Bennett Offers Revised School Voucher Plan

Education Secretary William J. Bennett offered a revised version of his controversial voucher proposal on Thursday as part of his suggested overhaul of the $3.9-billion remedial education program.

Even though Bennett called the new vouchers “compensatory education certificates” and said they differed substantially from previously proposed versions, members of the Senate Labor and Human Resources subcommittee on education, arts and humanities noted past opposition to the vouchers.

“You’re coming up with something people are calling a closet voucher, a backdoor voucher, a side door voucher,” said Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.).

Bennett proposed last year that parents of poor children be given vouchers they could use to pay for private school tuition, even if the schools did not offer special remedial classes. Congress rejected the proposal.

Defending the new proposal, Bennett said it is more limited than last year’s version.

The vouchers could be used only for remedial services, provided through what are known as Chapter 1 programs, and only if approved by the local school district.

‘Right Can Be Forfeited’

“Putting it baldly, it doesn’t seem to me a school that starts with the right or responsibility of educating a child should keep that right or responsibility absolutely,” Bennett said. “That right can be forfeited by failure.

“If a school isn’t doing a good job they run the risk of losing those kids to someone who will do a good job,” he said.

But Sen. Lowell P. Weicker Jr. (R-Conn.) said those schools should not be punished. “If there are failings within the public education system, why aren’t we correcting those failings?”

The Administration has requested $4.1 billion for Chapter 1 programs in the budget year that begins Oct. 1.