Clinton Will Flunk Spending Bill Unless School Tests Included

President Clinton threatened Saturday to veto a sweeping funding package for federal education and labor programs unless it provides money for his national school exam initiative and continues to support other administration programs for reforming public schools.

In his weekly radio address, Clinton lambasted the Senate for voting to combine funding for various education programs - including charter schools - into lump-sum block grants for states, and he took the House to task for voting against his proposal for voluntary national reading tests for fourth-graders and math exams for eighth-graders.

“In effect, they’ve cast their votes against better schools and for a status quo that is failing too many of our children,” Clinton said.

In the Republican radio response, Sen. Slade Gorton, R-Wash., said Clinton’s veto threat shows that he believes the notion that Washington knows best.

“By taking this position, I think the president is telling parents and teachers, ‘I don’t trust you,”’ Gorton said.

Rep. William F. Goodling, R-Pa., the chief House opponent of Clinton’s national testing plan, insisted that the president’s veto threat would not deter House Republicans from their efforts to kill the “new education tests developed by Washington bureaucrats.”

Goodling also inferred that a veto of the education and labor bills could have serious ramifications. “I am very surprised that the president would suggest a veto that could force a government shutdown,” he said.

Clinton made his veto threat on a presidential weekend full of education themes. On Friday, Clinton and first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton dropped their daughter Chelsea off to begin life as a Stanford University student. On Saturday morning, he met with parents, students and administrators of several California charter schools at one of the schools in San Carlos.

The president used the event to praise the fledgling charter school movement and announce that $40 million in federal grants - including $3.4 million for California - will go to support new and existing charter schools. Such schools, while publicly funded, are free from many of the requirements and bureaucracy that govern traditional public schools.

But as Clinton listened to charter school founders, teachers, students and high-tech executives talk about the success of these innovative schools, a battle was brewing in Washington over the funding that helps them run and the federal role in public education in general.

One of the measures that provoked Clinton’s veto threat was a Senate provision - offered by Gorton - that would consolidate Education Department funding for charter schools with other specific federal initiatives for elementary and secondary schools - such as bilingual education and safe and drug-free schools programs. The Senate would have the money go to states in the form of block grants, which they could use at their discretion.

Clinton suggested that this Senate provision would hurt charter schools because the federal money specifically allocated to fund them would no longer exist.

Meanwhile, the House, in an unusual coalition of conservatives, who say the national tests advocated by Clinton would open the door to more federal control of schools, and some liberals, who believe that the tests would stigmatize poor and minority students, voted to block federal funding for the initiative. The Senate, however, approved a modified version of Clinton’s plan.

The House and Senate versions must be reconciled before the legislative package is sent to Clinton; it remains unclear whether the final version will include the either the Senate’s block-grant plan or the House’s test-funding ban.