
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, April 19, 1991                   TAG: 9104190256
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

'REINVENT' SCHOOLS, BUSH SAYS

President Bush on Thursday proposed a sweeping package of educational reforms that would add little to federal spending but ask state and local governments, the business world and communities to join in an effort to "reinvent American education."

Meeting with business and government leaders at the White House, he detailed a program that would create a voluntary national testing program and set up a system of rewards and penalties to prod schools to better performance.

Bush's "America 2000" program would use $550 million in federal seed money to set up 535 experimental schools, and create a non-profit, business-funded corporation to sponsor research and development of new kinds of schools.

The administration proposes to spend $690 million on the program, a small portion of an overall fiscal 1992 education budget of $29.6 billion - a proposed increase of 3.7 percent in total outlays. But Bush said the country is spending 33 percent more per pupil in 1991 than in 1981, in inflation-adjusted terms, and insisted that more spending is not necessary.

"I don't think there's a person anywhere who would say we've seen a 33 percent increase in our schools' performance," the president said in a speech from the White House, where he was joined by newly appointed Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander and others.

Bush stressed that the nation's governors would be partners in leading the program, and alluded to his 1988 campaign call for volunteerism: "I ask all Americans to be points of light in the crusade that matters most," he said.

One of the program's most sensitive proposals calls for parents to be given more choice to pick schools, as a means of applying leverage to improve curricula. It says parents should be free to send their children to any public school in their district - or even to private schools.

The program calls for special federal aid to school districts to encourage them to allow parental choice. And it seeks revision of federal regulations so federal dollars from the government's big Chapter 1 school-aid program could follow a child to any private school.

Critics of choice contend it would encourage middle-class families to flee public schools at the expense of the poor. Administration officials said they would try to ensure that low-income families would be given the same opportunities as those with more money.

by CNB