Iowa Education Leader
A policy and advocacy update from the Iowa Department of Education * Ted Stilwill, Director * February 19, 2004

Many school leaders were able to travel to Des Moines earlier this week to visit with US Secretary of Education Rod Paige and hear his comments regarding No Child Left Behind. I greatly appreciate your willingness to make the trip, as well as the Secretary's commitment to meeting with Iowa educators as he promised last summer. A special note of thanks to Superintendents Greg Robinson (Urbandale), Eric Witherspoon (Des Moines) and Tom Narak (Indianola), who actually extended the invitation to Secretary Paige, and to Senator Chuck Grassley and his staff, who helped coordinate the visit.

Several persistent points of confusion emerged during the visit that I would, again, like to clarify. Secretary Paige repeated that a) Iowa has $35+ million in unspent federal funds that can be used to implement NCLB, and b) NCLB is fully funded.

The "unspent federal funds" myth was started by federal officials in January, essentially telling all 50 states: stop complaining about NCLB funding, because you all have billions in unspent federal funds (Iowa's portion was said to be $39 million). That allegation was not correct, and most state education agencies, as well as the National Conference of State Legislatures, quickly and appropriately sought to correct the record.

I immediately sent a letter to Secretary Paige that very specifically stated the information was wrong and needed to be retracted. Although federal officials didn't retract their accusations, they at least stopped repeating them -- or so I thought. It is unfortunate that Secretary Paige repeated the erroneous claims while he was in Iowa. For the record and your information, I've attached our response to Secretary Paige, the response from the Michigan State Board of Education, and a national perspective from NCSL.

The other point of confusion regarding whether NCLB is fully funded recurs because the USDE has, in fact, over the past several years increased its overall federal funding for education. The portion they say is allocated toward NCLB, also has increased. Those increases, however do not fully fund NCLB. We anticipate that while testing, data collection, and reporting costs most likely will be funded, we will not receive the funding necessary to build capacity and help teachers enable a much higher proportion of students to succeed. This requires additional professional development and specialized interventions such as summer school or other academic supports.

On a related note, The USDE announced today they will be offering new recommendations for testing of LEP/ELL students, and reporting of their achievement results. We do not yet have the details about the new recommendations, but will be sure to share them with you as soon as we receive the appropriate guidelines from USDE.