Education Chief Cavazos Aims to Curb Dropouts

As a member of Ronald Reagan’s Cabinet, Lauro F. Cavazos Jr., named Monday to continue as secretary of education in the George Bush Administration, has been unique. He has a characteristic that has set him apart from all his colleagues and may well continue to do so under Bush.

He is a Democrat.

Cavazos’ party affiliation is not often the first thing that commentators note about him--more often people make the point that the 61-year-old educator is the first Latino named to the Cabinet. And, by retaining him, Bush fulfills a campaign pledge made last July in a speech to the League of United Latin American Citizens in Texas.

But the nonpartisan nature of his appointment may be a better measure of what Cavazos’ tenure at the Education Department will be like, particularly by contrast with the tempestuous reign of his highly partisan predecessor, William J. Bennett, whom Cavazos replaced in September.

Some GOP Activists Angered

Cavazos did spend much of the last several months campaigning for Bush in Texas and the Southwest, but he angered some Republican activists by refusing to record a commercial endorsing the entire Republican slate. And he has not been shy about admitting that, in the past, most of his votes have gone to Democratic candidates. “I thought those were the better candidates, so I voted for them,” he said in an interview shortly after taking office in late September.

Bennett used the post of education secretary to fight for conservative values in education and against powerful forces that, in his opinion, were blocking educational reform, particularly education bureaucracies and teachers’ unions. Monday night, by contrast, the largest of the teachers’ unions, the National Education Assn., hailed Cavazos’ reappointment by Bush, saying that he had established “a new atmosphere of good will and cooperation” in education.

Cavazos laid out a straightforward agenda for his tenure in his first news conference as education secretary. His most important contribution, he said, would be to persuade children and their parents, particularly among the poor, to heed a message that he delivered in Spanish: “Por favor, ninos, no dejen la escuela”--”Please, children, don’t leave school.”

It is a message rooted in a personal experience that stretches from his days growing up as the son of a foreman on the vast King Ranch in southwest Texas to his earning degrees in zoology and physiology and becoming dean of the Tufts University School of Medicine and president of Texas Tech University before being named by Reagan to the Cabinet.

“I am convinced education is the key to many things,” he said. “If you have sufficient education, you can solve almost any problem in the world.”