Budget Plans Interfere with Promises of "No Child Left Behind"
Feature Story by civilrights.org staff - 3/18/2003
Last year the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act was signed into law with promises of ensuring all students would receive a quality education through accountability and testing. But the demands of the new federal education law have not been accompanied by the funding increases educators and advocates had expected.The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR) the nation’s oldest and largest civil rights coalition points to certain discrepancies in NCLB Act and the budget:
- The Administration’s FY 2003 budget cut overall funding for NCLB by $90 million.
- The FY 2004 NCLB authorizes $18.5 billion. President Bush’s budget for FY 2004 proposes on $ 12.3 billion.
- Overall the President Bush’s budget fell more than $ 7 billion dollars of the promised amount of NCLB.
"Even the President’s proposed FY 04 budget plan would also underfund the Title I program, targeted to the nation’s low-income schools, at $12.3 billion instead of the $18.5 billion level authorized by Congress last year," said LCCR Executive Director Wade Henderson. "This funding is badly needed, especially since states and school districts are facing severe financial crises."
New requirements of the law include annual testing from grades three to eight. Progress is to be monitored both overall and within subgroups including race, income level, and disability. If any student subgroup in a school does not make sufficient progress for two years, the school is labeled "in need of improvement." Critics say that schools that have faced a lack of equitable funding for years will face sanctions for not showing improvement. Once a school is labeled in need of improvement, students may transfer out to other schools, and if there is failure to improve after five years the school may be shut down.
Many people who championed the law at first are now expressing concern. "We were optimistic about being able to make No Child Left Behind work when a very good budget was passed with the law. ...Now we feel that its going to make it impossible to implement the law," explained Sandra Feldman, president of the American Federation of Teachers.
