Bush Moves to Reposition Republicans on Education

As much as any other policy initiative, the education plan President Bush released Tuesday may determine whether he can change his party’s image and broaden his base of support.

In the presidential campaign, Bush drew much better marks on education from voters than previous Republican nominees--helping him attract moderates who abandoned the GOP in Bill Clinton’s two victories during the 1990s. The education blueprint Bush offered Tuesday could cement his gains by providing the basis for bipartisan agreement with Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.) and other centrist Democrats who introduced a largely similar plan only hours earlier.

Yet Bush faces the risk that the consensus over his package’s key elements will be overshadowed by the largest remaining difference: the question of whether the federal government should fund vouchers that low-income parents can use to send their children to private schools.

One key to Bush’s campaign success was convincing voters that his top priority was improving public schools--a decisive shift in emphasis from earlier GOP leaders. But Democrats believe that a partisan fight over vouchers could push Bush back into a much more conventional position of seeming to emphasize the interests of private over public schools.

“The reality is, in the campaign Bush made real progress on education. But he stands on the verge of squandering” it, said Democratic pollster Mark Mellman. “To the extent Bush promotes vouchers he looks as though he is promoting private schools at the expense of public schools. And the last thing people want to do is give up on public schools.”

Conscious of that danger, White House aides stressed that vouchers are a relatively secondary part of Bush’s plan. They emphasized areas of agreement--particularly on the idea of giving states more flexibility in spending federal dollars, in return for more rigorous evaluation of student performance.

Indeed, many education experts in both parties believe that Bush has the chance to reach agreement on a fundamental revision of federal education programs around those broad principles. “This is kind of reminiscent of the welfare debate 10 or so years ago, when we got to a point of consensus that a major federal program wasn’t working,” said Chester E. Finn, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute. “I suspect we are on the brink of something similar in education.”

In the 2000 election, education played the same role for Bush that welfare reform did for Clinton in his 1992 campaign: It was the principal measure he used to convince voters that he was moving his party back toward the political center. Muting the sharp-edged ideological message of House Republican conservatives--who once sought to eliminate the federal Education Department and pushed for private school vouchers--Bush repeatedly stressed his commitment to improve public schools so “no child is left behind.”

On election day, exit polls conducted by both The Times and the Voter News Service, a consortium of television networks, found that Bush ran much better than recent GOP nominees among voters who considered education their top priority.

By highlighting education as his first legislative initiative, Bush already has avoided Clinton’s mistake of angering his centrist supporters by shelving welfare reform through his first two years. Like the conciliatory tone of his inaugural address, Bush’s quick movement on education suggests that he is committed to balancing the parts of his agenda aimed at conservatives--such as his order Monday blocking federal funds for abortion services abroad--with measures meant to reassure swing voters.

Education may also offer Bush the best opportunity to prove that he can establish bipartisan cooperation in Washington. Compared to disputes over tax cuts or the private investment of some Social Security taxes, the differences between Bush and centrists in both parties on education are more modest.

Sides Share Some Philosophical Points

That does not mean that aspects of Bush’s plan will not face resistance on the left or right. But some common philosophical assumptions undergird the reform plans of both Bush and the Democratic group led by Lieberman. Among them:

* Trading flexibility for accountability: The core of Bush’s plan is his belief that “authority and accountability must be aligned at the local level,” as he put it Tuesday. Centrists in both parties largely agree. Both the centrist Democratic bill introduced Tuesday and the education blueprint released last week by a coalition of moderate congressional Republicans follow the basic outline of Bush’s plan. Like Bush, each would give states more flexibility in spending federal money, while requiring them to measure student performance more rigorously through standard tests.

Even so, Bush’s proposal will face partisan sniping. Liberals are skeptical of Bush’s plan to consolidate more than 60 federal education programs into five broad block grants that states would have more freedom to spend as they see fit. The principal concern is that states will shift resources from the neediest students toward more affluent districts. “If the states have control, that would be a very big worry,” said Sandra Feldman, president of the American Federation of Teachers.

Meanwhile, conservatives may bridle at the flip side of Bush’s plan: a requirement that states agree to test every student in reading and math every year from third through eighth grade. States would either gain or lose federal funds based on the results.

Some conservatives are likely to consider that to be excessive federal intrusion. They will be even cooler toward Bush’s insistence that Washington establish a common benchmark for the state tests by refusing to recognize progress on the local exams if it is not matched by gains among the state’s students in the nationally administered National Assessment of Educational Progress test.

* Using market forces to leverage improvement: In a broad shift, both parties now agree that one way to leverage improvements in public schools is to expose them to increased competition for students. On Tuesday, for instance, Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) declared that the centrist Democratic plan “harnesses market forces . . . to encourage innovation and improvement and increased accountability.”

The dispute is over what forms of competition to promote. Most moderates in both parties believe that conventional public schools should face competition from other public institutions--such as charter schools (public schools that operate free of most bureaucratic rules) or provisions allowing children in poorly performing schools to transfer to other public schools. This consensus could lead to quick agreement on such Bush priorities as providing $3 billion in federal loans to help start more charter schools.

But Bush also believes that poorly performing public schools would be forced to improve if low-income students were given vouchers they could use to transfer to private schools. That is the point on which almost all Democrats, and many moderate Republicans, get off the train. Bayh spoke for many of them Tuesday when he said that reform efforts should use “market forces within public education without abandoning the public school system.”

Incentive for Voucher Compromise

Thinkers in both parties said there is enough consensus on other issues that the two sides have incentive to compromise on vouchers. Bush took a step toward Democrats this week by adding to his plan new funds to help failing schools before the voucher requirement would be triggered. Finn said that Bush’s focus on local control points toward another potential compromise: letting states decide whether to offer vouchers.

Yet in their initial responses, even Democrats previously sympathetic to vouchers have voiced surprisingly unequivocal opposition to Bush’s plan. “We as ‘New Democrats’ are really going to hold the line on that,” said a source close to Lieberman.

Given that staunch resistance, one challenge for Bush will be to prevent the education debate from devolving into a familiar standoff over vouchers. Vouchers are not nearly as central to his plan as they were to earlier GOP ones. But if vouchers still dominate the debate, the broad changes Bush has imposed on Republican education thinking may be lost--and with it the opportunity to politically reposition his party on the issue.

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Bush’s Education Plan

Highlights of the president’s plan. Costs were not provided.

Standards, Accountability and Vouchers

* States would assess reading and math for grades 3 through 8 annually to measure performance of pupils and schools.

* Schools and districts that do not make enough progress in one year would receive aid to make improvements.

* When a school does not make enough progress for two straight years, all children in it would be offered the option of attending another public school. Corrective action would continue.

* When a school fails for three years, disadvantaged students could use federal Title I funds to attend a private school or another public school, or to obtain tutoring.

* States and school districts would be given broad flexibility in how they spend federal education money in return for agreeing to specific performance requirements.

* States and districts that make significant progress would get financial rewards, while federal administrative money would be cut to states that fall short.

* Districts would be required to report specifically on the progress of their student population.

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Literacy, Language

* Students would have to be taught in English after three years in school, and states and school districts would get more flexibility in spending bilingual education money if they show progress each year in English proficiency. States that do not show progress could lose a portion of federal money.

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Student Safety

* Pupils in “persistently dangerous schools” would be allowed to transfer to safer schools.

* Authority of teachers to remove violent or disruptive students would be strengthened.

Teachers

* Dozens of existing federal programs that help train teachers would be consolidated into grants giving states and localities more spending flexibility if they show results.

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Tax Break

* Families could put up to $5,000 a year into tax-favored accounts that can be used for K-12 school expenses.

Source: Associated Press