Obama Announces Educational Funding Changes

President Obama traveled to a suburb of Philadelphia this morning to unveil reforms aimed at boosting accountability levels within a federal school-readiness program administered by the Department of Health and Human Services.

During a speech in Yeadon, Pa, Obama announced new rules designed to strengthen the national Head Start program, which provides early-learning services to children of low-income families. The president told an audience gathered inside the town’s regional Head Start center that the reforms won’t require the blessing of a sharply divided Capitol Hill.

“After trying for months to work with Congress on education, we’ve decided to take matters into our own hands.”

The rules will force recipients of Head Start grants to meet new standards in order to be eligible for federal funding. Programs that fail to meet the new benchmarks will lose out.

Obama also blamed Hill Republicans for blocking his efforts to pass comprehensive education reform.

“Earlier this year, nearly every Republican in the House voted for a budget that would have cut hundreds of thousands of children from Head Start,” he said. “Their argument is that we don’t have the money…what I’ve said is we can make these investments in our children without adding to the deficit simply by asking people who make more than a million dollars a year to pay a little more in taxes.”