House Panel Kills School Voucher Plan

Voting to kill a proposal to give parents federal money to pay for private school tuition, a House committee on Wednesday confirmed what for weeks has been a foregone conclusion: President Bush’s school voucher plan is all but dead.

The 27-20 vote in the House Education and Workforce Committee erased a provision in a Republican-authored education bill that would have granted low-income parents aid for private schooling if they wished to remove their child from a persistently failing public school.

Five House Republicans broke party ranks to oppose vouchers, joining a united bloc of Democrats.

Voucher fights are expected to flare again on the floors of the Senate and the House as the two chambers move to consider legislation to reshape the federal role in education. But none of the principal advocates of vouchers in Congress believes those debates will be anything but perfunctory.

Bush, who has made school reform a top priority, acknowledged as much in an interview with education reporters.

“There are people that are afraid of choice,” he said in newspaper interviews published today. “And I’m a realist. I understand that. It doesn’t change my opinion, but it’s not going to change the votes, either.”

Indeed, administration officials and congressional GOP leaders recognize that their goal of a bipartisan accord on education would be unattainable if a bill contained school vouchers. Most Democrats, in line with the views of teacher unions and other public education groups, fiercely oppose school vouchers.

“We knew that, clearly, vouchers were going to be a poison pill to a bipartisan bill,” said Rep. George Miller of Martinez, ranking Democrat on the House education committee.

Nonetheless, Congress is inching toward other measures to encourage school choice.

Legislation the Senate will formally take up today for the first time includes a provision to allow parents whose children are in failing schools to get extra help from private tutoring services. Those services, available before or after school, would be screened by public school officials and paid under contract with public funds.

Another provision agreed to by Democrats and Republicans would require school districts in certain low-income neighborhoods to allow parents to move a child from a persistently failing public school to one judged adequate.

The centerpiece of the legislation is a proposal to require states to test all students in reading and math annually in grades three through eight.

The proposed testing requirement, though likely to be approved, is generating some controversy.

Rep. John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), chairman of the House committee, who backs testing, called it “a bright light of truth that scares a lot of people--all across the ideological spectrum, on both sides. But if you don’t test, you don’t know” how much children are learning.