House Delays Vote on School Reform

Amid intense maneuvering over rival education proposals, House Republican leaders Wednesday postponed until next week a vote on the school reform plan backed by President Bush.

Debate on the bill is still scheduled to begin today on the House floor. But previously GOP leaders had said the Bush-backed legislation would be ready for anticipated House passage Friday.

Two prominent Republicans allied with the White House, Reps. David Dreier of San Dimas and Rob Portman of Ohio, attributed the delay to at least two factors.

First, they cited problems in ensuring full attendance by House members Friday. Second, and perhaps more important, they acknowledged that delicate negotiations were underway on which amendments will be allowed for debate and when.

The carefully crafted education bill, which cleared a House committee with bipartisan support, has the potential to split Republicans and Democrats alike.

At its core, the bill imposes a new requirement to test all children in grades three through eight in reading and mathematics--and to measure their progress against state-approved benchmarks. Schools that failed to advance would, after a grace period, face sanctions. And some parents would be allowed to move their children to better public schools or get extra tutoring help from private groups--at federal expense. The White House argues these would represent noteworthy changes in federal education policy.

In exchange for these new policies, school officials would be given a degree of latitude in how they can spend federal money. And they would get significantly more of the funds, a key reason many Democrats have been backing the bill.

But some conservative Republicans want to add a provision to allow federal funding for vouchers to help parents pay for private school tuition. They also want to further cut the strings on federal aid sent to states while holding that spending more in check.

Liberal Democrats say such amendments, which have considerable support in the House, would kill a bipartisan bill.

Democrats, for their part, are proposing to require federal programs to rebuild schools and hire teachers for class size reduction--amendments that could drive away Republicans.

The bill, Portman said, “has become much more complicated than we thought it was going to be.” But he said the vote count in support of the bill remains “pretty good.”

Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), who voted against the bill in committee because he believed it strayed too far from Bush’s original goals, predicted some legislation would pass next week. He also said he believed the House would vote on 18 or more amendments--a huge number by House standards.

One that Hoekstra is sponsoring with Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) would scrap the bill’s new testing requirement.

The Senate is debating a similar bill, and Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) won approval Wednesday for an amendment to raise authorized funding for after-school programs to $4.5 billion by 2008, up from $1.5 billion in the next fiscal year. The vote was 60 to 39.

But the Senate defeated, on a 50-49 vote, an amendment by Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) to spend $1.6 billion a year to renovate dilapidated schools. The vote was seen as a critical test of the GOP’s ability to uphold Bush’s goals.

Toward the end of a tense roll call, Republican leaders leaned heavily on Sen. Olympia J. Snowe (R-Maine), a centrist, who cast the deciding vote against the proposal.