Too Early to Tell Effects of NCLB Federal Funding
WASHINGTON – Ever since the No Child Left Behind act was signed into law in 2001, educators, New Hampshire legislators and federal officials have been debating whether the federal government is providing New Hampshire enough money to pay for the law’s requirements.
Lorraine Patusky of the Office of Accountability of the New Hampshire Board of Education said it was too early to tell what kind of financial impact the new requirements will have on schools in the Granite State.
“The truth is we don’t know,” Patusky said. “The truth is we’re much too early into this and we really don’t know what the effects are going be because the effects aren’t short term.”
The law is intended to raise the standards of schools across the country by holding schools accountable for low test scores and unqualified teachers. Under the law, schools are expected to test their students annually, hire and retain higher-quality teachers and identify students needing special education.
U.S. Department of Education officials have defended the amount of federal funds allotted to New Hampshire schools, saying the state is expected to receive approximately $167.9 million in 2004, up $32.4 million from when President Bush entered the White House. Approximately $62.9 million is directed toward No Child Left Behind reforms.
But New Hampshire educators insist that the dollars are not enough, especially because of the costs of implementing the accountability tests within each school.
“What we’ve learned is that the testing that has to be done under this law is very expensive,” said Steven Sacks, staff attorney for the National Education Association-New Hampshire. “And I question whether the Congress understood รก the cost it would entail to undertake all this testing when they passed the law.”
The U.S. Department of Education could not provide numbers on the cost of the new accountability testing. A report from the New Hampshire School Administrators Association, however, says implementing annual tests will cost approximately $5.5 million a year.
Patusky said part of the fiscal problem is that state legislators have cut education funding because of the expectation that the federal government will pick up the check, she said.
“If you look at the legislature, they’re seeing that all of this money is coming into the state for No Child Left Behind,” Patusky said. “So why do they need to fund things on a state level anymore?”
“That creates a feeling in the state that there’s not enough money, when in fact the legislature had been appropriating money on an annual basis for [education], and they just stopped the funding.”
One of the key goals of the No Child Left Behind law is to ensure the presence of high-quality teachers in the school system. Washington is expected to provide $13.6 million to New Hampshire in 2004 to help meet that goal, according to the U.S. Department of Education.
A report by the Concord-based Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy in February states that attracting and retaining high-quality teachers would cost New Hampshire schools approximately $11.5 million in 2004. However, a report last November from the New Hampshire School Administrators Association (NHSAA) put the cost at approximately $28 million.
The Bartlett report also concludes that the federal government is providing adequate funds if schools manage their money well, while the NHSAA report accuses Washington of failing to provide enough.
Patusky said the real financial effects of No Child Left Behind are probably “somewhere in the middle” of the two reports, and “neither one is probably accurate.”
Part of the problem could be a disconnect in communication between the federal government and the state government, especially when it comes to specific financial figures, said the NEA’s Sacks.
“The federal government has been pushing No Child Left Behind and the advantages of it without looking at the realities,” Sacks said. “It frustrates educators because they’re the ones that are dealing with the reality of this law on a day-to-day basis.”
