Copyright 1999 The Washington Post
The Washington
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February 07, 1999, Sunday, Final Edition
SECTION: EDITORIAL; Pg. B06
LENGTH: 635 words
HEADLINE:
School Aid Dispute
BODY:
ONE OF the
first bills out of the box in the Senate this year apparently will be an
"education flexibility" act to give state and local school officials greater
freedom from federal regulation in the use of federal aid. The Republican
leadership hopes an early vote on the measure will help to show that the party
has an agenda extending beyond impeachment. The bill neatly fits the Republican
theme of local control; the National Governors' Association is strongly in
favor; and former governor Bill Clinton and congressional Democrats are finding
it hard to resist.
Civil rights and other advocacy groups, however, are
fighting splitting it off from the rest of the Elementary and Secondary
Education Act (ESEA), which is up for renewal this year, and
which is the font of most of the aid the flexibility legislation would affect.
The bulk of the aid is supposed to go to poor kids; the periodic
reauthorizations of the basic act have become the arena for arguing whether the
government is doing enough of the right thing in those kids' behalf. This year's
debate will likely include the president's proposals for increased
"accountability" in the use of federal funds as well. The ESEA
arguments almost always are about adding to the kinds of regulations that the
flexibility bill would waive. On Friday, the Leadership Conference on Civil
Rights sent a letter to Sen. Edward Kennedy, ranking Democrat on the Labor and
Human Resources Committee, which deals with education, saying the flexibility
bill could "undermine . . . fundamental objectives" of federal aid, and asking
that it "not be considered on the Senate floor until it has been determined that
it will have a beneficial impact on the education of students at risk."
To be fair, this fight, like most over federal education policy, is
already a little overblown. Education remains solidly a state and local
function, at which the federal government is a bystander, contributing only
about 7 percent of the cost. But 7 percent is not zero, and there is a
philosophical difference between the parties, milder than their rhetoric would
suggest, symbolized by the dueling buzzwords, flexibility and accountability.
The reauthorization fights have an earthier side as well. They are partly about
money -- the old-fashioned issue of the slicing of the pie.
The advocacy
groups tend to want the federal funds concentrated on the lowest-income
students, and only after those students also get their fair share of state and
local funds, so that the federal money becomes a distinct extra. The instinct of
the politicians, at the local level as well as in Congress, tends to be instead
to spread the money out, give at least a little to almost everyone, thereby
increasing the popularity of the program at the expense of its possible impact
and converting it into a form of general aid.
At the last renewal of the
act, in 1994, the concentration rules were tightened. The administration rightly
supported the tightening, which is said to have had a good effect; more money is
being reserved for the lowest-income schools. But in 1994 Congress also set up
the pilot flexibility program that it may now expand -- and, according to
studies by the Congressional Research Service and General Accounting Office,
most of the waivers granted have had the effect of easing, marginally, precisely
the concentration rules on which the administration was insistent.
The
flexibility legislation may well be a good idea. But it is not clear to us why,
except for the weakest of political reasons, it needs or ought to be considered
before the rest of the elementary and secondary act that it would amend. If only
as a precaution, it should also be tightened to limit the extent to which aid
could be reduced to the neediest schools.
LOAD-DATE: February 07, 1999
