Proposed federal cuts leave Missouri children behind

The negative impact of No Child Left Behind just keeps growing with new funding cuts in federal programs for Missouri students.

Next year’s proposed federal cuts for Missouri include:

• 60 percent cut in the Reading First—a primary grade program to make sure all students can read
• 72 percent cut in Even Start—a preschool program for our most needy
• 11 percent cut in Migrant Education—at a time when our migrant student population is growing
• 44 percent cut in Education Technology—bringing technology progress in many schools to a halt
• 100 percent cut in Innovative Program Grants
• 33 percent cut in Safe and Drug Free Schools
• 4 percent cut in Special Education Preschool Programs

In addition to lack of funding, policy changes required by NCLB have negatively affected Missouri’s public schools. Since the mid 1990s and prior to NCLB, Missouri was one of the first states to require public reporting of student growth on the state assessment through an Annual Performance Report. Long before NCLB, Missouri required a school district report card that included data on growth in student achievement by school building. When NCLB was enacted, Missouri already had several years of data that showed it was closing achievement gaps and student achievement was moving in the right direction in most schools. Schools that weren’t moving in the right direction were offered assistance and resources to turn things around.

“NCLB caused Missouri to take two steps backward,” says DeeAnn Aull, MNEA Director of Programs and Public Relations. “This federal law forced the state to use a new and less effective public reporting system based on a preset goal. The new system was called Adequate Yearly Progress. Unfortunately, from the beginning it was clear that the AYP system was designed to eventually make it look like 95 percent of Missouri’s schools were failing by 2014. Instead of offering incentives to turn things around, most schools are left alone to deal with negative labels. Currently, this AYP labeling system is making public schools across America look like they are failing—when most are making significant progress in student achievement as measured on their state assessments. NCLB is clearly flawed and underfunded.”

sb, spring '08