and out of the way.

When we figure this out, we might do something about it

Next they will start on the libraries

It's worse than short sighted, it's...I can't find the right word for it.

Don't know if the bill was amended. This article talks about what exited the Senate committee, not what passed the Senate.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/07/16/us-usa-senate-education-idUSKCN0PQ2AH20150716

Discretionary funding request was something like $48 billion for next year; mandatory funding request was $3 billion, which included some preschool program (and almost certainly wasn't cut by the committee, whatever Think Progress might have said).

Lots o' tables linked to from here
http://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/budget/tables.html

Need to see the details, but overall sounds like an improvement. "It's 99% good, but I'm going to pitch a fit over that 1%." Meh. Standardized testing is both what's killing a lot of education and what's making a lot of education happen.

Sadly, there's no compromise:
*Great schools with a lot of great students and few bad students don't need it and hurts them trivially;
*The great middle lump of schools with a lot of average schools with mostly mediocre students and some bad and some good students is seriously hurt by standardized testing because it warps what education is supposed to be and they can't get past it;
*But bad schools with mostly bad students need the accountability, because it's so easy to just let the curriculum slide as you babysit the students, and push discipline problems and failing students into programs that minimize testing. At the same time, it's hard to hold them accountable because mostly you just need to babysit the students, or you have such a draconian rules enforcement policy that suddenly some district discipline numbers look outrageously and blatantly racist, given the way we're moving to class segregation, and the correlation between class and race in most of the US.