Continuing and Urgent

Public School Education

The organized Jewish community's commitment to public school education derives from its longstanding belief that quality public education, accessible to all students, is vital to preparing young people for full and productive participation in American society. That commitment has engendered support for innovations to make public schools more effective.

In April 1994 President Clinton signed into law the Goals 2000: Educate America Act, which provides a new approach to federal aid for education. The bill establishes voluntary national education goals, standards and tests for elementary and secondary school students, and authorizes $422 million a year in grants to help states fund their own vision of what it takes to improve public schools. It codifies six education goals, including improved graduation rates and making schools drug and violence free.

The 103rd Congress is currently considering the Improving America's School Act. This legislation would revise and expand federally funded elementary and secondary school programs mainly by reallocating more than $6 billion in annual grants under the so-called Chapter I program. Originally intended to provide extra help primarily to poor children, the program has distributed funds broadly and so thinly to over 93 percent of all school districts that many schools with high concentrations of poor students get little or no money, and many students who do benefit are not poor. President Clinton proposed increasing from 10 to 50 percent the share of Chapter I money reserved for "concentration grants" that favor counties with the largest number of low-income students. However, such reallocation would have resulted in denying funds to the wealthiest school districts and would have resulted in half the nation's 3,000 counties losing at least half their Chapter I money. That political reality appears to have undermined the effort.