The House Appropriations committee passed a version of the FY 2007 federal education budget earlier this week (details here). There weren't a lot of differences from the budget President Bush submitted earlier this year. But one small change is worth noting.
The administration's proposal to increase funding for state data systems from $24 million to $54 million was reduced to an increase to $35 million. This is one of those low-profile items that's not going to generate a lot of news coverage--there won't be legions of data system administrators marching on Washington to protest (too bad--that'd be pretty funny). But it actually has potentially far-reaching implications for some of the biggest K-12 issues of the day.
There's a great deal of talk right now about the potential for altering the core accountability provisions of NCLB to include "value added" measures, to shift attention from absolute performance levels to the change in performance from year to year. It's an important and complicated debate. But for many states it's also largely theoretical, and will remain so for some time. Why? Because they don't have the longitudinal data systems needed to calculate value-added measures accurately.
Those are precisely the systems this money is designed to develop and support. By failing to do all it can to build state data capacity today, Congress is potentially severely limiting its options to reform and improve NCLB in the future.
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