Bush Visits St. Paul School to Highlight Education Goals : Presidency: He uses the event to advance a sweeping package that is being sent to Congress. The proposals include little extra in federal funds.

President Bush, choosing an experimental magnet school in St. Paul as a backdrop, said Wednesday that his sweeping package of education proposals was being sent to Capitol Hill.

Bush’s “America 2000” program, which leans heavily on incentives for state and local government action and relatively little on federal funding, was announced at the White House a month ago and his quick trip here apparently was intended to revive interest in it.

In his message to Congress accompanying the legislative package, Bush said his proposals “are just components, albeit very important components, of a strategy most of which would take place outside the federal government.”

Addressing his audience here, Bush ticked off his Administration’s goals: to raise literacy and high school graduation rates, to improve quality, to establish a national standard of “core competence” in basic elementary, intermediate and high school academics and to raise the competence of American workers to compete in a global economy.

“Minnesota remains a pioneer, leading the nation in educational choice,” Bush said in his speech. The remark underscored the theme of parental choice and school accountability that remains a key part of the Administration program devised by Education Secretary Lamar Alexander, who also was on hand here.

“You have guaranteed that every family in the state can choose which public school its children will attend. Minnesotans know that education means opportunity.”

During the opening minutes of the President’s brief address, a small band of demonstrators on the crowded streets outside who had been waving placards chiding Bush for the Persian Gulf War and branding his education policy with an “F” grade, slipped through police lines with a bullhorn.

They tried to drown out the speech with a loud but undecipherable chant that seemed to be “Funds for schools, not for war.” Engineers simply turned up the volume on the public address system, and Bush brushed the demonstrators off with the observation: “They have a right to speak, and I think I have a right to be heard.” After a few minutes, the bullhorn fell silent.

The package sent to Congress on Wednesday would authorize some $654 million in fiscal 1992 to implement its incentive programs--a relative pittance compared to the proposed $29.6 billion earmarked for education in the overall 1992 budget. Through 1996, the projected budget for the package would total $1.3 billion.

Most of the money would be funneled to state governors seeking funding for state proposals that would qualify for programs in the Administration package.

While most of the program’s details were made public in April, the legislation contains some new items. The Administration bill calls, for example, for “flexibility and accountability programs” that will enable districts to seek waivers from burdensome federal requirements and thereby streamline their curricula. In return, the districts would be required to test their schoolchildren to demonstrate that the waivers provide some benefit.

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), chairman of the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee, introduced the Administration bill at White House request, along with five education proposals of his own. The committee will begin hearings on all of the proposals the first week of June.

Before his speech, Bush visited the recycled downtown YWCA building where the Saturn School for Tomorrow operates. He was taken in tow by teachers, fiddled with a static electricity experiment in the science room and seemed especially fascinated by the computers, in which the fifth, sixth and seventh graders in the program were clearly far ahead of the President, an admitted computer novice who kept expressing a determination to catch up.

“Fascinating,” he kept saying, in an informal back-and-forth with the children.

“Do you ever have any time to have fun?” a sixth grader asked the President.

“Yes. We go to Camp David,” Bush replied. “Have you ever heard of Camp David? They’ve got all kinds of sports.”

More seriously, he explained that he especially enjoys foreign policy, but he also got in a plug for America 2000. “We’ve got to do better in education,” he said.

Times staff writer Paul Richter in Washington contributed to this story.