Giving NCLB an A-PLUS boost: the Academic Partnerships Lead Us to Success Act would promote greater local control in education while maintaining accountability through state-level testing and information reporting to parents to ensure transparency

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FOR MORE THAN four decades, Congress has sought to improve public education by creating new Federal programs and increasing spending. In Fiscal Year 2007, the Federal government spent $23,500,000,000 on programs that fall under the original Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, now called No Child Left Behind.

More than five years have passed since Pres. George W. Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act. The Bush Administration's original blueprint for NCLB included some valuable reform principles, such as reducing bureaucracy, promoting state flexibility, and expanding parental choice in education. However, those initiatives either were watered down or eliminated during the legislative process on Capitol Hill in 2001 The hill that emerged from Congress greatly expanded Federal power in education while doing little to eliminate bureaucracy, restore state and local control, or empower parents.

No Child Left Behind significantly increased Federal spending on--and authority over--public education. According to the Department of Education, the Bush Administration's budget for FY2008 could increase NCLB spending to $24,400,000,000--a 41% jump over FY2001 spending. This budget also includes a 59% increase in Title 1 grants to local education agencies.

Yet, these funding increases also have added to the administrative burden on state and local authorities. No Child Left Behind created new rules and regulations for schools and significantly increased compliance costs for state and local governments. According to the Office of Management and Budget, state and local governments' annual paperwork burden has risen by 6,680,334 hours at an estimated cost of $141,000,000. Moreover, the Federal government now has authority over issues that once were reserved to the local level, such as student testing policies.

The centerpiece of the No Child Left Behind Act is a requirement for annual state-level student testing, information reporting to the public, and a series of mandated sanctions for schools that fail to demonstrate adequate yearly progress toward achievement benchmarks. The purpose of this provision was to shift the focus of Federal education policy from inputs to outputs and student achievement. However, five years of experience implementing NCLB has exposed numerous structural problems.

Under NCLB, states must test students from third through eighth grade, and once in high school. The law requires states to report on the performance of various subgroups of student populations, such as ethnic minorities, those from low-income families, and pupils with limited English skills. Students and student subgroups are required to show increasing gains in proficiency scores. The law sets a goal that all children will score proficient by 2014.

While the Department of Education sets the broad framework of this accountability system, the states maintain control of state-level tests and performance measures. This means they have the responsibility for defining "proficiency" and setting performance levels on state tests. As a result, some states have lowered standards on tests to avoid Federal sanctions. Ironically, while No Child Left Behind has sought to improve public school accountability and strengthen standards-based reform across the nation, the law's perverse incentives are threatening to eliminate transparency by encouraging all states to lower standards to avoid Federal sanctions.

One of the problems in Pres. Bush's original No Child Left Behind proposal was that it continued to fund ineffective programs. "This 'program for every problem' solution has begun to add up--so much so that there are hundreds of education programs spread across 39 Federal agencies at a cost of $120 billion a year," wrote the White House in February 2001. Regrettably, this situation persists. The current Bush Administration has proposed eliminating 44 Education Department programs that cost taxpayers a total of approximately $2,200,000,000 annually. Yet, the White House unsuccessfully has proposed terminating many of these same programs in previous years. These are programs that the Bush Administration states "have achieved their original purpose, duplicate other programs, are narrowly focused, or unable to demonstrate effectiveness." For instance, the $2,200,000 Women's Educational Equity Act promotes educational equality for women and girls, yet female students generally outperform male students on test scores and other performance measures.

In addition, members of Congress earmark hundreds of millions of dollars in Federal education spending for specific projects. According to the Office of Management and Budget, the FY2005 Department of Education budget included 1,199 earmarks totaling $483,000,-000. Its Office of Innovation and Improvement budget included $289,000,000 in earmarks, including $198,000 for the Akron (Ohio) Zoological Park and $248,000 for the Alaska Sea Life Center in Seward for its Marine Ecosystems Education Program. Education earmarks divert scarce taxpayer resources to members' pet projects, which they create outside of the traditional legislative process.