Schools Top Priority, Gingrich Says

House Speaker Newt Gingrich used the congressional recess Tuesday to try to drum up support for a new set of Republican imperatives meant to wrest political momentum back from President Clinton.

Chief among his future goals, the Republican from Georgia said at two appearances here, is improving the nation’s often faltering public schools system.

Citing statistics that indicated only a small percentage of Los Angeles inner-city children make it through high school and are able to read, Gingrich called the situation “a catastrophe of civilization scale.”

“You cannot be in the world market and you cannot be in the information age if large blocks of your population are literally failing to get the basic tools that are necessary to pursue happiness, to create prosperity,” he told hundreds of members of the civic group Town Hall Los Angeles. “And we are undervaluing the need for dramatic, bold and courageous reforms.”

Gingrich said that the Republican-led Congress had pulled President Clinton in its direction on major issues, citing in particular the signing of bills to balance the budget, reform Medicare, cut taxes and dramatically alter the welfare system.

He said he is working now to design a tax cut for next year’s budget, and also plans to encourage establishment of small businesses, abolish death taxes and eliminate the capital gains tax.

But if he was hewing to a familiar Republican line on those items, he also appeared to be moving in President Clinton’s direction on others--or, at the very least, hoping to mimic Clinton’s success.

Education, for example, was a hallmark of Clinton’s successful presidential campaign in 1996. While Republicans concentrated on their proposals to cut the federal Department of Education, Clinton crisscrossed the country advocating school uniforms and other changes meant to restore order to public schools.

Gingrich took up the theme Tuesday, both at Town Hall and at a separate meeting with reporters and editors at The Times. He insisted that allowing parents to choose where to send their children to school--be that private or public--was essential to force public schools to improve.

“The worst public schools are fled by everyone who can flee them,” he said. “Everyone else is trapped.”

Gingrich scorned public school administrators, saying that “the educational bureaucracies of America are dedicated to preserving their own rice bowl at the expense of the children.”

The speaker presented little in the way of specifics, however. He said if children are unable to read by age 9 or 10, or four years after they begin attending school, their teachers should be fired. “Change it,” he said.

He also said local districts should decide on their own whether to allow bilingual education. And he said the federal government should require that 90% of the money it sends to schools be spent in the classroom. He said he did not know what the percentage is now.

The speaker recently survived an abortive coup attempt that involved some of his lieutenants, but there was no mention of that as he delivered a fairly buoyant assessment of the Republican revolution in the House.

“We have a 10-vote majority, dealing with a Democratic president, so of course there’s tension,” he told the Town Hall members. “On the other hand, we just passed a balanced budget bill with over 300 votes. We just passed the tax cuts with over 300 votes. . . . I’m supposed to be in trouble? We just passed the bills I campaigned on for three and a half years.”

Gingrich spent Monday in San Diego and planned to attend a Tuesday night fund-raiser for Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren’s gubernatorial campaign. The stops were among dozens, in as many states, that the speaker plans to make during the August recess.