Don’t Be So Bratty

Ask the mothers who wrapped themselves in blankets and slept on the sidewalk outside Cahuenga Elementary School last weekend how much patience they have for the sort of partisan scuffling that is bogging down the education bill in Washington this week.

Eager for their children to attend the Koreatown school, these parents started lining up before dawn so they would be there first on Monday for kindergarten enrollment.

Cahuenga has a strong principal, rising test scores and teachers who expect all students to excel even though most are minority, immigrant and low-income children. It’s just the sort of inner-city school that the education bill would help if our lawmakers in Congress would stop behaving like bratty kids on the schoolyard and reauthorize the federal education law before them.

Education reform must not die because Republicans insist on deal-breakers such as federally funded vouchers for private schools or block grants that would allow states to spend billions of federal dollars on programs that don’t target poor children.

The House is expected to vote by Friday, and for the sake of children like those whose parents lined up outside Cahuenga, our lawmakers had better compromise.

The new law must require, as President Bush insists, annual testing of all children in grades three through eight to measure progress by a standard that is not watered down. All states must be required to participate in the same national test to allow comparisons that encourage success across state lines so that poor, minority students in California, for example, do as well as poor, minority students in Texas.

The bill that finally gets signed into law must have, as Democrats want, much more money for schools that educate the nation’s neediest kids and for teacher training.

Bipartisan compromise should allow vouchers for after-school tutoring. The House should also embrace a deal worked out in committee that would allow school districts to transfer federal funds between programs--say from a computer lab to a school safety project. That would increase flexibility and local control without consigning more low-income children to the worst schools.

Nineteen hundred boys and girls who live in the neighborhood near Cahuenga Elementary School have to be bused to campuses in the San Fernando Valley. Washington’s goal this week should be making sure that poor families nationwide find good schools and that their children get a good education.