Weak Non-Reformer: W. caves on education.(controversy over the Bush administration education reform plan)

It would be something of an understatement to say that the Bush education-reform program is distressing Hill conservatives. When House Republicans met on May 2 to be briefed on the details of the latest compromise, Rep. Jim DeMint from South Carolina ruefully summed up the feelings of a good number of his colleagues: "When the president talked about reform, we didn't realize he intended to 'Leave No Democrats Behind.'"

Later that morning, DeMint attended a meeting of the House Education and the Workforce Committee to consider the "No Child Left Behind Act of 2001." The first order of business in the small hearing room packed with lobbyists and administration officials was to consider a Democratic amendment to eliminate a modest private-school-choice provision from Chairman John Boehner's version of the bill. The amendment was adopted-with the support of five Republicans as well as the committee's 22 Democrats. The Democrats had removed the final obstacle to their support for the bill-as H.R. 1 was stripped of the only remaining reform conservatives felt could justify their support of a plan the Heritage Foundation was now dubbing "an expensive version of the status quo."

During the committee debate, Republican congressman Bob Schaffer of Colorado described the school-choice provision-which would permit low- income children in persistently failing schools to use up to $1,500 of federal aid toward private-school tuition-as "the heart of the Bush education proposal."

But when Schaffer implored his Republican colleagues, "Don't abandon our president on the most central provision of his program," he was in fact fighting a battle the administration itself had abandoned. A White House education aide-explaining that conservatives should have done more to lobby lawmakers on school choice, instead of expecting the White House to do it-said that the issue was "never central to the president."

The Bush campaign had pleased conservatives by insisting on an impressive set of education-reform priorities: consolidation of federal programs, relief from federal rules, and consequences for failing schools. But conservatives waited in vain during three months of negotiations on the education bill for a signal that these provisions were actually critical to the administration. Instead, the flexibility and consolidation provisions were dramatically watered down, and Bush's big proposed increase in federal education spending became even bigger.

It was not local control and spending restraint that became the cornerstone of the Bush agenda; pride of place belonged to the administration's plan for a major new federal testing mandate-a measure conservatives oppose, because it increases the likelihood that a uniform national curriculum will be imposed. In March, Sandy Kress, Bush's top education adviser, actually suggested that this was the only non-negotiable policy in the bill, declaring at an education symposium that without annual testing in grades three through eight, "there will be no bill signed." Rep. John Shadegg of Arizona, chairman of the conservative Republican Study Committee, remembers warning Vice President Cheney weeks ago that his fellow House conservatives would have a difficult time backing a system of national testing. "I told the vice president that Clinton proposed national testing and we fought him to the death. Our conservative constituents will see flagrant hypocrisy" if we back it now, Shadegg recalls.

Michigan Republican Peter Hoekstra was one of the members who opposed Clinton's testing proposal, but says he would have ...