Bush Proposes $75-Million Voucher Plan

WASHINGTON -- President Bush, reviving a neglected theme from his presidential election campaign, proposed spending federal money on vouchers that parents dissatisfied with public school could apply toward tuition at private schools.

Vouchers are popular with a segment of Bush’s conservative core of supporters, and his new attention to the issue comes at a time when he has been revving up conservatives for his reelection bid.

“We cannot have a two-tiered education system in America: one tier for those who can afford a certain type of school, and one tier for those who can’t,” Bush said at a public charter school in Washington, D.C.

The president will ask Congress to spend $75 million on vouchers, with $15 million going to families in the U.S. capital.

Bush spoke frequently about vouchers in the 2000 campaign, but he had rarely talked about them since agreeing with Congress in 2001 on a major education bill that omitted vouchers.

On Tuesday, however, he said his program “is the beginning of an experiment that will show whether or not private school choice makes a difference in quality education in public schools. I happen to believe it will.”

Teachers’ unions, congressional Democrats and many education experts do not. They note, for example, that the $15 million that the president wants to spend in Washington would provide vouchers for only about 2,000 of the city’s 67,000 public schoolchildren.

“It makes sense to us to put our energy and resources into the kind of changes that would make it better for all 67,000,” said Michael Pons, a spokesman for the National Education Assn., the largest teachers’ union.

The critics also said studies of existing voucher programs showed that they do not improve educational quality and that the vouchers generally are used by students who would go to private school anyway.

Democrats Object

Some Democrats criticized Bush for making his pitch for vouchers as the federal government and many states are considering deep budget cuts.

“I continue to be amazed that in the midst of unprecedented school budget cuts and teacher layoffs this president is proposing $75 million for private schools ... under the guise of giving students choice,” Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) said in a statement. “The best choice the president could give America’s students is a good public school education.”

Bush endorsed a House bill that would offer some low-income students in Washington who attend poor-performing public schools $7,500 scholarships to use at private schools.

The city’s mayor, Democrat Anthony A. Williams, has supported the idea. But the District of Columbia’s at-large representative in Congress, Eleanor Holmes Norton, also a Democrat, opposes it. She accused Bush of trying to use the city as a “guinea pig” for vouchers.

“He’s got a lot of nerve to come into the District [of Columbia] and use a public charter school as a backdrop to advocate vouchers without also advocating money for charter schools,” Norton said.

A spokesman for the mayor said the normal criticisms of voucher programs did not fit Washington. The funding for the program, which would come from the federal government, would not take away from the school budget, which is paid for by city taxpayers.

“We’re very excited about the prospect of expanding opportunities for our students who are currently in some of our most troubled schools,” said Tony Bullock, the mayor’s spokesman. “And we are not taking a single dollar from the public school system.”

Eleven states offer tax credits or vouchers to help pay for private schools. But Bush’s program would mark the first time that the federal government would provide money for private elementary and secondary education.

Private-school vouchers have not won broad public support. Ballot initiatives on vouchers have failed in several states, including California.

Conservative Backing

But private-school vouchers resonate with many conservative voters, who believe that allowing parents to opt out of badly performing schools would inject competition into school systems and improve education.

“A lot of conservatives like policies that put parents in the driver seat,” said Krista Kafer, a policy analyst for the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research organization in Washington. “It’s a compassionate solution to a difficult problem that works.”