Activists Propel Education Into Campaign Spotlight : Issues: Groups concerned about schools, government role are making themselves heard to ’96 candidates.

One recent morning, Ann Viar spotted Lamar Alexander strolling down her street, knocking on doors. She turned the radio up loud and retreated to her backyard.

It wasn’t so much that Viar is a Democrat and Alexander, the former governor of Tennessee, aspires to the Republican presidential nomination. It’s just that Viar, 41, considers the schools in this rural town near the state capital of Concord woefully underfunded, and in her view, Alexander, like the other GOP candidates, “doesn’t give a flying fig about education.”

About 40 miles south, in another small New Hampshire town, Romelle Winters has stormed into the intersection of parenthood and presidential politics with gusto. A self-described “recovering liberal,” the 58-year-old Winters is urging the Republican presidential contenders to say they will boot the federal government out of the schools entirely.

Viar and Winters have never met, but taken together, their stories illustrate how intricately the education issue is linked to America’s other concerns, from taxes and the role of government to the “values” debate that is spurring the nation’s culture wars.

What they share is a passionate belief that something is very wrong with the way America educates its children. Separating them is a gulf of opinion about how that might be remedied and how a president might assist those repairs.

President Clinton has called education “the most important task of government,” and he vows to make federal support for schools a key campaign issue.

Viar would love to see her children’s schools get more federal money and the government intensify its support for education.

Winters and her fellow social conservatives are trying hard to convince whoever will listen that government only gets in the way of what the schools really need: a return to teaching basic skills and traditional values.

And as the GOP candidates parade through New Hampshire, competing in its important early primary, these grass-roots activists are relishing their disproportionate clout. Their interests become the candidates’ interests, focusing the campaign spotlight on issues that include the suddenly controversial Goals 2000 program for distributing millions of dollars in federal funds to schools nationwide.

Decline of Schools

Romelle Winters began teaching at Calumet High School on Chicago’s South Side in 1970. That first year, she says, was “delightful.” The students behaved well and, after school, as many as 50 would gather in her classroom to hash out the tumultuous issues of the day.

Then the dark side of that time asserted itself. Drugs arrived. The neighborhood slipped deeper into poverty. Families frayed. Discipline waned.

Off campus, street gang members gunned each other down with regularity. On campus, Winters says, students set so many fires one year that teachers learned to simply keep lecturing as firefighters hauled hoses down the hallways.

Winters’ hope sputtered. After her seventh year, she reluctantly decided to leave the problems of the so-called underclass behind. For a while, she taught in the more selective and disciplined realm of an all-girl Roman Catholic school.

Then in 1984, her three children were grown and her husband was transferred by his company to Kingston, N.H. And six years later, fate reacquainted them with public education.

This time, Winters’ own family hit a crisis. Her daughter’s husband died in a car crash, and the young woman had a hard time putting her life back together, says Winters, who agreed to take in her 13-year-old grandson.

The boy, she says, was an emotional wreck, “not fit for human company.” She enrolled him in a Catholic school 35 miles away. But the drive proved draining.

“I thought, ‘What harm can there be in sending him to our local school?’ ”

Winters quickly answered her own question. She decided, with alarm, that the problems that had driven her from Chicago’s schools had permeated New Hampshire’s school system. And she decided, with anger, that educators’ attempts to address those ills--from drug use to teenage pregnancy--were merely contributing to them.

Making a Difference

The shelves in Ann Viar’s living room strain under the paraphernalia of family: soccer and basketball equipment, dogeared board games, toys, books and videos. Egged on by Viar’s sixth-grade son, a wet black dog carouses around well-worn furniture. In another room, her third-grade daughter pounds out “Old McDonald” on a piano.

The Viars’ small, Cape Cod-style house has the feel of an overused workshop, where the craft is rearing kids. But Viar knows as well as anyone that only part of a child’s molding and shaping occurs here.

A few minutes earlier, directly across Main Street, the students at Allenstown Elementary School were chattering like a tree full of mockingbirds in an auditorium sporting a banner that reads: “Believe in Yourself.”

Then, heads bent against a blustery storm, they streamed out the door in colorful ski parkas and faded sweaters toward homes that may or may not encourage that sentiment. Which is why Viar feels compelled to pitch in.

Her own plunge into parenthood was unusually abrupt. She had just given birth to the first of her two children when a relative foundered. Viar took in the woman’s 6-year-old boy and 8-year-old girl.

Her husband, Peter, later assumed custody of his son from another marriage and the couple had their daughter, pushing the grand total of children to five.

Allenstown, where Peter Viar was raised, once housed thriving textile mills. But by the time the couple settled there in 1987, the mills had closed and a recession was pushing the town into hard times. Today, half of its residents live in relatively inexpensive mobile homes. That makes education funding difficult because in New Hampshire, the state does not contribute to education and local property taxes are schools’ sole revenue source.

Viar remembers the day she crossed Main Street, cradling her baby, to enroll her relative’s children in the elementary school. “My first impression of the school was that it was a dump. . . . I almost said, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t do this.’ ”

But she gave the school a chance. “I decided to get to know the teachers and principal and find out what was going on and why,” she said. “I’d be as nice as I could be. I’d run into a school board member at the grocery store and say, ‘You know, I happened to notice today that the school bathroom was so dirty I couldn’t use it. I don’t think I should pay my taxes and have that happen, do you?”

As the school’s appearance improved, Viar volunteered in classes and pitched in on other fronts. She helped launch the PTA. She took on a Cub Scout den and a Brownie troop. She taught Catholic Communion classes in a little church with a white steeple. She coached her children’s soccer teams.

Still, Viar knew there were problems that community involvement couldn’t solve. She saw, for instance, “more and more students coming from homes that are not intact, coming to school hungry and cold.”

What really rankled Viar was how Allenstown’s schools made do with so little while nearby schools in wealthier communities brimmed with resources.

As it happened, parents in the small town of Claremont, about two hours to the north, were wondering the same thing. The town had slumped badly as the mining industry withered, and its schools suffered accordingly.

When Claremont officials filed a lawsuit in 1990 arguing that the state had a constitutional responsibility to help pay for public education, other poor towns joined in, and Viar added one of her children as a plaintiff.

The suit remains in dispute. Meanwhile, the prospect of new funds appeared on the horizon in the form of Goals 2000, a federal initiative to improve education nationwide. When New Hampshire’s Republican governor, Steve Merrill, turned that money down, Viar, like many parents and educators, was “speechless with rage.”

Education Assistance

Even many conservatives acknowledge a certain irony in their opposition to Goals 2000. After all, it was during the Reagan administration, in 1983, that the study “A Nation at Risk” blasted America’s school system, accusing the nation of “committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament.”

And it was during the Bush administration, in 1989, that a national conference of governors made the official decision to fight back with a program called America 2000.

Clinton inherited the education-assistance plan with his 1992 election, and he signed it into law as Goals 2000 on March 31, 1994.

Administered by the Department of Education, Goals 2000 sent $85.4 million to school districts in 47 states its first year and promised more each year after. With such stated purposes as assuring that children start school ready to learn, improving the nation’s high school graduation rate and making schools drug- and violence-free, it hardly seemed controversial.

Already, though, the Republican revolution was brewing. And while the GOP’s “contract with America” would say little about education specifically, one line telegraphed a whole philosophy: “Republicans believe parents know what’s best for their children--not the government.”

A ‘Dumbing-Down’

Kingston is in that part of New England where cemeteries filled with Revolutionary War heroes edge up against homes with perfect picket fences. Recently, the poverty behind that facade has been growing, but compared to the South Side of Chicago, Kingston’s schools at least look good.

But it was another sort of deterioration that concerned Winters. Classes weren’t even as challenging as they had been in the 1970s, she said. “Teachers saw nothing wrong with giving sophomore honors classes sixth-grade work to do.”

Winters says incident after incident convinced her that what her friends who had stayed in teaching had been telling her was true: A “dumbing-down” had occurred in schools, and bolstering students’ self-esteem had replaced teaching them to read and do equations as education’s chief goal.

“The main focus of education now,” she said, “is socialization and multiculturalism and getting along. That’s a twisted notion of what education should be.”

Meanwhile, other areas of her grandson’s education seemed to be flourishing, she says sarcastically: A business teacher brought a “how-to” book on suicide to class. An English class’ reading list ignored classics in favor of books Winters terms “pornographic.” And the sex education program “was very well developed.”

Maryann Clancy, superintendent of the school district that includes Kingston, disputes some of Winters’ claims. Academic standards have not been sacrificed for multiculturalism, she says.

And the health teacher does not have students practice condom use on a plastic penis, as Winters contends; rather, a Planned Parenthood representative does the demonstration, “and we use a banana,” Clancy said.

But, Clancy adds, Winters has indeed hit upon “the crux of the war between those people who are conservative and those of us who are trying to implement a universal public education system.”

“As public schools, we do not have the choice to turn people away. And more and more frequently we have . . . a greater variety of social and family problems and dysfunctions. . . . That is creating a real collision of values.”

Fed up, Winters pulled her grandson from the school and began educating him in her modest Victorian-style home.

“You’ve seen the last of him,” she told the school administrators. “But you haven’t seen the last of me.”

In fact, she was already setting her sights higher. Winters had heard about a group called Concerned Women for America, a nationwide group lobbying Congress on behalf of school vouchers--government payments to parents that could be used for the public or private school of their choice--and warning against alleged attempts by homosexuals to push their “agenda” in public education.

When the Education Department made its Goals 2000 money available, Winters embraced the group’s position, opposing the plan as a slap at “parental authority.” To her, most of education’s problems had resulted from attempts by liberal bureaucrats to begin social engineering as early as possible.

Like other social conservatives, she saw Goals 2000 as the sort of federal expansionism that would shove those bureaucrats’ “secular humanism” into a values void.

Winters became Concerned Women for America’s New Hampshire representative and hooked up with a coalition that included members of Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum, as well as gun-owner and taxpayer groups. She began faxing and phoning decision-makers up and down the political hierarchy.

Such efforts apparently have had an impact nationally. Montana, Virginia and Alabama have joined New Hampshire in rejecting Goals 2000 funding. And California Gov. Pete Wilson is keeping the $42 million the program earmarked for the state in limbo, threatening to send it back to Washington.

Groups Make Impact

Education Secretary Richard W. Riley seems flummoxed by the Goals 2000 backlash. “I really can’t understand the intensity of the objection in some states,” he said.

He thinks of Goals 2000 as “a very common-sense, really conservative approach to enabling states and schools to increase their standards in their own way.”

The vast majority of the states apparently view it that way and are using the funds to decrease class sizes, train teachers and build computer labs, according to Education Department officials. And the officials are quick to supply a lengthy list of high-profile business leaders who back Goals 2000 as a means toward a better-educated work force.

Clinton also remains committed to the program. Says Ann Lewis, deputy manager of the president’s reelection team: “Education will be a major subject of interest in this campaign because it’s of major interest to voters. Anyone who has talked to American families this year knows that their concern for their children’s future is linked to education.”

Winters couldn’t agree more, which is why she has already met each of the principal GOP presidential candidates and told them she thinks the Education Department should be abolished and Goals 2000 scrapped.

The local head of the Christian Coalition has delivered a similar message, as have representatives from a panoply of other social conservative groups.

It’s hard to measure the direct impact of such grass-roots buttonholing. But there is no doubt that New Hampshire activists, like those in the equally conservative, early caucus state of Iowa, have a peculiar ability to amplify national candidates’ commitments to their own obsessions.

Which may or may not explain why every major GOP candidate has come out against Goals 2000.

Alexander, who was Bush’s secretary of Education when Goals 2000 was launched, now says it should be treated as “a fox dressed as a duck at a duck family reunion.”

Patrick J. Buchanan, Winters’ candidate of choice, calls it “a snake that must be strangled in the crib.”

To which Viar responds: “Someone should put him in a crib with a snake.”

As far as Viar is concerned, the problem with education is money, and the solution is simple: “It should fall from the sky.”

The real battle for better values, she figures, is being fought by teachers and volunteers in the classroom, and by mothers and fathers on the soccer fields. “It doesn’t make any difference who sits in the White House. Nothing will be different in four years.”

And that may be where she and Winters disagree most.