An oversight, I'm sure.
Packer goes on to say:
Yes, it takes money to pay for smaller class sizes, expanded professional development for teachers, after-school programs, quality PreK, new textbooks, technology, and modern schools. Yet in each of the past three school years, an average of 63 percent of school districts have received LESS Title I money than they got the previous year.
Title I provides federal money for extra reading and math help for educationally disadvantaged students in schools where low-income students are concentrated. These cutbacks should not be a surprise because since the enactment of NCLB in 2002, funding for Title I is more than $54 BILLION below what was proposed in NCLB. And sadly, President Bush’s budget for next year would further shortchange children and public schools under Title I by another $10.7 billion; more than 4 million low-income children will NOT receive the full range of services and programs they need and deserve.
That’s not even the worst of it. When you compare the overall mandates of the law to the overall money committed, by the end of the Bush years the funding short fall will be more than $85 billion.
I'm not one of those people who believe that "money doesn't matter" in education. That's absurd; money matters a great deal, and there are plenty of schools that don't get their fair share. I co-wrote a whole paper about this just a few weeks ago. But it's simply not the case, as Packer implies, that NCLB suffers from massive budget cuts.
This chart shows funding for the Title I program, the heart of NCLB, in the year prior to NCLB and the years since.As you can see, there was a large increase (nearly $3.6 billion total) in the first few years and then virtually no increase since, as the federal budget situation tightened due to a variety of factors including inaccurate econometric forecasting, massive, unaffordable tax cuts for the rich, a mediocre economic recovery, post-9/11 security expenses, rapidly increasingly health care costs, and a ruinously expensively foreign war.
Schools were lucky that the increases came early, because even stagnant funding is much better than the pre-NCLB state of affairs. The total increase from 2001 to 2007 amounts to 6.5% annual growth; if that had happened steadily over time instead of up-front it would have blunted some of the "there's been no increase for three years" rhetoric, but that would of course have resulted in billions of dollars less for public education. The formulas that distribute the money, morever, are weighted for poverty, so a number of big urban districts saw Title I funds increase by 50% or more in the space of a few years. That's not bad.
Packer notes that many districts have recently experienced year-to-year reductions. But he doesn't explain why: Title I formulas are, per above, based on poverty rates. As demographics shift and poverty rises in some areas while falling in others, the money shifts too. In other words, all else being equal, those reductions were a good thing, a function of sound public policy designed to focus resources where they're needed most.
Packer says funding is $54 billion short of what was "proposed" in NCLB. The more accurate word is "authorized"--that's the total difference between what Congress appropriated for Title I and the maximum amount it could have appropriated, as authorized under the law. The meaning of those authorization levels is controversial: some people see them as a broken promise, others as an aspirational goal that fell victim to larger fiscal circumstances.
In either case, the appropriation targets are fundamentally arbitrary, not tied to any underlying calculation of how much it might cost to bring all students to proficiency by 2014. It makes more sense to compare actual current spending levels to actual previous spending levels than to hypothetical numbers with little or no inherent meaning. One might ask: what would non-arbitrary numbers look like? What's the real price tag here? Frankly, nobody knows. Increasing student performance to unprecedented levels is undeniably costly; but at the same time the current dollars aren't being spent as efficiently as they could be.
This doesn't stop Packer and others from calling NCLB an "unfunded mandate." Whether you think this is true depends on the scope of your view: in the narrowest sense, NCLB isn't a mandate at all, funded or otherwise--states choose whether to participate and are free to drop out and forgoe federal funding whenever they like. In the broadest sense, NCLB is absolutely an unfunded mandate: K-12 education is 90% state-and-local funded and is very likely to remain so for at least the medium term. So any federal law that calls for broad action and hugely ambitious goals, as NCLB does, is "unfunded" in the sense of "the federal government isn't providing all the money." But that's not necessarily a bad thing: the ADA was unfunded by that definition, as was school desegragation. Unfunded mandates can still be virtuous public policy.
To be clear, I think flatlining education budgets while pursuing mind-bogglingly expensive tax and war policies is inexcusable. For not a lot of money in the grand scheme of things, the President could have done much more to hold together the bipartisan coalition that originally supported NCLB and helped more impoverished children get the education they need.
But Packer's rhetoric fails the seriousness test, and serves to emphasize what should be obvious: the NEA's opposition to NCLB is not based on funding levels. There is no amount of money Congress could have spent that would have bought their support. Which, frankly, is one of the reasons the money isn't forthcoming, even from a Democrat-controlled Congress--why spend billions of new dollars for the same political headaches? As Packer says quite plainly in his first post "In case you can’t tell, the National Education Association opposes the law and is leading the way to a fundamental overhaul." It's pretty much as simple as that.
No comments:
Post a Comment