Dole Sees Problems in Schools and Blames Liberals

Opening a new front in his uphill presidential campaign, Bob Dole on Wednesday deplored the state of public education, linking liberal educational philosophies and President Clinton to falling test scores, rising dropout and crime rates and “all this politically correct nonsense.”

As he did so, Dole plunged into an already hot debate in California over how to teach reading, saying that “modern education experts” had fatally damaged California schools by causing the state to move away from teaching phonics to a reading curriculum based on “whole language” techniques.

State officials have begun reversing that policy, but, ironically, Democrats have been among the leading figures in the state pushing for a return to phonics.

Although Clinton has over the years been active in pushing education reform ideas, Dole said the president is incapable of helping to truly change the nation’s schools because he has become a “pliant pet” of the nation’s teachers unions--”the very groups who have run our public schools into the ground.”

“You cannot be a leader in education and at the same time be the pliant pet of militant teachers unions, currying favor with the very same vested interests who are fighting reform,” Dole said.

In the current election cycle, the political action committee of the National Education Assn., the nation’s largest teachers union, has given nearly $1 million to Democratic candidates and organizations and only $34,350 to Republican candidates and associations.

The proper method for teaching reading has been a controversial issue in California, which in many ways was at the forefront of a national move toward the “whole language” philosophy. In 1987, the state issued a manifesto emphasizing that teachers ought to use classics of children’s literature, rather than relying on boring basic textbooks and phonics drills, to get children excited about reading. At the time, the Republican-dominated State Board of Education sought to reinforce that position through its selection of textbooks that qualified for special state funds.

Now, state educators say they quickly realized that California had gone astray by failing to tell schools and teachers that phonics instruction was an important component of reading programs. But it took several years, until the 1994 election of state Supt. of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin, a Democrat, to begin to turn things around.

As one of her first acts, Eastin appointed a task force on reading that called for a renewed emphasis on basic phonics instruction as a complement to writing and exposure to a variety of literature. That view is now shared by the Legislature and Gov. Pete Wilson, a Republican, who earmarked $200 million in the 1996-97 budget for revamping textbooks and revamped teacher training that revived the importance of phonics instruction.

There was “plenty of blame to go around in both parties” for California’s slide in reading, Eastin said in an interview. The National Assessment of Educational Progress found last year that the state’s fourth-graders ranked last among the 39 states that participated in the test.

“The bottom line is that educators and some Democrats like myself have been raising the flag to put reading first again,” she said. “There was a de-emphasis on phonics, but it was a function of bad research, not liberalism.”

She criticized Dole for seeking to make education a partisan issue. “Both parties fouled this thing up and both parties ought to put away their partisanship and try to fix it,” she said.

Today Dole plans to continue his education theme with a proposal to set up a new federal program to give low-income parents money to send their children to private schools--an issue that has also been hotly debated in California.

Conservatives have long believed that voucher programs are potentially a ticket to popularity among parents concerned about troubled schools. So far, they have had little luck with the issue. In recent years, voters in California, Oregon and Colorado have defeated voucher proposals by margins as large as 2 to 1.

Responding to Dole, Clinton’s campaign shot back with a list of votes that Dole had cast in his years in Congress against federal aid to education.

“Bob Dole’s commitment to education was tested early in his career when he voted against creating the student loan program and Head Start,” said campaign press secretary Joe Lockhart. Last year, he added, Dole supported “the worst education budget in our history.”

Both the Clinton campaign and the NEA also took issue with Dole’s claim of falling test scores and rising dropout rates.

Scores on the Scholastic Assessment Test taken by college-bound seniors rose faster in 1995 than they have in a decade, reversing a long slide in verbal scores and adding momentum to steady improvement in math. At younger grades, math scores for students in grades 4, 8 and 12 were up in 1992 over two years previously, the latest year available. And 1994 reading scores remained flat in grades 4 and 8 but dropped slightly in grade 12 from two years prior.

The rate at which students graduate from high school has remained steady at about 86% since 1990.

Dole’s speech marked a major new effort to put behind him the distractions of recent weeks in which he has committed a string of verbal gaffes that detracted from his campaign and alarmed confidants and party faithful alike.

By contrast with most recent appearances, Dole read his speech carefully with the aid of a TelePrompTer, and he cautiously avoided answering any questions from reporters.

Instead, he stuck to the subject that his aides hope to make his topic of the week.

“Poor performance in many of our elementary and secondary classrooms is a key reason why real wages have been stagnant in recent years,” Dole told an audience of supporters and a sprinkling of students and parents at De La Salle High School, Minneapolis’ only coed Catholic high school.

“No other nation spends as much on education as we do, yet over our public schools hangs an air of failure, frustration and futility.”

Perhaps surprisingly for a candidate who fervently decries the role of the federal government, the former Kansas senator vowed to create a “clearinghouse” in the Justice Department’s civil rights division to help school districts defend their strict disciplinary codes.

“It is just staggering to hear some of our education experts today object to basic standards of discipline in the name of ‘children’s rights,’ ” Dole said.

“Every frustrated parent knows what I’m talking about,” he added. “Many children are taught ‘global awareness’ and ‘diversity’ before they can locate Europe on a map or name the country on our southern border. Something’s got to change!”

Dole also derided “some schools” for no longer holding spelling bees for fear of damaging the self-esteem of losers.

“Let’s drop all this politically correct nonsense and give our kids a decent education,” he said.

Meanwhile, in Washington, Clinton announced a program to hand out cellular phones to citizen patrols so they can alert police faster to suspicious activity.

The plan, which involves no federal money, would provide 50,000 phones to Neighborhood Watch groups nationwide.

The phones are being donated by regional cell phone companies that are members of the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Assn. The White House said the donations grew out of a request to the industry made by Vice President Al Gore in June.

Also in Washington, former Colorado Gov. Richard Lamm continued his campaign to win the Reform Party nomination, saying that he still believed he could defeat party founder Ross Perot. Party members are too “cantankerous” and independent to simply vote for Perot without looking at other candidates, Lamm said. “These are not Ross Perot clones.”

Chen reported from Minneapolis and Colvin from Los Angeles.