April 26, 2005

Texas Officials Shrug Off Fine Over Bush Law

The authorities in Texas yesterday shrugged off a fine that the federal Department of Education has imposed on the state because it was late last year in notifying schools and districts whether they had reached student achievement benchmarks under President Bush's No Child Left Behind law.

While promising to notify schools in a timely fashion this year, the education commissioner of Texas, Shirley Neeley, said, "Classrooms and teachers will not be harmed by this fine."

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings announced the $444,282 fine on Friday. It appears to be the largest fine imposed on any state since Mr. Bush signed the federal law in 2002.

Ms. Spellings, who was Mr. Bush's top education adviser when he was governor of Texas in the 1990's, said in a terse letter that she would withhold the money from the more than $1 billion the state receives in federal education financing, arguing that the six-week delay was unwarranted.

The fine concludes one skirmish in a broader conflict between Washington and Texas, the home state of Mr. Bush and Ms. Spellings.

In the dispute, which has nettled the Bush administration, Texas has refused to apply a provision that limits the number of students with learning disabilities who can be exempted from regular standardized tests.

Last year, Washington said that only 1 percent of disabled students could be given easier alternative tests, but Texas officials allowed schools to administer the alternative examination to about 9 percent of its students.

As a result, hundreds of Texas schools' standardized test scores were higher last year than they would have otherwise been, allowing the schools to meet the federal achievement benchmark known as adequate yearly progress.

Ms. Spellings has not yet announced what sanction, if any, Texas will face for defying the federal law.

That law requires states to identify which schools have met its achievement benchmarks before the opening of fall classes each year, which in Texas last year occurred in mid-August.

But because of the dispute with Washington over the testing of disabled students, Texas did not identify the schools until September.