April 23, 2005, 12:00AM
Texas fined for No Child defiance
Toe the line, education chief warns the agency she once headed
By JUSTIN GEST, Houston Chronicle Washington Bureau

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WASHINGTON - Education Secretary Margaret Spellings fined Texas $444,282 Friday for the state's continued defiance of the No Child Left Behind Act.

For the last two years, the Texas Education Agency has exceeded the federal cap on how many students with learning disabilities can be exempted from regular state testing, mandated by the act, in favor of an easier exam.

In a stern letter addressed to Texas Education Commissioner Shirley Neeley, Spellings said "the TEA has not shown cause why" she should not withhold the money from the agency's 2004 federal grant.

"The TEA's proposed amendment was not consistent with the law and the regulations, and something the Education Department could not approve," Spellings wrote.

It is only the second fine ever levied against a state under the 2001 landmark education law. It is also the steepest.

Minnesota was fined $113,000 by Spelling's predecessor, Rod Paige, for not testing an adequate number of students in 2003.

In January, Paige threatened to fine Texas for noncompliance, but he gave the state time to submit a defense.

Spellings, formerly of Houston, who took over later that month, was not convinced by the state's justification of its actions.

Texas' fine comes a little more than two weeks after Spellings announced that she would offer more flexibility in meeting No Child Left Behind requirements to states that otherwise adhere to federal rules.

But Texas had flouted the federal guidelines.

Neeley's defiance touched off a public dispute between her and Spellings, who helped design the original No Child Left Behind Act in Texas when she advised then-Gov. George W. Bush from 1994 to 2000.

Neeley was accused of exempting the extra students to falsely inflate state scores. In response, she said the Education Department was out of touch with needs of students in Texas.

Texas may be subject to further sanctions.

The federal limit on the number of students who can take the special exam remains capped at 1 percent, and Texas again exempted nearly 9 percent of its students during the current school year.

"We're going down another path where there's going to be another standoff," said Patty Sullivan, director of the Center on Education Policy in Washington. "They're probably going to fine the state again this year."

But education experts said the penalties were not severe enough to force Texas to change its guidelines.

The $444,282 fine represents a fraction of Texas' $1.1 billion federal allocation, and a sliver of the state's $33 billion annual public education budget.

"Texas got a slap on the hand for breaking a fundamental principle of No Child Left Behind. Now any other state that doesn't comply is going to expect a similar financial penalty," said Scott Young, a policy adviser for the National Conference of State Legislatures.

"Texas called their bluff. Apparently, the department's not going to jeopardize public education in Texas and the individual students there. I can only imagine what Utah and Connecticut are thinking right now."

On Tuesday, Utah's Legislature passed a resolution that declares federal education laws subordinate to state policy.

Last week, Connecticut officials announced plans to sue the Education Department for the right to disregard federal rules, saying the federal government fails to provide enough money.

It is unclear how Texas will return the money from its 2004 federal allocation, all of which has been spent. Officials at both TEA and the Education Department were unavailable for comment when the letter was released Friday at 7:20 p.m. EDT.

justin.gest@chron.com

Suit against No Child Left Behind about education, politics

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WASHINGTON (USATODAY.com) - Last Wednesday's suit by the National Education Association, the nation's largest teachers union, against the federal No Child Left Behind Act received plenty of news media coverage.
In some of the nation's largest newspapers, the suit received front-page billing, as well it should have.

After all, it isn't every day that a legal challenge is launched against a program that has been the centerpiece of President Bush's education agenda for the past four years. And when the challenge is brought by a union that represents 2.7 million elementary and secondary school teachers, it is that much more compelling.

The suit alleges that the law, which requires public schools to show "adequate student progress" in reading and math verified by annual standardized tests, is underfunded and creating a serious financial burden on cash-strapped local school districts.

Nine local districts in three states have joined the NEA suit, which says Congress should more than double current spending on the law from $12.7 billion this year to $28 billion.

"Today, we're standing up for children whose parents are saying 'no more' to costly federal regulations that drain money from classrooms and spend it on paperwork, bureaucracy and big testing companies," NEA President Reg Weaver said in announcing the suit.

But many - if not most - of the stories reporting the suit left out one essential ingredient of the story: The NEA has long been an opponent of No Child Left Behind, opposing it almost immediately after it was proposed by Bush in the 2000 presidential campaign and campaigning against it with money and political pressure as it made its way through Congress in 2001.

Aside from what it saw as too much federal involvement in local schools, one of the provisions of the law the teacher union frowned upon requires teacher qualifications and quality, as well as student performance, to improve.

And once the law was enacted, the union continued its opposition, using the argument that not enough money was put behind it to allow the law to be effectively implemented. It is a charge that has been taken up by Democrats in Congress and one that was used against Bush by Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry in the 2004 campaign.

In the third Bush-Kerry debate last October in Tempe, Ariz., the Democratic candidate said, "The president who talks about No Child Left Behind refused to fully fund - by $28 billion - that particular program so you can make a difference in the lives of those young people. ... The president reneged on his promise to fund No Child Left Behind."

That $28 billion Kerry mentioned is the shortfall figure the NEA uses in its argument now. It's not a coincidence. In the 2004 campaign, the NEA spent $1.16 million to fund ads, mailings and other activities to defeat Bush. Many of the ads attacked No Child Left Behind.

At their annual convention last July in Washington, NEA members were urged by Weaver and other union leaders to host "house parties" before the November elections to build opposition to a law that "forces us to spend money we don't have, on programs we don't need, to get test results that don't matter."

NEA also spent another $235,000 on behalf of Kerry. Kerry and the NEA have long been close friends and allies. The union endorsed Kerry in 2004. Moreover, the NEA spent more than $1.6 million on the 2004 congressional elections, the vast majority of it (91%) on behalf of Democratic candidates.

There's nothing wrong with any of that. It's all a legitimate part of democracy. But news reports on the lawsuit that failed to mention the politics involved, and in effect cast the NEA as a neutral party here, just didn't tell the whole story, or at least put it into proper perspective or context. The lawsuit is as much a political fight as it is a fight over education quality.

Utah teacher union joins lawsuit over No Child funding
By Mike Cronin
The Salt Lake Tribune

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A day after the Utah Legislature soundly rebuffed President Bush's education-reform act, the Utah Education Association has joined a national lawsuit to force the federal government to cover states' costs associated with implementing No Child Left Behind.
The suit, filed on Wednesday, seeks to ensure that the 2001 act means what it says: The federal government will cover states' cost for enacting NCLB.
"Does it really mean that we are not required to spend any state or district funds to fulfill the mandates of NCLB?" said UEA President Pat Rusk, who announced her group's participation in the suit.
And Rusk said that she and her fellow plaintiffs hope the suit will prohibit the U.S. Department of Education from withholding funding from states - $76 million is at stake in Utah - that refuse to comply with NCLB.
The UEA joins in the suit with its parent organization, the National Education Association, and school districts in Texas, Michigan and Vermont.
DOE spokeswoman Susan Aspey said in a statement that the lawsuit was "regrettable."
A statement from the national educators' group said the federal law aimed at improving test scores is underfunded by $27 billion.
The bill passed by Utah lawmakers on Tuesday puts Utah's education priorities ahead of NCLB mandates and authorizes state educators to ignore provisions that conflict with state priorities or that cost state dollars.
Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. on Wednesday said he will sign the bill, probably next week. He said he would continue efforts to lobby the federal government for flexibility under NCLB.
Principals and district officials who oversee Utah schools with high percentages of English-learning and low-income students are anxious about the threat of losing federal funding.
"I cannot believe that (Utah lawmakers and the UEA) are gambling with $270,000 of Title I funding" that Jackson Elementary School in Salt Lake City receives, said Principal Shawna Wilde. If that money disappears, she said, six teachers will lose their jobs.
JoEllen Killpack, the research and evaluation specialist for the Salt Lake City School District, said, "It's going to be really severe" if the feds cut funding.

mcronin@sltrib.com

Tribune reporter Thomas Burr and Bloomberg News contributed to this story.

April 22, 2005
EDITORIAL
Stand Firm for Educational Fairness, NY TIMES, April 24, 2005

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The Bush administration jeopardized the most important education reform of the last 100 years when it failed to fully finance the No Child Left Behind Act, which requires states to improve scholastic achievement for poor and minority children in return for federal dollars. The shortfall in funds has not only made it more difficult for some states to comply, but has also provided a handy excuse for those who don't believe that the achievement gap between white and minority children can ever be closed - or don't want to make the effort to try.

Right now, when the law is under attack from all sides, it's important to divide the critics who want to make it work better from those who simply want to see it go away. It can't be a coincidence that the states most actively opposed to No Child Left Behind have poor records when it comes to the very issues the federal law is supposed to address.

The National Education Association, the nation's largest teachers' union, made headlines this week when it engineered a lawsuit asserting that No Child Left Behind illegally requires states to spend their own money on enforcing new federal requirements. The N.E.A. has misrepresented the law to the public from the start, and the primary aim of its suit is to throw out the baby with the bath water. The union doesn't want a better No Child Left Behind Act; it wants to make the law disappear entirely.

The new law has also drawn protests from Connecticut and Utah, two states where the achievement gaps between white and minority children are among the largest in the nation. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, who has been working to fix some of the genuine problems with the administration of the law, struck the right tone this week when she notified Utah that if it insisted on substituting a weaker system of its own choosing for the federal rules, it could potentially lose federal funds.

That same warning should apply to Connecticut, which has threatened to sue the federal government over the portion of the law that requires annual student testing in grades three through eight. The testing is necessary to ensure that the states are actually closing the achievement gap between white and minority children.

Connecticut, which already tests in some grades, argues that testing every year in the grades required by the law would be of no value. But it would be extremely valuable to the parents of at-risk children, who should not have to wait two years to find out whether the schools are actually helping their children.

The No Child Left Behind law has been a success on many levels - particularly in reorienting the thinking of the school districts that used to average out success by letting the stellar achievements of middle-class students wipe out the failures on the bottom. But it will take years, and far more work and money, before the public sees the kind of improvement it has a right to expect. Right now, everyone who cares about quality education for all children should be working to make that happen, not to dismantle what has already been done.

Secretary Spellings should make it clear that Congress meant business when it declared an end to educational inequality and required the states to actually teach impoverished children in exchange for getting federal aid. Money is clearly crucial, but the argument over funds should not be allowed to derail the new law, which is already showing that achievement gaps can be narrowed if the schools apply themselves.

No Child Left Behind - Wrightslaw

No Child Left Behind Legislation From the Illinois DOE

Questia: NCLB

Wikipedia: No Child Left Behind