Bush’s Education Plan Losing Support Over Parental Choice Issue

President Bush’s education reform plan, welcomed warmly by teacher groups and other organizations at its introduction a week ago, is getting a cooler reception in some quarters as details of the program are examined.

The National Education Assn., which last week hailed the nine-year education plan as “challenging,” has shifted ground as it becomes clear the Administration is placing heavy emphasis on the idea of giving parents tax funds to enable their children to go to private schools.

NEA President Keith Geiger, whose organization represents most American teachers, said the controversial “choice” plan last week appeared to be but one of many concepts in the program, rather than a core feature.

“Now it’s clear they’re making it the centerpiece, and I find it incredible,” he said. “It’s morally wrong.”

Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said he, too, was concerned by the shift of emphasis. At a meeting of the President’s Education Policy Advisory Committee he attended last week, the choice idea “was very much downplayed--certainly it was not the centerpiece,” Shanker said. “If that’s the way they feel about it, we’re going to war.”

The President’s program calls for parents to be given wider choice to select schools, either public or private, to the extent the law allows. The goal is to foster competition among schools that would eventually improve educational quality.

The program proposes spending $200 million next year to help school districts develop special choice plans. It calls for reorganizing the big Chapter 1 federal program for disadvantaged children, so that eligible children can attend private schools with money earmarked for the program.

Many educators support programs designed to allow more parents to choose among public schools. But many oppose programs to funnel tax dollars to private schools, arguing such an approach would leave only the poorest and most troubled children in the public system.

Sol Horowitz, president of the Committee for Economic Development, a nonpartisan group of 250 business leaders and educators, was quoted last week as calling the President’s plan “a bold, far-reaching and multifaceted plan that deserves serious consideration.”

But Sandra Kessler-Hamburg, director of education studies for the group, said those comments were made based on early press reports that the program called for more spending on the non-educational needs of disadvantaged children, including nutrition and preventive health care. In fact, the program calls only for improved efforts to coordinate such government programs, but no additional funding, she noted.

Bruce Hunter, associate director of the American Assn. of School Administrators, said the plan has “lost massive support” among educators because it proposes using a test called the National Assessment of Educational Progress to evaluate students and individual schools for the next several years. The test is to be replaced in 1994--possibly later--when government officials have developed a sophisticated series of tests that are to establish national educational standards.

Hunter said the National Assessment of Educational Progress was designed only to sample what American students know in reading and math, and to track their progress through school. It was not designed, he said, as an evaluation system.

Such narrow, multiple choice tests “can only lead to distortions,” he said. “It’s an outrageous proposal.”

Meanwhile, Bush on Thursday welcomed students from a high school in Richardson, Tex., and hailed them as “our newest American heroes” for winning the U.S. Academic Decathlon, a nationwide contest that tests students in math, economics, literature and fine arts.

“We’re proud of you, and I think the nation’s proud of you,” Bush said in a Rose Garden ceremony for nine students from J. J. Pearce High School. The school has won the contest five times in the last 10 years.

“The lesson . . . of the Academic Decathlon is something each of us needs to take through life,” Bush said. “It’s about learning to be the best you can be.”