Obama's expected budget won't include cuts to education, says Duncan

The head of the U.S. Department of Education, Arne Duncan, says President Barack Obama's upcoming budget will not include cuts to education, although there will be cuts in other areas, according to ABC News.

“The president is making very tough cuts, and painful cuts, across agencies, and there are pieces of our budget that are being hit hard, but we have to continue to invest,” Duncan told ABC's Jake Tapper. “What parents don’t want is their children’s future to be impacted.”

Instead of cuts, Duncan says the president will be funneling money toward educational efforts that will boost the performance of the nation's schools and make learning more accessible to all Americans.

“He’s proposing a responsible budget that makes important investments in education reforms that will deliver results,” Duncan said. “The budget will be investing in early learning programs, reform and innovation, and making college affordable.”

Over recent years, the United States has been falling behind in international standardized academic tests. Duncan says Obama's latest budget will bolster science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education as a way to move the U.S. from “the middle to the top of the pack internationally.”

Duncan is probably referring to the United States' most recent performance on the Program for International Student assessment (PISA). The 2009 results for the PISA test found the U.S. ranked at 14th out of 34 countries in reading literacy, which reflects virtually no movement in the area of reading since 2000. In math the U.S. did even worse, ranking 25th out of 34 of the countries evaluated, which is considered below average.

“To win the future, we have to begin to out-educate our competitors,” Duncan said. “Unfortunately, the brutal fact is, today, there are many developed countries that are out-educating us.”