Only Remnants of Bush’s Education Plan Remain in Bills

The White House is cringing under friendly fire over its education bill. President Bush expected complaints from the left about his effort to restructure federal education policy. But now the legislation--which the House and Senate are scheduled to debate this week--is facing a barrage from some of the best conservative thinkers on education, including some who helped formulate Bush’s original proposal.

“What began as an excellent reform strategy has been eviscerated,” William J. Bennett, President Reagan’s Education secretary, wrote recently in The Times. Adds Chester E. Finn, a leading Republican education guru: “Most of the engines of change in this thing have had their fuel lines cut.”

It’s true that the left and the right in Congress have tugged and snipped at Bush’s plan. But in declaring the plan eviscerated, the critics, for the most part, overstate the case--and slight the need to accommodate Democratic ideas in a Congress split almost 50-50. Let’s look at three major counts in the conservative indictment:

Choice: Conservatives are incensed that the bills in both chambers have dropped Bush’s proposal to provide low-income parents who have children in failing public schools vouchers they can use for private school. But the unavoidable fact is that private-school vouchers lack majority support in either the House or Senate; too many moderate Republicans share the virtually universal Democratic fear that vouchers would drain needed resources from the public school system. Unless Bush is willing to veto the legislation for excluding vouchers--a suicidal strategy--there’s not much he can do to change that equation.

In their disappointment about the loss of private-school vouchers, the conservative reformers may be underestimating the measures the bill does include to increase parental choices. The legislation will make it much easier for the parents of kids in failing schools to transfer their children to a better-performing public school. It will encourage more charter schools. Most important, Bush accepted an idea from centrist Senate Democrats to offer qualified low-income parents vouchers they can use to purchase after-school tutoring for their children.

These vouchers would give low-income parents the same opportunities already available to more affluent families, allowing them to enroll their children in private, remedial tutoring services, like those run by the Sylvan Learning Center. Once the vouchers create this new buying power, more of those centers will almost inevitably open in inner-city neighborhoods. That’s a prospect liberals should applaud.

And because part of the money for the vouchers would come out of the school districts’ federal funds, they would advance the conservative goal of increasing marketplace pressure on public schools to improve. “It is going to provide huge leverage for parents,” predicts Margaret La Montagne, Bush’s top domestic policy advisor.

Finn, though, has a strong point when he says the bill lets schools fail for too long--four years--before giving parents the vouchers. In this case, accountability delayed is accountability denied: “If your school is failing when your kid is in first grade,” Finn notes, “he’ll be in fifth grade before you get to do something about it.” Triggering the vouchers after three years, or even two, would inspire more appropriate urgency.

Flexibility: The conservative reformers complain that the bills don’t grant states enough control over spending federal education dollars. It’s true that neither the House nor Senate moves as far in that direction as Bush wanted. But both bills take significant steps toward greater flexibility; each, for instance, would trim the unwieldy thicket of federal teacher training programs into one streamlined grant. Overall, the House bill cuts the number of narrowly targeted federal educational grants roughly in half.

The real conservative complaint is that the bills don’t include the so-called Straight A’s plan--which would give states that agree to meet high specified goals for student performance virtually unfettered freedom to shift money not only between programs but between districts. But that idea is as polarizing as vouchers--critics fear that it would allow states to shift resources from the neediest school districts to the most powerful and affluent.

Working together, House Democrats and Republicans have produced a better idea--providing greatly increased freedom to transfer funds between programs at the school district, not the state, level. That approach combines the local flexibility Republicans prize with the protection for low-income districts paramount for many Democrats.

Testing: This is where reformers, in both parties, have their strongest case against the legislation. Both bills maintain the shell of Bush’s testing plan, requiring states to test all students in reading and math every year between third and eighth grade.

But under pressure from congressional Republicans fearful of federal intrusion, the bills hollow out that requirement by allowing states to measure student performance using different tests in different years. That could produce a Babel of results--and undermine Bush’s hope of mobilizing parents to demand local improvement by providing them with a clear picture of their children’s progress. Moreover, the idea of letting schools use local exams one year and commercially available national tests the next rests on the erroneous premise that states can accurately compare the results of these disparate exams; in a detailed 1998 study, the National Academy of Sciences flatly concluded that such correlations are “not feasible.”

Sandy Kress, Bush’s chief negotiator on the bill, acknowledges the potential for confusion, but says that in implementing the legislation the federal Education Department will weed out state testing plans that obscure student performance. “I believe it will be impossible for those kinds of plans to be approved by the [Education] secretary under the current language in the bills,” Kress insists.

But it may be too much to ask Education Department bureaucrats to stand up to state officials--and their conservative allies in Congress--later if the White House won’t stare them down now. If Bush wants to require meaningful testing in the states, he needs to make that more explicit in the bill itself--even if that means picking a fight with those in his own party who reflexively flunk any Washington intervention in the schools.