Tucson, AZ--- Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva, a member of the Education and Workforce Committee, comments on the public appearances made by President Bush today to tout his administration’s work on education. He releases the following statement:
“For the past five years, the Bush administration has undermined the success of the No Child Left Behind Act by consistently underfunding it and botching its implementation. Today’s talks by President Bush are an insult to the American people, especially our students and teachers.
“Since the No Child Left Behind law was enacted in 2002, the Bush administration and Republican-controlled Congress have provided $40.4 billion less to schools than they promised to provide when they wrote and passed the law. And a spending bill now pending in the House of Representatives would provide $16.4 billion less than promised for the law in 2007, which would raise No Child Left Behind’s cumulative underfunding to $56.8 billion.
“That lost funding could have been used to improve teacher effectiveness, develop better assessments for students, provide additional opportunities for after-school tutoring, and meet a number of other important needs.
“The Bush Department of Education has also botched the implementation of the law since 2002 by offering confusing and sometime contradictory guidance to states. Most recently, the Education Department has proposed regulatory changes that could make it harder to determine whether minority children are being left behind.
"The President needs to come clean with the American people about his failures in education policy, and stop this false promotion that his Administration is improving the education of our children.”
