STEM education in the schools, but
its funding plans for other subjects
have been criticized by many education groups. The administration’s
budget proposal to increase funding
of school subjects that have been
increasingly pushed to the margins in
mainstream education also includes
consolidation of several funding
streams for the arts, history, geography,
foreign languages, and other subjects.
In the FY12 education budget,
the administration has requested an
additional $38.9 million, a 17 percent
increase, to support teaching and
learning in the arts, history, foreign
languages, geography and economics, and other subjects, for a total of
$265 million. Known as the Effective Teaching and Learning for a
Well-Rounded Education program, it
increases the total available money but
would consolidate existing subject-area
programs, including the $40 million
Arts in Education program, the $119
million Teaching American History
grants, the $27 million Foreign Language Assistance program, and the
$1.4 million Excellence in Economic
Education program. Many education groups say that this would force
programs from diverse subject areas to
compete against each other.
the administration’s budget proposal ... includes
consolidation of several funding streams for
the arts, history, geography, foreign languages,
and other subjects.
“Doing the jurying process [for
grant applications] and deciding the
worthy projects are difficult enough
in a given content area. If one has
to try to compare history, to foreign
language, to arts, I honestly do not
see how you could come up with any
reasonable way to compare all those
apples, to oranges, to bananas,” says
Michael Blakeslee, deputy executive
director for MENC: The National
Association for Music Education.
The federal government’s cur-
ricular funding should be to “spur
innovation” and successful teaching
strategies for each subject, asserts Ted
McConnell, executive director of the
Campaign for the Civic Mission of
Schools. The Teaching and Learn-
ing for a Well-Rounded Education
program “would force states to choose
which non-STEM curricular area it
would like to apply to fund. It forces
states and subjects to compete against
each other for that funding,” McCon-
nell says. “Only through dedicated
funding will each subject area have an
opportunity to see innovation.”
Within the current atmosphere of
fiscal restraint, the Obama adminis-
tration has proposed cutbacks across
the board in the 2012 budget for the
various components of the overall
Effective Teaching and Learning for a
Complete Education program:
•;$383 million for literacy initiatives,
down from $450 million in fiscal
2011 request
•;$206 million for STEM initiatives,
down from $300 million in fiscal
2011 request
•;$246 million for a well-rounded
education, down from $265 million
in fiscal 2011 request
Don’t Pit Subjects
Against Each Other
Mixing varied pots of money that
had been separate has many educators worried. However, that budget
request proposes “to combine eight
subject-specific grant programs into a
single competitive grant program that
would pit these subjects against one
another for resources,” writes ASCD
Executive Director Gene R. Carter in
the MENC magazine Teaching Music
(2010, Oct.). President Obama’s blueprint for reauthorizing ESEA, furthermore, takes a narrow view of college
and career readiness by equating it
