ADMINISTRATION - Summer's School Debate Commences

By Siobhan Gorman, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Saturday, May 22, 1999

	      Just in time for summer vacation, the education debate is 
heating up in Washington. President Clinton this week unveiled 
his proposals for reforming the Elementary and Secondary 
Education Act, the 1965 law that oversees most federal spending 
on K-12 education. And House Republicans say they'll put forth 
their first bill seeking their own changes to the act in a week 
or two. 
	     Education Secretary Richard W. Riley calls the 
President's proposals ''the next generation'' of the 
Administration's reforms. In essence, Clinton's Educational 
Excellence for All Children Act of 1999 starts with the 
Administration's 1994 reforms, which built on a foundation of 
basic education standards initiated by the Bush Administration, 
and puts more masonry on them. If the 1994 reforms defined the 
more-general ''what'' would make schools better, this legislation 
defines the more-specific ''how'' to achieve those ends. And this 
is by far the harder task. 
	     John F. ''Jack'' Jennings, director of the Center on 
Education Policy, a Washington-based group that lobbies for more- 
effective public schools, said that the battle in 1994 was to get 
conservative Republicans and liberal elements of the Democratic 
Party to support ''standards-based reform''--requiring that 
states receiving federal money for elementary and secondary 
education set minimum standards that students would have to meet. 
Now policy-makers have to figure out how best to get schools to 
meet the new standards, and these efforts are broadly described 
under the rubric of ''accountability.'' 
	     The Administration's new accountability measures would 
require each school to assemble an annual report card, grading 
its own performance, and to end the practice of ''social 
promotion''--sending kids on to the next grade whether or not 
they've mastered their current grade-level work. States would 
have to intervene when a school was performing poorly, and would 
have to ensure that schools have strong discipline policies. 
	     Clinton's other proposals sound the theme of 
accountability as well. Under the Safe and Drug-Free Schools 
proposal, which seeks to further guard schools from violence and 
drugs, money will be doled out competitively, and schools will 
need to show ''satisfactory progress toward meeting performance 
targets'' or risk losing the funds. The President's bilingual 
education plan gives schools three years to show that their 
students are improving their English skills, or lose their 
funding. 
	     The Clinton plan also spells out efforts to improve 
teacher quality by phasing out teachers who are not certified in 
their subject area and allocating more money to competitive 
grants for teacher training. 
	     Republicans are wary of Clinton's accountability 
proposals, saying they are too Washington-focused and give too 
much power to the national government. ''The (Education) 
Department appears to be on the path of dictating your social- 
promotion policies (and) your discipline policies,'' said Victor 
F. Klatt III, education policy coordinator for the House 
Education and the Workforce Committee. ''We believe in generally 
the same goals as (Clinton), but we do not believe that you can 
mandate everything from Washington.'' 
	     The real debate most likely will turn on how to design 
and enforce accountability measures, and whether Washington 
really will be allowed the power, or have the fortitude to 
exercise the power, to take money away from states that aren't 
meeting standards. 
	     Enforcement is the teeth of any plan, and some observers 
say the Clinton proposals lack bite. ''I'm not sure you can force 
the state of Illinois, that gets maybe 4 percent of its funding 
from the federal government, to meet performance standards for 
all children,'' Jennings said. 
	     The Administration argues it has a spectrum of 
enforcement options, some of which are easier to implement than 
others. For example, the Clinton plan for improving low- 
performing schools gives students the option of transferring to 
another school while the low-performing school either tries a new 
curriculum, is reconstituted, or is closed. A second line of 
action could include simply notifying the public that the school 
continues to fail. Only if other enforcement measures didn't work 
would the Administration resort to withholding money. 
	     But Klatt said past experience suggests the 
Administration is unlikely to withhold money from any schools. 
''You could make a good argument that the department has a lot of 
tools right now to deny funding to states and localities, and 
they don't do it,'' he said. 
	     Marshall S. Smith, acting deputy Education secretary, 
said that because many states are already implementing these 
enforcement measures, he doesn't expect that many recalcitrant 
states or districts will fail to comply. But if enforcement is 
necessary, he said, ''it's not politically impossible to take 
away administrative money; it's not politically impossible to 
tell the press that they're not following the law.'' 
	     The real impact of the President's emphasis on 
accountability may lie in its influence on the national education 
debate. ''What he's proposed may or may not be enacted, or if 
it's enacted, it will be enacted in a watered-down way,'' 
Jennings said. ''But just by the President standing up and saying 
it, and then if it is put into a federal program . . . it changes 
the nature of the debate, so people start thinking differently.''