Dr. Kaitlyn Brennan

It has been a minute. August did what August does: recess for them, a fall semester bearing down on you, and a draft that never quite made it from my email to your desktop. So this edition does double duty- we’re going to catch you up on what moved while Congress was home, and it brings you to the present: a stopgap signed last Wednesday, a bipartisan House bill on special education administration, and an IES grant pipeline that reopened with our workforce named on the front page. Grab a coffee- it’s a long one. Read more >

This week the HELP Committee gaveled its way through one of the fullest agendas of the year: ten bills and three nominations, with the two bills at the top written for our field. This is a special edition covering the whole docket; OSERS transfer, dyslexia and literacy, college students with disabilities, transparency data, and the nominee who would run the department where much of K-12 may be headed. Let’s get to it. Read more >

A quick map of this update: the House committee voted to advance ten bills codifying the interagency transfers, with special education conspicuously left out, and Senate HELP will take that question up at a markup on July 29... but maybe the 30th. The House passed a stopgap through December 4 while the Senate writes its own. A federal court ruled OMB cannot cancel grants over shifting priorities. Workforce Pell is live. And the White House released its 123-page blueprint for American science, with real implications for educator preparation. Read more >

Since I last wrote you, the House introduced a ten-bill package to write the interagency transfers into law, every Democratic senator signed a letter arguing the transfers exceed the Department’s authority, a lawsuit was filed over withheld education research funds, and the Department launched a public hub explaining its side of all of it. Add the regulatory agenda, the loan-cap litigation, and the oversight record from earlier in the week, and this is the fullest picture of the reorganization we have had since the agreements were signed. Read more >

This is the news many of us had been bracing for, and it came in the form most of us expected: not a statute, not an executive order, but a set of administrative agreements. On June 15, the U.S. Department of Education signed four Interagency Agreements (IAAs), three with the Department of Justice and one with the Department of Health and Human Services, and announced them the next day. Read more >