Too Many Cooks Spoiling The Broth
It hurts to say this, but President Clinton and Education Secretary Dick Riley are making a hash of their effort to improve schools. They’re not alone in this; a number of Republicans have added to the mess by their policy interventions. But somebody needs to take hold of this. Right now, it looks as if no one is in charge.
Riley is one of the most honorable public officials I have ever covered. It is clear that he and Clinton are motivated by the same passion for public education they displayed as school-reform governors of South Carolina and Arkansas. Still, the strategies they have followed have been so muddled that they may be harming the cause.
In the first term, their main initiative was Goals 2000, a direct descendant of the program both of them had promoted, along with other governors of both parties, in the 1980s. The idea was pretty simple: Put a pot of federal money out there to help states devise their own programs for lifting the performance standards of their schools. The goals were noncontroversial and all that the feds required was some sort of comprehensive state plan for reaching them.
The legislation was passed by a Democratic Congress, but with the arrival of the Republican majorities in 1994, a critical barrage was fired by freshman conservatives who really wanted to abolish the Department of Education but would settle for crippling its programs.
In the last Congress, they rewrote the Goals 2000 legislation in a way that destroyed its policy rationale. No longer were integrated state plans required; no longer was there a nongovernmental peer review of the plans. Instead, states were allowed - indeed encouraged - to use the money for piecemeal projects like buying classroom computers.
Clinton and Riley accepted these changes. When I wrote at the time that the program had been gutted as a serious reform effort, Education Department officials responded that all was well.
They were wrong. While Goals 2000 still exists on paper, it has become a piggy bank that Congress breaks open to pay for programs that have no connection with education reform. The House Appropriations Committee cut it from $491 million in the current year to $475 million, far below the $620 million Clinton and Riley requested for 1998. Then floor amendments snatched another $90 million for vocational education courses and programs for the developmentally disabled. With no real policy rationale, Goals 2000 is easy pickings.
Meanwhile, Clinton came up with a new idea this year: national standards and national tests. This one, too, has been a nonstarter. The rhetoric was always much bigger than the proposal. He talked about the need to measure every child and every school by uniform, world class standards. But he proposed only that the feds pay for developing a pair of tests - for fourth-grade English and eighth-grade math - and administering them once. Contradicting the logic of his own proposal, he said any child, school, district or state that didn’t want to be graded would be excused.
The reception has been chilly. Riley needlessly antagonized Congress by ordering work to begin on the tests without legislative authorization. After some stroking, the Senate said OK. But only seven states and 15 cities have indicated an interest in participating. And the House, heeding governors who said they had enough tests of their own, thank you, buried the proposal on a 295-125 vote.
Meanwhile, Clinton and Riley have tossed other reform balls into the air. They have a pot of money to spur creation of more charter schools - public schools organized and run by folks with innovative ideas. There is a separate and larger pot of money to expand on the work of the New American Schools Development Corporation, a big-business-backed effort to develop and test new models of education. The House went along with that after writing in guidelines to calm the nerves of Republicans such as Rep. David McIntosh of Indiana, who complained that one of the academics involved had the temerity to agree with You Know Who that “it takes a village to raise a child.”
In the midst of this mishmash of underfunded initiatives, two Republican senators who ought to know better, Slade Gorton of Washington and Pete Domenici of New Mexico, unhelpfully suggested that all federal aid to education programs, old and new, be junked and the money sent out to communities for whatever they care to do. To everyone’s surprise, the Senate approved this by a one vote margin, after as much consideration as you’d give to choosing dessert.
That’s what happens when the two officials who are supposed to be leading this debate make a muddle of it.
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