Some of the costs of doing education business with Washington

Education Sector:

Excerpt from Mikhail Zinshteyn's article:

As the Senate moves forward with Sen. Tom Harkin's (D-Iowa) bill to overhaul U.S. K-12 education, with a greater emphasis coming on the side of local control and funding flexibility, states are still shouldering federal expectations that aren't expected to go away any time soon.

Here are two education funding obligations states have to the federal government -- even as the country moves beyond NCLB -- and one way for states to increase its funding flexibility.

One obligation to have persistently earned the ire of education advocates is test funding, with repeated critiques coming down on "billions" spent on assessments and test preparation. Sure, billions are being allocated, but it's a drop in the bucket compared to overall education spending.

Before NCLB, most states already had some form of student assessment in place. The 2002 law mandated no fewer than nine grades be monitored for student proficiency and improvement -- a six grade jump from what was required previously. The costs of implementing, issuing, grading, and analyzing those assessments makes up a soupcon of total education spending.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at October 23, 2011 1:49 AM
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