Smart, Unselfish Congressional Budget Policy. No, Really.

The iron-clad conventional wisdom around NCLB is that the law is an "unfunded mandate," an idea driven by the disparity between the amount of money Congress has appropriated for the Title I program and the maximum amount it could appropriate, given the escalating annual authorization targets established in NCLB. For the first few years of NCLB implementation, supporters could counter that argument by noting that while appropriations fell short of the maximum authorized levels, they still represented significant real-world increases. Title I grew from $7.7 billion in federal fiscal year 2000 to $12.7 billion in FY 2005, a significant bump no matter how you slice it.

Most of that increase, however, came out the outset of NCLB implementation. The FY 2006 Title I appropriation fell victim to across-the-board recissions and actually dropped from FY 2005. The President's budget for FY 2007 proposes no new Title I funding. Given the current fiscal climate, the prospects for any near-term Title I increases in Title seem dim. The fact that new support for education has stalled even as metastasizing Congressional earmarks and hugely expensive corporate tax cuts march forward unabated is of no credit to the people in charge of the federal pursestrings.

But somehow in all of this Congress has managed to not get credit for a piece of genuinely smart, unselfish public policy: In addition to putting more money in Title I, they've also changed the way new Title I funds are distributed. As a new Chart You Can Trust from Education Sector shows, every additional Title I dollar sent out under NCLB has been distributed through a pair of never-before-used funding formulas designed to target the highest-poverty school districts and reward states that expend the most effort funding schools and distribute state and local money equitably to school districts. Congress has even reallocated $600 billion in funding previously distributed under older, less-targeted formulas.

Given the deserved beating Congress has taken in recent months over persistent deficits, "bridges to nowhere," and other evidence of a general breakdown in budget discipline, it's surprising that they've not received more credit for doing right by the states, schools and students who need need and deserve new funding the most.