The Unfulfilled Promise of Block Grants.

You would have thought they'd have learned by now, but they haven't.

"They" are the members of the majority Republican Party in the House of Representatives, and the lesson they refuse to learn is that the 30 Republican governors don't necessarily know what's best for children and schools.

During the GOP's infamous "first 100 days," the governors got the House side of the Capitol to agree to dismantle the National School Lunch Act and turn it into a static block grant that will make school lunch money a gubernatorial plaything. Their proposal would have given children in fast-growing, high-poverty states less money for meals, while those in low-growth, low-poverty states would be able to pile on an extra helping.

A hue and cry developed over that fiasco as the public saw House members as miserly Scrooges. It also led to a new phrase on Capitol Hill: to be "school lunched," meaning to allow the majority party to be seen as uncaring and crotchety.

Repeat Performance

Congress is on its way toward doing it again. Once more it's the House, being corralled by the nose by those 30 GOP governors who want as much unfettered state control as possible over federal dollars. This time they're going after the venerable Carl D. Perkins Vocational and Applied Technology Education Act, the just-created and highly praised School-to-Work Transition Act, the Job Training Partnership Act, Job Corps, and dozens of other youth and adult training programs. All were packaged into four block grants by the House Economic and Educational Opportunities Committee to be sent to the governors.

AASA and one of the broadest-based coalitions of local education groups ever assembled--including the American Federation of Teachers, the National Education Association, the National School Boards Association, the National PTA, the American Vocational Association, the Council of the Great City Schools, the National Association of State Directors of Vocational Technical Education Councils, the American Association of Family Consumer Sciences, the National Association of Elementary School Principals, the National Association of Secondary School Principals, and the American Association of Community Colleges--pushed hard for a school-based program and a sub-state formula to drive money in the vocational education block to schools.

AASA also sought equal representation for educators on the state and local "workforce development boards," which will decide how the programs will be run, and a guarantee that the new block grants will not be used simply to supplant state or federal dollars already being spent on vocational education and job training.

Except for a weak agreement in committee to "work something out" on this last issue with the Republican side before the bill, H.R. 1617 (The Careers Act), reaches the House floor, none of the concerns of local educators made its way into this legislation.

Futile Approach

Education is facing a critical juncture in Washington and throughout the nation. In public opinion polls, taxpayers consistently support greater spending on education. They see tax cuts as a foolhardy way to trim back government.

But the "less is more" advocates are the ones with their hands on the federal government's steering wheel. Less government regulation, they claim, means less money needs to be spent by local schools and communities.

To see the futility of block grants, just consider the Chapter 2 block grant program created in 1981. What began with $900 million in specific categorical program dollars was squeezed down to $500 million, where it sat unattended for years. Now Chapter 2 is below $380 million and is on everyone's target list, both the administration's and those of the House and Senate appropriators.

So beware of block grants and their catchy appeal for less administration. Beware of being school-lunched. It's happened before and it can happen again.