Two Very Different Questions

Assuming that schools can simply buy an inexpensive and 'proven' teaching program runs counter to the dismal record of 'one size fits all' reforms.

By William J. Mathis

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I want it to mean—neither more nor less."

"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."

"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master—that’s all."

Lewis Carroll’s conversation above from Through the Looking Glass holds meaning for American education today. For so it is in the Wonderland of competing cost claims about the No Child Left Behind Act. Federal officials and defenders of the law say it is fully funded, one recent example being an essay in these pages by Paul E. Peterson and Martin R. West, both of Harvard University and the journal Education Next. ( "Money Has Not Been Left Behind," Commentary, March 17, 2004.) State officials, meanwhile, already strapped with state deficits and funding lawsuits, sharpen their pencils and compute apoplexy- inducing numbers. No Child Left Behind Act costs often mean just what the different speakers see them to mean. "Fully funded" is tossed around with markedly malleable meaning.

Whether the states or the federal government are to be masters of educational goals and costs is a question that cuts across partisan lines. Liberal and conservative state legislators are fomenting what the Associated Press has described as a "rebellion" against the No Child Left Behind legislation. States point out that federal aid to education is only 7.4 percent of total spending, and that the amount for the No Child Left Behind provisions is less than...