Bush Renews Warning About Schools : Education: The President offers no defense for the decline in college-board test scores. He pushes his model program for improved learning and a plan to let parents choose institutions.

President Bush on Tuesday renewed his warnings about a crisis in the nation’s schools, saying that the bells tolling on the traditional first day of classes across the country were sounding an alarm about the state of American education.

“We sometimes seem more worried about how our students feel than what they learn,” Bush said in a back-to-school address in a high school gymnasium here. “That’s got to change.”

In turning his attention back to what may be a newly sensitive issue, the man who three years ago vowed to become the “education President” offered no defense for the fact that college-board test scores declined nationwide again last year.

But he said recent reports of those steep drops had demonstrated anew that “our schools are in trouble.”

Bush once again urged school districts across the country to adopt the rigorous standards and goals laid out in “America 2000,” a model program that he contends can elevate American schools to world leadership by the end of the century.

And, although beseeching parents and teachers to ask more of students, he made a fervent appeal on behalf of an Administration proposal designed to allow parents to choose schools more freely, even to the extent of receiving public funds for private education.

“For far too long we’ve sheltered our schools from healthy competition, and our children have paid the price,” he said.

The Administration’s “choice” plan has been criticized as likely to benefit private institutions at the expense of public schools, but Bush suggested instead that it would “expand opportunity” by repairing an existing imbalance in the system.

“Wealthy families already enjoy choice,” he said. “Poor families do not.”

The morning address, which Bush delivered on the way back to Washington from his vacation home 60 miles south of here, marked his return not only to the capital, but also to the domestic programs that his advisers say will be the focus of much of his fall agenda.

After a four-week respite made unusually tense by the attempted coup and the resulting tumult in the Soviet Union, Bush jokingly apologized that he would need a “a little more time” to write his report on “what I did on my summer vacation.”

But his attention was clearly still on Moscow and the events that have unraveled at dizzying speed since the afternoon coup-makers in the Crimea came knocking on the door of Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s holiday dacha.

“If you think mine’s a tough assignment, how about President Gorbachev--what he did on his summer vacation?” Bush said.