DUPED BY THE MORON

The Kids Left Behind (BOB HERBERT, 8/28/03, NY Times)

Next week the Senate will take up the education budget proposed for next year by the White House and Senate Republicans. From the perspective of those who are pro-children, it's loaded with bad news. Not only does the bill fall far short of the photo-op promises Mr. Bush made to provide funding for programs to improve public education, but it would actually cut $200 million from the president's very own (and relentlessly touted) No Child Left Behind Act.

We're talking about a real cut -- $200 million less than is being spent on this already underfunded initiative.

The proposed cuts, according to Congressional officials who have studied the budget proposal, would eliminate a high school dropout prevention program, would prevent more than 32,000 children with limited proficiency in English from participating in federally supported English instruction programs, would drastically cut high school equivalency and college assistance for migrant children, and would end the Thurgood Marshall Scholarship program.

The proposal would also cut more than 20,000 teachers from professional training programs, despite Mr. Bush's promise that teachers would "get the training they need to raise educational standards." And it would completely eliminate training for teachers in computer technology.

Among those who are steaming over the proposal is Senator Edward Kennedy, one of a number of Democrats who gave the president the kind of good-faith, high-profile, bipartisan support that was crucial to the passage of No Child Left Behind.

The Smart Party gets it anyway: the education bill was never about money, but about vouchers. George W. Bush was willing to give Ted Kennedyt whatever dollar figure the Senator insisted on, knowing that he could gut the bill later, so long as he got testing to show that schools are failing and vouchers so that kids can get out of those schools. That much was easy, because Democrats (and the libertarian Right) underestimated him. The hard part, even with the coming Republican super-majority, will be to reform the program so that vouchers can be used in private and parochial schools as well as public. Posted by Orrin Judd at August 28, 2003 10:26 AM