Rivals Target Education, Economy : Bush: President’s plan would create $25,000 line of credit in student aid.

President Bush, embracing an idea for student aid already championed by Democratic challenger Bill Clinton, proposed Thursday to create a $25,000 line of credit for any American willing to repay the money from future earnings.

And, as part of a continuing effort to bolster his claim of being “the education President,” Bush said he will seek to expand access to existing federal student aid programs and increase the amount that can be borrowed. Those changes were suggested in the budget he sent to Congress in January but he had not followed up with actual legislative proposals.

“Education doesn’t end with graduation,” Bush told a group of Pennsylvania high school students. “Learning has got to be a lifelong pursuit.”

He suggested an approach to federal aid that would embrace both young college students and older workers seeking new job skills to adapt to changing labor markets.

The convergence of the Republican President and his expected Democratic opponent on the idea of creating a kind of revolving credit plan for student aid appears to reflect the belief among political strategists in both parties that education could be a critical issue in this election year.

But Administration officials acknowledged that parts of the Bush package are recycled from earlier Administration proposals and that key elements closely resemble proposals already offered by Clinton. Moreover, the Arkansas governor noted Thursday that, until January, Bush had opposed allowing any but the very poorest students to have access to the so-called Pell grants that now constitute the federal government’s basic aid program for students.

Bush’s difficulty in dominating the education issue despite the advantages a sitting President enjoys in setting a policy agenda spring in part from his longstanding aversion to creating new federal programs and the limits on new spending imposed by the still-soaring federal deficit.

In addition, there are deep divisions within Bush’s political base over how to deal with education.

William J. Bennett, the education secretary under Ronald Reagan, said Bush’s approach reflects a “risk-averse, Rose Garden strategy. . . . There are people at the White House who are afraid to alienate any potential voters.”

Nonetheless, Administration officials declared that Bush’s proposals will strike a responsive chord with voters.

Education Secretary Lamar Alexander described the $25,000 line of credit plan as a “breathtaking idea” that was “something every American can understand.”

“It’s money in the bank,” he said. “You take it, you spend it, you pay it back.”

Terms of repayment would vary, with interest charges keyed to recipients’ ability to pay. Alexander had no details.

The line of credit for education and job training would be offered through the Student Loan Marketing Assn., known as Sallie Mae. Alexander said management by Sallie Mae would ensure that the new plan “won’t cost anything” to taxpayers. That assumes no one would default, however.

Sallie Mae provides a form of loan guarantee to banks that advance money to students by pooling thousands of such loans and selling securities with the pooled loans as collateral.

Bush chose to present the plan just over a week before the Pennsylvania primary. Although Bush’s remaining rival for the Republican nomination, Patrick J. Buchanan, is not actively opposing him in the state, Clinton suggested that politics lay behind the announcements.

“Just 12 days before the Pennsylvania primary, the President comes to Pennsylvania to promise universal access” to education aid, Clinton said in a speech at the Wharton School of Business in Philadelphia. “And they say I’m slick.”

In this political year, the White House schedules such events with one imperative in mind: getting the President’s face and words on the nightly television newscasts. This time, however, Bush’s schedule may have done more to boost the visibility of his likely opponent.

Both ABC and NBC opened their news programs with pieces pointing up the similarity between the Bush and Clinton proposals and showing Clinton poking fun at Bush for having borrowed one of his ideas. CBS aired a similar piece later in its broadcast.

“The President may not have stolen this idea from Gov. Clinton,” ABC correspondent Brit Hume told his viewers, but “it sounded fishy.”

The plan is identical in name and similar in structure to one already introduced by Clinton, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, and a spokesman for the governor had earlier suggested that the Bush proposal was tantamount to plagiarism.

But Thomas Scully, a senior White House official traveling with Bush, said the plan was “not a political ploy.” And Alexander said he and others in the Administration had been at work on the proposal for a number of months.

“It’s the President’s proposal,” Alexander said, “and if other people have the same proposal, then so much the better.”

The principal difference between the plans is that the Arkansas governor would give students the option of repaying loans through community service rather than with cash, as the Bush approach requires.

At the same time, the Clinton plan would make federal loans available directly to students; the Bush plan continues to rely on the government-sponsored Sallie Mae as a secondary lender.

In Bush’s speech--his fourth to a high school audience in the current school year--he again cast himself and his “America 2000” strategy as instruments for innovation in a flawed educational system. (America 2000 enlists localities in a national campaign for school reform.)

“We don’t need another test to tell us something is wrong with the state of American education,” he said. “For the sake of every student here today, we’ve got to shake off any sense of complacency--and have to shake up the status quo.”

One week ago, Bush said education would be his top domestic priority in his second term, and aides have said the issue will also be a centerpiece of his campaign.

But Bush’s record on education is being contested--from within his party as well as outside it.

On the plus side, Bush and Alexander have gotten high marks from all sides for having raised the profile of education issues. Exploiting its ability to command national attention, the Administration has enlisted states and cities in its America 2000 program.

The Education Department has focused new attention on the idea of national curriculum standards that would set out what students need to know, and voluntary national tests to show what they have achieved. The Administration has also advocated the idea of giving children a choice in where they go to school, to foster competitive pressures that would theoretically improve schooling for all.

“A President’s job on education is to use the office as a bully pulpit, and this one’s done an excellent job,” said Rep. Bill Goodling (R-Pa.), ranking minority member of the House Education and Labor Committee.

But critics from the right are faulting Bush for spending time on image-burnishing schoolhouse visits, while not promoting reform ideas aggressively enough to shake the education Establishment from its entrenched habits.

Some also contend Bush has been lukewarm in promoting private-school choice--for fear of alienating the suburban moderates who worry that it could bring in minority students and undermine the quality of their schools--and not active enough in arguing for national curriculum standards and tests--for fear of losing conservatives who see it as a usurpation of local school prerogatives.

“He doesn’t have the boldness to say what needs to be said,” said John E. Chubb, a Brookings Institution policy specialist who strongly influenced the Administration’s proposals on school choice and generally gives Bush high marks.

From the other direction, Bush and Alexander have been faulted for relying on rhetoric rather than dollars to help the schools, and, in particular, neglecting the worst-off inner-city schools.

After years of virtually flat budgets, U.S. school aid now represents about 5.5% of total school spending. That compares to more than 9% in the late 1970s--a spending level Clinton has vowed to restore.

“All the schools aren’t in trouble, but the ones that are in the most trouble aren’t getting what they need,” said Ernest Boyer, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. “So you’d have to say that the Administration’s record is very mixed. And no matter what is said, it is not the centerpiece of the Administration’s program.”