President Practices What He Teaches With Budget Plan

President Bush raised the curtain on his budget Wednesday, promising that he will seek an increase for the Department of Education that will top that of any other federal department.

Bush’s proposed 11.5% boost in education spending--including a 9% increase in spending for elementary and secondary schools--represents a dramatic change of course within the Republican Party establishment. For much of the last two decades, the party has led efforts to eliminate the Department of Education, created during the Jimmy Carter administration. And conservatives are still concerned about federal intrusion into what they see as essentially a state and local issue.

But Bush campaigned on a platform of education reform, including standards, testing and a program that would give parents of students in failing schools up to $1,500 a year to use for tutors or private schools.

And for the last two days, he has championed education, vowing in St. Louis and Townsend to make it a priority.

“I think it’s so important for us to prioritize public education,” he said, adding that the nation also must “make it a priority of making sure our money is spent well.”

Ari Fleischer, the presidential press secretary, said that higher spending would not reflect the cost of moving the Head Start program from the Department of Health and Human Services to the Department of Education, something that Bush also advocated Wednesday. The shift in the program that helps young children in poor communities is another Bush priority and would emphasize Head Start’s education component.

The president spent about an hour Wednesday in the Townsend Elementary School, in this community set in the fog-shrouded hills of eastern Tennessee about 30 miles southeast of Knoxville. He divided his time between classrooms, where reading specialists were at work, and the gymnasium, where he spoke to about 200 Tennessee political figures and local residents.

“We’ve got an aggressive program for public ed,” he said. His goal is “an education system focused on each individual, an education system that diagnoses early and solves problems early.”

On Tuesday, Bush said that he would increase from $300 million to $900 million the federal funding for reading programs next year, part of a $5-billion, five-year increase. The new spending for teaching reading will be part of the overall increase in the education budget.

Adding detail to that announcement, Bush said Wednesday that the additional money would be spent on curriculum development, teacher training and diagnostic testing of students in the first three years of elementary school, beginning with kindergarten.

As he entered one classroom Wednesday, a little girl asked: “That’s him?”

“Yeah,” a classmate responded, “that’s him. Duh!”

The president sat on a minuscule chair, his legs squeezed beneath a desk, and said: “President Bush may not be able to get out.”

Later, in his speech in the school gym, he praised the work he saw, “where the teacher was using some of the most advanced thought about teaching reading, a balanced approach including phonics.”

“You teach a child to read and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test,” the president said.

From his first days in office, Bush has been pitching his education program, first in some of Washington’s toughest neighborhoods and this week in the heartland. But as he has kept his focus on rebuilding an academic system that once set the standard by which other countries’ schooling was measured, he has avoided budget details and specific program recommendations.

His campaign catch-phrase, “leave no child behind,” was ripe with hope, if silent on detail.

Next week, however, he will put numbers next to the programs. Under the demands of a balanced budget, he must say where the money is coming from while he also presses his demand for a $1.6-trillion, 10-year tax cut.

On Tuesday, he will present his broad-brush look at the nation’s domestic agenda in a speech to a joint session of Congress. On Wednesday, he will send his budget blueprint to the House and Senate. By outlining the shifts he would make from Clinton administration spending, his document will set specific priorities for the coming year across the government.

On education, Democrats signaled last week that they will be watching carefully how he proposes spending federal funds--and, indeed, whether he will make enough money available to meet his goals.

At the heart of Bush’s plan is the idea that schools must be accountable for how they spend their money and, most particularly, what they achieve with it. In other words, are students learning?

“Accountability without resources, I’m concerned, could be a hollow exercise,” Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.) told Education Secretary Rod Paige during a Senate hearing. “I don’t want to create a bill that just creates unfunded mandates.”

The Democrats serving on the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions were worried that orders from Washington would force communities to shift money to the most troubled schools at the expense of other pressing needs.

The president’s plan and the concerns raised by the Democrats go beyond the controversial elements that have received the most attention: making federal assistance available to help pay private school tuition or tutoring fees for students at schools that fail to improve despite concentrated efforts, and annual testing to monitor progress in reading and math in grades three through eight.

What about the cost of reducing the number of students in each classroom and modernizing old schools?

“Obviously, more funding is better. But, in many cases, more funding might not be the catalyst for change,” Paige said.

Then there’s the cost of testing itself. Some states have developed expensive tests, which can be used only once and include subjective answers that are time-consuming to grade. These states have been disappointed that other states do not want to buy them.