A RAND Corporation study applauds the progress states have made since the implementation of NCLB but also argues that the extent of the achievement gap and the complications that arise in assessing and setting standards among states often bring more harm than good to the students the law intends to help. RAND concludes that ensuring a high level of literacy for all students is a "tremendous challenge" and that "simply mandating standards and assessments is not going to guarantee success."

While most of the provisions in NCLB address elementary-level students, early in his second term President Bush turned his attention to high school reform.

The Administration has used the power of the White House bully pulpit to publicize the need for high school reform, citing estimates that overall, just 68 out of 100 ninth-graders receive a high school diploma on time. The average on-time graduation rate for minority students is worse.

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings has made strong arguments about the need to improve our high schools to keep our workforce competitive and reduce the social and economic costs of millions of students failing to complete their high school education each year.

But the Bush Administration's High School Initiative has not received support in Congress.

The President's FY06 budget proposal included $1.5 billion for the Administration's High School Initiative, paid for by cuts of $1.33 billion from college-readiness and vocational/career preparation programs under the Carl D. Perkins Vocational and Technical Education Act. Congressional budget proposals have restored much of this Perkins funding and eliminated the funding for the President's new High School Initiative.

Raising the quality of education and student performance naturally translates into raising the quality of educators. President Bush, along with researchers and policymakers alike, has emphasized the integral role of teachers in setting high standards and achieving them. NCLB mandates that all teachers must be "highly qualified" by 2005-06. But because NCLB allows states to define what counts as "highly qualified," assessing teacher quality on a national scale has proven difficult.

To help increase the pool of qualified teachers in the coming years, the Bush Administration has proposed a new $500 million initiative, the Teacher Incentive Fund. The program would reward 100,000 teachers, especially those in low-income schools, up to $5,000 a year based on effectiveness.

Performance-based compensation for teachers has been a controversial topic. The National Education Association, for instance, supports bonuses and incentives for teachers in high-need or hard-to-teach subject areas but disapproves of linking pay to student achievement, which usually depends heavily on test scores.

President Bush proposed using the Teacher Incentive Fund as a replacement for the $68.3 million Teacher Quality Enhancement funds, whose services he says are sustainable through other federal programs. Congress, however, decided to keep the Teacher Quality Enhancement program at a reduced funding level and to provide $100 million, one-fifth of Bush's original request, for the Teacher Incentive fund.

Bush's budget also allocates $2.92 billion to Teacher Quality State Grants, the same amount that the program received last year.

We are also giving parents information about the quality of their children's schools, and the choice to take their children out of a school that is not meeting state standards.

NCLB sets out specific conditions that allow parents to transfer their children from one public school to another if the child's current school fails to meet performance standards mandated by NCLB. While there are more and more schools falling into the category where parents can move their children, relatively few parents have tried or succeeded in getting their children transferred to a better-performing school.

The President's FY06 budget proposal requested $50 million for a Choice Incentive Fund that would provide competitive grants to states and districts for letting parents transfer their children to a "higher-performing" school of their choice, including private and charter schools. The program, intended to ensure that children have equal educational opportunities regardless of economic background, is a spin-off of a federal program in Washington, DC, that was implemented in 2003 and provides $7,500 for low-income students to attend private school.

Since 2001, we have coupled these policies with dramatically increased Federal funding for education�a 49% increase for elementary and secondary education; a 39% increase in support for teachers; and a 52% increase in funding for Title I schools, which serve the poorest students.

NCLB has funneled substantial federal funds into the nation's school systems since its passage in 2001, but President Bush's FY 2006 education budget request of $56.58 billion for administering educational programs represented a cut of $530 million, or nearly a 1 percent cut. Of the 150 total programs that the President's FY06 budget proposal slated for elimination, 48 programs, representing $4.3 billion, were in the Education Department.

While President Bush's budget proposal would maintain the current level of funding for K-12 education through FY 2006, over time the money would fall dramatically, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. In FY 2006 K-12 programs would receive 90 percent of their funding, but in the next five years, these programs would face an $11.5 billion reduction. By 2010, the President's proposed budget would fund education as a whole at 14 percent below the 2005 level—a $28.5 billion reduction.

The President's education budget also proposes far less in actual allocations than levels set by Congressional authorizing committees. While the President's proposed NCLB funding level of $24 billion for FY 2006 does represent a $315 million increase, this amount is actually $12 billion less than what Congress had authorized. Similarly, the proposed $603 million boost for Title I grants to low-income schools nevertheless falls short of the authorized amount.

Another area of contention, especially regarding education funding, is the federal commitment to funding added costs for special education.

When Congress passed IDEA in 1975, it mandated that the federal government make a 40 percent commitment towards the cost of educating children with disabilities. While the $11.1 billion Bush requested for Special Education programs in his FY 2006 budget is $500 million more than the FY 2005 funding level, it nevertheless falls $3.5 billion short of the authorized amount.