Goals 2000

WASHINGTON -- Finally ending months of budget battles that included two partial government shutdowns, White House and congressional negotiators struck a deal last night that will finance the government through the fall.The agreement, which negotiators expect to see passed by Congress today and signed into law by President Clinton tonight, completes work on about $23 billion worth of cuts from the federal budget for the current year, most of which Mr. Clinton had originally vetoed.The compromise was reached when the Republican-led congressional negotiators agreed to restore nearly $5 billion that had been cut from Clinton priority programs, most of them relating to education and the environment.

AS ANY policy-maker will tell you, consensus is the key factor in change. You must have consensus to move legislation and policy proposals.Several years ago, the Clinton administration's national health care program died because of a lack of a consensus. So did Ronald Reagan's "Star Wars" arms proposal in the 1980s and the Equal Rights Amendment in the late 1970s. George Bush, on the other hand, made sure he had consensus on Capitol Hill before going forward with the gulf war.In education -- an area rife with new ideas and reforms -- consensus is the linchpin of success.

TELEVISION GETS blamed for everything. The American Academy of Pediatrics wants to get television sets out of children's bedrooms and ban TV watching entirely for those younger than age 2. Babies, it seems, need social interaction for their brains to develop properly. There's a lot of good programming on television, but children who stay up until 2 a.m. with their eyes glued to the TV aren't watching the History Channel. Nor are they reading. The latest National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)

REPUBLICANS HAVE MADE some political hay in recent years by accusing Democrats of being the tax-and-spend party. Ronald Reagan rode into town on a dual platform of cutting taxes and reducing spending, along with the size of government. He managed to reduce taxes but he failed to slay the spending beast. The last Republican-dominated Congress behaved more like the party of FDR than the party of Ronald Reagan. The Department of Education, which Mr. Reagan pledged to eliminate, had its budget increased 17 percent by a Republican Congress, which added $2 billion more than what President Clinton had requested.

Chicago -- WHEN THE HOUSE of Representatives recently recessed after passing major spending bills, Speaker Newt Gingrich said it had demonstrated the new Republican priorities. There were, he said, "substantial underlying changes going on at a philosophical level of how you try to do things in this country."The speaker was exactly right. The shaping of the appropriation bills made clearer than ever where the radical Republicans want to take America.They cut Head Start by $137 million. They added $7 billion to the defense budget that the armed services had not requested.

EVEN before his election, Bill Clinton was saying that the focus of his administration's education policy would be on the two ends of the spectrum: very young children, on the one hand, particularly in such things as the expansion of Head Start; and the transition, on the other, from high school to work, with focus on the development of more effective German-model apprenticeship programs for those not going to college.But the most revealing element in the Clinton program -- and potentially the most influential -- will be the attempt to develop national education standards and the assessment program that goes with it. And in searching for such a policy, the administration will be buffeted by two very contradictory forces.

Washington. -- In his speeches and in his best-selling book, ''To Renew America,'' House Speaker Newt Gingrich likes to call himself a ''revolutionary.'' Now that the first House session of the Newt World Order has gone into August recess, let's see how the revolution goes.In a matter of days, the revolutionaries cut $137 million from the Head Start preschool program and eliminated 170 other programs, including job training, summer youth employment, the Goals 2000 education improvement program and the entire surgeon general's office.

Children who lag behind in reading skills in kindergarten and first grade will be getting extra one-on-one help starting this spring through a $250,000 federal grant just awarded to Carroll County schools.The money will be used to provide daily tutoring for 15 to 20 minutes for pupils who are in the lowest 25 percent of the class in reading skills."We wanted to advance those lowest-performing children, so they can exit first grade as competent and confident readers," said Dorothy Mangle, director of elementary education.

Imagine an America without standards -- no weights and measures, anyone who likes drives a car, airline pilots who are long on enthusiasm but short on skills, self-declared brain surgeons, basketball players who can dribble but not shoot. It's a hair-raising vision, but exactly the situation we face in our nation's schools.Alone among the industrialized nations, America has no national education standards. The product of our frontier past, "local control" is a venerated, even mythical tradition.

It's Not Just Money, It's RespectTeachers at MacArthur Middle School are extremely concerned with the lack of respect being shown us by the Board of Education. We would expect the board to show some amount of appreciation for what we do in the classroom.By the tenor of the negotiations, this is apparently not the case. In the past, we have made concessions with respect to economics, even agreeing to no raise in salary when it was clear that fiscal limitations would not permit one. The board has adopted "Goals 2000 for Anne Arundel County Schools," but does not seem to want to give the staff the peace of mind with which to concentrate on achieving these goals.