House Gives Schools Spending Flexibility

The House on Tuesday approved a measure that would allow school districts to choose how to spend their part of $2 billion in federal education funds--on reducing class size or improving teacher quality.

Despite heavy lobbying by the White House, 24 Democrats broke ranks to join Republicans in backing the measure after a major debate over whether it is more important to decrease the student-teacher ratio or boost the quality of teachers in the classroom. Four Republican lawmakers voted against it.

The 239-185 vote was a blow to President Clinton’s proposal to add 100,000 teachers to the nation’s classrooms within seven years to reduce class size.

The president vowed Tuesday to veto the measure if it reaches his desk, arguing that it would “kill” his initiative by not guaranteeing “one red cent” specifically for reducing class size and that it would do too little to ensure that schools in poor districts receive adequate resources and attention.

“We’ve got to do more to lower class size in the early grades, especially for our poorest children, especially for our minority children, especially for all these children whose first language is not even English,” Clinton said during an unrelated event at the White House.

The GOP measure would add the $1.2 billion appropriated last year for the first phase of Clinton’s teacher initiative to other funds for teacher training and development. States and school districts would have greater latitude in deciding how much of the money to use to hire additional teachers and how much to allocate for improving teacher qualifications and wooing top educators with merit pay and bonuses.

“This is the beauty of this bill--we can have our cake and eat it, too,” said Rep. Howard P. “Buck” McKeon (R-Santa Clarita), architect of the measure.

McKeon said that his goal is to ensure that the federal money actually helps children learn. He and other lawmakers used California’s experience in reducing class size as an example of how merely shrinking the student-teacher ratio does not guarantee better education for students.

“Reducing the class size won’t make one bit of difference if you don’t have quality teachers,” said Rep. William F. Goodling (R-Pa.), chairman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.

To receive the funds under the GOP proposal--which would have to pass the Senate before it could go to the White House--states would have to demonstrate that all teachers are fully qualified by the end of 2003 and that they are reducing the learning gaps between low-income and middle-class students and ethnic minority and white students.

Rep. Matthew G. Martinez (D-Monterey Park) offered a Democratic alternative that would have targeted more money toward schools in poor communities and preserved the Clinton initiative, but that measure failed, 217 to 207.

Reminding his Republican colleagues that they voted with Democrats to approve Clinton’s plan to hire 100,000 teachers last fall, Martinez said that the current measure “reneges on that promise.”

Rep. George Miller (D-Martinez) led defecting Democrats who supported the GOP bill.

“We have a very real opportunity for the first time to stop this process where we continue to hire unqualified people to teach our children,” Miller said. “We have a tragedy in the making, with emergency-certified teachers teaching children with the most education needs.”

Miller criticized the president’s 100,000 teacher initiative, which would reduce class size to 18 in the first to third grades, saying that it would spread some of the problems California has had under its program to other states.

California has lowered its student-teacher ratio to 20 to 1 in the first three grades. But the haste to lower class sizes--at a time when enrollment is booming--helped put more than 31,000 people without teaching certificates in California classrooms. Many of the underqualified teachers work in low-income areas where many students face big academic hurdles.