Posted by
DFMJR on Thursday, July 10, 2008 2:00:00 AM
The No Child Left Behind act (NCLB) was passed through congress in May
of 2001 and signed into law by President George W. Bush in January of
2002. The NCLB act reformed the federal government’s education policy
by reauthorizing provisions from Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society
reforms. In addition to the policies which were reauthorized, the NCLB
act created many new reform policies. When adopted by the individual
states, the old as well as the new policies would allow the state
governments to receive federal money for education. In 2006, NCLB’s
budget was $25.3 billion, but with the expiration date of September
2007 passed, is reauthorization worth it?
The main factor that congress should consider, but won’t, is whether or
not the federal government has any right to demand standards in
education, and furthermore, if it is Constitutionally permissible for
the federal government to fund public schools at all. The quick answer
is that the federal government has no place in education. The federal
government has specific enumerated powers and according to the tenth
amendment, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the
Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the
states respectively, or to the people.” Thus, since the Constitution
does not grant the federal government the power to involve itself in
education, and it does not deny that power to the state, the power
belongs to the state.Many critics of NCLB have pointed to the tenth
amendment to strengthen their opposition. In response, many supporters
of NCLB have stated that adoption of NCLB is optional. While it is true
that if states do not accept federal education money they also do not
have to accept the rules that accompany it, not accepting education
money is not so simple. As Neal McCluskey of the Cato Institute writes
“turning down hundreds of millions of dollars is hard to do, especially
since it is, in essence, money being returned to state taxpayers after
the federal government grabbed it out of their hands.”
But since
the federal government has no constitutional right to involve itself in
education, they compromise with the states. The compromising between
the federal government and the state governments turned the original 36
page NCLB act that President Bush submitted into the 1100 page bill
that he signed 8 months later. The underlying problem is that the
strings attached to that money have been constructed in such a way as
to allow states to maintain the majority of the sovereignty in
education, and at the same time, allow the federal government to demand
results. For example, the federal government offers money to a state in
exchange for adherence to the federal policy. The state then defines
how to analyze the data, which allows them to shape results in a way
that appears as though they are making Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP).
The state then sends those results back to Washington. This leads to
what some scholars have called the “race to the bottom.”
So
if Congress will not end NCLB because it is illegal, than surely they
would if it was not working. So, is it working? No. The Results that
NCLB have produced are minimal. Holding school accountable for the
achievement of students has become more difficult, and assessing the
true cost of NCLB requires in depth research. To understand the true
cost, it is necessary to use a cost-benefit analysis. The federal
funding that states receive establishes an enormous burden on state and
local governments. In 1994, a report from the General Accountability
Office (GAO) concluded that “the federal government was the cause of
41% of the administrative burden at the state level despite providing
just 7% of overall education funding.” NCLB has increased the funding
as well as the burden that the federal government already placed on the
states. For instance, NCLB “increased state and local governments’
annual paperwork burden by 6,680,334 hours, at an estimated cost of
$141 million.”
The administrative burden that NCLB
places on local and state governments is second only to the decline in
accountability. The tying of federal education dollars to AYP, progress
the states themselves define, has encouraged “all states to lower
standards to avoid federal sanctions.” States all over the country are
lowering standards in the attempt to avoid sanctions at the federal
level. Even worse than this, many states are simply lying about their
numbers. One statistic that the federal government requires yearly
progress in is graduation rates. This is supposed to be measured as the
percentage of students that earn regular diplomas within four years.
However states have found ways to manipulate this data to paint a
better picture of their “progress.” Some states count students that
have obtained GED’s, other states only count dropout rates, leaving out
students that transfer only to fail later. For example, a Study by Jay
Greene found that North Carolina’s true graduation rate was estimated
at about 63%, a number far below the 92.4% that the state had reported.
Upon further investigation, it was uncovered that North Carolina based
its graduation rate on the “percentage of diploma recipients who got
their diploma in four years or less.” This manipulation of the data
undermines performance and severely cripples public schools.
So
why not dismantle the entire public school system? Why not place
education on the free market? At first consideration, outrage at this
concept seems normal. But what are people so mad about? On the surface
it seems as if the worry is that low income families will not have the
money to send their children to school. But in a market system there
will always be some level of education available for all families, in
all income brackets. The concern than becomes the quality of the
education you are able to purchase. Faced with this question, I would
suggest you analyze the quality of education that is available now,
through the public system. The National Assessment of Educational
Progress reported that 50% of Highschool seniors did not know what 87%
of 10 is. Furthermore, the NAEP report stated that 58% could not name
Plato as the author of “The Republic,” and 54% could not identify the
half century during which the Civil War occurred.
This is the
education your tax dollars fund. Think about whether or not that tax
money could be used to send our children to a better, private school.