Bush to Sweeten Education Plan With a Dash of Gore’s Ideas

Bidding to broaden support for his top priority, President Bush will incorporate a key plank of Al Gore’s school reform agenda in the education blueprint that the new administration plans to unveil today, White House aides said Monday.

Officials said that Bush will add to his plan measures touted by Gore, former President Clinton and leading congressional Democrats that provide more financial help to poorly performing public schools. In return, the schools would commit to far-reaching reforms, such as revamping curriculum and allowing all students to transfer to better public schools.

This new proposal could help Bush soften at least some resistance to his plan for using school vouchers to help prompt improvement at poorly performing public schools. In today’s proposal, Bush still will call for the federal government to fund vouchers--which could be used for private school tuition--for low-income parents whose children attend schools that fail to improve student performance after three years.

But with the new initiative, Bush will propose that those troubled schools receive additional aid for two years before the voucher requirement would be triggered, officials said. That shift could eliminate one of the main arguments critics have raised against Bush’s voucher plan. During the campaign, Gore and other Democrats argued that Bush set up struggling schools for failure by not offering them any additional assistance before the vouchers would be imposed.

In effect, the new proposal seeks to reduce the likelihood that vouchers would be needed by providing failing schools more help. In the campaign, Bush did not propose such assistance.

Rep. Michael N. Castle (R-Del.), a leader on education issues among moderate Republicans, said that the new assistance proposal could help attract GOP legislators like him, who have been skeptical of vouchers.

By adding the step of additional help to failing schools, Castle said, the Bush plan “is going in the direction of something that is supportable. . . . It sounds to me like they are bending over backwards to make it a more acceptable concept.”

Several Democratic education experts praised the new proposal as a good-faith gesture but were skeptical that it would soften their party’s strong resistance to Bush’s voucher plan.

“I don’t think it will change the dynamic much,” said Bruce Reed, Clinton’s former chief domestic policy advisor. “It makes sense to help turn around failing schools . . . but it doesn’t make sense to allow that money [at some point] to go into the private education system rather than starting a new public school that works.”

Congressional sources said that funding for failing schools may be only one of several compromises Bush will have to offer to advance his voucher proposal--which has faced a chilly reception from moderates in both parties, even as his overall plan has received generally good marks.

Though not a retreat from any of Bush’s campaign proposals, the initiative does represent the most specific new policy overture he has offered to moderates since his razor-thin presidential victory. It attempts to bridge a philosophical divide between Democrats and Republicans over how to help public schools that fail to improve performance for low-income students, as measured by standard tests.

Democrats have argued that the schools should receive additional money but be required to undertake specific reforms. Republicans, led by Bush, have argued for less prescriptive solutions, saying that schools would face marketplace pressure to improve if parents were given vouchers that allowed them to move their children into private schools. With this plan, Bush is blending both arguments.

Aides said that Bush will not release his full education bill today but instead will put forward “a very detailed blueprint” for Congress that will run about 25 pages.

The blueprint may not flesh out all aspects of Bush’s proposal for intervening in failing schools. The aides, for instance, said that the size of funding would not be specified until the president releases his overall federal budget proposal. And the plan will not lay out all of the measures that failing schools would be required to undertake, apart from specifying that schools that fail to improve performance for two years allow all students to transfer to better public schools.

But in its broad outline, the new aspect of Bush’s plan largely tracks a Clinton administration initiative that Gore proposed expanding significantly. Provisions for aiding failing schools also are featured prominently in the centrist Democratic education reform plan that Bush aides see as the basis for a potential bipartisan agreement. The authors of the Democratic plan--including Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.), Gore’s running mate--plan to reintroduce that bill today.

In his final two years, Clinton won approval of a new fund--now budgeted at $225 million annually--to support improvements at failing public schools. In return for the money, school districts must agree to allow students to transfer to better public schools and to undertake reforms in the troubled schools themselves.

In his campaign, Gore proposed to increase both the amount of money available for troubled schools and the requirements imposed on them.

Bush’s campaign plan, by contrast, relied on vouchers--not money and mandates--to leverage improvement. He proposed that schools be required to test annually in reading and math those students for whom they receive aid under the federal Title I program. School funding for low-income children is provided under Title I. Schools that improved performance for those students would receive bonuses. But under Bush’s original plan, parents of Title I children in schools that failed to improve performance for three years would receive $1,500 vouchers that they could use for tutoring, after-school enrichment or tuition at private schools.

One White House aide said that, even with the assistance proposal added to Bush’s plan, two significant differences still separate his thinking from the Clinton-Gore approach to failing schools. One is support for vouchers after three years, which the aide called “the final accountability mechanism” for failure. The other is that Bush has called for annual testing to measure student performance, which Gore and Clinton did not.

Even centrist Democrats like Lieberman who have been sympathetic to other aspects of Bush’s education-reform agenda have been unwavering in their opposition to his voucher proposal. Appearing on ABC’s “This Week” program Sunday, Lieberman said that, although he had supported voucher experiments in the past, he saw no basis for compromise in the Bush plan. “I don’t think we can find a meeting of the minds on the question of so-called vouchers,” Lieberman said.

Storm clouds also have been building within the GOP over the voucher provision. Last week, the Republican Main Street Partnership, a coalition of some 50 centrist congressional Republicans, issued a detailed education wish-list for 2001 that pointedly excluded any mention of vouchers.

That was a reminder to the Bush team that it faces a selling job in its own party on vouchers. In October 1999, House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas) offered a reform plan similar to Bush’s that would have provided vouchers to low-income parents in poorly performing schools. The measure failed on the House floor by 91 votes, with 52 Republicans among the opposition.