From: Jamal Mazrui 
Subject: Wash. Post editorial on Gorton amendment (Forward From 
dandrews@visi.com)
09/15/97 -- Copyright (C) 1997 The Washington Post [Article 293437, 48 lines]
                      EDITORIAL:  Wrong Move on Education
     THE SENATE voted almost casually last week in effect to abolish most of
the current forms of federal aid to elementary and secondary schools   for 
he
year ahead by merging them into two block grants to school districts. The
51-49 roll call after only perfunctory debate seemed mainly meant to score a
political point -- that Republicans, all but four of whom supported the
amendment, favor local control of the schools, while Democrats, all of whom
opposed it, would have the federal government dictate school policy. But the
issue is phony. Democrats no more than Republicans favor anything like 
ederal
control of the schools, of which there is scant danger -- and the schools
deserve better from the Senate than to be used as political stage props.
     The federal government pays only a small share of the cost of elementary
and secondary education -- about 6 percent. The rest is state and local. The
federal role thus never has been to sustain the schools, but to fill gaps and
push mildly in what have seemed to be neglected directions. About half the
federal money -- some $6 billion a year -- has been aimed since the 1960s at
providing so-called compensatory education for lower-income children. The
block grant amendment, by Sen. Slade Gorton, would have the effect of
converting this into general aid. The requirement that the money be spent on
poorer students would be dropped in favor of letting school districts spend 
t
as they "deem appropriate." That's more than just a shift to local control;
it's a shift away from a long-standing sensible effort to concentrate the
limited federal funds on those in greatest need. Does Congress really want to
reverse that policy?
     Most other Department of Education programs -- though not such popular
ones as aid to the disabled -- would be bunched in the second block grant. As
in most departments, a pretty good case can be made for some such bunching.
Some programs are always floating around for which the original rationale was
weak or has faded and that are too small to warrant separate administration.
But that's true of only some, not all, of those Mr. Gorton would dispatch.
Example: the Senate voted Thursday in favor of a compromise version of the
national testing program the president supports -- but in voting for the 
lock
grant, as Education Secretary Richard Riley observed, "It then voted to
eliminate the funding for this purpose."
     Other special-purpose programs in aid of particular groups or in support
of reform likewise would disappear, the secretary said, including several the
president has touted as evidence of his commitment to education. The 
resident
and Democrats generally have made effective political use of the education
issue in the past few years. Block-granting would leave them less of a stage
from which to do so.
        The Gorton amendment would be only for a year, at which point the
appropriations bill to which it was attached would lapse, and the issue would
have to be fought all over again. That's another reason why, even if mainly
for show, it was the wrong way to do business. Mr. Riley was authorized to 
ay
it was "unacceptable" to the administration, meaning presumably that the
president would veto the bill if the amendment were to survive in conference.
He'd be right to do so.
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