Recently, President Obama proposed a new stimulus plan that includes a massive $150 billion increase in federal money for education. But what does that really mean for us?
According to Education Secretary Arne Duncan, this is an extraordinary opportunity. Here is a top 5 list of what she expects (and what we can expect) from this stimulus.
- It’s going to help us a tremendous unmet capital needs and so it’s really going to be a huge opportunity to invest in infrastructure and several ready projects that we want to get to work on very early on, late spring and through the summer.
- It will continue to raise the bar academically, raise standards, raise expectations, and there’s opportunities in the stimulus package to do that.
- It will save literally hundreds of thousands of teaching jobs.
- We will have more of our high school graduates going on to college. So for the first time ever, we hope Pell grants will go above the $5,000 mark and give many, many more students a chance to go onto some form of higher education.
- And finally, the significant investment in the early childhood level as well. So this is an extraordinary comprehensive thoughtful package that the president’s put together and it’s a chance to take public education, higher education to another level.
Do you agree or disagree? We would love to hear your thoughts.
