Copyright 1999 Globe Newspaper Company
The Boston
Globe
February 2, 1999, Tuesday ,City Edition
SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A1
LENGTH: 1167 words
HEADLINE:
President touts school plan in Boston today ;
Ann Scales reported from
Washington; Beth Daley from Boston.
BYLINE: By Ann
Scales and Beth Daley, Globe Staff
BODY:
WASHINGTON - When President Clinton arrives in Boston
today, he will be pushing a plan to improve public education so steeped in
traditional Republican philosophy that it might have been considered political
suicide for a Democratic president to offer only a decade ago.
But with
Democratic states like Massachusetts in the vanguard of embracing ideas that the
president has adopted, such as testing teachers and ending social promotions,
Clinton has seized on a way to answer a public clamor for better schools.
Today, he will visit the 716-student Jackson-Mann
Elementary School in Allston's Union Square to tout a
$200 million initiative in his proposed budget to identify and
turn around low-performing schools.
If approved by Congress, the funds
would go directly to school districts and states to help them target the worst
schools and send in special teams to determine problems and how to fix them.
The initiative is a follow-up to Clinton's warning to states and school
districts during last month's State of the Union address to "turn around their
worst-performing schools, or shut them down."
The money would be part of
a much broader effort aimed at increasing the accountability of school districts
under this year's reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary
Education Act.
Clinton wants to require new teachers to pass
performance exams and have credentials to teach in their given subject area and
to require school districts to issue report cards on every school.
"I
don't think you can look at what we are proposing and say that's a conservative
agenda," Bruce Reed, Clinton's domestic policy adviser, said in an interview
yesterday. "These ideas aren't conservative or liberal. They're just plain
common sense."
But educators and political scientists said the
prescriptions Clinton offers for improving schools are conservative. They said
many of the ideas once were considered the province of Republican governors and
a handful of Southern Democratic governors, including Clinton, who broke with
his party's liberal wing while governor of Arkansas to embrace testing teachers
and incurred the wrath of the state's teachers union.
"For a Democratic
president, this would have been unthinkable 10, 15 years ago," said Tom
Loveless, associate professor of public policy at Harvard University's John F.
Kennedy School of Government.
"These are Republican ideas," said Mark
Rozell, a political scientist with the University of Pennsylvania. "These are
ideas that largely grew out of the socially conservative base of the Republican
Party, which is the ultimate irony."
Rozell said Clinton's ideas on
school accountability dovetail with his 1996 reelection campaign, when Clinton
gained the advantage over Republicans by adopting the debate over values in
education and focusing on national standards, school discipline, school choice
and mandatory school uniforms.
Sandra Feldman, president of the American
Federation of Teachers, which supports Clinton's education proposals, said after
years of frustration about poor-performing schools, Democrats are looking for
new remedies.
"There is more of a consensus now than there has been over
the past decade," Feldman said. "There was not a consensus before on the
direction we should take on education. Now we know more than we did a decade or
two ago, and we have seen children achieve better when those elements are put in
place."
But Clinton clearly does not want to alienate teachers' unions,
a huge presence at recent Democratic Party conventions. His proposal, for
example, steers clear of endorsing school vouchers, which Democrats and the
unions oppose. He also did not call for testing current teachers, only new ones.
And his proposal also centers more power in Washington, which has led some
Republicans to label him "superintendent in chief."
"The center line in
the country has shifted. There's no question about that," Representative James
E. Clyburn, the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, said about Clinton's
education proposal.
Clyburn, a Democrat from South Carolina who taught
world history in high school, said: "I don't have any problems in theory with
what the president is proposing. Now when we come up to passing legislation . .
. that's where we are going to have the problems."
When Clinton arrives
today, he will find that Massachusetts communities, and Boston in particular,
have already embraced many of his initiatives.
Boston pledged to end
social promotions by instituting new promotion and attendance policies this year
that require students to pass courses and tests and miss no more than 12 days of
school a year. More than 20 percent of high school students are already at risk
of being held back this year for attendance.
The city has also embarked
on a massive effort to create after-school programs linked to students' school
work.
Jackson-Mann school is one of six elementary
schools in the city that scored better than expected on tough new state tests
last spring - a sign, educators said, that higher standards set on the state
level are trickling into classrooms.
Most of the Jackson-Mann school
population is poor, often synonymous with low test scores. But some 75 percent
of its students scored in the "basic knowledge" or above categories on the
Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System test last spring, and did better
than similar schools.
About 40 fourth- and fifth-grade students in the
school choir will sing before today's event. Grade 2 teacher Gail Zimmerman will
talk about the school's literacy efforts. After Clinton speaks, he will meet
privately with chorus members and other students.
The school, which is
43 percent black, 28 percent Asian, 16 percent Hispanic and 13 percent white,
has reallocated federal money to ensure small class sizes of no more than 25 for
Grades 1 and 2, said principal Joanne Collins Russell. Every day, the school
spends 90 minutes with students on reading.
Russell said the school's
strong ties with local colleges and Boston Partners in Education, a volunteer
group, has helped with efforts to teach all students how to read well.
Statewide, Massachusetts has also been trying to raise standards: New
learning guidelines now spell out what each student should learn in each grade.
Meanwhile, teacher tests now are administered to new teacher candidates,
and Governor Paul Cellucci filed legislation last month to do the same for
veteran teachers. Starting last year, students began taking the MCAS exams that
are tied to the new learning standards. Beginning in two years, every student
will have to pass the 10th-grade test in order to graduate.
Still, with
some 48 percent of teacher candidates failing the first test and an estimated 25
to 35 percent of students expected to fail the graduation test, Massachusetts
has a long way to go to declare the new efforts a success. Statewide, 50 percent
of 10th-graders failed the MCAS math test last spring.
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