An Education President?
The federal government’s proper role in education is more essential and more sophisticated than that of common scold, its only contribution of recent years. Teachers and all others in education know that. They would be thrilled to see either Vice President George Bush or Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis become what both say they would like to be: an education President.
Dukakis made his bid for the title with an idea for an extended pay-after-you-go student loan plan, although some school finance experts have raised questions about it. Bush has his own proposal for college tuition, and is advocating more money for Head Start programs and for schools that experiment with merit pay, year-round calendars and other reforms.
Certainly college students need more government help than they now get. Federal grants for the lowest-income students have diminished under the Reagan Administration, and and moderate- and low-income students who take out the current student loans often find themselves saddled with huge debts once they finish school. The federal government must also find a way to increase funds available for existing grant and loan programs.
The need is enormous, but so are the costs. The General Accounting Office estimates that in one recent year more than half of all low-income students who received funds known as the Pell Grants got no financial support from their parents, and 35% had no income at all. The grants simply aren’t large enough to give them the help that they need. But to increase the Pell Grants to cover all college expenses for students with no income instead of the 60% now covered would have cost $651 million during the 1986-87 school year.
Increasing the number of Pell Grants available could also help reduce the number of students who default on loans that they can’t handle. Another GAO study found the default rate about twice as high among students who get no financial help from parents as for those who get help. Reducing the number of loans in default, $1.3 billion in 1987 alone, would increase the government’s ability to guarantee loans to other deserving students.
There’s a role for the federal government in public-school education as well. Again, part of it is financial. More students are eligible to participate in the demonstrated successes of the Head Start program than actually can be enrolled. That program pays off so well in the long term in reducing later welfare costs and increasing incomes that it seems fiscally irresponsible not to give more children that start in life.
But there are leadership tasks, too. The federal government can help state and local education officials convene meetings of teachers to talk about techniques that work in the mathematics classroom or that excite students to improve their lackluster performance in geography. It can help teachers stay ahead of their students in computer literacy, and it can provide leadership to encourage industry to help schools upgrade abysmally outdated science laboratories.
Trying to keep America moving educationally involves far more than one candidate’s coming up with one right answer. It involves what teachers do every day: raising all the questions, looking for all the approaches that work and leading the way to those solutions not by bullying the people who are being led but in partnership with them. We hope that Bush and Dukakis will follow that approach instead of slinging rhetorical stones at each other, with schools merely a convenient backdrop.
