A Meeting Ground

George W. Bush has declared war on poverty, much as did another president from Texas, Lyndon B. Johnson. But the new chief executive has chosen public schools as his battleground, rightly equating learning with earning. His plan, which should be largely embraced by both parties in Congress, is a welcome dose of moderation and practicality.

Decrying a nation increasingly divided into readers and nonreaders, the plan that Bush delivered to Congress Tuesday focuses on the poorest students, the targets of most federal education spending. The largest program, Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, will spend $8.6 billion during fiscal 2001 on programs for millions of low-income students, and the president is right to demand some results from that investment.

Washington contributes only 7% of the money spent nationwide on public education, which is funded largely at the state and local levels. However, federal goals and regulations can influence what takes place in a classroom. So can a presidential bully pulpit.

Refreshingly nonideological with the exception of his rather low-key support of school vouchers, Bush’s blueprint centers for the most part on practical, tested reforms. He touts, for example, pre-reading skills in Head Start and other preschool programs, research-based reading instruction and incentives to make teachers more effective in helping students learn to read by age 9. Congress should deliver much of Bush’s program.

Bush also calls for annual testing of students in third through eighth grades so parents and teachers would know where children stand and failure could be corrected early. Bush wants Washington to pay for the development of state tests, like one used in Texas, that measure subjects taught in state classrooms. To corroborate the results, Bush would require all states to participate in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) examination, which tests a sampling of fourth- and eighth-grade students in reading and math in states that choose to participate and then ranks the results by state.

Mandatory testing is already in place in California, which depends on the Stanford 9 standardized test to measure student achievement in grades 2 through 11. Similar testing should be required in all states for all students.

To those who say the achievement gap between white and minority students and between rich and poor can’t be narrowed, Bush points to Texas, where reading and math scores have risen across the board regardless of race, ethnicity or family income. On this issue, Bush already has the benefit of the doubt. He didn’t invent the Texas reforms, but he steadily backed them.

His support of vouchers that could use federal money to pay private school tuition may be the largest threat to bipartisan compromise, but even there he has narrowly tailored his proposal to schools that have repeatedly failed their students. His proposal would give such schools that receive Title I funds three years to improve. If the failure continued, parents would get a $1,500 voucher to use at another school or for tutoring.

Education legislation was also introduced Tuesday by Sens. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.) and Evan Bayh (D-Ind.). There’s enough commonality in the competing plans that if bipartisanship is possible in this Congress, education reform is its best chance.