WASHINGTON — Education activists assert that President Bush has sacrificed needed school reform in order to earn a bipartisan education bill.

Among the elements omitted from the education reform package passed by the House last month was school vouchers, a concept that has been endorsed by Cardinal Edward Egan of New York and other prominent Church leaders.

The House May 23 gave Bush a landslide 384–45 approval for his education bill, known also as H.R. 1.

But 34 of those 45 dissenters were Republicans, most of them conservative. There's a reason why, said Erika Lestelle, education policy analyst at the Washington-based Family Research Council.

“H.R. 1 is not really the president's bill. It is a bipartisan piece of legislation that no longer reflects many of the main components of the President's original ‘No Child Left Behind’ plan,” Lestelle said.

During the House debate, Lestelle said, most of Bush's reform ideas were gutted, leaving only policies that many education reformers dislike.

Many education “activists never liked the heavy-handed federal testing requirements, but they were willing to swallow it if the private school choice and local flexibility measures were also passed,” said Lestelle. “Unfortunately, those components have been weakened to the point that they no longer balance the intrusive federal testing mandates.”

But she said she remained optimistic that the bill can be sufficiently repaired in meetings with the Senate. She noted that the White House promised Rep. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., that a popular reform plan known as Straight A's would be included in the final bill.

Straight A's

Straight A's would allow states and local districts the option to consolidate a large number of federal programs for use as they see fit.

The funds would come free of federal regulations, giving a large degree of local autonomy to institute innovative reforms. States and districts would have to demonstrate to the Secretary of Education that they meet certain mutually agreed upon academic goals over a five-year period.

“Without Straight A's, the bill does not really reform the current education system,” said Lestelle. “The same old programs will be funded at even higher levels without the ability of local schools to initiate the programs and activities they believe would best help the children in that area.”

Lindsey Kozberg, director of public affairs at the Department of Education, confirmed the administration's support for Straight A's, which she noted is in the Senate's education bill.

“We've been supportive of Straight A's,” Kozberg told the Register. But she added a note of caution regarding negotiations between the House and Senate. “It remains to be seen what happens in conference.”

Even without Straight A's, the Bush bill would do a lot to reform public schools across our country, Kozberg argued.

“The president set forth the plan as a means to how we create a system of accountability and a culture of performance,” Kozberg said. Such a plan begins with testing students between the third and eighth grades on reading and math.

“It lets every parent in the country know how their child, their school, their district, their state are performing,” the Education Department official said. “It gives them the power to get involved.”

While vouchers were not in the final bill, Kozberg noted that the legislation contains more choices for parents with children trapped in bad schools.

The bill provides federal funding for supplemental services, like private tutoring, and aids the transportation costs of sending a student to a different public school.

Parents Not Empowered

Such moves don't really empower parents, said Kristina Twitty, education policy analyst in the Washington office of Eagle Forum, a conservative grassroots organization based in St. Louis.

“Real choice is putting the money that a school gets for the attendance of a child in a public school back in the parent's hands like a Pell Grant, or the G.I. Bill,” Twitty said. “Then the student and parent have a real choice in education.”

Twitty said the White House caved too easily before pressure from anti-reform Democrats, and warned that conservative support ultimately rests on whether the White House demands that the final education bill contains Straight A's, Twitty said.

“President Bush has promised to have the language of DeMint's Straight A's included in the conference report,” she said. “We appreciate that promise and will take him at his word.”

Joshua Mercer writes from Washington, D.C.