Jack Jennings, President, Center on Education Policy, testified on March 14, 2007, before the Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies, U.S. Senate Committee on Appropriations. He summarized data from CEPs four comprehensive annual reports and more than 20 specialized reports about the implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) since 2002.

After studying NCLB for five years, we’ve reached four findings about funding:

• For the last two school years, 80% of the school districts in our nationally
representative sample have reported that they are absorbing costs to carry out NCLB ...

• For this current school year, about two-thirds of the school districts in the nation have received a smaller grant than last year or a frozen grant for Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act ...

• Last school year, 34 states reported receiving inadequate federal funds to carry out their general responsibilities under NCLB. Insufficient staffing is a major problem ...

• In the last two school years, nearly two-thirds of the states reported receiving insufficient federal funds to carry out the NCLB-imposed duty of assisting schools identified for improvement.

Jennings recommended that Congress appropriate more funding to support implementation of NCLB.

It appears that the CEP testimony accepts the assumption that NCLB is an add-on program. Use of that assumption means that public schools will provide an appropriate education for some, but not for all students. In other words, public school educators do not have a legal, fundamental duty to use public funds to provide an appropriate education for all students.

Many in Congress and in the general public appear to accept this assumption also.

If they did not, we would hear recommendations about public school educators adjusting our budgets without additional funding in order to assure that all students increase their learning rates.

Thanks for the clear testimony, Jack. You bring honor to education through the Center's straight forward empirical data. Kudos for posting your testimony promptly.

Perhaps someone in the center will examine assumptions that public school educators use to assert funding shortages. It would be most interesting to understand how some educators have increased student learning and met other NCLB requirements with existing funding.


The Center is totally independent, with no membership and with all our funding provided by charitable foundations.

Tablet PC Education Blog