President Bush’s sweeping school-reform ideas remind me of what the English author Samuel Johnson said of the poet Thomas Gray, “He was dull in a new way, and that made many people think him great.”
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Indeed, our new president wants us to get excited about his first major initiative, his sweeping education-reform plan, but he doesn’t seem to want us to get too excited.
Take, for example, his most controversial proposal, which is to make federal money available to parents who want to transfer their children from failing public schools to the private or religious school of their choice.
The best known way to do this is through vouchers, which also are very controversial. Teachers unions, in particular, fear vouchers will help put kids in private schools, draining money from public ones. Civil libertarians object to possible violations of the separation of church and state if public money goes to parochial schools.
For these reasons, among others, Michigan and California became the latest states to vote down statewide voucher referenda in November.
Into this crossfire, George W. Bush is willing to wade, he said, in announcing his education plan. “Others suggest different approaches,” he said in his first weekly radio address, “and I’m willing to listen.”
And listen, I am certain, he will. Bush is looking for bipartisan backing for his education proposal, which means he is putting as many sweeteners as possible into his plan. But one wonders if it’s sweetened too much will it become ineffective in helping the schools and parents who need help the most?
To Bush’s credit, his plan has not given up entirely on public schools. He offers, first of all, to provide additional federal “assistance” to help schools that “fail to make adequate yearly progress for disadvantaged students.” If the schools fail to make adequate progress for three consecutive years, disadvantaged students may use Title I funds to transfer to a higher-performing public or private school or some other “provider of choice” like, perhaps, home schooling.
Although he didn’t mention it, that part of his scheme echoes the “A+ Plan” for education reform that Bush’s brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, put into place in that state two years ago.
In Florida, students in schools that fail in two out of four years to get a passing grade in achievement, as measured by performance on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, are eligible for state-funded tuition vouchers for private schools.
That plan has drawn criticism, as have other test-based plans in other states, from educators and parents who say schools are “teaching to the test,” meaning schools centering lesson plans around teaching students to take tests, not necessarily to get a balanced education.
That’s a valid concern, although one might also say that teaching to a test is better than not teaching at all. For some school districts in Florida and the rest of the country, that’s a persuasive argument for accountability.
For some Florida schools, the test has been an important, if by no means perfect, indicator of serious weaknesses penalizing students. For underachieving schools, just the threat of vouchers may be proving more valuable than their actual implementation. This past year, for example, none of the schools in Florida’s 67 districts flunked.
But, at the same time, President Bush is offering a another goodie that may not be as helpful to schools that need help the most. Instead it could be a big bonus to the middle class.
Buried in his plan for overhauling education, Bush proposes expanding the $500 deduction for the Education Savings Account that pays for college tuition. He would expand the account downward to kindergarten and increase the maximum allowable deduction to $5,000 for families earning up to $100,000 a year.
This has a great chance of passing Congress, since a similar bill sponsored by Sen. Paul Coverdell, a Georgia Republican who died last year, passed Congress twice, only to be vetoed both times by President Clinton. It would have allowed tax deductions of up to $2,000 by parents whose children attended public or private schools, including religious ones.
Tax breaks have a better chance of surviving court tests than vouchers do. Minnesota, Arizona, Illinois and Iowa have adopted or expanded tax credits to help finance private and religious schooling and six other states are considering similar legislation.
And there’s a bigger reason, more cynically political reason, why a tax break might have a much better chance of passage than vouchers: Parents who need help the least might benefit the most. After all, tax breaks don’t provide much help to parents who are too poor to pay much in the way of taxes.
So if Bush wants to do something really exciting, he will keep the focus of his school reform on the schools, communities and parents who need help the most, not just those who provide the most votes. Then, as Samuel Johnson might say, he can do something truly great.
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