States Rebuff President's Ed Law
Legislatures refuse to pay for the high costs of the law's requirements
By Walter Minkel -- School Library Journal, 3/1/2004
A handful of state legislatures nationwide are sending President Bush a clear message: the demands of the federal No Child Left Behind Act are too expensive, so they're refusing to fund them.
The latest protester is Utah's House of Representatives, which passed a resolution ordering the state department of education to withhold spending on any of the law's mandates. As Terry Newbold, superintendent of Utah's Jordan School District, explains, it would cost $41.8 million to tutor underachieving students and $7.3 million to provide teachers with the training they need to meet the "highly qualified" status called for under the law. The district would need $182 million to meet all of NCLB's requirements in order to receive a measly $5 million in federal education aid next year.
Meanwhile, the state legislatures in Hawaii, Utah, Virginia, and New Hampshire recently passed resolutions that halted state spending for NCLB and asked Congress to authorize more money to pay for its requirements. And the legislatures in Arizona, Indiana, New Mexico, Tennessee, Washington, and Wisconsin are in the process of expressing similar dissatisfaction with the law.
