The ‘Academic Pro­ficiency Cliff’: COUNCIL OF GREAT CITY SCHOOLS ON THE EDUCATIONAL IMPACT OF SEQUESTRATION

From Urban Educator | http://bit.ly/Zq8L4Y

Jan/Feb 2013  ::  The Council of the Great City Schools recently released a research brief called the Impact of Sequestration on the Nation’s Urban Public Schools, providing a snapshot of the major effects of the potential across-the-board federal budget cuts, or sequestration, on education programs and services for tens of thousands of urban schoolchildren.

In December, the Council called on national leaders to design a fully balanced budget solution that includes both rev­enue and entitlement program reforms to prevent the “fiscal cliff ” of pending federal budget cuts and tax increases in 2013.

To avoid what it calls an “academic pro­ficiency cliff ” as the nation works to imple­ment the more rigorous Common Core State Standards, the Council cautions that the investment in educational programs for disadvantaged students, English learn­ers and students with disabilities, as well as teacher professional-development pro­grams, must be strengthened— not cut.

“The economic implications of the ed­ucational cliff are as serious as those pre­sented by the fiscal cliff itself, and the na­tion’s leaders should keep these twin issues in mind with the same sense of urgency,” says Council Executive Director Michael Casserly.

Without a balanced resolution to the fiscal crisis, federal domestic discretion­ary programs in education and other areas --which constitute only 16 percent of the federal budget -- will be squeezed out, and important investments in the nation’s fu­ture, such as better schooling, will be per­manently undermined, Casserly stresses.

The research brief – Impact of Sequestra­tion on the Nation’s Urban Public Schools -- is based on a survey of more than 30 big-city school districts and can be accessed on the Council’s web site at http://www.cgcs.org. (follows)

Sequestration Research Brief by