by Lance T. Izumi, Fellow in California Studies
Pacific Research Institute
March 1997

Announcer lead: Time for Perspectives. Lance Izumi says that the Clinton administration's actions on education don't match its words.

Vice President Al Gore recently delivered a speech to a joint session of the California State Legislature which was billed as an announcement of a "national blueprint to reinvent the way we spened money for education." In his address, Mr. Gore said that America must ensure that more dollars are spent on educating students rather than on "bloated bureaucracy." That great rhetoric, but the Clinton administration's record shows that it has no problem with propping up that bloated bureaucracy.

Take, for example, federal education spending. According to a recent study by the Heritage Foundation, of the $100 billion spent by the federal government on education in 1995, only $13 billion went to local school districts. According to the report, several billion dollars is spent on bureaucracy at the federal, state, and local level just to administer the federal dollars going to local districts.

Take also the Clinton administration's Goals 2000 program, which is supposed to finance innovative state and local education initiatives. Under the Goals 2000 law, a wide variety of new federal bureaucracies are created such as the National Education Goals Panel, resource and technical planning groups, regional educational laboratories, and a National Institute on Student Achievement, Curriculum and Assessment.

The size of state and local education bureaucracies have also ballooned in response to federal mandates. For instance, under the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, local schools are required to provide services for a disabled child's education regardless of costs or the ability of schools to pay for them. In California, this has not only caused special education to be the state's highest spending education categorical program, it has also spawned new layers of bureaucracy. According to the state Legislative Analyst's Office, a whole consulting industry has sprung up just to help schools fill out the complicated forms needed to get special education funding.

If Bill Clinton and Al Gore want to attack bloated bureaucracy they should start by attacking Washington's role in promoting that bureaucracy.

With a perspective, I'm Lance Izumi