Of Bomb Throwers and Consensus Builders.

Election night 1994 will go down as one of the most earth-shattering in the history of mid-term congressional balloting.

Not only did the first sitting speaker of the house since 1862 lose his own seat, but enough voters crossed party lines to unleash the Democratic Party's 40-year hold on the U.S. House of Representatives. And Republicans again regained control of the Senate for the first time since 1986.

So how will this impact elementary and secondary education?

For starters, the new chairman of the House Economic and Educational Opportunities Committee (formerly known as the Committee on Education and Labor), Rep. William Goodling, R-Pa., has formally stated that he wants his committee to "empower Americans through local decisions" by extending "local control and putting confidence in local officials to make the best decisions about how their children will be educated."

You won't find much quarrel among local school administrators over that. AASA has been pushing for greater flexibility over the use of federal funds for years. Since Goodling is a former local administrator and former AASA member, he genuinely knows how schools work and how not to place undue burdens on them.

Extraneous Issues

The chairman also has expressed a possible desire to reopen the recently-passed Improving America's Schools Act, also known as H.R. 6, the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Goodling doesn't particularly like the way the new Title I funding formula affects his district's schools.

He and some of his panel's more senior Republican members also have talked about revisiting the Goals 2000: Educate America Act. They believe it encroaches too far into local decisions regarding curriculum, a role the federal government promised not to play when Congress created the U.S. Department of Education in 1979.

Goodling and his Democratic colleagues always have gotten along well together when it came to education issues, and we expect that to continue to a certain degree. He is a moderate Republican who will not allow social "hot button" issues such as sex education, school prayer, and guns in school to distract his panel from its focus on children and learning.

However, AASA does expect these extraneous issues to be raised on the House floor, which will be controlled by that chamber's bright, politically volatile and battle-ready speaker, Rep. Newt Gingrich, R-Ga. The first issue out of the box, after House internal reforms have been addressed, very well may be a vote to amend the U.S. Constitution to allow some type of individual or group prayer in publicly supported schools. Since the courts have determined such activities to be unconstitutional, the members of each political party's far-right faction can be expected to push hard for this issue.

Consensus Building

In the Senate, the reign of power have shifted to Sen. Robert Dole, RKan. He is much more of a consensus builder than Gingrich and already has stated that his side of the Capitol will not move with Gingrich-like speed and will not embrace volatile issues lightly.

Goodling's counterpart in the Senate will be Sen. Nancy Kassebaum, RKan., a calm moderate who helped placate civil liberty and religious groups alike with her compromise school prayer amendment to H.R. 6. (That amendment places decisions on prayer in the court system, not in the hands of school administrators.)

Kassebaum has expressed no desire to reopen the Title I formula battle, but, like Goodling, she wants to take a hard look at what programs really work and which ones are just using up money.

As is true in the House, the Senate has its share of social "bomb throwers." Foremost among them are Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., and Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas, a contender with Dole for the 1996 GOP presidential nomination.

This should be a fascinating time to watch a major shift in legislative power in Washington. This also is a time when the ground will be shifting constantly. The staff at AASA stands ready to keep you well-informed any time a threat to public education n or a promising idea emerges.