FY16 Budget Update and ESEA Nears Final Passage


FY16 Budget Update: Still Waiting on Congress

When we last talked about the FY16 budget, it was early October and it was looking like the next Speaker of the House would be Kevin McCarthy (R-CA). As we now know, in early December, the Speakership is very different but we still don’t have a passed-into-law budget. Congress has until this Friday, December 11th, to either pass a budget into law or to pass a stopgap continuing resolution (CR). Or let the government shutdown.

Could it be? ESEA Nears Final Passage!

As our readers will have noticed of late, Congress has a well-earned reputation for doing little-to-nothing, legislatively speaking. So when the newly installed Republican House and Senate majorities promised in January to move on the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), a bill that had not been reauthorized since No Child Left Behind was passed into law in 2001, and had expired eight years ago, most people (myself included) thought it would go nowhere. Over the last year Congress has proved the naysayers wrong.

Connect with students during their first Hour of Code!


If you remember your very first line of code, you know it shaped the rest of your life.

That’s what the Hour of Code is all about. In the last two years, the movement has shattered stereotypes of what it’s like to code and helped more than 100 million students in 180 countries try computer science for the first time.

House STEM Education Caucus Briefing on Building a STEM Education Pipeline for Industry Needs


Earlier this week, the House STEM Education Caucus sponsored a briefing for Congressional staff titled, “Building a STEM Education Pipeline Aligned with Industry Needs: Perspectives from the Field.” The briefing was moderated by the Council on Undergraduate Research (CUR) and partnered with CRA, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), and the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM). The briefing focused on ways […]