Governors Offer Five-Year Plan for Upgrading Schools

The nation’s governors Saturday issued a broad five-year plan for upgrading public education, which proposes giving local schools greater autonomy--if they can turn out better-trained graduates.

But for school districts that do not respond to repeated evidence of failure, the plan would propose allowing the state itself to intervene to provide education to children for as long as necessary.

“The governors are ready for some old-fashioned horse-trading,” said Republican Gov. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, head of the National Governors’ Assn., which officially opens its annual summer meeting at this Atlantic island resort today. “We’ll regulate less, if schools and school districts will produce better results.”

The report, “Time for Results,” stresses that this more flexible approach would require formulating clearer goals and standards for educational achievement. And to go along with this stress on the bottom line, the report urges acceptance of greater accountability for ultimate results by the local school systems.

At a press conference, Alexander, the driving force behind this bipartisan, yearlong educational initiative by the nation’s governors, said: “We’re not ready to bargain away minimum standards that some states are just now meeting. But we have learned that real excellence can’t be imposed from a distance.”

Among the more significant recommendations made by the seven task forces--each headed by a governor--that produced the 171-page report:

--Widening the choices for parents in picking public schools for their children, including the option of sending high school juniors and seniors to accredited public colleges.

--Restructuring school management to give teachers and administrators more authority on budgets, and on allocation of time and selection of staff and curriculum material, in return for teachers accepting greater accountability for the results.

--Enhancing the role of teachers by making their work environment more professional, offering chances for raising earnings and increasing opportunities for decision-making.

--Creating machinery for state intervention to provide for education of children in cases of “educational bankruptcy,” where school districts fail to respond to repeated evidence of failure.

--Stepping up assistance to low-income and other “at-risk” students from infancy through graduation, by greater coordination of school efforts with programs offered by community and religious organizations and other private and public agencies.

--Emphasizing efforts, such as demonstrations of new equipment and group purchasing, to get more results out of the funds being spent on technological aids to instruction such as computers.

The governors’ report represents the latest in a series of manifestoes issued by government commissions and various other agencies in the last three years that offer prescriptions for reviving the nation’s faltering school systems. The most recent of these was the study released last May by the Carnegie Forum on Education and the Economy, which focused on raising the level of teaching through such approaches as creating a national teacher certification board and strengthening teacher preparation.

New Jersey Republican Gov. Thomas H. Kean, who helped draft the Carnegie report, said he hoped that the governors would endorse its recommendations, “at least in principle.”

Threat From Overseas

Most of the previous reform efforts were sparked in large part by declining test scores and similar academic evidence. But the governors also had a more pragmatic and political motive--the damage done to the U.S. economy as a result of difficulty in competing against highly skilled work forces overseas.

Citing one study which showed that U.S. eighth-graders’ skills in mathematics rated ninth among 12 major industrialized nations, Alexander said that “more than anything it is the threat to the jobs of the people who elect us” that impelled the governors to launch their education project.

Their report acknowledges the importance of previous work done in the field and calls for closer ties with professional educators and others working toward the objective of improving the schools.

And a number of educational leaders, including Education Secretary William J. Bennett, National Education Assn. President Mary Hatwood Futrell, American Federation of Teachers President Al Shanker and Lewis Branscomb, chairman of the panel that drafted the Carnegie report, are scheduled to participate in discussion of the “Time for Results” report at the three-day conference here.

Gives Impetus to Reform

In the meantime, the main significance of the governors’ effort probably is the promise it makes of sustained political leadership at the state level to help carry out reform objectives.

Arkansas Democratic Gov. Bill Clinton conceded that he had “bad dreams” that the burgeoning educational reform movement might fade “like the Edsel and the Hula Hoop.” To prevent that, Clinton, the next chairman of the governors’ association, pledged to continue to monitor progress in the area.

The heads of the various task forces that produced the report did not seek the formal approval of their fellow governors for their recommendations. “We have not tried to develop a consensus on every issue as we do when we speak as an association to the President or the Congress,” Alexander explained. “We hope (the report) will be used to build the consensus that counts--in states, in school districts and in individual school buildings.”