Show-and-Tell: ‘Education President’ on Display

Surrounded by the shining faces of children in an Appalachian school room Wednesday, President Bush could not have offered a more appealing portrayal as the “Education President.”

His stage was a second-grade classroom. The props were the chairs and desks of 7-year-old boys and girls as he saluted their teacher. His message was simple and straightforward and not the least bit controversial: education is good.

Thus, in a hamlet in the mountainous eastern arm of West Virginia, Bush sought to put a human face on his effort to shift his Administration’s focus from foreign affairs and the war in the Persian Gulf to domestic issues as the 1992 presidential campaign nears.

And education, some believe, may offer just the right starting block.

In his 12-minute speech to several hundred townspeople gathered outside the one-story brick school, Bush spoke in only the most general terms about education. This was not the setting for a formal speech. Indeed, his Administration, he said, is planning to unveil its national education strategy “very soon back in Washington.”

Rather, it was a time to simply associate the presidency with the overall goals of education and, in particular, with reading.

Rae Ellen McKee, the teacher he honored with a crystal apple and the title of National Teacher of the Year, is a reading specialist.

“I heard a story about one of Mrs. McKee’s reading students--I don’t know if it’s true or not--about a boy who’d been watching me almost every day on television, back during the troubled days of the war in the Gulf--making speeches, making statements to the press,” Bush said. “And the boy allegedly asked Mrs. McKee, ‘are you really going . . . to meet the President?’ ”

The teacher, Bush said, replied that she was indeed going to meet him. The child responded: “He doesn’t need you. He can already read.”

While education is not the sort of issue on which presidential elections turn--it ranks far below the economy and matters of war and peace in public opinion polls on the central questions facing the nation--it is one on which the President’s advisers believe that they can make some political headway. And Democratic politicians believe that it may offer them a window through which they can attack the President.

In 1988, Bush pledged, among other things, to become the “Education President.”

Last January, two years after Bush took office, a Los Angeles Times Poll found that the public believed that little progress had been made in improving education in the United States with 66% saying that the quality of education was unchanged during Bush’s first two years as President and 19% saying that it had deteriorated.

For Bush, said one aide to the House Democratic leadership, “education is a double-edged sword.”

“It’s a cutting issue for the public,” and thus Bush is “onto the right issue,” the aide said. But, he said, Bush “has a two-year track record of no performance.”