Covering a speech by President Bush in Latrobe, Penn., Raymond Hernandez of The New York Times this morning writes, “Mr. Bush said the No Child Left Behind education law he pushed through Congress had bolstered student achievement with the rigorous academic targets it requires schools to meet.”
A few paragraphs later, Hernandez provides a response from the Kerry campaign:
Phil Singer, a spokesman for Mr. Kerry, repeated a longstanding complaint of many Democrats who supported the education measure: that the Bush administration had failed to finance the program fully. Mr. Singer said the administration had provided $27 billion less than it pledged when the law was passed by Congress in 2001.
That view is reinforced later in the story by Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell, who says, “The president reneged on his funding proposal.”
Wondering who’s right? So were we. But that’s all we get on the subject of No Child Left Behind from Hernandez’s dispatch. Never does the reporter step in to tell us whether the Democrats’ allegations are accurate.
So we looked into it ourselves. The Kerry campaign is correct that, when funding from each individual year is combined, the Bush administration funded No Child Left Behind by roughly $27 billion less than the maximum amount the law originally authorized. But it’s not uncommon for programs ultimately to receive less funding in the appropriations process than the maximum amount agreed upon in the original legislation. Whether one agrees with Ed Rendell that this means that “the president ‘reneged on his funding proposal,’ is a matter of semantics,” says Kevin Carey, a senior policy analyst at the non-partisan Education Trust.
So, as often occurs with political disputes, the truth lies somewhere between the competing claims of the campaign camps. But that’s no excuse for reporters not taking the time to explain that to readers.
–Zachary Roth
Zachary Roth is a contributing editor to The Washington Monthly. He also has written for The Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, Slate, Salon, The Daily Beast, and Talking Points Memo, among other outlets.