Gregg Secures Additional $2 Billion for Education Funding
WASHINGTON—New Hampshire Sen. Judd Gregg secured more than $2 billion in additional federal education funding Thursday as part of the fiscal year 2003 omnibus appropriations bill, which he said “translates into significant dollars for New Hampshire.”
Expected to pass the House late Thursday evening and the Senate Friday, the bill provides “unprecedented” education funding for the No Child Left Behind Act, Title I and special education, Gregg said.
Passed in 2001, the No Child Left Behind Act requires local school districts to establish their own educational standards and track individual student progress using testing aligned with those standards.
“These dollars flow back to states with very few strings attached to Title I dollars,” Gregg said, referring to the longstanding program of federal assistance to improve education in high-poverty schools. “They can be used basically to do whatever the local towns think they need to do in order to improve their educational system, and it pre-funds any obligations which the towns might have under the No Child Left Behind Act.”
Calling the funding a “win-win” situation, Gregg said towns will begin receiving federal dollars for the No Child Left Behind Act even though they are not required to fully implement the act for another 12 years.
Funding for the Education Department totals $53.1 billion, a $3.1 billion increase over fiscal year 2002 funding. New Hampshire will see a 14 percent increase in Title I funding and an increase of almost 17 percent in special-education funding over 2002, Gregg said.
Gregg dismissed the validity of a study released by the New Hampshire School Administrators Association that the No Child Left Behind Act is an unfunded mandate and would actually cost the state $575 per child to meet federal requirements. Calling the study results “bogus, inaccurate, dishonest and misleading,” Gregg said he thinks there has been “significant misrepresentation, led by [education] administrators, intentionally put out for the purposes of misleading school boards.”
“I have a problem with misleading information put out by the professional education community,” Gregg said. “They do not want to be held accountable, and they’re using this bill as an excuse for not being held accountable, and they’re using this claim that it’s unfunded as an excuse, when in fact it’s not only not unfunded, it is funded.”
Tom Loveless, director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said nobody actually knows what the No Child Left Behind Act will cost, which is both a strength and a weakness of the law.
“I think local districts are right in being concerned that there’s not enough money being provided to help them get every single kid up to the standards that No Child Left Behind mandates,” Loveless said.
He added, however, that some money and resources for the new law should be provided locally, since local school districts are being allowed to set their own requirements for educational standards.
“If the federal government were to provide all the resources, it would then almost certainly dictate a lot more about education than it does today,” Loveless said.
Published in The Manchester Union Leader, in New Hampshire.
