Editorial: Education pact is a mixed bag

Thursday, Dec. 13, 2001 | 8:41 a.m.

Republicans and Democrats in Congress finally have reached an agreement on an education bill -- no small feat given the yawning partisan divide on what in recent years has been a contentious issue. Under the compromise, congressional Democrats prevailed in getting more money spent on education while President Bush and like-minded Republicans in Congress were able to get greater accountability through the use of testing to measure student performance.

The federal government will spend $26.5 billion on K-12 education in the next fiscal year, about $8 billion more than now. The final amount was almost $6 billion less than what the Democrats had wanted, but $4 billion more than what the president had sought. Just as important as the overall increase was the decision to significantly increase the share of money that goes to school districts based on their poverty rates.

Meanwhile, the president was able to get support for his testing initiative, which would require annual state tests in reading and math for all children in grades three through eight starting in the 2004-2005 school year. Public schools should seek greater accountability, but it is troubling that the final plan may not have provided schools with enough funding to administer the tests.

The president of the National Education Association worries that this could become an unfunded mandate, one that could hit school districts and states especially hard since revenues are down now that the nation is in a recession. Here in Nevada, as the Sun's Benjamin Grove reported Wednesday, the Clark County School District doesn't believe it will have a difficult time meeting the new requirement, but state education officials are concerned about testing becoming an unfunded mandate, especially since there are school districts in Nevada that currently don't conduct these tests. Besides the funding question, it is important that the tests are devised to actually measure achievement. It also will be a waste if the public schools become nothing more than testing mills, teaching students how to take tests, but not teaching them how to be thinkers.

One proposal that fortunately was omitted from the final package was the president's voucher plan, which would have weakened already fragile schools in inner cities and created educational haves and have-nots. But one proposal that disappointingly was omitted from the compromise was a plan that could have defrayed the costs that school districts absorb in providing special education. The federal government, under a law passed in 1975, is supposed to provide for 40 percent of a school's costs to teach children with disabilities.

A plan championed by Sen. James Jeffords, I-Vt., would have boosted special education funding so that the federal government finally would honor this commitment, a large increase over its current contribution of just 16 percent. It's too bad that some Republicans in Congress who opposed the increase did so because they couldn't get over their enmity for Jeffords, whose defection from the Republicans earlier this year resulted in the Democrats gaining control of the Senate. The Republicans actually are punishing the children with disabilities with their punitive action against Jeffords.

This definitely wasn't the perfect education bill, but it is much better than what had been expected when President Bush first presented his plan to Congress earlier in the year. That shouldn't be considered an endorsement of the plan as much as it is an acknowledgement that the final package could have been worse. Members of Congress should use the compromise plan as a floor to build on in future years. It is time that Congress and the states give education the importance it deserves, and that is by providing the necessary funding so that -- to borrow one of the president's favorite lines -- no child is left behind.