Kerry Accuses Bush of Plans to Cut Education Funding

Democratic presidential hopeful John F. Kerry hammered President Bush on Thursday for proposing cuts to federal programs that ease access to college for students from low-income families.

Kerry’s attack was the latest variation on his broader argument that Bush had failed to provide enough federal money to sustain the education reforms that he signed into law two years ago.

To illustrate his case, the Massachusetts senator campaigned Thursday at a local high school where students told him how the college-preparation programs had helped them.

Kerry faulted Bush and his supporters for portraying themselves as “trying to help kids and help education” even as they tried to cut those programs.

“There’s such a disconnect between the truth and their talk, and what’s really happening to young people,” said Kerry, who for months has fought charges of inconsistencies in his own record on education and other issues.

Kerry’s visit to the school was one of a string of recent stops designed to keep his campaign focused on schools, healthcare and jobs at a time when Bush was immersed in the crises in Iraq.

Since Monday, the presumptive Democratic nominee has touted his record on civil rights and affirmative action -- themes with potential appeal to African Americans and other minority voters.

In an interview Thursday with the Philadelphia affiliate of Univision, a Spanish-language television network, Kerry said he would “guarantee the continued enforcement of the set-asides, the minority-business funding, the affirmative action efforts, the procurement programs that empower people to be able to achieve wealth, to do better in business, and to break into the marketplace.”

At Philadelphia’s Edison High School where he campaigned Thursday, 97% of the students enrolled are Latino or black. In a speech to hundreds of cheering students on bleachers in the gymnasium, he framed his support for more college preparation programs as partly a matter of race.

“In America, only 18% of African Americans have a college degree, and only about 14% of Latinos have a college degree, but we need to change that,” he said. “We need to make certain that every young person who wants to go to college can go to college in the United States of America.”

Minority voters are a central part of the Democratic Party base, and Kerry’s hopes for winning the White House depend partly on his success in mobilizing them in Philadelphia, Detroit, Miami and other cities in the most hotly contested states.

His criticism of Bush on Thursday stemmed from the president’s proposed cuts in federal spending on GEAR UP, an acronym for Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs. The programs help low-income students prepare for college and navigate the admissions and financial-aid process with tutoring, mentoring, college visits and workshops.

Kerry, however, told the students that it was “inconsistent” for Bush to tell Americans, “We’re going to leave no child behind,” and then “make choices to cut programs like this, or to starve them so that they can’t do the full job.”

Kerry, who has proposed a $200-million increase in spending on GEAR UP, said Bush last year had proposed a $70-million cut.

Steve Schmidt, a spokesman for Bush’s reelection campaign, said annual funding for the college-preparation programs has risen from $295 million to $298 million since Bush took office in 2001.

According to the GEAR UP website, the administration has proposed freezing the program’s budget at $298 million in fiscal 2005.

Schmidt cited a rise in overall federal funding for education -- a total of 48% since Bush became president.

Kerry, he said, voted for the president’s signature No Child Left Behind education reforms, “but now attacks it daily on the campaign trail, not out of principle, but out of cold political calculation, and that is a consistent theme of the Kerry campaign.”

From Philadelphia, Kerry returned to Washington for a Senate budget vote that wound up not occurring.

From there, he flew to Massachusetts, where he spoke in Cambridge to guests at a fundraiser at the home of Swanee Hunt, the ambassador to Austria under President Clinton. The event raised $400,000 for Kerry’s campaign and $400,000 for the Democratic National Committee, the candidate said.

Beyond education, Republicans also attacked Kerry on Thursday for telling Associated Press this week that he was open to nominating anti-abortion judges as long as that did not lead to the Supreme Court overturning the landmark 1973 ruling that made abortion legal.

The remarks by Kerry, an abortion rights supporter, led the New York Post to run a story under the headline, “His Latest Flip Flop: Abortion.” The Republican National Committee sent the article to the news media in an e-mail.

Kerry spokesman David Wade said it was “absurd” to accuse Kerry of waffling on abortion.

Although Bush “has tried to pack the courts with right-wing ideological judges,” Wade said, Kerry would appoint Supreme Court justices “who will uphold the right to privacy and protect the right to choose.”