The President’s proposal for funding
elementary and secondary education through Title I and other provisions of the
Elementary and Secondary Education Act calls for only a small increase. This increase is more modest than the
proposals made by his predecessor and well short of what experts regard as full
funding of Title I.
The fact is that standards-based
reform will provide opportunity for disadvantaged children only if they have
access to good teaching, small classes and a curriculum that prepares them to
reach high standards. In its 1999
report, Testing, Teaching, and Learning,
the National Research Council concluded:
“ In our view, standards-based policies can
affect student
learning only if they are tied directly to efforts to build the capacity
of teachers and administrators to improve instruction” (p.3).
This will happen only if resources
are made available to help states and districts increase the supply of highly
qualified teachers, provide rewards and incentives to such teachers to teach in
schools with greater needs, ensure that teachers at high-poverty schools will
have access to professional development programs that have proven successful,
reduce class size in these schools, and ensure that they have up-to-date
curriculum materials.
The Bush proposal pays scant
attention to these needs. Nor, despite
the three-decade struggle in Texas to redress inequities in school finance,
does the Bush Administration demonstrate an awareness of the vast disparities
in school funding that still exist in many states-disparities that almost always harm disadvantaged
children. The Bush proposal does not
call upon states to level the playing field as a condition of receiving federal
funds.
As long as federal resources are
kept at a low level and the federal government does not insist that states deal
with the maldistribution of resources within their own systems, public
education in this nation will continue to be marked by a denial of equality of
opportunity.