Clinton Proposal Seeks to Build, Modernize Schools

In response to booming enrollments and decaying school buildings throughout the country, President Clinton has decided to push a large-scale federal effort to build and modernize local schools.

The plan, which will be included in the fiscal 1999 budget Clinton will submit early next month, is expected to provide $5 billion over five years to help school districts pay the interest on $20 billion in construction loans taken out by districts, administration sources said.

The funds would be part of the White House’s broader education agenda: to increase the number of teachers, set learning standards and target needy regions for special increases in assistance. A Clinton advisor vowed that the effort would be “extensive.”

“You can go to school districts anyplace in the country and see either overcrowding or seriously flawed facilities,” said Michael Cohen, an education specialist at the White House. “These are not the kinds of conditions under which kids learn up to the high standards that we’re setting for them.”

There is little disagreement that the nation’s classrooms are under enormous stress as they seek to accommodate the children of baby boomers as well as recent immigrants. California Gov. Pete Wilson, a Republican, recently proposed a $16-billion state program of school construction.

In 1995, the General Accounting Office estimated that it would cost the nation $112 billion to modernize and build schools in response to overcrowding and the dilapidation of facilities that are decades old. A separate report by California’s Department of Finance pegged the state cost of deferred maintenance and construction at $22 billion.

Nonetheless, Clinton’s emerging proposal Tuesday underlined the powerful emotions that surround education policy, immediately prompting critics to note that historically the schoolhouse has been a concern of local officials rather than Washington bureaucrats.

“We’re scratching our heads a little bit,” said Sean Walsh, Wilson’s deputy chief of staff in Sacramento. “I imagine pretty soon the president will come out with a proposal for crossing guards in California schools.”

The state could use the money, Walsh acknowledged, but preferably as grants, with no strings attached. “Just send us the money, and we’ll spend it in the best way and on the most pressing needs,” he said.

Under Clinton’s plan, the federal government is expected to provide $5 billion that school districts could use to pay interest costs on $20 billion in loans for construction and renovation. While the White House declined to release further details Tuesday, the plan is based on a similar administration proposal that Republican leaders vehemently opposed last year.

That proposal, which the White House removed from the balanced-budget package at the insistence of Republicans, would have steered half the aid toward districts with especially high concentrations of poverty; Los Angeles stood to receive some $450 million, which could have been used to reduce borrowing expenses on a far larger amount. The money was to have been used to pay for up to half the interest costs of a loan.

The administration’s new school-construction plan is one element in a much larger White House education agenda. It proposes to hire more teachers--possibly 100,000, in an echo of the program to put more police officers on the street; develop national tests to buttress academic standards; and create “education opportunity zones” in which hard-pressed districts would become eligible for new federal aid.

White House aides expect education to be a prominent theme in Clinton’s State of the Union address Jan. 27 and predicted that the president’s proposed budget, to be released in early February, will include billions of dollars in extra education funding, much of it dedicated to the hiring of new teachers.

“What I hope we will be able to do in this session of Congress is to make education a national issue,” White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry said.

Clinton also is likely to recommend at least $200 million in added spending for bilingual education, education aid for migrant children, and colleges with high enrollments of Latinos, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.

Conservative critics remain extremely wary of a wider federal role in public schools, although it is unclear how much of the public shares this view. An NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey found last year that while 44% of Americans feared the federal government would get too involved in education, 49% feared the contrary--that it “will not be involved enough.”

Joe Karpinski, Republican spokesman for the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee, said he has not seen the administration proposal on school construction, but added: “I would assume that it’s going to have the same problems this time around that it did last time.”

Advocates of the spending retort that the needs are pressing and should not be subjected to partisan politics. Nationally, public school enrollment has reached an all-time high of more than 50 million pupils.

Wilson’s construction proposal, announced earlier this month, is designed to take care of the need through $16 billion in state and local bonds and other measures, including $300 million in annual funding over 10 years.

“It’s not just a Democratic issue, and even with California willing to spend large sums of money, there’s still a large, unmet need,” declared Joel C. Packer, a lobbyist with the National Education Assn., the largest teachers union. Clinton’s plan, he said, would help fill the gap.

As to arguments that the White House proposal represents an inappropriate federal intrusion into local affairs, he argued: “We don’t really see why kids in school should be less important than commuters or sewers.”