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The next Elementary and Secondary Education Act edition will carry within the economic stimulus law as intended by the Obama administration in the 2011 fiscal budget request.

There will be a heavy investment in grants for principal and teacher compensation, training and recruitment and a shrink in the quality funding for teachers. Teaching programs that are smaller in size with fierce defenders from the congress will also be consolidated according to this budget proposal.

According to a Washington lobbying firm Raben Group’s education Principal Joel Packer, it is difficult to comprehend congress agreeing to the consolidations that involved so many structural and programmatic changes. The administration will face a tough task of explaining the way administrative bureaucracy will be able to save money with this by way of lesser number of criteria and applications.

One of the first major concept changes brought about in the Federal teacher quality spending, this budgetary proposal request for the US Education Department reflects a highly coherent vision. According to New Teacher Project, a teacher training group, New York’s President Timothy Daly, this is far from a disjointed group of individual programs.

For competitive spending, a budget of $530.5 million will be added for teacher spending in the current fiscal year. Until the No Child Left Behind Act was revamped recently, there was no real shift in teacher funding.

According to this 8 year old law, schools must staff with highly qualified teachers, its core academic courses. The teacher standard and quality is defined by demonstration of high competency in subject matter and holding full certification.

There have been many longitudinal research studies conducted lately which have revealed that the influence of teachers on achievement of students varies and is related to credentials and other traditional effectiveness measures.

Academic growth of students have been taken into account to specify decisions about evaluation, retention and promotion of teachers by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funded $4 billion Federal Race to the Top program.

All districts and states will be pushed to examine effectiveness measures as reflected by the budget request by the administration, according to Washington  based advocacy and research group Centre for American Progress’s teacher quality associate director Robin Chait. She has written a great deal on teacher quality policy.

$500 million finance for these competitive programs will come from the $3 billion Title II state formula grant. This will significantly decrease the federal formula funding that was hitherto guaranteed for states as is evident with the Education Department’s budget projections. This may result in resistance from many states.

Many say that it is not really possible for state to suffer a net loss from one year to the next. From a planning and budgeting perspective too, scaling of formula grant is not viable said Raben group’s Mr. Packer.

Interestingly, there were certain philosophical concerns raised against the budget proposal. According to NEA President, it will not really be acceptable if the Federal government tries to micromanage school districts’ evaluation and compensation systems.