From the WSJ Opinion Archives
POTOMAC WATCH
Teddy Takes George to School
Bush's education plan is Potemkin reform.
Here's the news about President Bush's education reform: Ted Kennedy is happy but Checker Finn isn't.
Mr. Kennedy is the liberal icon who just cut a deal with the Bush White House. His only beef now is that he wants more money.
Mr. Finn is the conservative who helped Candidate Bush write his education plan. But after inspecting the Senate-House fine print, he now says, "I'm fairly depressed. It's Potemkin reform, a facade underwritten by billions in new spending."
That's the conclusion genuine reformers are reaching as they watch education's progress, or rather regress, on Capitol Hill. It's true on the right but also on the pro-accountability left. Amy Wilkins of the Education Trust, which wants rigorous testing to close the "achievement gap" for poor kids, says, "We're going to get a status quo bill at the end of the day."
White House spinners dispute this, and it's true that Mr. Bush has helped to change the public-education debate. For the first time in 35 years, the federal educrat establishment has had to talk about results not just spending. This "paradigm shift," as GOP Sen. Bob Bennett calls it, is worth something.
The problem is that the policy details don't come close to matching this reform promise. Jeanne Allen of the Center for Education Reform, another Bush ally, calls the emerging product at best a "15% to 20% improvement." And given all of the new spending Mr. Bush is accepting, she adds, "they ought to be getting a lot more reform than that."
What's gone wrong? The answer seems to be a marriage of Beltway inertia and White House political calculation. The forces of the status quo are relentless. And from the beginning, Mr. Bush has signaled that he wants a bipartisan bill-signing ceremony more than a defining political fight.
More than a few Republicans think the strategy is deliberate. Candidate Bush used education to define himself as a different sort of Republican. Now President Bush wants the issue to offset the conservative tone of his tax bill and early economic decisions.
Mr. Bush and his Machiavells may want to be seen in the Rose Garden next to Teddy and the unions. Suburban voters, who think their schools are fine, will notice only the feel-good bipartisan atmospherics. And the GOP will have neutralized what used to be one of the Democrats' best issues.
If only the price of this photo-op weren't so steep. The first casualty was choice, with vouchers now stripped from both the House and Senate bills. Reform stalwart Judd Gregg (R., N.H.) plans to offer an amendment on the Senate floor to provide cash for voluntary voucher demonstrations, such as the successful Milwaukee plan. But the White House hasn't insisted on its passage.
Also thanks to Mr. Gregg, a remnant of choice survives in the Senate for "supplemental services" such as private tutoring, though only for schools failing after three long years. One White House aide calls this "the camel's nose under the tent" for vouchers. To which Mr. Finn replies, "Well, maybe one nostril, and there's one heck of a long neck on that camel."
The agents of no-change have also watered down testing and flexibility. Schools will be able to offer different tests for different grades and in different counties. This undermines the main point of testing, which is to give parents and the media comparative data that make the system less opaque.
Schools will also be able to report "composite" test results, which will allow them to disguise any gap between the best- and worst- performing kids. Mr. Bush didn't accept this in Texas, a fact that allowed him to brag during the campaign about his record improving results among poor minority kids.
Meanwhile, a "charter states" provision, which would allow maximum reform flexibility, has been excised in the House at Democratic insistence. It survives in the Senate, but only as a demonstration for seven states and with a host of regulatory barnacles. A stronger version passed the House last Congress.
The silver lining is that at least the bill won't do much harm. Even with billions of more dollars wasted, federal school spending won't be more than 8% of America's total. States will still be where the reform action is.
But despite all the bipartisan back-slapping to come, a rare reform chance is on the road to being squandered. Presidents who signal that they'll sign anything usually end up doing exactly that.
Mr. Gigot is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.
