School Plan Investment, Not Interference, Clinton Says

President Clinton said Thursday that his plan to increase federal funding for the nation’s schools is intended to “invest in what works” rather than give the federal government a greater hand in education.

Expanding on remarks he made in his State of the Union address on Tuesday and in rallies in New York and Pennsylvania on Wednesday, the president pitched a program intended to boost the number and qualifications of teachers across the country.

The program, if approved by Congress, would extend a number of already-introduced initiatives, among them one that has helped 3,000 retiring military personnel move into classroom jobs since 1994. It would also recruit teachers with collegiate training in specific fields--math and science, for example--to teach the subjects of their expertise in poor communities.

“Listen to this,” Clinton said to an invited audience of educators and members of Congress. “A quarter of all secondary school teachers don’t have college majors or even minors in the subjects they are teaching.”

The program is also intended to train 1,000 teachers, at a cost of $10 million, to work in communities with large numbers of Native American and Alaska Native students.

But the centerpiece is a continuing plan to place 100,000 more teachers in classrooms. The fiscal 2000 budget, for the year beginning Oct. 1, will seek $1.4 billion, an increase of $200 million over current spending, for a plan to reduce the average size of classrooms in the first through third grades to 18 students.

The White House said the additional funding would allow local schools to hire 8,000 additional teachers and continue meeting the costs of 30,000 teachers hired in the current fiscal year.

But the legislative director of the Council of Great City Schools, Jeff Simering, said Clinton needs to make a long-range commitment to make sure the figure of 100,000 additional teachers can be reached.

“I don’t think those numbers quite work out,” he said. “The Republicans weren’t overly thrilled with the program during the budget negotiations last year.”

An annual increase of $200 million, he said, “isn’t going to get you anywhere.”

Seeking to expand the number of teachers working in impoverished areas, Clinton also said he will seek a fivefold increase, to $35 million, to pay for 7,000 college scholarships “for our brightest young people who commit to teaching where they can do the most good, in the poorest inner city and rural schools.”

The chairman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, Rep. William F. Goodling (R-Pa.), was wary of Clinton’s proposals, saying they represent an increased federal role in education. He said his Republican colleagues will want to protect local control of schools.

“Americans want . . . common-sense education ideas--not more regulations, nor federal tests, nor unfunded mandates, nor duplicative programs,” he said in a written statement.