Gov. Bush Stresses Safety in Schools

Texas Gov. George W. Bush proposed a series of education reforms Tuesday designed to make America’s schools safer, including allowing teachers to banish persistently disruptive children from the classroom and providing federal funds to enforce existing gun laws.

Saying “clear instruction in right and wrong” must be a priority, Bush said he would triple the $8 million currently spent by the federal government each year on character education. He also said he would require federal youth and juvenile justice programs to incorporate character-building elements.

Bush stopped short of proposing stiffer gun-control measures in his third education speech as he campaigns for the Republican presidential nomination. But he did suggest that “any juvenile found guilty of a serious gun offense” should be banned for life from carrying or purchasing a gun.

“We must do everything in our power to ensure the safety of our children,” Bush told the Northern White Mountain Chamber of Commerce in Gorham, N.H., stressing what he called “moral education.”

“When children and teenagers go to school afraid of being bullied or beaten or worse, it is the ultimate betrayal of adult responsibility,” he said.

Joe Andrew, national chairman of the Democratic National Committee, was quick to criticize Bush’s proposals and the school safety record of the governor’s home state, arguing that Texas has not enforced its own Safe Schools Act, according to a 1999 audit by the Texas Education Agency.

“It’s ironic that George W. Bush is preaching to New Hampshire voters about how to create safer schools when his own record in Texas is more in line with the National Rifle Assn. than the National Education Assn.,” Andrew said in a written statement.

In fact, a juvenile crime control measure approved by the U.S. Senate last spring after the shooting at Columbine High School included a provision that would prohibit juveniles from owning guns if they are convicted of a serious crime.

But the measure has been bottled up for months in a House-Senate conference committee because of opposition--mostly from conservative House Republicans. They object to a provision in the Senate bill that would allow up to three days for background checks on people who purchase weapons at gun shows.

“The governor’s speech on school safety was bush league,” said Chris Lehane, a spokesman for Vice President Al Gore’s campaign. “Time and time again, he’s had the opportunity to choose between the gun lobby and children, and he’s always sided with the gun lobby.”

Bush proposed that teachers be allowed to banish their most consistently misbehaving students, who would not be allowed back into the classroom without that teacher’s consent. And he espoused a “teacher protection act” to free educators from what he called “meritless federal lawsuits when they enforce reasonable rules.”

In his earlier education speeches, delivered this autumn in New York and Los Angeles, Bush proposed that states be required to test students. He also said schools should be held accountable for their students’ performance and risk losing federal funds if the students do not achieve. And he called for greater availability of school vouchers so that parents can use federal money to pay for private education.

All of his education proposals, he said Tuesday, “are bound by a thread of principle.”

Unlike his fellow members of the Grand Old Party, who spent much of the 1996 presidential campaign promising to dissolve the U.S. Department of Education, Bush said in the New Hampshire speech that “the federal role in education is to foster excellence and challenge failure with charters and choice.”

But educational attainment, he said, is not enough. The “moral message” sent by schools, he complained, is “mixed and muddled.” While that is beginning to change, Bush said, more must be done.

Students must be taught the common values shared by a diverse America, he said, including respect, responsibility, self-restraint, family commitment, civic duty, fairness and compassion.

Michael Josephson, president of the nonpartisan Character Counts Coalition, based in Los Angeles, called Bush’s proposal “potentially very important,” particularly in the wake of several school shootings.

Bob Chase, president of the National Education Assn., agreed with the need for teaching the elements of good character to the nation’s schoolchildren. But he rapidly parted company with Bush, saying that “this is what teachers are already involved in all across the country.”

Bush also pushed abstinence education Tuesday, suggesting that America should spend as much money “on promoting the conscience of our children as we do on providing them with contraception.”

Cory Richards, vice president for public policy at the Alan Guttmacher Institute, a nonpartisan think tank specializing in reproductive health issues, called Bush’s proposal simplistic.

The most that can be said after nearly two decades of research into abstinence programs, Richards argued, is that “there is no evidence they work, but we’re not willing to say they don’t work. On the basis of that to propose a massive increase in abstinence education is not such a good idea.”

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Times staff writer Richard Simon contributed to this report.