Conflicting U.S. School Plans Offered

Offering a lesson plan for failing schools, President Clinton urged Congress on Saturday to vote $250 million to help states radically improve troubled public schools or shut them down and start over. Critical Republicans quickly countered with their own formulas for improving education.

Clinton also offered the option of permitting a student at a “chronically failing” public school to transfer to a public school with a better record of achievement. But he emphasized efforts to transform the schools now doing a poor job.

“Too few of these failing schools ever get enough help to turn around,” the president said in his weekly radio address. “With today’s action we are declaring as a nation that we will not fail our children by tolerating failing schools. . . . Students can’t aim high in schools that perform low.”

Republicans, meanwhile, pushed the GOP plan for education savings accounts to pay the costs of transferring to private, parochial or public schools, an idea Clinton has twice vetoed, in part as a threat to the nation’s system of public school education.

Rep. J.C. Watts Jr. (R-Okla.), chairman of the House Republican Conference, faulted Clinton for offering “only baby steps of reform.”

North Dakota Gov. Edward T. Schafer, chairman of the Republican Governors Assn., called Clinton’s comments on permitting students to transfer out of failing public schools “tricky.” He said the option to transfer from a failing school to a public or a charter school already exists in law and he believes the president is trying to narrow it.

Clinton announced state-by-state allocations from an existing $134-million fund that states and cities can tap for struggling schools and released guidelines on how the money can be used most effectively. California’s share is $16.5 million.

The president also asked Congress to approve the $250 million--$31.9 million for California--he requested for the accountability fund in his fiscal 2001 budget proposal so that states can make concentrated efforts to fix schools that no longer perform for students.

His guidelines suggest ways to strengthen curricula, improve teacher training or close schools and then reopen them with stronger leadership and teaching staffs or reestablish them as charter schools with community support.