James Peyser and Robert Costrell, Education Next
Spring 2004
Last week, I commented on the weakness of an Ohio analysis that purported to estimate the state's cost of "complying" with the No Child Left Behind act. (See http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=134#1661.) I also steered readers to two other new analyses. Each deserves further comment. The latest (spring 2004) issue of Education Next contains - along with much else of interest - a super essay by James Peyser (who chairs the Massachusetts state board of education) and Robert Costrell (chief economist in that state's Office of Administration and Finance) that refutes the widely held view that NCLB is an "unfunded mandate." Rather, say Peyser and Costrell, the "studies" that estimate absurdly high costs of implementing NCLB arise from the same faulty analytic approach as contemporary school-finance equalization lawsuits. In particular, they rely on a flawed and "outdated notion that education can be reduced to a simple production function between input and output." Any conscientious effort to estimate the cost of boosting student achievement must be approached in a very different way, and efforts to calculate NCLB's costs must be carefully distinguished from the education-reform efforts (and spending increases) that virtually every state and district was already undertaking. Conclude Peyser and Costrell: "[I]t would appear that spending in Massachusetts is adequate to achieve the NCLB student achievement mandate." Nationally, they say, the critics are also wrong. The increases underway in federal education spending either "fully cover the fiscal gap" or "come pretty close - especially when combined with state-level spending increases." You can find the article (along with other preview articles from the spring issue of Ed Next) online at http://www.educationnext.org/20042/index.html.
