Education act won’t be open to change

The Bush administration will not bow to liberal or conservative pressure to reopen the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) for congressional changes, but will use the regulatory process to improve implementation, Education Secretary Rod Paige said in an interview.

“We don’t think that any part of the law yet that we’ve identified that we need to go back to get legislative remedies. We think that inside the regulatory system that we have the flexibility that we need in order to make the changes that we need,” Mr. Paige said.

At its national convention last July, the National Education Association (NEA), which opposes the law, mounted a political effort to elect a Democratic president next November and new members of Congress who support 47 NEA-drafted “technical amendments” that would change the law’s requirements to report test results for minorities separately from entire school populations.

Republicans object, saying the NEA amendments would “gut the accountability provisions of NCLB.”

“We never once said we did not approve of the goals. We never once said we did not approve of closing the achievement gap,” NEA President Reg Weaver said in an interview.

“We recognized that it was impossible to implement this law the way it was crafted, and we do have a lot of history in terms of implementation of mandates that are unfunded.”

Mr. Weaver and Democrats object that the administration and congressional Republicans, despite a 52 percent funding increase for federal education programs since President Bush took office, have sought annual budget increases that are about $6.5 billion less than the act’s 12-year authorization levels.

The president announced last week that his 2005 budget will increase federal education programs another $2 billion a year.

“It’s real clear to us that more funding would help a lot, especially with the cuts that have gone on in the states,” said Kati Haycock, director of the Education Trust.

“People are reeling, and unfortunately, the underfunding of the law has allowed the conversation to kind of shift off how we’re going to meet the challenges of the law to kind of whether we can actually meet the challenges of the law,” she said.

Quentin Lawson, executive director of the 6,000-member National Alliance of Black School Educators, calls the unfunded-mandates argument “excuses” by opponents to mask other reasons for not implementing the law.

“I can’t think of any congressional legislation that has passed with 100 percent funding,” he said. “But we don’t use that as an excuse.”

Conservative supporters want amendments to “fine-tune” the law’s limited school-choice provisions, called “the least effective” by Chester E. Finn, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.

“The law calls for school districts to allow children at failing schools to attend other public or charter schools in the district. Most districts just don’t want to do that. It’s inconvenient for them. It’s embarrassing. It’s complicated. So very little of it’s going on, and the reason is that the districts are put in charge of doing something that they don’t want to do. It’s a major challenge for them,” Mr. Finn said.

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