Accounting for NCLB

It’s a good idea for Maine’s Legislature to focus on the proper funding of the federal education act, No Child Left Behind, but lawmakers will be disappointed if they think they will be able to get an exact accounting of the act’s costs here, as a legislative bill demands. Should a review of federal funding on the issue establish approximate fairness from Washington, lawmakers here would be better to focus on the effectiveness of the reform rather than trying to count every dollar.

One of the difficulties in reviewing NCLB is that it came along as Maine was advancing its own reform, the Maine Learning Results. The two overlap in some areas, complement each other in some and may conflict in a few.

That LD 1716 prohibits Maine from using state funds to implement the policies of the federal reform poses a challenge. The urge behind it is easy enough to understand: The federal government has yet to meet its expected level of funding for special education, so suspicion precedes new regulation; NCLB is long and complicated, especially in the ways schools can get in trouble; nobody likes to be told what to do, particularly by the federal government.

But a prohibition on spending state funds for federal policy creates its own problems. If, for instance, improved teaching expertise helps schools meet NCLB standards and teachers, as they have traditionally done, take courses to improve their skills, should the federal government be required to pay for them? Can state money be spent by school districts on materials that help students understand concepts listed in Learning Results, which in turn result in a school making progress on federal standards?

Certainly the federal government should fund what it mandates, but the inverse, essentially declaring that all expenses will be seen through the prism of NCLB, if it were possible to do, would require so much record-keeping (a prime complaint about NCLB) that it would further distract from teaching time. The other half of LD 1716, a resolve to direct the Department of Education to investigate the costs and benefits of not participating in NCLB, should give the state a better sense of what the federal requirements include. (It is a regular complaint of federal officials that states do not understand what is actually required under NCLB, where the act provides for waivers to give states flexibility and what states require of themselves apart from but often confused with the federal act.)

LD 1716, supported mostly along party lines in committee, would be most helpful if amended to further spread understanding about the act, including its costs, and to minimize the burden on school districts and their teachers, which is already considerable.