By Joan Crigger

A handful of House Democrats joined their Republican colleagues on July 20 to pass HR1995, a $2 billion block grant to states. This legislation is the first piece that, when finished, will result in the full reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Despite furious lobbying and a veto threat by President Clinton, 24 Democrats supported the measure and four Republicans opposed the bill that would end the President’s one year old program to hire 100,000 new teachers.

The legislation would permit states to decide how much of the federal money they receive to use for hiring new teachers and how much to use for the professional development of existing teachers. House Education and the Workforce Committee Chairman William Goodling (PA) and other advocates said it would give states the flexibility to make sure that schools did not find themselves forced to hire teachers simply to fulfill a mandatory body count. They argue that simply hiring more teachers and making classes smaller is not the magic solution to improving student education. They prefer a combination of reducing class size and improving quality of teachers, and they said local educators should decide what balance to strike between the two strategies to improve student achievement.

President Clinton and the majority of Democrats supported a Democratic alternative piece of legislation, introduced by Rep. Matthew Martinez (CA), that called for $3.5 billion in federal spending on teachers next year, $1.5 billion of which would be dedicated to the hiring of additional teachers who had certain basic qualifications. That alternative was only narrowly defeated, along party lines, by a vote of 207 to 217. Democrats were able to maintain enough party unity to easily meet the 145-vote threshold needed to sustain the promised veto. Clinton argued that the block grant was an attempt to undermine his class-size reduction program, adopted last year with bipartisan support and backed by research showing achievement gains by young pupils in smaller classes.

HR1995 combines approximately $800 million that was being spent on teacher training under the act with the extra $1.2 billion that was allocated for President Clinton’s class-size reduction program of 100,000 teachers, for a total of $2 billion.

The block grant legislation is one of several House bills that Republican leaders indicate they intend to push in the renewal of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). In contrast, Senate leaders plan to take a more traditional approach and draft a single, comprehensive renewal of ESEA which would ultimately force the various House bills into a single piece of legislation. ESEA which was originally enacted in 1965 comes up for reauthorization every five years and represents about $13 billion a year in federal spending.