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When will the GOP court blacks?
African-Americans like George W. Bush, and they're more conservative than ever, but will Republicans be smart enough to recruit them in 2000?
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By Jake Tapper
[09/15/99]

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Almost 35 years since Congress began massively funding education support for disadvantaged students, through the $8 billion Chapter 1/Title 1 program, the effort is widely judged a disappointment. In most states, poor kids continue to lag far behind their advantaged peers in school achievement, while blacks and Latinos still lag behind whites, and those achievement gaps -- which started to close for a while -- began widening again in the mid-1990s.

So more than a few reformers have begun to flirt with heretofore taboo ideas -- charters, school privatization, merit pay for teachers, even vouchers. And some are even flirting with supporting a Republican presidential candidate, Texas Gov. George W. Bush. Bush's Sept. 2 education policy speech in Los Angeles, in which he committed himself to closing the achievement gap for poor and minority kids and cracking down on the failures of Title 1, was a hit with many education reformers, and some of them will even say it publicly.

Bush won points for both style and substance. "The fact that it was about poor kids and minority kids was right on the money, because that's where the feds are supposed to count," says Kati Haycock, executive director of the Education Trust, a respected Washington advocacy group for low-income education reform. "And he's clearly learned that accountability matters."

But the centerpiece of Bush's accountability plan frightened some advocates: Schools receiving Title 1 funds that, after three years, don't show improvement in low-income kids' achievement will see their federal funding yanked, and given to parents -- to the tune of $1,500 a year per student.

Is Bush a dedicated education reformer, finally enforcing standards for poor kids? Or is he a right-wing ideologue trying to slouch toward vouchers -- a word, the New York Times noted, he never used during his speech?

Salon News asked Haycock, who has closely watched Bush's reform efforts in Texas, to talk about the implications of the Republican front-runner's proposals. Although Haycock worked closely on education reform issues with the White House, she's won no friends there by praising Bush's education plans to NBC News and other media outlets.

Judging from his Texas policies, Haycock says, Bush means business. He's used both carrots and sticks to force schools to devise strategies to improve the achievement of poor, black and Latino kids -- and achievement gaps have narrowed significantly in his state. So Haycock thinks Bush deserves a serious look from education advocates -- although she notes that Clinton, too, was a committed education reformer when governor of Arkansas, while as president he has disappointed his former allies.

Next page | Should poor kids be held hostage until we fix public schools?