Dick Cheney on Education Vice President of the United States under George W. Bush

Sub-sections under Education:
• School Choice
• Other issues under Education

We are making significant progress with No Child Left Behind

EDWARDS: They didn’t fund the mandates that they put on the schools all over this country. That’s one of the reasons 800 teachers have been laid off in Cleveland. 1/3 of our public schools are failing under the Bush administration. Half of African-Americans are dropping out of high school. Half of Hispanic-American are dropping out of high school. We have a clear plan to improve our public schools that starts with getting our best teachers into the schools where we need them the most by creating incentives for them to go there.

CHENEY: We are making significant progress there. We are closing the achievement gap. The results coming in from a number of studies show, without question, that on math and reading, that in fact our minority students, our Hispanic and African-American students are doing better, and that gap between them and the majority population is, in fact, closing.

Bush passed most significant education reform in 40 years

Bush focuses on accountability; Gore on status quo

He said Gore is “a defender of the status quo. I don’t think Al Gore understands the meaning of accountability. Al Gore focuses on what resources go in, not results.”

Demand accountability so no child is left behind

CHENEY: I think public education is the solution. There’s been no progress on reading scores in the last eight years. We’ve had a significant increase in spending for education, but it has produced almost no positive results. We’ve graduated 15 million kids from high school in the last 15 years who can’t read. They are permanently sentenced to a lifetime of failure. Governor Bush and I want to emphasize local controls so that people can decide what’s best for their kids. And we want to insist on high standards and accountability. We have to test every child every year to know whether or not we’re making progress. This is the most important issue in this campaign.

LIEBERMAN: You cannot reform education without spending money. We have committed $170 billion: to recruit 100,000 new teachers, to help local school districts build new buildings. We’re going to give the middle class the ability to deduct up to $10,000 a year in the cost of college tuition.

Teach reading, writing, and values

Tests will be taken, results will be measured

Voted against Head Start; but with surplus, supports it

“I voted against various worthy programs,” he said. “I would not vote against Head Start today.” He mentioned that there were questions about whether the program was being operated “in the fashion that would allow us to get the maximum benefit out of it.”

Cheney co-sponsored the following bills in Congress:
• H.R.5357 (1988):A bill to establish demonstration grants for conducting school-based management projects.
• H.R.1692 (1988):A bill to make permanent the exclusion from gross income for educational assistance.
• H.CON.RES.344 (1986):A resolution to express the sense of the Congress that local educational agencies should require quality daily physical education programs for all children from kindergarten through the 12th grade.

Voted against Head Start, and against Dept. of Education

Supports school prayer

Where he stands:
• opposed the Equal Rights Amendment
• anti-abortion rights
• supported prayer in schools
• supported balanced budget amendment

Supports certifying military retirees as teachers

A: We’re making some progress. The decisions have to be made at the state level. States have to agree to allow alternative credentials to be used for the certification of teachers. Some states have begun that process. We’ve got some great folks in the US military who are leaving because their services are no longer needed as we downsize, and many of them have an interest in moving into the education community.

We probably run the biggest training and educational establishment in the world today, in the Department of Defense. If we can move some of those talented folks over to work in the public school systems around the country, I think it would be a wise use of a very valuable asset.

Supports school-based management; & tax-deductible loans

Cheney co-sponsored the following bills in Congress:
• H.R.5357 (1988):A bill to establish demonstration grants for conducting school-based management projects.
• H.R.1692 (1988):A bill to make permanent the exclusion from gross income for educational assistance.
• H.CON.RES.344 (1986):A resolution to express the sense of the Congress that local educational agencies should require quality daily physical education programs for all children from kindergarten through the 12th grade.

Supported grants for low-income “bootstrap schools”

Cheney co-sponsored H.R.5356 (1988):A bill to make grants to local educational agencies (LEAs) to enhance the quality of education through the establishment of bootstrap schools. LEAs are eligible where poverty is high. The grants can be used only for:
1. planning and outreach activities directly related to enhancing academic programs and services;
2. acquisition of teaching materials, books, and equipment for educational programs (including computers); and
3. teacher compensation.

Money from failed schools can be used as parents decide best

A: “We have not advocated vouchers, per se,” Cheney explained that the mechanism that parents could use to spend the money would be up to state and local governments to determine. “The notion that we are somehow anti-public school is simply not the case,” he said. “We want the public schools to work. We want them to be as good as they were when we went to school.”

Cheney explained that Title I money for schools that failed would be given directly to the children’s parents. The parents could then use the money to send their children to a private school or a charter school, or to hire a tutor and send them to another public school. “We’re not proposing to take the money away until the school fails,” he said. “But if the school fails, we think it’s important that federal funds not be used to reinforce failure, that instead that there be accountability built into the system.”

Co-sponsored bill for parental choice within public schools

Cheney co-sponsored H.R.5355 (1988) to establish Federal financial assistance for parental choice open enrollment programs in public schools. Allows grants to be used for:
1. increasing school attendance and student achievement;
2. increasing accountability for success of the educational program in schools;
3. increasing parental involvement and public interest in schools;
4. establishing and operating distinctive schools with new and innovative approaches to education, including increasing flexibility and autonomy at the school level; and
5. providing a wider range of choices of educational courses of instruction to educationally and economically disadvantaged children.
6. Requires that at least 50 percent of a grant be used to carry out the parental choice program.