Local options: Congress should return control of education to states, school boards - and parents.

AS IT SETS out to repair the damage wrought by its predecessor, the new Republican majority in Congress needs to look hard at education. Among the least-noticed events of October's closing legislative rush was final passage of HR-6 the 6, Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), a $65-billion measure that is bad for children, for education, and for American federalism. In 1,000-plus pages it sets back the cause of serious school reform, wastes billions of dollars, and erodes local control of American schools.

At a showy pre-election bill signing in Massachusetts, President Clinton and Senator Edward Kennedy said the law signals a national commitment to our children. Retiring Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell (D., Me.) cited education as one of the jewels in the crown of the 103rd Congress. Education Secretary Dick Riley said no one in Washington, perhaps in the whole country, was serious about education before Clinton's inauguration. And columnist Jack Anderson reported that Morgan Stanley's research department finds Clinton's "political stock ... bluechip when it comes to keeping its promises on education reform."

Like so much associated with this Administration, however, what sounds too good to be true turns out to be not entirely true and not very good at all. HR-6 was the legislative equivalent of a stealth bomber, heavily armed with dangerous weapons but scarcely visible save to its controllers and crew.

Part of a comprehensive education package, along with "Goals 2000" and measures such as a "school to work" program and expansion of Head Start, HR-6 did far more than reauthorize ESEA, the keystone of federal school aid since 1965. It reversed a decade of progress toward a coherent, bipartisan education-reform strategy as embodied in the Bush Administration's "America 2000" plan, which sought to roll back federal regulation and replace it with the initiative of teachers, communities, and parents, and which coupled voluntary goals with good tests and accountability for results.

By signing off on HR-6 and Goals 2000, President Clinton transformed a nationwide reform movement into a federal program. The new regulations concern not only the standards and assessments that schools use but also how they discipline student offenders, the topics that teachers and parents must discuss with one another, the content of sex-education courses, and the (rare) circumstances in which denying a child the right to pray may be an infraction. Clinton has even created something akin to a national school board, the National Education Standards and improvement Council.

Almost as worrying is the resurrection of inputs, resources, and services as gauges of education quality. Three decades of research show no reliable link between what goes into schools and what children learn there. Yet Goals 2000 and HR-6 affirm the routine assertion of the education establishment: If we're not happy with school results, more money and regulations will improve them.

Political correctness pervades many sections of the bill. Education Daily matter-of-factly reports that "HR-6 is laced with language on gender equity, from authorizing grants to requiring schools to collect data." The bill also establishes a post-modern definition of the "family," provides day care for the babies of unwed teenage mothers, and conflates school reform with health care, violence prevention, etc. The law provides vast windfalls for colleges of education and authorizes funds for dozens of pork-barrel projects. More troubling still is the bill's hypocrisy with respect to such promising reform strategies as charter schools and parental choice. While allowing members of Congress to claim that they voted for them, HR-6 actually immobilizes them with rules and conditions. What good, for example, is a school-choice program that lets the "sending school" veto the child's departure? Furthermore, such shackles will help the enemies of school choice argue a few years down the road that these reforms don't work.

How It Passed

THE passage of this legislation reveals much about the opportunities and perils awaiting the new Congress. HR-6 spent more than a year on Capitol Hill after the White House sent it up. Hearings dragged on. The high-profile issues were how to adjust the Chapter One formula to direct more federal dollars toward poor communities and whether to keep or jettison Chapter Two, a block grant that was immensely popular with states and localities. Tucked away in the fine print--but seldom discussed or reported--were dozens of new programs and hundreds of changes in existing ones, as well as intricate linkages between ESEA and the Goals 2000 bill. The Administration's complex proposals were heavily embroidered by Bill Ford's House Education and Labor Committee, and Ted Kennedy's Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee.

Eventually, the House cranked out the most offensive piece of education legislation in memory, the Senate a somewhat milder version. The final edition was cobbled together behind closed doors during August and September in a "staff conference" dominated by Democratic congressional aides, some of them around since the days of LBJ. Lobbyists and Administration officials played key roles in the process, but nobody else was allowed into the room.

The vast bill emerged from conference about 48 hours before the House voted on final passage. Senators had a couple of additional days to try to get hold of copies and examine the bill. Few did. It is likely that not a single member of either body had actually read the full text of the final version.

The teachers unions and the Washington-based interest groups quietly did their part to round up votes, rousing their memberships with the promise of federal dollars. Business groups went along, perhaps because their education staffs consist mostly of establishment fellow-travelers. Governors, state legislators, and mayors, many of whom had fussed loudly about Goals 2000, were mute about HR-6, though it will cost them substantial control over their schools.

Conservative organizations sat this one out or focused on such narrow items as the school-prayer provisions. Editorialists naively supposed that any bill labeled "education' must be a good thing. As for congressional Republicans, most donned their "damage control" garb, curbing the worst Democrat-drafted excesses without challenging the measure's fundamental premises.

What can we do now? When it comes to education, decisions made in Washington are decisions not made by parents, teachers, and 15,000 local school boards. Mandates shaped in Washington are programs not fashioned by the states and communities, which foot most of the bill. Regulations crafted in Washington can be counted upon to respond to the demands of special interests rather than the needs of fifty million unique children attending some 110,000 distinctive schools across this diverse land.

Education is not an endeavor where one size fits all. Perhaps we can agree on a core of voluntary goals and standards that make sense for the nation, but it's folly to prescribe a single path to them, or to suggest that Uncle Sam knows best. Worse than folly, it saps initiative and responsibility, curbs creativity, and wrongly pretends that some of the touchiest and most localized issues in American society--the way our children are taught about religion and sex, the place of education in our communities--lend themselves to uniform national solutions. Decentralizing education policy is a way to strengthen communities, to rebuild the culture, to buttress families, and to diffuse--and perhaps defuse-volatile decisions.

Horse-Trading

IN 1986, when one of us was chairman of the nation's governors and another was education secretary, the governors proposed some "old-fashioned horse-trading," namely lifting the regulatory burden from American schools in return for better education results. In time this proposal turned into a consensus about how to reform the schools: local control coupled with gubernatorial leadership; voluntary national goals combined with responsibility for each state and locality to work toward them as it deemed best; wide-ranging choices for families among excellent schools that differ on many dimensions; the fundamental right to flee a bad, or unsafe school for a good one, (plus tests that make it possible to know which are which); and essential skills and serious content taught by talented individuals who are accountable for their results and rewarded for classroom excellence.

That's what America 2000 was all about. And that's still how the American people believe we should tackle our education problems. A recent survey by Public Agenda makes plain that a "safe, orderly environment and effective teaching of the `basics"' head their list, joined by high standards and clear lines of accountability. But the public has serious misgivings about the trendy schemes beloved of today's education establishment--the very approaches on which money and legitimacy are lavished by HR-6 and the rest of the Clinton package. As Public Agenda reports, "the large majority of Americans are uncomfortable" with such things as "ending the `tracking' of students, and replacing standardized, multiple-choice tests with new, more `authentic' assessments." We also know from other surveys that the American people strongly favor school choice and are deeply mistrustful of the Federal Government's ability to improve our schools.

Today Washington is on a collision course with what the American people want and what they know to be right. The recent election results provide dramatic evidence. HR-6 is a large, ugly example of what has gone wrong and what the voters are rejecting. It should be repealed. The "national school board" should be canned. and local control should be restored. Education should be sent home to states, communities, and families.

Indeed, it's time for the Federal Government virtually to withdraw from elementary and secondary education and relinquish the authority it has seized in this domain. Dozens of federal programs ought to vanish. The resources they now consume should be made available--perhaps through a federal tax cut or an expanded version of Chapter Two--to states and localities to do with as they judge best. We're now drafting, and one of us plans in January to introduce, a short, simple bill to accomplish this. The new majority in Congress creates a more hospitable environment for such legislation than we've had since the Great Society pointed federal education policy in the wrong direction.

Insofar as any education functions stay in Washington, their guiding principles should be choice, deregulation, innovation, accountability, and serious assessment keyed to real standards in core subjects. The National Education Goals Panel, made up of governors and state legislators along with Executive Branch and congressional representatives, is where oversight responsibility should rest. not with civil servants, "experts," or the Federal Government. Today's Department of Education could be reduced to something far humbler and less costly.

That doesn't mean Presidents have nothing to say about education. In truth, they should say quite a bit. But they shouldn't try to run the nation's schools. They must not seek to control them. And they need to understand that acceptance of their education agenda depends on the power of their ideas, not on federal red tape, Bill Clinton should tell the country what he thinks a good school is. Those who agree with him can be trusted to create their own. Those who favor a different idea must be free to march to their own drummers.