Who Gets the 'A' in Education?

By ERIC POOLEY

Ask political strategists about the presidential race, and you'll hear that Al Gore has an edge over George W. Bush on the big domestic issues. A majority of voters agree with Gore that tax cuts should be modest and the budget surplus should go to save Social Security and Medicare, that health coverage should be expanded and women should retain their right to abortion. But on at least one traditional piece of Democratic turf, Bush is sure he can beat Gore. Public education "is a bright and dividing line in this campaign," Bush said repeatedly last week. He called it "a defining issue" and (in case anyone missed the point) "a deciding issue." According to a new survey by the bipartisan Battleground Poll, Bush does about as well on the issue as Gore--44% said the Vice President would "do a better job" on education, and 42% gave the nod to Bush--erasing the usual Democratic advantage.

Education, of course, is the Texas Governor's policy home page--the place where the reformer really does have results, where he seems to speak from his heart and mind, not an invisible set of cue cards. Public schools in Texas have improved dramatically on Bush's watch. And although the structural reforms that made it happen were in place when Bush took office, he has built on them year after year. Black and Latino children have made galloping gains in math and reading scores during his years in office, narrowing the achievement gap that bedevils school systems around the country. Because of that, Bush has a chance to argue that he is both competent and compassionate--a message that was all but lost in the grim heat of his primary battles with John McCain.

Bush and his strategists also believe education gives them an opportunity to define Gore as a special-interest coddler, a roadblock to reform. On Friday, Bush's campaign unveiled the first TV commercial of the Bush-Gore contest, an education-reform spot running in Illinois and reaching parts of Iowa, Kentucky and Missouri. "Gore and Clinton had eight years, but they've failed," the ad says. "As President, George W. Bush will challenge the status quo with a crusade to improve education." In response, Gore put up an ad pointing out that reading scores "are going up across America," styling himself a champion of "revolutionary improvements to our schools" and attacking Bush for attacking him.

Bush's charges may sound like workaday campaign rhetoric, but he has a point. He has a plan for comprehensive school reform--flexibility and local control coupled with high standards and consequences for failure--and Gore, so far, does not. Gore gets part of the equation right--he backs statewide standards and testing--but comes up short on the issue of holding schools accountable for student performance. During his time as Vice President, the Education Department has done little to reward schools that flourish and nothing to sanction schools that persistently fail. And Gore remains fuzzy on the subject today. He says failing schools "should be shut down fairly and fast," but his campaign proposals don't spell out how he would do that as President. "Gore has been very, very soft on school accountability," says Amy Wilkins, a principal partner at the Education Trust, a center-left school-reform group. "He doesn't set consequences for schools that fail. I'm a black Democrat," she adds, "so it's frightening for me to see Bush more concerned about minority achievement than Gore."

Washington can't and shouldn't call the shots on education. But the Federal Government sends more than $13 billion in education aid to the states each year, much of it to help impoverished children under a program known as Title 1, and it can use the money to leverage reform through a carrot-and-stick approach. Gore's plan, however, is all carrot, no stick. He proposes $115 billion in new spending over 10 years, calling for an array of valuable programs--universal preschool, training and pay raises for teachers, smaller class size, school construction and new technology. But he seems to have given little thought to making sure that all the new money actually boosts student achievement. Even his allies admit the problem. "The Vice President hasn't defined or articulated his thinking on school accountability," says Will Marshall, a 1992 Clinton-Gore adviser who is head of the Progressive Policy Institute, the think tank run by the Gore-friendly Democratic Leadership Council. "He needs to flesh out his thinking and tell us what his philosophy is. I hope there's more to come." Gore's top domestic policy adviser, Elaine Kamarck, admits the campaign "intended to" detail its accountability policy during the primary but spent so much time wrangling with Bill Bradley on health care that it didn't have time. "We haven't talked about it specifically," she says, "but we will. Extensively."

Gore's reform-minded friends are waiting to see whether his ties to the "educrats" will keep him from extracting real results from public schools. The Vice President is backed by unions like the American Federation of Teachers, which has endorsed him and given more than $300,000 in soft money to the Democratic National Committee since 1997. So far, he has shown some willingness to buck the teachers--for example, his call to triple the number of public charter schools. But "he's under a lot of pressure to go with the feel-good theory that all schools need is more money," says a Gore ally on Capitol Hill. In a tight competition with an education-savvy Bush, the ally says, "it would be a big mistake to simply propose spending our way out of the problem."

When Bush's education team put together his plan, it drew not only from Texas but also from a more surprising source--the Progressive Policy Institute. Last April the New Democrats' think tank kicked out a proposal for consolidating federal education spending into five broad categories while giving states far more flexibility as long as they met achievement goals. It also called for Washington to embrace "performance-based funding"--cutting administrative aid to districts that consistently fail. When Bush unveiled his plan last fall, it bore a striking resemblance to the institute's--the same consolidation ideas, the same kind of sanctions. "I can't criticize his plan because it's ours," says Marshall.

What the Bush plan adds is another penalty for failure, one based on private-school vouchers. Under the plan, schools that receive Title 1 money from Washington would be given three years to meet standards. If they failed, Bush would cut up their Title 1 money and give it directly to parents in the form of $1,500 vouchers that could be spent on tutoring or tuition at another public, private or parochial school. The idea is to liberate kids and shame schools into shaping up. But it also contradicts the rest of Bush's proposal, since private schools abide by none of the accountability measures so dear to the Governor. His solution would allow students to flee from the standards-and-testing system he wants to create.

Beyond that bit of illogic, opponents are worried that the voucher program would drain resources from the schools that need them the most. Their cause got a boost last week, when a Florida judge ruled that Governor Jeb Bush's state voucher plan--the model for his brother's national program--violates the state constitution and must be dropped. The judge's ruling was narrow and may not mean that George W.'s plan would face a similar fate. But even if it did, Bush wouldn't stop talking about vouchers, because they help conservatives swallow his federal activism on education. Bush talks constantly about the primacy of "local control" in schools. But he understands that after 25 years of headlines about the "education crisis," parents don't care where good ideas come from. So in at least one area, he calls for more federal oversight than Gore. Bush would require statewide reading and math tests for all students in Grades 3 through 8 every year instead of every four years.

Teachers complain that constant standardized testing kills classroom creativity by forcing them to teach for the tests alone. And education wonks see other problems with the Bush plan. If Gore throws money at the problem without demanding accountability, Bush demands accountability without throwing enough money. As Gore argued last week, Bush's proposed tax cut is so expensive--between $1.3 trillion and $2.1 trillion over 10 years, depending on whose analysis you believe--that it would exceed the projected surplus, leaving nothing for anything else. Blithely ignoring that problem, Bush proposes a five-year, $5.5 billion spending increase for education, but most of it would go to pay for tax-free Educational Savings Accounts and vouchers to let low-income parents buy after-school programs for their kids. Bush offers no money for teacher training, school construction, class-size reduction or preschool. And his plan is silent on boosting teacher quality--a baffling lapse, since it is the most important factor in a child's education. Bush also would do nothing to help supply the 2.2 million new teachers needed in the next 10 years, while Gore proposes federal scholarships that he says would reel in 75,000 a year. "Put Bush and Gore together," says Wilkins, "and you start to get a pretty decent education policy."

That, in effect, is what a group of seven centrist Democratic Senators did earlier this month. Led by Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut and Evan Bayh of Indiana (both said to be in the running for Gore's vice-presidential slot), the group introduced a bill that reflects some of the best thinking in both plans. Like Gore's, it would bulk up federal education spending--by $35 billion over five years--in an effort to close the achievement gap, improve teacher quality, promote charter schools and stimulate innovation. And like Bush's, the plan would streamline bureaucracy and penalize states that fail to show improvement--hitting them with tougher sanctions than Bush proposes but no vouchers. The bill has little or no chance to go anywhere this year, because congressional Republicans seem content to send the President an education bill based on overly broad block grants, which he has signaled he will veto. As such, Lieberman-Bayh may be most significant as a way for Gore to find religion on sanctions and accountability.

But Gore shows no sign of knowing that he needs cover on this issue. He may believe he can blunt Bush's attack merely by teaching a civics class (as he plans to do this week in the Midwest) and repeating the phrase "revolutionary change in our schools" several times a day. That's his slogan for bringing the info-tech revolution to the classrooms--computers (and computer-savvy teachers) that will one day allow each student to work at his or her own pace. It's a bracing vision, but he'll have trouble running with it if Bush cuts him off at the knees on the basics of reform. "I'm not sure people vote for President based on flexibility and accountability for school districts," says Lieberman with a chuckle. "But if one candidate gets identified as the candidate of education reform and the other as the defender of the status quo, that would be a problem for the latter. Al isn't going to let that happen. He'll talk about focusing on results for kids." But will he mean it?