Reform and the Democrats - education reform under Bill Clinton

National Review, July 19, 1993 by Rich Lowry

PRESIDENT Clinton recently boasted about the productivity of his young Administration, citing the motor voter bill, family leave, and sundry other accomplishments. Notably missing was what the Administration had hoped would be an easy strike--education reform.

Here is a President whose party controls both houses of Congress and who, as governor, worked effectively with Republicans to forge a strategy for improving education. What could stop a Clinton reform bill? But before the Administration's "Goals 2000: Educate America Act" was even introduced in April it had been disastrously reshaped by the status-quo liberals in the Democratic establishment.

Mr. Clinton's education bill was meant to be the capstone of the reform effort that began with President Bush's 1989 "Education Summit" with the governors, Clinton included. They were working toward reform based on performance, or student achievement. It was agreed that the nation's schools needed better results, not more spending. National content standards would be set at "world-class" levels and states would be encouraged to adopt them. National testing--really a system of separate state or regional tests calibrated to allow results to be compared nationally--would determine whether children were mastering the curriculum. Teachers and principals would be allowed to find new ways of making their schools work.

That was then; this is now. "Goals 2000" flips from stressing outcomes to stressing "inputs"--i.e., spending--and establishes a more intrusive role for the Federal Government. Although the bill sounds like the Bush program--including language about curriculum standards and testing--it actually heads away from reform, thanks to something called "opportunity to learn" standards [see box].

"Opportunity standards" really mean "school delivery standards," which--on the theory that more "inputs" mean better outcomes--are designed to ensure that schools have adequate (and equal) resources, such as textbooks, computers, and professional development programs for teachers. Such standards formed the heart of the bill pushed last year by Senator Edward Kennedy (D., Mass.) and Representative William Ford (D., Mich.), a bill that was intended to provoke an embarrassing, election-year Bush veto but that couldn't even pass the Senate. Mr. Clinton's bill is essentially a reprise of that political provocation on a smaller scale.

A new, federal National Education Standards and Improvement Council would oversee the formulation of "opportunity standards" (read: spending targets). The Council itself would consist mostly of professional educators; there's no requirement that it be bipartisan (and little likelihood that it will be genuinely reformist). The bill creates a $393-million slush fund for grants to states to promote reform. To be eligible states must adopt "opportunity standards," which in theory they could craft to fit their own circumstances. In practice, pressure would be put on them to adopt the Federal Government's standards wholesale.

See You in Court

THAT pressure would be augmented by lawsuits. Michael Heise, an education expert at the Hudson Institute, points out that lawsuits charging states with inequitable school finding have resulted in court-ordered spending increases across the nation, notably in New Jersey and Kentucky. With the defeat of almost all recent ballot measures to equalize school financing, litigation increasingly looks like the only way to get more dollars for education.

This isn't lost on the Clinton Education Department. Its undersecretary, Marshall (Mike) Smith, former dean of Stanford's school of education, has said that prompting lawsuits is one of the purposes of "opportunity standards"--"I know people already who are getting their cases together," Smith is reported as saying.

But governors like this possibility a good deal less. "States and localities don't want a federal mandate of what a classroom should look like," says National Governors Association (NGA) policy analyst Patricia Sullivan. The bipartisan NGA--which finds much to like in Goals 2000 and would accept standards on resources that weren't federal mandates in disguise--hasn't taken a position on the bill. However, South Carolina Governor Carroll Campbell, vice chairman of the NGA, objects not only to the "opportunity standards," but also to the federal council's "certifying," on a "voluntary" basis, state curriculum standards. That's considered more intrusive than the Bush approach of creating national standards states could sign onto. Privately, some Democratic governors have the same reservations.

Old Democrats

HOW DID President Clinton and his Education Secretary, former South Carolina Governor Richard Riley, produce legislation that so alarms their former peers? The answer comes in three parts--the President's own party in Congress, his own coalition, and his own Administration. When Mr. Riley brought to Capitol Hill a draft of a reform bill that was more New Democrat than big spender, House Democrats sent him back to rework it, complaining the bill was just warmed-over George Bush.