Education Dept. Analyst’s Report Called Callous : U.S. School Aid for Disabled Questioned

Federal funding for educating the poor and the handicapped is “counterproductive” and has “selfishly drained resources from the normal school population,” a newly hired Education Department analyst wrote in a report disclosed Tuesday.

The policy consultant, Eileen M. Gardner, contended in a 31-page study for the Heritage Foundation drafted in 1983 that “man cannot . . . within one short life span . . . raise the lower to meet the higher.”

“The only way the performance of the lower can be made equal to that of the higher is artificially to constrain and pervert the performance of the higher, thereby defeating the purpose of existence, which is to evolve upward,” Gardner wrote.

“In a misguided effort to help a few, the many have been injured,” she added.

Report Denounced

Sen. Lowell P. Weicker Jr. (R-Conn.), the father of a child with Down’s syndrome, denounced the report at a contentious education subcommittee hearing attended by Education Secretary William J. Bennett. Weicker told Bennett, who was testifying on his department’s budget and had not yet read the report, that he had “never seen such a callousness.”

Bennett defended his Monday hiring of Gardner, calling her a “thoughtful, sensible person.” He said Gardner, pending her formal appointment, will work in the Office of Educational Philosophy and Practice, a new department unit that he created to study the “whole range of education reform issues.”

But the secretary downplayed Gardner’s influence on department policy on handicapped programs, denying that she would head the new office. “I don’t think you should be flogging her in public,” he told Weicker.

Bennett himself fell under criticism almost immediately after his confirmation nine weeks ago when he said federal loan cuts would force some students to divest themselves of stereos, cars and beach vacations.

Conservative Think Tank

Gardner’s former employer, the Heritage Foundation, is a think tank that has provided the Reagan Administration with many studies supporting conservative policies.

Her report expressed a view that Bennett called “religious existentialism,” postulating that spiritual and genetic factors, rather than environmental influences such as poverty and prejudice, are primarily responsible for determining a person’s fate and that no amount of money can reverse the plight of the poor and the handicapped.

“When one blames his problems on external sources and thereby separates himself from a situation he has created . . . he becomes an ineffective malcontent,” the report contended.

Gardner argued further that special interest groups have persuaded Congress to fund federal programs for the poor and the handicapped and that this has “destroyed quality in education.”

Views Not ‘Irrational’

Bennett told the subcommittee that he did not believe that persons who hold such views are “irrational or crazy.”

Michael Landwehr, legislative analyst for the nonprofit Disability Rights and Education Defense Fund, said of the report: “It certainly opposes the best interests of disabled kids and brings up the notions of social worth, social Darwinism and survival of the fittest.

“That is what’s really scary: It seems like the lunatic fringe, but then you hear the Administration giving credence to these views.”

Weicker asked Bennett to have Gardner and John Uzzell, another new department appointee who, like Gardner, has advocated the abolition of the Education Department, to appear before the subcommittee today.