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Hi. I’m Arne Duncan. I’m pleased to have a chance to answer a number of questions this
week that we got through Facebook.
Lynn had a question about are we doing enough in terms of early childhood education, and
I would say honestly, I don’t think we can ever do enough. It’s easily the best investment
we can make. As an administration, we’re spending about $2.6 billion a year on a variety
of different programs, but honestly our Department of Education I don’t think has done enough
in this area historically. So, we’re proposing in our FY ’11 budget $300 million to support
access to high quality early learning programs. The vast majority of Race to the Top winning
states incorporated early learning programs in their winning grant proposals. The Promised
Neighborhoods winners 21 who are in the planning process -- all of them focused on early childhood
education -- so we’re trying to step up in a big way through a variety of our grant
competitions and in terms of our next year’s budget to really better support the critically
important work of giving our children socialization and literacy skills in tacked before they
enter kindergarten. We’re also working much more closely than ever before with HHS. Kathleen
Sebelius has been just a fantastic partner there. She and I and our staffs are linked
up in ways that have never happened historically and ultimately if we can give every child,
in particular, every disadvantaged child, a chance to go to a high quality, not just
any other childhood program, but a high quality program so they’re entering kindergarten
ready to learn, ready to read with their socialization skills in tacked, that will go a long way
to closing achievement gaps that we fight so hard to end.
We had several questions about what are we doing in terms of supporting students with
special needs and obviously those numbers are increasing and when we say every single
child deserves a world-class education, we mean every single child needs a world-class
education.
So a couple of things, through the Recovery Act we invested an additional $12.2 billion
in states and districts who are hit very, very hard at the local level. So that was
hugely important. We’re asking for an additional $250 million in our FY ’11 budget to support
students around the country with special needs. I think one of the most important things we
can do as we launch this national teacher campaign to recruit this next generation
– hopefully a million great teachers coming into our nation’s schools. We have a special
emphasis on bringing in teachers who really want to work, who have a passion for working
with students with special needs. And you can visit our teacher recruitment campaign
website at teach.gov, and we’ve tried to make it very, very easy for folks in many
different walks of life all around the country to come into education. We have a couple areas
of critical need – math and science being two of them. We want to continue to diversity
the teaching workforce. We want to have more men come into teaching but finding more teachers
who really want to come work with students with special needs is going to be a big part
of the campaign. So please visit us at teach.gov.
We had several questions about what are we doing to better support students who are learning
the English language – English Language Learners -- and we’re trying to address
those critically important needs in a couple of different ways. First of all, in our FY
’11 budget request, we’re asking for an additional $50 million to support these students
around the country. That would take that total investment on the formulative programs to
$800 million. Also, the Race to the Top states did a great job of talking about what they
wanted to do with ELL students, so we’re really trying to support them there. As we
come up with this next generation of assessments have doing a much better job of assessing
English language learners is a big piece of that equation and so the two consortium of
states are working very, very *** that and unrelated, but I think important, I’m
also pushing very, very hard for the Dream mat, and I think we have to give every single
child in this country a chance to go to college who has worked hard. So many of the students
now who are denied those opportunities are English language learners that have worked
hard, that stayed in school, they played by all of the rules, they’ve done the right
thing and for us, as a country, to deny them a chance to be productive citizens and enter
the work force and go get a college education after all the hard work they’ve done makes
absolutely no sense to me, and we are going to continue to push that issue very, very
hard.