Kennedy Amendment Counters Bush’s Proposed Education Cuts
WASHINGTON, March 14- The Senate Tuesday by the narrowest of margins rejected legislation introduced by two senators from New England that sought to increase education spending in the next fiscal year.
Sens. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., and Susan M. Collins, R-Maine, offered an amendment to President Bush’s proposed budget that they said would increase federal education aid by $6.3 billion, including money for vocational, workforce and higher education programs.
The vote was 50-50, one short of the required majority.
The President has proposed cutting education spending by 3.8 percent, according to Tom Kiley, an aide to Rep. George Miller of California, the senior Democrat on the Education and the Workforce Committee.
Sen. Kennedy, in a statement after the vote, said “the Republican Senate turned its back on countless struggling students in communities around the country.. Locking the door to the American dream can only make America a lesser nation in the years ahead.”
Before the Senate voted, the Senator told his colleagues, “The amendment is offered in response to the challenge we are facing internationally.”
China and India are increasingly graduating greater numbers of engineers and more foreign students are getting their degrees from American universities than in past years, Mr. Kennedy said. In recent years, the United States has fallen behind in producing scientific literature, he said, and jobs at companies such as Intel and IBM have increasingly been outsourced.
“We have to equip every young person with the skills to deal with the ongoing challenges of globalization,” Mr. Kennedy said.
Federally funded vocational education programs in Massachusetts would lose $20.2 million under the President’s proposal, where programs are 95 percent effective, the senator said. Currently 78,376 students are enrolled in vocational programs in Massachusetts, and 74,457 passed the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System, a test required for graduation, Sen. Kennedy said.
Pell grants, which provide money to students pursuing higher education, would increase from a maximum $4,050 a year to $4,500 under the Kennedy-Collins proposal.
“When I graduated in 1975, the maximum Pell grant covered approximately 80 percent of the costs of attending a public, four-year institution,” Ms. Collins said. “Today it covers less than 40 percent of these costs, forcing students to make up the difference by taking on a larger amount of debt.”
However, not every New England senator was in favor of the proposed amendment. Republican Sens. Judd Gregg and John E. Sununu of New Hampshire strongly opposed the amendment, calling it “not fiscally responsible.”
Mr. Gregg, who is the chairman of the Budget Committee, said Republicans have provided more for Title I aid funds for low-income families in grades K-12 in the past five years than the Democrats did during the eight years of the Clinton Administration.
“I take a backseat to no one when it comes to education funding,” Sen. Gregg said.
Mr. Sununu criticized the Kennedy-Collins amendment, saying it “ignores fiscal restraint and responsibility.”
“The amendment comes as a suggestion that no program should ever be cut or redirected from education,” Mr. Sununu said, even when other programs may require more resources.
###
