President Sees Bright Future for Education : But Byrd Says Schools Weren’t Reagan Priority

President Reagan maintained Saturday that, as U.S. schools reopen this month, prospects for education are “brighter than they have been for two decades,” but Senate Majority Leader Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.) replied that “this White House has never had a real commitment to education.”

Frequently colliding views on the merits of the Administration’s approach to education were aired in Reagan’s regular weekly radio broadcast and in the Democratic response, delivered by Byrd. Despite election-year differences on methods, the two agreed that the nation’s future progress depends on the quality of today’s education.

Since 1980, Reagan said, test scores and school attendance have improved, while the number of high school dropouts has decreased. He called it “a genuine grass-roots accomplishment” that “proves the solution to problems is not to throw money at them, but to come up with common sense answers and start applying them.”

‘Sympathetic Ear’

Dropping an oblique testimonial for Vice President George Bush, the Republican presidential nominee who has said he wants to be an “education President,” Reagan said that he and Bush “have been there with a sympathetic ear and a helping hand.”

“But we’ve only just begun,” Reagan said. “Far too many Americans are graduating from schools without the skills they will need to prosper and the knowledge they’ll need to grow as adults. . . .

“The education our children need is the ability to read, write and reason as well as any student in any country in the world. . . . The nation needs it as well if we’re going to prosper and grow.”

Reagan said he believed children should be instructed in “the best that has been known and said,” but added that curriculum decisions are up to school districts, because “the final arbiter of what a child should learn is not the state, but the family and the community.”

Byrd argued that Democrats have tried vainly for seven years to “educate the Administration about the value of education,” but “the Administration hasn’t done its homework.”

‘Not Teaching ... Skills’

Even though “America’s future economic prosperity depends on having the best educated work force in the world,” Byrd said, 40% of engineering students graduating from U.S. colleges and universities today are foreign born. He said this is “because our schools are not teaching our children the math and science skills they need for our new high-tech economy.”

Although this point has been made repeatedly, Byrd said, “nothing has been done by the White House to link America’s economic future to rebuilding our nation’s educational system.” He said the White House version of the traditional “three R’s” amounts to “rhetoric, reductions and retrenchment.”

Byrd maintained that the Administration’s record for educating the 23 million Americans who are believed to be functionally illiterate is “completely blank,” although “these illiterate Americans are the very Americans who can make the difference if America is to stay No. 1.”