Meanwhile back in Congress

Congress comes back for a lame duck session next week, and they still have yet to appropriate funds for (among other things) the Department of Education (for FY11, by the way. That's the current fiscal year). There's a number of questions raised by this:

The administration asked for $1.35 billion to continue the program for an additional year, and Congress is poised to provide some of that (there's $800 million in the House version of the bill, and $675 million in the Senate). Money is tight, but a lot of folks argue that money is likely to stay in the bills if they are presidential priorities.
Still, I can see why the administration wanted Congress to put money into a recent stop-gap measure to fund Race to the Top and i3.
And of course, advocates for school districts and teachers note that there's another huge problem with just extending funding for another year: There won't be any additional money for Title I grants to districts to help educate disadvantaged kids, or for special education.

This doesn't even get into what happens when the new Congress comes in, because yes, they can (in essence) reconsider the appropriation.