Correction, Please!(criticism of education spending)(Brief Article)

Little Learned at Great Cost

ITEM: On February 4th, Deputy Education Secretary William Hansen announced the 2003 budget request for the Department of Education, proposing $50.3 billion in discretionary appropriations. Commented Mr. Hansen: "With the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act, ... schools and school districts will benefit from more than the increased levels of funding for federal programs. With the changes in the new law, what used to be federal spending programs are now federal investments in improving student achievement."

CORRECTION: Feeble rhetoric claiming that more federal spending will result in greater student achievement is baloney badly disguised as food for thought. Why should this particular passel of greenbacks imbue children with greater proficiency when experience shows no positive relationship between federal spending and learning? The feds have guaranteed a Teflon education, where nothing sticks.

The core of the plan remains that huge section of the federal education budget known as Title I, which dates back to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965. It was supposed to help disadvantaged children catch up with contemporaries. Yet, even the Education Department admits Title I doesn't cut it. A department evaluation entitled "Prospects" acknowledges, "Over the school year, the initial gap between their [participants'] learning and that of non-participants did not change."

Passage of the ESEA would, by the end of the authorization period, triple the ESEA's funding as recently as 1994. However, reports the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), an astounding 60 percent of underprivileged fourth graders are unable to read at a basic level -- despite $130 billion spent specifically for this group over three decades.

Achievement is flatlining. "Long-Term Trend NAEP assessments show no statistical change in scores between 1994 and 1999 for science, reading, or math," says an analysis by the Heritage Foundation. "On the most recent assessment, the 2000 NAEP Science Assessment, only 18 percent of students were proficient." It doesn't get better in later years. U.S. high-school students, for example, finished a dismal 19th out of 21 nations in the Third International Exam in Math.

Moreover, the proposed department budget, $50.3 billion, is actually only a fragment of what the feds spend on education. That has reached $112 billion over all agencies -- despite the fact that education is not a federal responsibility.