million students in 2007, according to the most recent data from the National Center for Education Statistics. Homeschool families have long held that education choice is a parental right; furthermore, it’s an exercise of free speech and, in some instances, religious freedom. By extension, it is a constitutional right and a human right, Farris says.

Farris said that the case was an important one and will serve as a test of whether the US accepts violations of individual liberty as a violation of one’s human rights. According to Farris, the administration’s position is that because everyone is oppressed equally by Germany’s “no homeschooling” rules, no human rights violations are occurring. Yet the Romeike family’s religious freedom is being violated by the German mandate – and it’s hard to argue that US doesn’t consider such freedoms to be a fundamental human right.

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Officials in some Ohio school districts have come to believe that the strings attached to federal Race to the Top grants make the money not worth receiving, The Columbus Dispatch reports. As a result as many as 80 districts and some charter schools have withdrawn from the program, in part because the money wasn’t sufficient to cover the costs associated with the grant requirements.

Even schools that have been accepting money for years are now having second thoughts, as the expense of developing a teacher evaluation system that would meet the standards set out by the grant program proved too much.

“We were spending a disproportionate amount of time following all the requirements,” said Mike Johnson, the superintendent of Bexley schools, which turned down the last half of a $100,000, four-year grant this school year. “It was costing us far more than that to implement all of the mandates.”

Teachers lost classroom time because they were stuck in training sessions aimed at familiarizing them with the new assessment regimes. The burden was particularly onerous on smaller schools who didn’t have the staff numbers nor the flexibility to allow this much time to non-academic pursuits. All in all, it was a long list of commitments for an amount of money that frequently added up to less than a percent of the district’s annual budget.

The goal of the grant program is to increase student achievement and raise the graduation rates for schools who commit to overhauling their testing systems in line with the approach championed by education reformers in the Obama administration. The Ohio grant – one of the 11 state grants to be given out – also comes with a condition that the new assessment system be put in place in the coming academic year, a full 12 months before the requirement kicks in for the rest of the state’s schools.

Some have been leery of the evaluations because half of a teacher’s performance is based on how much progress his or her students make in school. Worthington school officials haven’t decided whether they will accept the last quarter of their $520,000 grant, saying the new teacher evaluations would violate the contract between the district and its teachers union. Both Worthington and Bexley schools promised their teachers that they wouldn’t use the evaluations until 2014, giving them more time to prepare. They said it was unclear when they signed on to Race to the Top that they would be required to meet an earlier deadline.

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The federal Department of Education has released a report on its current “Race to the Top” grant winners, now in the third year of a four-year grant, with some troubling results. The Washington Post reports that District of Columbia, Maryland and Georgia are cited as not doing well with their use of grant money, although none have been ordered to give back federal dollars.

According to Lyndsey Layton and Emma Brown, Arne Duncan said the report is mostly good, but with some concerns.

There are 12 states currently receiving federal money in the “Race to the Top” initiative to improve state education. The money must be used to improve teacher evaluations, improve data collection and use, turn around failing schools, and move toward implementing Common Core standards.

The new report criticized the District of Columbia for falling behind on deadlines for better use of data to track students’ progress over their school years. Perhaps most importantly, it cited the District’s unambitious approach to failing schools:

Federal officials said the District’s greatest failure was that it moved to improve only one of 13 low-performing schools that it had committed to turn around under the terms of the grant.

Georgia, by contrast, is considered “at high risk” in carrying out its planned goals and has not kept strictly to its plans and timetable for improving teacher evaluations. The plans were to use a combination of classroom observation, student growth, student surveys, and a reduction in student achievement gap, but the state has not been able to do everything as planned; the Department was also concerned that Georgia may be moving to make further changes before there has been enough time to see how earlier reforms have worked.

Maryland had proposed to improve their use of student data, to help assess the state’s instruction levels. The state was also supposed to develop a new teacher evaluation, but when the new program was tried, state officials did not collect and use its reports and data. Additionally, two of Maryland’s 24 counties are not participating at all. Montgomery and Frederick Counties did not want to use student scores as part of teacher evaluations. Montgomery County’s Superintendent has even called for a moratorium on standardized testing, arguing that it takes away energy from classroom teaching.

All of the troubled states point to problems with staff retention and hiring. Maryland was without a state superintendent of education for a year, and during that time, the programs drifted. The District of Columbia, too, complained of turnover in its administration which made it more difficult to keep up with their ambitious goals. They have not found it easy to hire qualified people to manage data analysis, a key component in all of these programs.

Maryland now has a Superintendent of Education as of July. She reports that she has tried to make up for lost time since her appointment:

In a statement, Lowery said Maryland is moving ahead. “We have made further strides since this report was completed,” she said, noting that test scores are starting to reflect the impact of the federal grant money. Of the 16 low-performing schools that Maryland is working to turn around, all have met state goals in math and 12 have met state reading goals, Lowery said.

Besides Maryland, Georgia and the District of Columbia, other grant winners and participants are Florida, Delaware, Hawaii, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Rhode Island, and Tennessee. Each state developed its own plan for complying with the federal goals outlined in the original proposal.

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While this election day is being touted as a big win for the Democrats, considering the the control of the House remains with the Republican Party, there are questions about how much of his agenda — and which parts — President Barack Obama will be able to implement in the next four years. As he prepares to take the oath of office again this January, will the goals he outlined for higher education in the U.S. during his State of the Union Address last year remain a priority for the administration that will have to deal with a looming fiscal crisis as well as grapple with economic struggles that continue to haunt the country?

Some things remain clear. It is widely expected that in his second term the President will continue to support the expansion of the federal financial aid programs like Pell Grants and subsidized Stafford loans. In the coming battle over next year’s federal budget, Obama will push for an increase in research and education funding.

Still, the country’s finances being what they are, those expecting a federal windfall will be disappointed. According to Inside Higher Ed, it is more likely that the President’s priority will be to serve as a barrier to deep budget cuts favored by the Republicans, rather than than to push for an additional chunk of the shrinking federal kitty.

In the short term, “I think it’s very likely that the Education Department will continue to use its regulatory authority to advance federal education policy,” said Terry Hartle, senior vice president for government and public affairs at the American Council on Education, after several networks called the race for the president late Tuesday night. Several new regulations are expected in the coming months, including new rules governing teacher preparation programs and a new round of negotiated rule-making dealing with fraud.

Tuesday’s results did bring succor to at least one higher education system. After strenuous campaigning by Governor Jerry Brown, among others, voters in California approved Proposition 30, a sales tax and an income tax hike meant to raise money for California schools, colleges and universities. Brown’s effort on behalf of Prop 30 is credited with “rescuing” California’s community college system from extensive “trigger” cuts that would have gone into effect if the measure had failed.

Early returns — from mostly rural, conservative areas — had Prop 30 losing until just after 11 p.m., when votes shifted to the affirmative, never to look back. Returns from late-reporting counties — you know who you are, Los Angeles — continued to grow Prop 30′s margin into the evening, which stood at 53.0 percent to 47.0 percent at 1:20 a.m. with nearly three-quarters of California votes tallied.

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The fate of current Secretary of Education Arne Duncan — should President Barack Obama win a second term — has been uncertain for some time. It’s no longer a mystery; in a National Journal exclusive, via Yahoo! News, revealed that Duncan is prepared to stay in his position for a second term.

However, his focus during the last four years on secondary education, will shift to combating the growing problem of higher education student debt. He also plans launch initiatives to double the number of college graduates in the U.S. By 2020.

Duncan joked that he has been prepared to stay until the President “got sick of” him — not something that will likely happen any time soon, as the two men have served together most of their political lives dating back to their starts in Chicago. Furthermore, and perhaps in part due to his closeness the President, Duncan has influence beyond matters concerning the Department of Education. According to National Journal’s Fawn Johnson, his stamp is on almost all major domestic policy moves of the administration.

In education, Duncan was one of the major influences behind the Race to the Top grant program. The program, with goals of encouraging education reform that underscore the commitment of reformers like Duncan, is an effort to get states to look at how their school systems might be improved, and requires minimal federal investment.

Well over 30 states have embarked on some sort of school-reform efforts in hopes of winning one of the grants. Nineteen states and several districts have won them. Duncan and Obama also are enormously proud that 46 states have signed on to the Common Core State Standards for K-12 schools; they believe Race to the Top deserves some of the credit for that achievement.

Duncan’s partiality to reformer programs like vouchers and school choice have put the administration in conflict with one the strongest supporters of the Democratic Party — the labor unions. Although administration officials, Duncan included, didn’t comment on the recently-concluded Chicago teachers strike, the fact that the union’s opposition was a city government headed up by former President’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, speaks volumes. Emanuel famously shares many education-related ideas and approaches with both Obama and Duncan.

 The administration didn’t touch those issues, which are some of the thorniest questions in education. How teachers are treated, paid, and evaluated are issues that could dangerously divide Democrats. When the Chicago strike started, Duncan issued a brief statement saying only that he hoped the parties resolved their differences.

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