Accreditation Explains Everything

InsideHigherEd reports a new flare-up in an ongoing dispute about the way the U.S. Department of Education regulates people who regulate colleges. Yes, this sounds very boring. It's not; it actually explains much about higher education as well as school vouchers and other hot-button K-12 issues. But first, a little history:

For a long time the federal government had very little role in higher education, other than famously giving states Western land rights in exchange for building public institutions that would train students in useful arts like agriculture, mining, etc., i.e. the land-grant universities that remain an important part of higher education today (Contrary to popular belief, the feds didn't grant the actual land on which the universities were built; rather revenue from the land rights financed the building. (Trivia: the University of the District Columbia is a land-grant university.))

That began to change after World War II with the G.I. Bill and even more importantly a huge influx of research dollars into higher education meant to build the nation's technological capacity and fight the Cold War. This had a profound impact on the character of the modern university, cementing research prowess as the over-riding determinant of prestige. The problem is that it happened at the exact same time that the nation's higher education system was expanding to accommodate huge numbers of new students as college-going became the norm. So we made universities care about one thing--research--even as we needed them to be good at another thing--teaching. This fundamental and on some level irreconcilable tension is the source of much of what's wrong with higher education today. 

By the mid-60s the huge, powerful research universities were in their heyday. There was an expectation among many that federal support would expand from research to subsidizing the general operations of the universities themselves. But academic institutions didn't always turn out to be the best places to conduct research, and parts of the general public, along with conservative politicians, saw higher education as the source--both physical and ideological--of the dirty hippies who were allegedly tearing the nation apart. 

So instead of giving money to institutions, Congress gave money directly to students, in the form of subsidized student loans and Pell grants, which are essentially higher education school vouchers (more on this later). This helped fuel an increasingly consumerist mindset among prospective college students, which in turn spawned things like aggressive college marketing and the U.S. News college rankings.

The people who created Pell grants weren't idiots. They realized that you can't just hand an 18-year-old thousands of dollars and let her spend it however she likes. Without some controls, nothing would prevent me from founding Kevin University in my home office, setting tuition at the exact amount of the Pell Grant, and handing out worthless diplomas to gullible and/or complicit lower-income students. So Congress set certain criteria for an institution to be eligible to receive money via Pell grants and subsidized loans. This provision (called "Title IV eligibility," after the relevant section of the Higher Education Act) is the primary leverage point used by Congress to make universities do what it wants, since most students now pay for college, in whole or in part, with some form of federal grant or loan. 

One of the main criteria for Title IV eligibility is accreditation. But of course this still wasn't enough--otherwise I could create Kevin's Accreditation in my spare bedroom, accredit Kevin University, and then proceed to blow my ill-gotten Pell grant money at the track. So Congress directed the U.S. Department of Education to create a body that would essentially accredit accreditors. It's called the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity, or NACIQI (pronounced nah-SEEK-eeh). 

Accreditation has always been a mixed bag when it comes to quality control. The basic structure, for example, is confusing. In most respects "national" is better than "regional" in higher education--national universities are world-famous, while regional universities are where you go if you can't go somewhere better. In accreditation, it's the other way around: the country is split up among six regional accreditors, each with its own long-established territory, that provide the overall institutional accreditation that institutions need to be Title IV-eligible. Each regional accreditor goes about this in a somewhat different way. So if you read that a university is "nationally accredited" keep in mind that this is not as good as being regionally accredited.  (There's also a whole separate system of program accreditation for things like schools of education, engineering, medicine, etc., but that's a topic for another day).

The current accreditation system works well in some ways. Accredited colleges are very unlikely to steal your money and take it to the track or hand you a worthless diploma from KevU. Accreditation brings certain standards in terms of faculty credentials, financial integrity, etc. Accreditation is based on peer review, so it gives institutions a good opportunity for self-reflection based on expert feedback, if they choose to take it. 

But the peer-based nature of accreditation also limits its utility. There's a tendency toward log-rolling: you don't ask me hard questions, and I'll return the favor. Regulatory capture is a risk: accreditors can see institutions as their clients, not students or the public at large. Accreditors rely on institutional fees to run their operations, which means they often don't have the resources that evaluating something as complex as a university requires. More fundamentally, accreditation lives within the present values of higher education. And in that system, short-changing student learning in favor of research isn't a bug--it's a feature. 

So when the Secretary Spellings' Commission on the Future of Higher Education convened a few years ago and began asking some hard and perfectly valid questions about the fact that a lot of college students don't graduate or learn very much, the Department of Education responded by re-evaluating the role of accreditation. It appointed some new members to NASIQI who weren't inclined to just rubber-stamp approval, and it drafted new regulations which would require accreditors to require colleges to provide some kind of objective data indicating the extent to which they were successfully helping their students learn.

Naturally, the institutions and accreditors took to the challenge with vigor ran to Congress and had language inserted in the Higher Education Act to make such requirements illegal. This is what the recent flare-up is all about. 

This seems to be a trend of late: (1) A regulatory agency charged with ensuring the quality of the nation's education system decides to create new public information about educational success. (2) The system responds by cutting off the process at its knees. That's what happened in New York when the teachers union pushed through dead-of-night legislation to prohibit the use of student performance data in evaluating teachers, and that's what's happening here. 

What are the lessons in all of this? First, while it's easy enough to condemn government bureaucracies for focusing on bean-counting and process instead of bottom-line results, there are plenty of powerful organizations and interest groups out there that wouldn't have it any other way. They want bad government, because it frees them to act in their own interest, instead of the public interest. 

Second, it hasn't been lost on school choice advocates that our higher education system, which is in many respects very successful, maintains a diverse mix of public and private providers who compete for what amount to post-secondary school vouchers. That's why President Bush re-labelled his latest voucher proposal as "Pell Grants for kids" in the State of the Union this year. 

But from the beginning, it was obvious that you couldn't just hand college students a voucher and leave it at that. In any kind of choice-based education system, there has to be some kind of external quality control in addition to what market forces bring. Unlike cars, houses, and other expensive things, schools and universities are far too complicated for consumers to fairly evaluate on their own. They're also institutions that pursue fundamentally public interests, and thus need to be influenced by publicly-elected officials and organizations in a way that gives society more than what freely-acting consumers and providers would produce on their own. 

Accreditation, properly regulated and designed, is one way to do that, and isn't wholly dissimilar from well-run charter school programs that are answerable to publicly-appointed boards. Either way, or any way, a smart combination of choice and public accountability is the best recipe for education, K-12 and higher alike. 

Obama and McCain (surrogates) debate on education

From what I can tell, this morning's debate on education was the first time Obama and McCain surrogates have squared off head-to-head as representatives for each party's nominee. If today's event was any indication of the general election, Obama needs to bone up on his specifics.

McCain's surrogate, Lisa Graham Keegan, has been around the block and through her own mini-scandals, but today she was competent and commanding. She easily dismissed a question asking if No Child Left Behind was an "unfunded mandate" by explaining the difference between authorizing and appropriating funds and citing the rise in federal education dollars since Bush took office. Being experienced in education technology, she easily answered a question about ways schools can incorporate it into classrooms and teaching. She even made the audience laugh when quoting Milton Friedman (no small task for a roomful of reporters and educators) saying two things are resistant to technology: Congress and American public schools.

By contrast, Obama's surrogate, Jeanne Century, was vague and elusive. Her answer on the technology question focused on raising the floor and ensuring broadband access. These are great goals, but Century seemed almost awed at technology, discussing cellphones and the Internet in an airy tone suggestive of some far-off future. Century dismissed the Department of Ed's recent focus on "scientifically based research," at one point saying flat-out it, "makes our research less rigorous." I understand that randomly assigned, control group experimental designs limit what can be studied a little due to cost and ethical considerations, but to call it less rigorous is certainly not the right choice of words.

On a question about dual-language programs, Century waffled because we don't know which languages they should be. She cited the statistics that, by 2010, a third of our students will come from a home where the primary language is not English, and that some schools have students with as many as 100 native languages. While these are important numbers to recognize, they shouldn't paralyze us into inaction or discourage dual-language schools and classrooms. We can make some decisions, right?

Most troubling, Century refused to give a concrete example of how to measure effective teaching, instead preferring to defer to local district and union officials to battle it out. In other words, keep the status quo. On an issue some were calling Obama's "Sister Souljah" for his inclusion of merit pay in an NEA address las summer, surely the candidate has a better answer than this.

These events are usually pretty mundane affairs, but I found myself particularly underwhelmed this morning. As someone who usually comes down more on this side of issues, I was dismayed that all the good ideas and all the strength came from McCain and Graham Keegan.

Putting the Teaching Company Out of Business

If you read the New York Times Book Review or similar publications, you've probably noticed advertisements for "The Teaching Company," which sells audio recordings of college lectures. They've been around for a while and imagine NYT advertising space isn't cheap, so there must be a market here.  I've always been vaguely tempted to buy one, if only to pick up some of the stuff I missed while chronically skipping class as an undergraduate. But I haven't, primarily because it's expensive: they charge $270 for CD recordings and $199 for Internet downloads, which is a lot of money for a product with a marginal cost of production of essentially zero. I downloaded two albums by The Submarines from EMusic yesterday for less than ten clams total--that seems like a better deal.

Fortunately, there's now an alternative to giving The Teaching Company two hundred dollars. You can give Yale University no dollars for something better. The Open Yale Courses Web site, which debuted late last year, offers a raft of well-produced, full-video lecture courses in a variety of subjects, for free. This is a growing trend in higher education, and it raises a lot of interesting questions.  Such as: How can Yale give away a product it's selling to its students for $50,000 a year? The answer, of course, is that Yale isn't giving away the credentialing part of higher education, which is the key to maintaining the exclusivity on which all elite colleges are based. This is the subject of my new column in InsideHigherEd, published today. 

Governor Crist: Don't Sign That Bill

Gary Fineout, in the Miami Herald, writes about the virtual education bill that is now on Florida Governor Charlie Crist's desk. Florida is not only the fourth largest state, but also a trendsetter for virtual education. Unfortunately for both the state and virtual education in general, this bill takes the state in the wrong direction. Ironically, it will do the exact opposite of what its sponsors purport:

State Sen. Don Gaetz, a Niceville Republican and one of the backers of the legislation, said the state needed to spur competition to boost the availability of online courses. "I've seen students who desperately need online courses and have been unable to access them," said Gaetz, a former school superintendent. "Now school districts can pick and choose and negotiate for price and quality."

Florida already has the largest state-run supplemental virtual school (Florida Virtual School) with the widest array of course offerings in the country. The state also has a strong student choice provision that guarantees students access to these courses. So Senator Gaetz is referring to students that want a full-time virtual education, primarily at the K-8 level. The state authorizes these full-time programs and can already pick and choose and negotiate for price and quality. And, the main barrier to expanding those programs is a legislative cap on funding. So, this bill, which mandates that each of Florida's 67 school districts contract with a provider or develop its own program to provide a full-time K-8 virtual schooling program, is not really about those things. What it does is move Florida from a well-run, successful, state-authorized program to a system that forces each district to manage and authorize its own program.

As I wrote a few weeks ago, this change will actually reduce competition and options for students. Under the current statewide model, families in Florida have at least two options. But, this bill would remove the option from families and give districts, most of which have no experience or mechanisms to oversee virtual education, the option instead.

It's highly unlikely that districts will provide multiple options. It's almost certain that they will contract with either one of the current providers or start their own program--with much less oversight. Even more troubling, the districts, with little administrative capacity to manage these programs, will have incentives to choose the lowest cost providers so they can capture part of the per student funding provided by the state.

Expanding options for students is a worthy goal. The governor should send this bill back to the legislature and ask legislators to develop a bill that spurs robust competition among multiple providers at the state level. And, to re-assert Florida's role as an innovator in virtual education, the state should offer incentives for providers to successfully serve low-income and other at-risk students--students that are many times not well-represented in or well-served by virtual education programs. Instead of mandating just full time programs, a new bill would also provide incentives for districts to work closely with both the Florida Virtual School and private providers to experiment with hybrid learning programs--allowing students to benefit from a blend of the best of both traditional and online learning. With this new bill, students across the state would have access to more than just what their district chooses. All Florida families, whether in Hialeah or Niceville or Tampa, would have access to many high quality options--options that offer a real mix of online and hybrid models to fit a wide variety of student needs.

Money Matters in Education

Last week, I wrote that "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." Ken DeRosa responded by saying:

The "money doesn't matter" meme is not as absurd as Kevin is suggesting, provided that it's qualified with "at today's funding levels." At today's funding levels, money doesn't matter. The correlation between school expenditures and student performance is very low to non-existent. The fact that some schools "don't get their fair share" is irrelevant. The important question is whether schools are getting sufficient funding to educate their students. No one knows the answer to that question. What I do know is that many schools with low funding outperform many schools with much higher funding.

There are several issues here that need unpacking, so let me take them in turn. First, any claims that money doesn't matter in education, at current spending levels or otherwise, have to overcome some obvious and very powerful commonsense arguments to the contrary. There is, for example, a long-established multi-billion dollar private market for K-12 education characterized by significant price variance. Here in DC you can spend a relatively modest amount of money to send your kids to Catholic school or several times that for tony private academies. Presumably the people forking over $31,428 per year (!) for St. Albans aren't idiots who are getting ripped off, but rather smart, well-educated consumers who are getting something for their money besides just peer effects.

More generally, it's common to see per-student spending differences of two-to-one or more in most states. In fact, Ken cites some examples in his post. Imagine you're the parent of a student in one of the schools on the good side of that ratio. You pick up the paper one morning and read that your local school district budget will be slashed by 50% next year, bringing it down to the level of the lowest-spending districts in your state. Do you (A) Panic, on the grounds that this will have a devastating effect on your child's education; or (B) Say to yourself "Well, a meta-analysis of multivariate school funding /outcome analyses reveals inconsistent results and small r-square values, so I'm sure little Johnny will be fine," and go back to drinking your coffee?

You also can't determine "sufficient" funding for a given school district without considering funding for other school districts, because most school funding is used to purchase teachers for whom districts compete. Virginia, for example, has a state school funding formula whereby school districts are required to raise enough local property tax money to meet a "foundation"--read, "sufficient"--funding level. For nearby Fairfax County, that amount is $631 million (Fairfax is the 13th largest school district in America). Fairfax then voluntarily raises another $729 million, which it uses to attract good teachers, which makes people want to live in Fairfax, which leads to high property values, which is one of the reasons Fairfax is able to raise an extra three-quarters of a billion dollars per year for education in the first place. The point being, in a competitive labor market there's no absolute amount of money schools need to provide a good education--if they get much less than everyone else, they are, by definition, screwed.

That said, it's reasonable to believe that schools are insufficiently sensitive to differences in resources. When you give them more money, performance doesn't improve as much as it should. I think this is the proper conclusion to draw from the numbers and studies Ken cites. The real question, then, is what are the implications of this? My take is that (A) We need to pursue policies designed to increase resource sensitivity and do a better job with the money we have, which include but aren't limited to well-designed accountability systems and various reforms involving teacher recruitment, compensation, school leadership, etc. and (B) Any significant new infusions of dollars from court orders, political initiatives, etc., have to be seen as rare opportunities to leverage the reforms needed to increase efficiency, resource sensitivity, etc. Both taxpayers and schoolchildren deserve more than they're getting from school money today.

What I don't believe is that resource insensitivity is an argument against fixing gross inequities in school funding levels. If you've got a school system suffering from the double whammy of not enough money, badly spent, the best reform strategy is, per above, one that combines new resources with systemic reform. The problem with the "money doesn't matter" formulation is that it's been hijacked by privatizers and anti-government zealots (to be clear, I'm not putting Ken in this camp) who use it as an excuse to promote reckless tax cuts and disinvestment in public educaiton. (For more on these issues, see this interview that I conducted with economist Eric Hanushek a couple of years ago.)

differentiated accountability proposals

In response to Secretary Spellings’ March 2008 call for differentiated accountability proposals, 17 states submitted plans. The Department forwarded all 17 plans to a peer review committee, which will comment on them in mid-June before a final decision by the Secretary. Up to ten state plans may be approved. I've had a chance to review all 17 plans, and they vary in quality and method.

Ultimately, there is evidence within the applications to support both sides of the debate. Those who want to preserve NCLB as originally intended will see the lessened importance of disaggregation and specific subgroups as wrong and as a blatant disregard for the law as written. Others who want more state flexibility, a little more lenience, and the recognition that not all failing schools are equivalent will also find evidence to support their cause. Altogether, here are the lessons learned:

• At least four states (Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, and Virginia) used this opportunity to ask to change the emphasis of Public School Choice (PSC) and Supplemental Educational Services (SES). In the case of Virginia, they repeated this request throughout the application. In fact, it appeared the state had no other plans for differentiation, as it did not introduce new categories or cut lines to demarcate them.
  

• Two states (South Carolina and Tennessee) acknowledged a change in the number of students who would be eligible for PSC and SES and provided an estimate for the change. South Carolina estimated a 7% decline in the number of students eligible for choice and a 22% increase in students eligible for SES. Tennessee’s numbers were dramatic. They estimated 47% fewer students (-29,333) would be eligible for choice and 73% fewer (-35,551) for SES. Other states declared the eligibility rules would not change in the interim, but they did not address how the differentiated accountability would affect the provisions in the future.

• Despite the Secretary indicating that priority would be given to states with at least 20% of their Title I schools identified as in need of improvement, only three of the 17 met this criteria. About half addressed why, while not meeting the 20% threshold, they should still be considered, but the remainder of states (6/17) ignored the requirement altogether.

• The methods of identifying the new categories varied in style and depth. Many simply divided schools and districts that previously did not meet Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) by the percentage of Annual Measurable Objectives (AMOs) met. For example, South Carolina had three tiers. Schools and districts meeting 90-99% of their AYP objectives were slotted for “limited” intervention. Schools and districts meeting 60-89% would bear “targeted” intervention, and schools and districts below 60% would fall into “comprehensive” support. Twelve states featured this type of division of categories, albeit with different specifics.

• Two states (Illinois and Maryland) have created new categories depending on whether the school and/or district fail in the “all students” category or for single or multiple sub-groups. While Maryland featured a chart that justifies the validity behind this tactic, it also violates the central tenets of disaggregation in NCLB.

• Maryland also included a chart that broke down which schools and districts would be most affected by the changes. As we might expect, the changes give more flexibility to suburban schools that are largely failing because of only one subgroup, compared to urban schools that are struggling across the board.

Arkansas’ application states what many skeptics of the differentiated accountability plan suspect, saying, "In contrast to much of the more national rhetoric of schools missing performance goals for NCLB due to one or two subgroup, the Arkansas data models suggest that missing for one or two subgroups is a more isolated situation…A much more common occurrence is schools missing NCLB due to several subgroups in both reading and math."

New Jersey’s application contains the following alarming passage, which seems to suggest that, even if a school reaches restructuring, it would only have to do it for the failing category that’s to blame:

Our system [of differentiated accountability] does not result in schools with low performing subgroups such as Students with disabilities or English language learners remaining in the least intensive phase of intervention. A school that continues to miss AYP solely on the basis of the performance of one subgroup will continue to move through the phases and will ultimately reach Phase III: Restructuring. However, within this phase of improvement, the intervention will necessarily be focused on improving the subgroup’s performance.

At what point is this just a legitimization of under-the-table negotiations between states and districts over schools that REALLY fail and those that only sort of fail? Surely states already make distinctions at least in terms of oversight and aggressiveness; these plans just codify them.

Arguing for differentiated accountability would have been a lot more defensible if more applications included statements like this one:

PDE’s [Pennsylvania Department of Education’s] proposed differentiated accountability model will allow Pennsylvania to restructure our interventions so that communities with the fewest resources are receiving the most assistance.

Since these sentiments were rare, the cynic in me says these proposals are mostly about avoiding strong consequences for schools and districts with a lot of political power.

Profits vs. Purpose

This article in yesterday's NYT underscores the need for market-sensitive subsidy payments in the federal loan program--or a wholesale shift to the Direct Loan program. The NYT reports that 2-year colleges are worried that their students will have a harder time finding student loans in the next few years. Because it's more expensive now for banks to lend money, private loan companies are less interested in supplying higher-risk, less-profitable loans to community college and career school students.

That's a perfectly reasonable response from a for-profit company, but the purpose of the federal loan program is to ensure that exactly these types of students--those who are too high-risk to find loans on the private market--can receive money for college at a reasonable rate. If private loan companies are unwilling or unable to do that, then we need some fundamental changes to the federal loan program.

One option is to make subsidy payments, which the federal government pays to loan companies to encourage them to participate in the federal student loan program, more sensitive to changes in the credit markets. Subsidy rates would be higher in credit markets like today's, giving lenders sufficient profits to encourage them to lend to all students, and it would be lower when credit markets are better and profits are bigger.

But historically loan companies have resisted this type of subsidy system, preferring to rely on lobbyists and political donations to get subsidy rates that would allow them profits today and even bigger profits when credit markets improve. If they continue to resist a market-based approach to establishing subsidy rates, the best alternative may just be to switch entirely to the Direct Loan program, in which the federal government lends directly to students. Under this system, the government won't have to worry about paying excessive subsidies and all students will be guaranteed loans from the same lender.

If loan companies want to access to student loan business in the future, they'll need to come to the table with some ideas on how to make a profit while also ensuring that the purpose of the federal loan program is fulfilled.

Something to watch this summer

EdWeek is right to highlight the struggle nearly half the states will be facing in the coming years. Twenty-three states, as identified in a recent CEP report, back-loaded their performance targets for reaching the goal of 100% proficiency by 2014. That allowed them to reach relatively easy goals for the early years of NCLB, but now they must meet dramatically rising targets.

NCLB imposed some strange restrictions on the states as they wrote their plans. States must make all increases equal, but they were allowed pauses of up to three years where no improvement was required (for a more complete explanation, see here). Half the states chose steady progress over time. The other half created strange stair-step patterns that will really hurt them in coming years.

This chart shows California's English proficiency goals for elementary and middle school students. The state implemented the NCLB provisions slowly with a modest goal of 13.6% of its students proficient. By keeping these numbers low through 2006-7, they ensured only moderate amounts of school and district failures. But look at the numbers for this year, and the year following. From now until 2014, California's elementary and middle schoolers must improve 10.8% every year.

California hasn't released its 2007-8 performance scores yet. When it does, and when those of other stair-stepping states come out too, we're in for some eye-popping numbers.

Grab That Cash With Both Hands And Make A Stash

Joel Packer, chief lobbyist for the National Education Association, the nation's largest teachers union, has started a blog. (Technically, a transcript of a podcast, but close enough.) Eager to counter the impression that the teachers union agenda begins and ends with a bottomless appetite for new funding without accountability to match, he quickly put up a post quoting the Beatles singing "gimme money that's what I want." Which is all well and good, but then--and really, this is Blog 101--he forgot the follow-up sentence to say that he's just kidding.

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.