For all of this year’s debate about the future of testing, accountability, and other policy issues around the No Child Left Behind Act, virtually no one has brought up the question of how best to give out billions of dollars a year under the law.

Until 2001, debate over the allocation of funding often dominated efforts to revise the main federal K-12 law, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Members of Congress concentrated on how to distribute money to the point, sometimes, of overshadowing other policy discussions.

But that hasn’t been the case in the early work to reauthorize the No Child Left Behind law, the current version of the ESEA, even though the nearly 6-year-old law has dramatically shifted the distribution of money under the $12.8 billion Title I program for disadvantaged students. The changes have benefited the nation’s largest cities, as well as suburban areas with pockets of poverty.

“The increase in targeting of federal aid in NCLB is a success story that nobody knows about,” said Michael Dannenberg, the director of the education policy program for the Washington-based New America Foundation. In 2001, Mr. Dannenberg worked as an aide to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat who chairs the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, and who advocated a formula that helped districts with large concentrations or numbers of students eligible for Title I services. ...

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