April 8, 2008

After contentious debate on an omnibus-omnibus budget bill, (otherwise known as a garbage bill), in both the House and Senate which combines finance and policy in every major area of government into one huge bill for each chamber, the withdrawal of Minnesota from No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was gutted. It remains a shell of what passed the House committee. 

HOUSE:

In the House, Rep. Jeremy Kalin (D-North Branch) offered a two-part amendment that guts the NCLB withdrawal. The DFL majority are having it both ways. They give themselves political cover to destroy the amendment without actually stripping it out of the bill.  They will claim to vote to withdraw from NCLB while assuring that it won't happen. 

The first part of the amendment requires both the Commissioners of Education and Finance to certify that if the state withdraws from NCLB, the school districts would "realize a net financial gain."   Though this sounds reasonable, it is very difficult to certify unless the legislature requires that the Department and all the school districts calculate their myriad implementation costs.  The 2004 legislative auditor's report on NCLB was not able to or decided not to accurately calculate the implementation costs, but the report did give some clues: 

"These costs cannot be estimated with precision, but it is quite possible that NCLB's new costs will exceed the increase in NCLB revenues." 

"It is plausible that new, NCLB-related costs will exceed the $42 million (inflation-adjusted) increase in annual revenues that Minnesota is expected to receive under NCLB, but this will be unclear until school districts proceed further with NCLB implementation. In a statewide survey, less than 3 percent of Minnesota superintendents said that they expected their school district's share of the increased federal revenues to cover the cost of new spending required by NCLB." (Emphasis added.) 

Even if the loss of federal revenue would not be mitigated by the savings in implementation and administrative costs of NCLB, this feigned concern for the potential loss of federal NCLB funding is laughable considering their profligate pork-barrel spending proposals in every area of the budget, including education.  Governor Pawlenty rightly just vetoed enough unnecessary projects out of the bonding bill to cover the entire loss of federal funds from NCLB were that actually to happen without the state realizing any cost savings for withdrawing. 

The other part of the amendment requires that districts implement the costly, bureaucratic and subjective growth-based value added system described in our last alert.  This will only add much more monitoring of private student data. It will also  increase the use of subjective measures to hide whether there actually is academic achievement, it becomes another complicated and expensive mandate for schools to implement, and it confuses parents and the public about real academic achievement. In addition, the subjective, intrusive, and potentially coercive survey of students' "self-reported sense of school safety, engagement in school, and the quality of students' relationship with teachers, administrators, and other students" remains in the House bill, despite opposition from both EdWatch and Education Minnesota.     

The requirement for this complicated value added system is especially unfortunate in language designed to free Minnesota school districts from the costly and bureaucratic federal mandates of NCLB.  Rep. Kalin acknowledged help in drafting this freedom squashing amendment from Representatives Carlos Mariani (D-St. Paul) and Mindy Greiling (D-Roseville), the chairman of the House Education Policy and chairwoman of the K-12 Finance Committees, respectively.  Rep. Mariani has always opposed withdrawal from NCLB.  Rep. Greiling's position is apparently still continuing to "evolve" if she helped write this language that essentially guts withdrawal.   

Although Representatives Sondra Erickson (R-Princeton) and John Berns (R-Minnetonka) asked some good questions showing problems with the Kalin amendment, the defense of the Garofalo amendment to withdraw was disappointingly tepid from proponents on both sides of the aisle.  No one asked for a roll call vote and when the outcome of the voice vote was in doubt in even the mind of Speaker Kelliher, no one asked for an accurate count. 

Rep. Mark Olson (R-Big Lake) offered an amendment that also withdraws Minnesota from NCLB, but only after the commissioner of education is refused flexibility by the federal government to improve academic achievement using NCLB funds, but the state's own methods.  That was opposed on a bipartisan basis due to cost concerns of losing the federal funds, and it failed on a voice vote. 

SENATE:

On the Senate side, Senator Geoff Michel (R-Edina) offered an amendment to withdraw MN from NCLB identical to the Garofalo language passed by the House K-12 committee.   

When Senate Majority Leader Larry Pogemiller (D-Minneapolis), who supported the amendment as a means to repudiate President Bush, asked if this was a policy matter that ought to be taken up in a different bill, Senator Betsy Wergin (R-Princeton) rightly pointed out that the chairmen of both the Senate education policy and finance committees opposed this language on financial grounds and that school districts have been telling her and other senators for a long time that costs to implement NCLB are far outstripping income. 

Senator Pogemiller did allow the amendment, but sadly, it failed on a narrow roll call vote with 31 senators in support and 33 opposed as follows: 

Republicans voting FOR the amendment to withdraw from NCLB:

Day, Dille, Fischbach, Frederickson, Gerlach, Gimse, Hann, Ingebrigtsen

Jungbauer, Koch, Koering, Limmer, Michel, Ortman, Pariseau, Robling, Senjem

Vandeveer, Wergin  

Democrats voting FOR the amendment to withdraw from NCLB: 

Bakk, Bonoff, Chaudhary, Dahle, Doll, Higgins, Olson, M., Pogemiller, Prettner Solon, Rest, Skogen, Tomassoni 

Republicans voting AGAINST the amendment to withdraw from NCLB:

Olson, G. 

Democrats voting AGINST the amendment to withdraw from NCLB:

Anderson, Berglin, Betzold, Carlson, Clark, Cohen, Dibble, Erickson Ropes, Foley, Kubly, Langseth, Larson, Latz, Lourey, Lynch, Marty, Metzen, Moua, Murphy, Olseen, Pappas, Rummel, Saltzman, Saxhaug, Sheran, Sieben, Skoe, Sparks, Stumpf, Torres Ray, Vickerman, Wiger 

Senators not voting on this amendment:

Johnson (R), Rosen (R), Scheid (D) 

The legislative action on NCLB teaches us two important lessons:

1.      Legislators and other politicians on both sides of the aisle lack true conviction to liberate Minnesota school districts, teachers, and students from the tyrannical mandates of NCLB that are wasting millions of dollars and doing nothing to improve academic achievement.  This is especially true for Democrats who now control both chambers of the legislature and who have railed for years against NCLB.  Now that they have the chance to do something, they are pretending to support withdrawal while in fact gutting it, as in the House, or letting the amendment be defeated, as in the Senate.

2.      Ending NCLB must be an important election issue on both the state and federal levels.  The federal House version of the A-Plus legislation, co-sponsored by Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann and Congressmen John Kline and Jim Ramstad, is a much better way for states to decide their own educational destiny.