COLUMN: "Clinton And Bush Should Put Education Ideas Together"

One of the less debated of Bill Clinton's proposals involves his plan for guaranteeing a college education to anyone who wants it in exchange for a specified length of mandatory national service following graduation -- kind of like a combination of the GI Bill and the Peace Corps. This proposal, when joined with President Bush's Pet Issue For the Election Which Will Be Ignored in January, otherwise known as school-choice, provides some interesting ideas for our educational system. However, initially the Clinton plan begs some key questions which Mr. Clinton has yet to answer. For example, how will the mandatory service time of around two years be regulated and enforced? With all the bureaucracy floating around Washington already it seems as though the last thing we need is some monolithic national service program which will cost the government millions of dollars just to push the paperwork. In addition, we already have similar programs for medical students whereby the student gets his/her medical training paid and in return agrees to spend some time as a doctor in a poor, rural or inner-city community providing a public service. However, as a "60 Minutes" segment pointed out, many of these doctors shirk their responsibility in favor of the immediate pursuit of big bucks and never fulfill their end of the bargain. They are allowed to get away with it because enforcement is so difficult. Given the problems of just getting medical students to devote a year or two to a public clinic, just imagine trying to get a Wharton student to sacrifice two years on Wall Street doing (gasp!) community service. At the same time, the concept of providing every child with a college education while unleashing a yearly army of bright "volunteers" on the social services offices, the rest homes, the community crime fighting organizations etc. has a great deal of merit. While providing both a real and politically possible solution to the financial problems that face lower and middle class students who want to go to college, what the Clinton plan does not address is the lack of quality among our primary schools. America has the best colleges in the world; our educational problems lie in the fact that all too many of our students are unprepared to attend them even if they can afford to. On the other hand, President Bush is pushing a plan that will allow parents to choose private schools for their kids while receiving government aid, in the form of vouchers, to attend them. This is assuming their income is low enough to qualify (and the Bush/Reagan era has guaranteed that there will be plenty of qualifiers). The obvious beneficiaries of such a plan would not be the poor farmer's daughter in Wyoming where alternative schools simply wouldn't exist, but the welfare mother's son in Philadelphia and the likely Catholic school he would attend. This fact has the leftist crowd out in force screaming about separation of church and state. These are the same people who complain about manger scenes on town greens and menorahs at firehouses. They are also the same bunch that has dominated the Democratic Party for the last 20 years and have thus contributed more than any other factor to the 12-year horror show in the White House simply because they have failed to provide an acceptable alternative. Consequently, one must take their complaints with a grain of salt. The religious argument against school-choice misses the point. School-choice is not about Congress or anyone else establishing or promoting any kind of religion, but about about educating our children to succeed in our society, a task many public schools have simply failed to do. Many non-denominational private schools exist, and the only people who would have to attend Catholic schools would be people who chose them. One would think that the left would understand that word choice. The argument goes that if public schools are forced to compete for students they will be forced to upgrade their performance, and thus many parents will end up choosing the public schools anyway. While this claim does seem a little shaky, I must ask, what exactly have we got to lose? Our public schools are failures. Why not try the choice approach? Unfortunately, I am sure that Mr. Bush, whatever his personal convictions may be (if he actually has any), is only using the issue to gain votes, particularly since surveys show that around 40% of the people who voted Republican in 1988 were Catholic. Bush hopes that by pushing the double whammy of school-choice and abortion he can hold on to that support. No doubt that after the election however, he will forget all about the issue and continue on cruise control. Of course, school-choice would never get through the Democrats in Congress anyway, since they have to pay back the special interest groups that got them there. These include the NEA and the militant pro-choice groups who have decided that offending Catholics is a good way to gain support for their abortion position. (Here's a tip from a pro-choice Catholic: It's not. Superimposing Bob Casey's face over the Pope's may seem funny to some of the radical feminists who have commandeered the legitimate fight for legalized abortion, but politically it is just plain stupid and is a good example of why Democrats haven't been able to win the White House.) Hopefully Bill Clinton will see the wisdom of the Bush plan and will combine it with his own. Then we would have a real "Education President" who addresses both the problem of spiraling costs in higher education and a lack of fundamental learning in lower education. Brian Newberry is a senior Urban Studies and American History major from Wallingford, Connecticut and a former Daily Pennsylvanian senior photographer.

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