President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have made some innovative proposals for making changes to the education system, but they aren’t getting quite the amount of support they were hoping to get from Congress. According to a story in U.S. News, President Obama is asking for an increase by about $1.3 billion more than the 2009 level – with the total budget proposal reaching $46.7 billion.

According to the article, the concern doesn’t appear to lie in how much money the president is asking for, but how that money is to be spent. For example, the new budget proposal calls for $1.5 billion worth of Title I monies to be transferred to the School Improvement Grants program. While Title I money is used to help schools that have a high percentage of students in low-income families, the School Improvement Grants program targets struggling schools and makes an attempt to help improve their quality. Some members of Congress are concerned about how the Title I program will be affected once the $81 billion of stimulus funding is no longer coming into the program in two years.

Another area of concern is the Teacher Incentive Fund, which works toward recruiting new teachers, creating professional development strategies and developing new compensation systems. The new budget calls for $517 million to go toward the fund, with $30 being specifically earmarked for the national recruitment campaign.

The new plan also calls for making some changes in college funding. While the Education Department wants to make expansions in financial aid, the new proposal calls for making changes in the Pell Grant program. These funds, which are used to help low-income students gain access to college, would be moved from a discretionary fund to a mandatory one with the new budget proposal. In addition, the budget calls for indexing the maximum award to inflation plus one percentage point. While this would be the first time the Pell Grant program would generate a stable amount of funding, this proposal is also seeing some resistance in Congress.

This resistance is probably partially due to the fact that this part of the proposal would be paid for by eliminating the $4 billion worth of annual subsidies that are currently provided to private banks that are responsible for making private loans. One representative, however, expressed concerns that indexing the maximum might actually have the opposite effect of its intension by placing a ceiling on the increases that can be made in the future.

As might be expected, the major concern surrounding the educational reform proposals are centered largely around the economy.

“I think it’s legitimate to question whether it’s realistic to also expect states and districts to implement dramatic new reforms until the economic situation stabilizes,” one unidentified representative is quoted as saying in the U.S. Times article. “I don’t want to set them up for failure in the public eyes, because they can’t do two things at the same time.”