New world demands new school-funding scheme

AS CONGRESS begins to debate the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act, our children are left waiting for the nation's leaders to stand up and provide a sound vision for their educational endeavors.

While standardized testing, teacher accountability and partisan rancor dominate the discussion, the actual reforms that need to take place continue to be muted by the unwillingness and ineptitude of our leaders to change the direction of the conversation and provide innovative solutions to our current educational crisis.

The time has come for the federal government to stop its irresponsible propensity of enacting unfunded mandates. In 2006, President Bush called for $22.8 billion in new initiatives, yet asked the U.S. Congress to fund only $13.3 billion of them, leaving the state governments to pick up the bill for close to $10 billion.

Sen. Edward Kennedy, the initial sponsor of the legislation, said, "The tragedy is that these long overdue reforms are finally in place, but the funds are not."

The federal government has to take a more active role in funding the education necessary for our children. How can our federal government continue to ignore the fact that 70 percent of our inner-city children can't read or write at a basic level?
The current funding mechanism provided to educate our youth is fundamentally flawed. Using property taxes to fund education has caused a statewide property-tax crisis, which has affected every family in the commonwealth. Reforming the current funding mechanism would go a long way toward addressing the inequality in education that property tax-based funds foster.

In a few months, a study that was commissioned by the General Assembly will be releasing information that will identify the cost of education per child in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

It's called "The Costing Out Study," and it will determine the actual cost of educating our youth, particularly children in poverty, English-language learners and children with special needs. We need to use the study as the impetus to create a more equitable funding mechanism for educating our youth, which would also alleviate the property-tax burden for all Pennsylvanians.

The onus of providing an education should be shared by the federal, state and municipal governments. The federal and state governments should take on the majority of educational funding, while local municipalities should act solely as a supplemental contributor. This would inevitably alleviate high property taxes in Pennsylvania, while creating equality in education across the commonwealth.

The debate over the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind has provided a unique opportunity to discuss the necessary changes in our educational system.

The time has come for us to revise the way we educate our children. The base of our current educational structure is a pre-industrial design that has grown stagnant. The world changed dramatically in the second half of the 20th century - and our visions for education should accommodate this phenomenon to ensure that our children are prepared for the demands of the modern, more expanded world.

THIS EXPANDED view must be reinforced with a renewed emphasis on the arts, languages and various after-school programs that foster a heightened intellectual blueprint for every child. However, before we can discuss how to educate the children of the 21st century, we must find adequate and equitable funding mechanisms that actually ensure no child is left behind.