Education: A Gentleman's C, Maybe.(George W. Bush's education policy)(Brief Article)

On one subject, President Bush has already kept his promise to "change the tone" in Washington: that of federal education policy. His $48 billion bill has been received warmly, with few echoes of the rancorous debates of the past. Republicans are no longer trying to dismantle the Department of Education, and Democrats are more willing than they once were to consider holding teachers and schools accountable for results. Democrats have expressed concern about the bill's limited voucher proposal, but said they can work with Bush. The president and his aides have repeatedly hinted that they might drop the offending proposal in the interest of bipartisanship. Harmony prevails.

Too bad. The direction of federal education policy is very much in need of debating, not least within the Republican party. For years, a tension has existed within conservatism between centralizers who want to raise academic standards at the state and federal levels, and pluralists who want to increase competition among schools and devolve power to parents. Often, the centralizers have been neoconservatives, and the pluralists libertarians. By and large, conservatives have split the difference. They have favored tests and standards, for instance, as a means of giving parents information rather than of regulating school districts.

Bush's proposal has several good components: its promotion of phonics, its consolidation of various federal programs, its reduction of federal regulations on what states can do with federal grants. But it tilts too far in the direction of standards and does too little to increase competition. Bush would give low-income parents "exit vouchers" to escape failing schools, true, but they would be worth very little money and be given out only after three years of certified failure. The schools would get a "fair chance" to reform even if children were not getting a fair chance to learn. Where similar plans have been tried, very few schools have been designated as failures. And while Bush proposes to expand education savings accounts, the accounts would remain fairly weak: Only the interest on them escapes double taxation.

Republicans who support Bush's approach say that moving faster on school choice is politically unrealistic: Voucher proposals bombed at the polls in California and Michigan in November, didn't they? But a strategy that leans heavily on raising standards, without much competition, is politically unrealistic too. It ignores how easily standards can be, and have been, co-opted, how easy they are to manipulate politically. Bush's plan is supposed to make it easier for parents to see how their schools are doing. But when governors complained ...