NEA on Education Funding:
Restore/Increase Funding to Help Ensure Great Public Schools for Every Child

• Improving the education of our nation's children should and must be a much higher priority.
  
  
• America's public schools are struggling to provide quality services to increased numbers of disadvantaged students and students with special needs, while also implementing accountability and testing mandates.
  
  
• Programs such as Title I, IDEA, and Pell Grants are already underfunded and cannot meet the needs of eligible students.
  
  
• In the 2005-06 school year, almost 11,000 public schools had already failed to make Adequate Yearly Progress for two or more years under NCLB provisions, and thus faced federal sanctions. These schools will face even greater challenges in the coming year as testing and teacher quality requirements go into full effect. In fact the 2007-08 school year is the first year of mandated science testing.
  
  
• The federal government is moving backwards, away from its commitment to provide 40 percent of the costs of providing special education services to students. Because of inadequate federal support, schools are often unable to provide the full spectrum of services mandated under IDEA. In addition, administrators must sometimes cut other critical programs to fund mandated IDEA services.
  
  
• An increase is also needed to ensure adequate resources for higher education programs such as Pell Grants. As public universities, long seen as the "affordable" option, have to raise their tuition to make up for severe state budget cutbacks, the ability for low-income individuals to pay for college becomes an even greater challenge. When the Pell Grant program was first created, the maximum grant for the poorest students covered 84 percent of the cost of a public four-year college. Today, it covers only 39 percent.
  

I need more info:

• NEA on Education Funding  
• Letters to Congress