Clinton Assails Bush Record in Education : Schools: He ticks off what he calls President’s broken promises and restates his own proposals for improvements.

Ticking off what he described as the broken promises of the self-proclaimed “education President,” Democratic presidential front-runner Bill Clinton issued a scathing denunciation Thursday of the nation’s education troubles under President Bush.

Clinton, speaking before several hundred people at East Los Angeles College, described a faltering system whose inequalities are more threatening to the nation’s security than was the gap between U.S. and Soviet missiles during the early days of the Cold War.

“The President’s education plan amounts to a form of trickle-down education that won’t help Americans any more than the trickle-down economics has helped us in the 1980s,” the Arkansas governor declared.

“America needs an education President who shows up for class every day, not once every four years.”

In his speech, the latest in a series of addresses on specific issues, the probable Democratic nominee restated proposals he has espoused for months, such as full funding of Head Start, public school choice, incentives for graduation, apprenticeship programs and a college loan program open to every American.

The addresses, particularly Thursday’s, are seen by the Clinton campaign as essential to the governor’s chances of developing a positive image among voters. Although he has uttered the proposals before, aides say, they have yet to filter into the public consciousness.

Clinton did not say Thursday how he would pay for his own wide-ranging programs, which grew out of his involvement in a 1989 education summit featuring the President and the nation’s governors. In the past he has said he would fund them with cuts in the defense budget, a tax on rich Americans, and a 3% decrease in the cost of the federal bureaucracy.

Before listing his objectives, Clinton first took aim at Bush, who when running for his first term in 1988 vowed almost daily to be the “education President.”

“The White House promised to fully fund Head Start,” Clinton said, “yet now in the fourth year of Mr. Bush’s Administration . . . 36% of the eligible children of this country are served by Head Start.

“He promised to support bilingual education. It’s been cut by 47% during the ‘80s while we faced an explosion of immigrant populations.

“He himself has pledged to help end adult illiteracy by the year 2000. Yet the President’s proposed budget eliminates four needed literacy programs, including one that helps to teach literacy to inmates incarcerated in prison, when we know that ignorance is one of the main causes of crime in the country.”

Clinton did not list sources for some of his statistics, and at times appeared to be citing declines that occurred over the two terms of President Ronald Reagan as well as Bush’s four years.

His own program, which covers all grades from preschool to college, is far broader than any proposed under Republican administrations. He favors national testing for students and vows to equalize education funding among disparate schools. He supports allowing students to attend the public school of their choice, but he opposes Bush’s plan to allow students to also use public vouchers for private schools.

He favors inducements to keep students in high school, citing an Arkansas law that strips dropouts of their driver’s licenses. For students not going to college, the governor has proposed a two-year apprenticeship and training program.

The hallmark of Clinton’s education policy has been what he calls a “Domestic GI Bill,” which would allow any student to borrow money for college. The loan could be paid back through a percentage of earnings over time, or through one or two years of community service.

The Democratic front-runner’s campaign-long emphasis on education prompted the President in April to announce his own set of reforms, essentially the same ones already rejected by Congress. In a speech in Allentown, Pa., Bush said he wanted to expand the government’s student aid program.

Unlike Clinton’s student loan proposal, with its option of working off debt, the President’s plan kept to the more traditional concept of student loans. But he said he would expand the program to include all students, no matter how few classes they planned to take.

He also proposed that the federal student loan agency float bonds, the proceeds of which would go toward allowing any person to borrow up to $25,000 in a lifetime. The percentage of interest would fluctuate according to income.

Bush has blamed congressional Democrats for stalling his plans. But the President’s student loan reforms were widely seen as the result of political pressure from Clinton, and the governor sought to reinforce that perception Thursday.

“Now that the election is upon us, he has reversed the past 11 years of Administration effort by now advocating a policy to give greater access to student loans for all Americans,” the governor said, referring to both the Bush and Reagan Administrations.

Throughout his campaign, Clinton has tempered his call for expanded opportunity for Americans with a demand that they exhibit more responsibility, and on Thursday he injected that theme into his education address.

“Just as there are opportunity gaps in education, there are also responsibility gaps as well, places where our system failed because people didn’t do their part,” Clinton said. “Politicians who posture instead of act on education. Schools where turf battles get more attention than gang battles. Bureaucrats who’d rather shuffle paper than change lives.

“Teachers who are burned out and given up and are just going through the motions. Parents who treat school as government-financed child care. Citizens who couldn’t care less about education so long as they keep their local taxes down. And students who sometimes act more like kids in ‘Beverly Hills 90210’ than the kids in ‘Stand and Deliver.’ ”

The latter, a movie starring Edward James Olmos, centered on the achievements of Garfield High School teacher Jaime Escalante, whose low-income students excelled on mathematics placement tests.

Clinton, who flew to Portland, Ore., after his speech for more campaigning, also sought to inject a little local flavor into the address by reminiscing about his visit in 1989 to a sixth-grade class in South-Central Los Angeles.

“They were bright, articulate and intelligent children and they were most worried about being shot going to and from school,” he said. “These kids are now in 9th grade. I’ve often wondered in the last few days, after what happened here, how many of them wound up in gangs, whether they looted, whether they’re all still alive.”