The call to service.

Last September, on the South Lawn, President Clinton sported a flashy tie and surrounded himself with young Americans to celebrate the signing of the National and Community Service Trust Act of 1993. Not only were the trappings distinctly Clintonian--the president clapping and beaming--but the bill was typical Clinton, too: the right idea, founded on the best of motives, but still coming up disturbingly short of the truest, best reform. "National service," the president exulted, "will remain throughout the life of America not as a series of promises but a series of challenges, across all the generations and all walks of life to help push to rebuild our troubled but wonderful land."

To hear the president tell it, you would think thousands of young people were marching forth to do important work the country needs: teaching, policing, helping out in busy hospitals, nursing homes, and shelters. But read the law and take a hard look at the Clinton pilot projects, and you get the sinking sense that the reality of national service could be very different.

Take the coming Summer of Safety, a lofty three-month project to respond, in the words of the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS), "to the growing fear of and frustration over the levels of crime and violence in every part of the country." Thirty-five hundred young Americans will get a subsistence wage and $1,000 educational vouchers to take on one of the country's most intractable issues. Problem is, the whole program just lasts the summer, which is hardly enough time to get off the bus, much less defuse fear of violent crime. Not that CNCS would let a national service corps member do anything remotely like police work anyway: Participants can't be involved in making arrests, collecting evidence, or "witnessing criminal incidents which may result in participants being called as witnesses in adjudicatory proceedings." (How CNCS figures a participant will know when or where he might witness a crime is anybody's guess. The Washington bureaucrats apparently think malefactors announce their crimes in advance.)

Of course, when you're talking about 17 to 23-year-olds dropping in for the summer, it's sensible not to put them in assignments too dangerous for them to handle. That's not the trouble. The trouble is that the Clintonite national service people like to pretend they're really doing something when they're actually doing nothing. After all, it can take at least three months just to train someone to do real work. But there is no indication that what is true of the summer pilots--the Summer of Safety and its politically correct predecessor, the 1993 Summer of Service in which the participants subdivided into caucuses based on everything from race to vegetarianism--won't be basically true of the first full year of service, which 20,000 participants will begin in September, working for small, locally based service programs in exchange for living expenses plus $4,725 vouchers to pay for school.

If you care about national service, you ought to be worried about the Clinton act's fine print. There, an ominous passage tells the sad story of the path the administration took. "National service participants," it reads, "may not displace existing workers nor duplicate their functions." The first provision of course makes sense: A regular teacher, cop, or construction worker shouldn't lose his job to a temporary national servant. But the second part is mind-bogglingly stupid: National service workers can't duplicate existing workers' functions? That's crazy. One of the major reasons for having national service at all is that there's not enough money for Washington or for local and state governments to hire regular employees to do all the work that needs to be done (the Ford Foundation estimates that there are 3.5 million service-oriented jobs in the country that need filling).

To be sure, CNCS money is underwriting worthwhile projects. In Washington, members of the D.C. Service Corps gave vision tests to elementary school students; out of 7,000 kids tested, 700 needed and got glasses. In New Jersey, Jermaine Puryear teaches Newark's juveniles to put their interest in cars to good use, training former auto thieves to be mechanics. And in Los Angeles County, Erin Ferguson runs a counseling program to keep pregnant teenagers in school, enrolling them, for instance, in prenatal courses instead of gym class. But service corps members can't do orderly work in hospitals, Puryear can't teach vocational ed in a regular high school, and Ferguson can't teach courses. Consider these other cases where Clinton has come up short:

* Throughout the 1992 campaign, Clinton insisted that real teaching--not just aide and tutorial work--would be part of his service plan. Now the plan is law, and real teaching jobs are nowhere to be found. Although Clinton argued at a February 1993 meeting with his aides that a college graduate taking two years to teach school would be making "a real gift to society," the president caved to teachers' unions, which opposed the idea of national service participants taking posts that could be filled by union members. But there is a model out there: Teach For America (TFA), which puts bright college graduates into classrooms as teachers and could be part of the national service corps. While TFA has its problems, the natural thing would be to work out the kinks [see "Class Action," Jonathan Schorr, June 1993]. But as Scott Shuger, who worked on the staff of the Commission on National and Community Service, recently wrote in The Washington Post, riling teachers' unions was anathematic to the Clintonites. Shuger quotes Catherine Milton, the commission's executive director, as saying, "I don't want the commission to be identified with a controversial program like Teach For America."

Far better, apparently, to avoid taking a stand against the education establishment and stick to working at the margins. So what will national service do in the schools? "School-Based Service-Learning," which limits corps members to "engag[ing] elementary and secondary students in service-learning projects during or after school, weekends, or summers." What is "service-learning"? It's typified by a Boston program run by a City Year graduate named Brendan O'Brien. Last year, he set up an afterschool environmental "service-learning" program in which he takes schoolkids into the Vermont or New Hampshire woods to teach them eco-friendly habits--like why recycling is important. While this may be worth doing, it hardly seems the best way to spend the lion's share of national service's attention to education, which is what's happening.

* This is not to say that real jobs require college degrees. The U.S.'s infrastructure is collapsing, and despite spending $80 billion a year on roads, the federal government and the states now classify fully one-third of America's roads as deteriorated. And 39 percent of our bridges are unsafe. We need to fix thousands of them, and miles of bone-jarring, pothole-filled roads, but don't look for national service labor to be put to work doing it. The Davis-Bacon Act, which governs federal hiring on construction projects, makes it prohibitively expensive for a contractor to use a national service participant. Why? Because the contractor is forced under Davis-Bacon to pay the worker what he would pay an experienced labor union member. But nobody in the administration has said a word about exempting national service people from Davis-Bacon, meaning that need, too, will go unmet.

Service Aces

To understand the path Clinton should have taken, you have to understand the best features of the two major successful American service antecedents: the thirties' Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and the Peace Corps, which was founded in the sixties. The CCC, one of the amazing stories of the New Deal, was substantially a work relief program. A favorite of FDR's, who once took a famous drive out to inspect the camps in the Blue Ridge Mountains with Harold Ickes and Henry Wallace, the CCC put 2.5 million unemployed youths to work planting 200 million trees, building trails, raising bridges and firetowers, restoring historic battlefields, clearing beaches, and erecting picnic grounds.

Organized by the military, there was a distinct sense of pride among the CCCers, who sported forest-green uniforms, rose at 6 a.m., and spent the day at work. By late afternoon, they would be back in camp, scrubbing floors and tending gardens. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s account of the experience is telling: "Boys from the East Side of New York found themselves in Glacier Park, boys from New Jersey at Mount Hood in Oregon, boys from Texas in Wyoming .... They learned trades; more important, they learned about America, and other Americans." One CCC boy put it best: "It helps you to get along with other people in general, because it helps you to get over being selfish."

The Peace Corps, on the other hand, has no relief element to it at all. Founded as a cornerstone of JFK's New Frontier, it drew volunteers with the promise of the opportunity to serve. There was some glamour attached to answering the exciting young president's summons, but once in the fields you did real work, in faraway, dangerous places like Nigeria, Cyprus, and Guatemala, where the possibilities of disease and violence were scary and routine. But the most successful Peace Corps programs gave volunteers serious jobs they did with pride. Teachers, nurses, well-diggers, surveyors, and others fanned out for extended stays. Teaching in a village school in Africa or taking care of the sick in Kuala Lumpur were real, substantive tasks that volunteers enthusiastically executed.

Clinton is trying to combine the differing objectives of the CCC and the Peace Corps. First, he is taking a page from the CCC by providing money--scholarships--in exchange for service. That means poorer kids are automatically attracted. In the Peace Corps vein, for those people who don't need the money but who want to answer the call, Clinton offers a chance to serve. What Clinton has failed to do, however, is confront the fact that what made the CCC and the Peace Corps work were real jobs. It doesn't matter how people come to a program, whether out of selfish or unselfish motives, or a combination of the two. What matters is that once they are there, serious work awaits.

We will spend $3.4 billion on national service by 1997, enrolling 70,000 participants. This is not inconsiderable: The Peace Corps had only 16,000 volunteers at its peak. And some jobs in the summer pilots are heartening: In Texas, 87 volunteers brought in 100,000 kids for immunizations. Still, much more could--and should--be done: Clinton's opening gambit in the health care war, for instance, was to promise immunizations for all American children. Here's a chance, if service corps members are trained to actually give the shots, to make sure that happens. Clinton deserves generous credit for pushing national service this far; now, he's got to press on. "Here," wrote one Army general of the CCC youths in the thirties, "is much fine human material capable of being brought to the best standards of American manhood... We know what proud and happy citizenship could be made of this material, if society were only awake to its responsibility to these boys and to itself."

Clinton, to follow in FDR's footsteps, needs to make national service real.

Alan Greenblatt is a Washington writer.