The President’s FY25 Budget Request: What’s in It for Education?

On Monday, President Biden released his FY 2025 budget request. With a Republican-controlled House of Representatives and a narrow Democratic majority in the Senate, the budget will certainly not pass as is, but it shows the priorities of the White House for the upcoming year as well as the policies President Biden will likely emphasize as he seeks reelection.

New America’s education and workforce teams are tracking the following:

Early & Elementary Education

President Biden’s budget request builds on his administration’s strong early education record and previews what will likely be one of the central themes of his reelection campaign. Like last year, the president’s proposal includes a federal-state partnership to provide free, high-quality pre-K in a variety of settings for all four-year-olds. The request also calls for $25 million for demonstration grants to expand free pre-K to children from families with low incomes, down from last year’s $500 million request for the same program, as well as a $65 million decrease for the Preschool Development Grant Birth Through Five (PDG B-5) program.

The budget request includes a bold proposal to lower child care costs by creating a new program for families with incomes up to $200,000 per year that would guarantee child care from birth until kindergarten. Under the proposal, families with the lowest incomes would pay nothing while most other families would pay no more than $10 per day, a figure that might sound familiar due to its similarity to Canada’s goal.

The request also calls for a $500 million increase for the Child Care and Development Block Grant as well as a $544 million increase for Head Start to reach pay parity between Head Start educators and some elementary school teachers. Finally, it includes plans to restore increases to the Child Tax Credit that were widely credited for helping to cut the child poverty rate in half.

PreK–12 Education

Title I funding was established in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 during President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “war on poverty” and aims to support low-income and historically disadvantaged school districts. This year, President Biden’s budget request includes $18.6 billion for Title I, a $200 million increase above the 2023 enacted level.

The budget request asks for $8 billion in mandatory funding to provide Academic Acceleration and Achievement Grants. These grants build upon efforts laid out by the Biden administration in the American Rescue Plan to support district implementation of evidenced-based strategies to increase school attendance, provide high-quality tutoring, and expand learning time, including both in the summer and in extended day or afterschool programs.

English Learners

President Biden is proposing to increase funding for students identified as English learners (ELs) through Title III by requesting $940 million which is $50 million more than 2024 levels. Of this, $80 million is expected to go to support the multilingual educator workforce, with $75 million going towards building multilingual educator pipelines and professional development focused on an asset-based approach to multilingualism for existing school staff and teachers. The rest would go to postsecondary fellowships for multilingual educator preparation. By investing in the teacher workforce, the administration is responding to a need not only for multilingual teachers but also for ensuring that all teachers have the skills and competencies to serve EL-identified students.

In the fall of 2020, it was estimated that there were five million EL-identified students enrolled in K–12 schools across the country. This means that after setting aside $80 million to develop the bilingual workforce, President Biden’s budget proposal would amount to roughly $172 per EL student. Although this would be the largest Title III appropriation since the fund was created if approved, it falls short of President Biden’s $1.2 billion 2024 request, and the $2 billion that national and state EL education advocates estimate is needed to catch funding levels up to EL population growth.

Title III is also expected to support recently arrived immigrant students, and researchers and advocates have called attention to how Title III has fallen short in this area in the past. Given recent growth of this population in recent years, the amount proposed by President Biden is unlikely to meet all the demands placed on Title III.

Students with Disabilities

Provision of high-quality education and services for students with disabilities in PreK–12 schools depends partially on funding allocated through the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). This year's budget request includes $14.4 billion for IDEA state grants, a $200 million increase over the 2023 enacted level. For provision of services to infants and toddlers with disabilities, including early intervention, the budget request asks for $545 million in IDEA Grants for Infants and Families.

Higher Education

The president’s budget includes substantial investments that would make college more affordable. A $750 increase in the maximum Pell Grant would be made up of $100 in discretionary funding for all students and $650 of mandatory funding available only to students attending nonprofit and public schools. This Pell expansion would help seven million low- and middle-income students to pay for college. Additionally, the budget reaffirms the Biden administration’s commitment to free community college, with a mandatory $90 billion investment over 10 years. Another $30 billion would fund two subsidized years of college at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), Tribally controlled colleges (TCUs), and minority-serving institutions (MSIs) for families making under $125,000. And a proposed $12 billion mandatory fund would offer grants to high-quality affordable public colleges, expand promising practices for improving retention, and fund more high schoolers to take college classes.

The administration shows a commitment to student support and college completion throughout this budget. The request more than doubled the current funding for the Postsecondary Student Success Grant program (PSSG), from $45 million in current funding to $100 million. With an emphasis on effective, evidence-based practices, PSSG provides critical funding that can potentially move the needle on college completion nationwide. To help colleges and states implement these practices successfully, the budget requests $10 million to create a new Postsecondary Advancement and Technical Assistance Center, a support that colleges, many of which are under-resourced and inexperienced with applying these practices, truly need.

Student support funding includes $80 million for the Child Care Access Means Parents in School (CCAMPIS) program that provides affordable child care to low-income student parents—a $5 million increase from last year, but still only enough to help a few thousand of the millions of student parents. The budget also includes $25 million for a new Comprehensive Postsecondary Student Supports program, which builds on the previous Basic Needs for Postsecondary Students program, aiming to address students’ mental health issues and basic needs. Last but not least, the budget requests a $93 million increase in funding for HBCUs, TCUs, MSIs and colleges that serve a significant number of low-income students to strengthen their financial resources and administration capacity.

The president’s budget would also shore up the federal student loan system. The administration seeks $625 million for the Office of Federal Student Aid, a 30 percent increase over current funding. The cash-strapped office has not received an increase in appropriations since FY 2022. More funding would help the Department of Education smooth the rollout of the new FAFSA application, implement a generous repayment plan and loan forgiveness programs after the pandemic pause, modernize loan servicing, and stand up regulations protecting students. The budget also would eliminate origination fees for student loans, saving families billions over the next decade.

Educators

Despite the growing understanding that state longitudinal data systems are essential for understanding the recruitment, preparation, employment, and retention of teachers, proposed funding for the Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems grant program remained flat, at $38.5 million. The biggest federal budget item supporting educator effectiveness, the Supporting Effective Instruction grants program in Title II of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, was the only educator-focused federal program the president’s budget proposes to cut (by $10 million, from $2.2 billion to $2.19 billion). This $10 million investment in educators appears to have been reallocated to focus specifically on preparing more and better qualified educators working with students with disabilities via a competitive grant program under the Individuals with Disabilities Act, the Personnel Preparation program. The Personnel Preparation program works to ensure that there are an adequate number of teachers and other personnel with the skills and knowledge necessary to help students with disabilities succeed educationally. This includes developing and improving programs for paraprofessionals to become special educators. The president’s budget proposal does not include new funding for initiatives targeted at supporting and retaining current teachers. However, it does propose funding increases for several higher education programs focused on recruiting and preparing new teachers.

The president’s budget also proposes small funding increases for several initiatives focused on making postsecondary teacher preparation programs better and more affordable. It includes $95 million for Teacher Quality Partnership grants, a $25 million increase from the prior fiscal year, to support the expansion of high-quality, comprehensive, and affordable educator preparation programs, including evidence-based Grow Your Own and residency programs, and high-quality registered Registered apprenticeship Apprenticeship teacher preparation programs. The budget proposal would also double the investment in the Augustus F. Hawkins Centers of Excellence grant program (from $15 million to $30 million) to help minority-serving institutions of higher education expand and improve their teacher education programs and increase the talent pool of effective educators from minority communities. Finally, the administration requested $5 million for the Graduate Fellowships to Prepare Faculty in High-need Areas at Colleges of Education program to support individuals in getting a doctoral degree so they can become professors at a college of education in a high-need area of teacher certification, including mathematics, science, special education, and instruction students with limited English proficiency. While the Graduate Fellowships program is authorized under Title II of the Higher Education Act, it has never received funding from Congress.

Youth Pathways

President Biden’s budget includes several proposals that would support his goal of creating more affordable, high-quality pathways for young people transitioning out of high school and into college and careers. The most notable is the $7.2 billion Classroom to Career Program, which would allow high school students to earn at least 12 no-cost career-connected postsecondary credits. (This $7.2 billion program is part of the new $12 billion mandatory fund described in the higher education section above.) This program seems to be designed to help fund a new apprenticeship model, Career & Technical Education (CTE) Apprenticeship, which the U.S. Department of Labor has proposed in a recent rulemaking effort. If implemented, CTE Apprenticeship would require participants to take at least 12 postsecondary credit hours, and the Classroom to Career Program would, in theory, ensure learners could enroll in those courses at no cost.

The proposed budget requests additional funding increases to strengthen CTE programming. President Biden has requested a $40 million expansion to the CTE State Grants program, which supports work-based learning programs for middle and high school students, for a total of $1.7 billion. He has also proposed doubling funding for the administration’s Career-Connected High Schools initiative, to $64 million. This initiative provides competitive grants to partnerships between K–12 school districts, community colleges, and employers to develop high-quality career-connected programs for high-school students.