Bush Delivers Plan for School Accountability

President Bush outlined his first major domestic initiative Tuesday, calling for an expanded effort across the nation to teach reading and math, annual testing and--if schools still fail--money to help parents pay for private schools.

As moderate Democrats offered their own education proposal, Bush championed a bipartisan search for a way to hold schools accountable for students’ failures and insisted that students must be tested every year from grades three through eight to determine progress in reading and math.

“We must confront the scandal of illiteracy in America,” the president said. “We must address the low standing of America’s test scores amongst industrialized nations in math and science.”

Bush’s allies in Congress indicated that there is room for compromise, particularly on the issue of vouchers--federal support that could pay private school tuition, for a transfer to another public school or private tutoring.

“I don’t think we’re going to walk away if we don’t get everything on that issue,” said Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas).

Calling for fewer commands from Washington and greater flexibility on the part of educators, Bush said: “The agents of reform must be schools and school districts, not bureaucracies.”

Just how far the proposals would go toward resolving the nation’s education problems--among them a shortage of teachers and crowded classrooms--was unclear.

Federal reach in education is limited. Fewer than 10 cents of every dollar spent on public education comes from the federal government. And in many states the Bush plan would not be that earthshaking since schools already are experimenting with similar proposals.

“The likelihood of the Feds having a large impact [as a result of the Bush proposal] is very low,” said Luis Huerta, a research associate at UC Berkeley’s Policy Analysis for California Education program.

The 28-page proposal that the White House distributed Tuesday amounts to the skeleton of a program, the muscle--made up of specific details--to be added later. It is built around a $47.5-billion plan that Bush touted during the presidential election campaign. Its early introduction reflects his desire to make improving education a signature of his presidency.

The primary components of the plan:

* Setting high standards for math, reading, science and history and testing annually to monitor the reading and math work of third- through eighth-grade students. States would have three years to develop and implement the assessments.

* Instituting programs to make sure all students can read by third grade.

* Improving teacher quality by helping schools pay for teacher training programs and by overhauling certification programs to bring into the classroom teachers with nontraditional training.

* Promoting math and science teaching. The report said “too many” teachers who teach in those areas have not been trained in the subjects. The program would provide federal funds to pay for partnerships between local schools and math and science departments in colleges and universities.

* Improving fluency in English by streamlining grants for bilingual education and basing them on performance.

* Promoting charter schools that work outside conventional public school formats.

* Expanding technology in the classroom, targeting federal programs for buying and installing computers at rural schools and those serving large numbers of low-income students.

* Boosting school safety and giving students “trapped in persistently dangerous schools” the option to transfer to other institutions.

Sending children or teens to school fearful of attack, Bush said, is “the ultimate betrayal of adult responsibility.”

Bush’s aides were unable to say specifically how the overall program would work, how much it would cost and when it would be sent to Congress.

“We just got here yesterday,” said one senior official who helped put it together and was drafted to brief reporters on it. Under White House ground rules, the official could not be identified by name.

Bush spoke of the program before an audience of perhaps 200 people in the East Room, among them his father’s secretary of Education, Lamar Alexander. The president acknowledged GOP efforts a decade ago to close the federal Department of Education.

“Change will not come by disdaining or dismantling the federal role of education,” he said.

Defending his proposal for annual testing, Bush cited the hypothetical case of a student who does well in third grade but fails the next standard test under many current programs in eighth grade.

He said: “And the parent says, ‘Who do I hold accountable? What happened? My child was successful in the third and here he or she is in the eighth. What went wrong? How come? Where did the system let me down?’ ”

He also called for compiling data on poor and minority students “to see if we’re closing the achievement gap in America.”

Bush aides took pains to portray vouchers as a last resort for use only when public schools fail to improve. Critics said that the $1,500 a year per student that would be provided under the program would not be nearly enough to meet the cost of tuition at most private schools. They also complained that the program would send public dollars to private institutions, including religious schools, rather than spending the money on public education. And, they noted, it would leave some students in failing schools with even less money to spend on their educations.

Officials were unable to say whether private schools would accept students already struggling in public schools.

Still, Bush and Democrats appeared hopeful of compromise.

The president singled out an education proposal by Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, the Democrats’ unsuccessful vice presidential nominee, as “a great place to begin.”

Bush called attention to his shared understanding with the Democratic senator that “an accountability system must have a consequence.” Those education buzzwords mean that students in schools with low test scores should be given options to seek education elsewhere.

“The good news is, I’m not alone,” he said, citing, too, the prospects of working with Rep. George Miller (D-Martinez), the top Democrat on the House Education Committee.

The two major national teachers unions, sharply critical of Republican education plans in the past, held their fire--except on vouchers.

Sandra Feldman, president of the American Federation of Teachers, praised the focus on reading. But she promised to “vigorously oppose” the voucher proposal.

Bob Chase, president of the National Education Assn., was more blunt. “For a new president who has pledged to unite the nation and end bitter partisanship,” Chase said, “his voucher proposal is sure to divide us.”

Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), a leader on education funding, noted that Bush already had printed his plan before meeting Tuesday with Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), a Senate leader on education, Miller and other lawmakers.

“If he wants to work with us,” Harkin complained, “why doesn’t he meet with some members and develop policy as he goes along? He’s making the same mistake [former President Bill] Clinton made--come in here and try to ram it down our throats.”

But Miller said after the White House meeting:

“We’ve struck up a relationship, based upon our common interest and concern about the performance of our schools.”

He said he was encouraged that the Bush plan includes strong language to demand improvement from failing schools and to improve the nation’s teaching corps. He also praised a proposal that parents be given periodic reports measuring a school’s performance.

Among Republicans and Democrats there is a sense that education is an issue whose time has come, after they failed in the last Congress, for the first time since 1965, to act on a major education bill, despite two years of extended debate.

The readiness to act may bode well for reaching a compromise in this Congress.

Sen. Tim Hutchinson (R-Ark.), a member of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, endorsed Bush’s plan. And he suggested that the climate is right for accommodation.

“If you just put exactly his blueprint out there [and ignore Democratic proposals], you would lose an awful lot of those [senators] you want to support the bill,” Hutchinson said.