Federal judge dismisses Connecticut's NCLB challenge

 A federal judge has dismissed a closely watched challenge to President Bush’s signature education law, No Child Left Behind (NCLB), ruling that the State of Connecticut failed to prove that federal officials had forced it to spend its own money to comply with the law’s requirements. NCLB contains language known as the unfunded mandates provision that says no state or school district can be forced to spend its money on expenses the federal government has not covered.

In 2005, Connecticut accused Education Secretary Margaret Spellings of violating that prohibition in directives governing the testing of students with limited English proficiency or disabilities. In a ruling issued late Monday, April 28, 2008, Judge Mark R. Kravitz of Federal District Court in New Haven wrote that although the state had provided estimates of what it would cost to comply with those testing guidelines, “nowhere did it state that the federal funding was insufficient to cover those costs.” Read the article in The New York Times online.