'No Child Left Behind' Underfunded?

Not if you look at the numbers. The Washington Times has an article doing just that. The article states,

State and local spending for kindergarten through 12th grade education more than doubled since 1990, while federal taxpayers' share rose by more than a third to $41.1 billion, or 8.2 percent of total spending in President Bush's fiscal 2004 budget, according to the booklet being distributed across the country by officials of the Education Department.


Rep. John A. Boehner, Ohio Republican and committee chairman, says Title I spending has increased $3.6 billion, or 42 percent, since January 2002.

"We are pumping gas into a flooded engine," he said. "The federal government has increased federal education spending so rapidly that many states haven't even been able to spend down the money we appropriated for them two years ago."

At the beginning of this year, according to a House committee report, states were "sitting on $5.75 billion in federal education funding, including nearly $2 billion in Title I aid from fiscal years 2000 through 2002."

Political fighting over the size of federal school-funding increases has drawn strong criticism from conservative education-policy analysts.

"Despite the huge infusion of federal cash and the near tripling of overall per-pupil funding since 1965, national academic performance has not improved," said Neal McCluskey of the libertarian Cato Institute.

"Math and reading scores have stagnated, graduation rates have flat-lined, and researchers have shown numerous billion-dollar federal programs to be failures," Mr. McCluskey wrote in a Cato report last month titled "A Lesson in Waste: Where Does All the Federal Education Money Go?"

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

John Kerry And Gay Marriage

The Importance Of Kerry's Cambodia Claim

Vietnam Boomerang