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At the same time that school funding and teacher pay are virtually frozen, school costs and the demands on schools, teachers, and students are increasing in unprecedented ways. The state government, with the blessing of most educators and their union, passed laws for higher academic standards, stricter teacher licensure and more teacher mentoring. These laws improve accountability and increase the value of the education profession. However, schools are forced to absorb the costs of these laws because they were enacted without funding increases to pay for them.
The federal government has imposed the so-called No Child Left Behind law on schools, an expensive testing program that it is not willing to adequately fund. The law requires an unnecessary regimen of standardized testing and economic penalties for schools that do not score at a certain level. This takes education out of the hands of the people who work with children in the classroom and puts it in the hands of federal bureaucrats, politicians, and for-profit testing companies. And the tests are expensive. The end result could be takeover of local schools by the government or private education companies, and in the meantime, the law assures that schools will struggle financially to pay for the punitive measures the law forces on them.
All of this together means our schools are expected to do more than ever and are forced to fund new programs with budgets that are already stretched too thin to maintain existing programs and services.
Posted July 9, 2004