Bush Raises Tough Questions About Decades of Frustration in Education

None of the Great Society ambitions has been frustrated more bitterly than the dream of narrowing the education gap between poor children and kids who go home to more comfortable beds.

Since 1965, Washington has poured more than $120 billion into that effort through Title I, a massive program that pays for extra instruction for low-income students. Nearly half of all American schools, and one-quarter of all students, receive services (such as tutoring and remedial instruction) under Title I. It pumps more money into elementary and secondary schools (nearly $8 billion annually) than any other federal program.

But for all that effort, there’s been precious little evidence that Title I is meeting its goals. Though it found some hopeful signs, even the left-leaning Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights concluded in a report earlier this month that “Title I has not made enough of a difference to close the persistent achievement gaps between poor and non-poor, and minority and non-minority students.”

This week, the House Education and the Workforce Committee is scheduled to begin drafting legislation to reauthorize the law. With the parties divided on how to reform it, sweeping changes aren’t likely. But a more fundamental debate is approaching.

In his first education speech earlier this month, GOP presidential front-runner George W. Bush tried to change the framework of discussion over Title I and its close cousin, Head Start, the federal preschool program for poor kids. When they talk about Head Start or Title I, Democrats, with some justification, prefer to focus on access--the question of whether Washington is spending enough to provide services to all eligible kids. Building on a critique advanced in recent years by House Republicans, Bush focused instead on quality--whether the programs are actually producing results for poor children.

Democrats play to their strength in talking about access because neither Head Start nor Title I reaches enough poor children. But Bush moves to high ground when he talks about quality. Both Head Start and Title I now focus too much on providing jobs for adults and too little on providing instruction for children. (By one tally, nearly half of all Title I money goes into hiring teachers’ aides, many with minimal qualifications.) “We start with the premise that every child can learn . . . and if they are not learning, we must say that this is unacceptable, and therefore something has got to happen,” Bush said in an interview Friday.

To Bush, the answers are to mandate a more academically focused curriculum for Head Start and to allow other competitors to bid for the federal contracts held by programs that aren’t adequately preparing children for school. On Title I, he wants to build on the reforms that President Clinton and the Democratic Congress passed in 1994. That legislation required states to test Title I students in their elementary, intermediate and high school years, and to compel reforms at schools that did not raise scores after three years. Bush wants to test Title I students annually; at schools that did not improve their scores after three years, Title I money would be given directly to parents in the form of vouchers that could be used for tutoring, after-school enrichment programs--or even private school tuition.

“I have no intention of federalizing education,” Bush says. “On the other hand, I’m taking a little different approach in this sense: I intend to actively use my office to make sure that, where the federal government is involved, poor children aren’t left behind.”

Bush’s rivals on the right have reacted to this proposal as if he had called for allowing Clinton to write a national curriculum on abstinence. “Mr. Bush’s scheme,” complained Gary Bauer in a typical response, “is . . . a prescription for more and bigger government.” Bauer instead called for converting all the Title I money into vouchers--immediately. So did Steve Forbes. Former Vice President Dan Quayle, before apparently rolling up his own campaign this weekend, said Washington should roll all federal elementary and secondary education programs, including Title I, into one massive block grant for states.

Even congressional Republicans acknowledge that none of these ideas could pass Congress unless the GOP makes significant gains in 2000. But their appeal on the right illuminates the political pressures facing Bush as he crafts his education agenda.

Bush is unlikely to reduce the traditional Democratic political advantage on education without articulating an activist role for Washington in reforming the schools. The problem is that opposition to any federal role in education is intensifying among conservatives. “In the general election, you benefit from having a proactive, vigorous, muscular federal role,” says Chester E. Finn, a leading GOP thinker on education. “You suffer, though, [during the primaries] because so many Republican voters don’t think there ought to be any federal role.”

Indeed, Bush’s concessions to the anti-Washington current provide the most obvious vulnerabilities in his plan. It says nothing about expanding access to Title I or Head Start. It offers poorly performing schools no additional funding or intervention before they face the loss of their funds to vouchers. Most important, the GOP resistance to any form of national testing leads Bush to repeat the mistake of the 1994 reform and allow states to design their own tests of how Title I kids and schools are performing. “Without a national benchmark,” notes Al From, president of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, “you have no way of judging whether state standards mean anything.”

Yet, even with those flaws, Bush’s plan embodies ideas whose time may be coming. Clinton reasonably wants to strengthen Title I by tightening the requirement on states to intervene in failing schools and providing them more money to do so. But Bush raises an equally reasonable question: Is there a point at which a school has failed for so long that the federal money might be better spent providing new options to parents and their children? “That says there will be a consequence for failure, and the consequence is to liberate parents,” Bush insists. With polls showing growing interest in vouchers, especially among minorities, that’s a consequence Bush could force Democrats to confront sooner than they would like.

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Ronald Brownstein’s column appears in this space every Monday.

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