New York Daily News - News & Views Columnists - Stanley Crouch: Bush's good deed for minorities

New York Daily News - News & Views Columnists - Stanley Crouch: Bush's good deed for minoritiesBush's good deed for minorities

It is more than a bit ironic that President Bush is out ahead of the civil rights establishment and its friends who spend more time crying crocodile tears for monsters like the recently executed Tookie Williams than they do addressing the issue of education. It is odd because education always has the greatest chance to close performance and income gaps between our country's majority and our minorities.

The President has not been playing around in that area, but the men around him often leave the President with egg on his face. Bush appointee Michael Brown was so incompetent as the head of FEMA during Hurricane Katrina that it was easy for many to take a rapper seriously when he said that Bush didn't care about black people.

Now New Orleans lays in the waste left by the rage of nature and the $600 million earmarked for aid to New Orleans is log-jammed in our federal bureaucracy. Such things could easily lead one to suspect Bush's intentions, and they provide the best defense for the President.

Bush has the elephants preparing to put into law a measure that would provide low-income students with grants to aid them in their college education if they do well in math, science and the other technological fields considered important if our country is to compete in the global economy. The measure stretches over five years and the tab is $3.75 billion, providing grants to students while assessing the academic strengths and weaknesses of our 18,000 public high schools.

As Sol Stern wrote in the Manhattan Institute's publication, City Journal, this all began with the President's No Child Left Behind program, which promoted scientific ways of improving reading skills when Bush was governor of Texas, making use of the expertise of Dr. Reid Lyon of the National Institute of Health beginning in 1995.

"The National Reading Panel, commissioned by Congress, concluded in 2000 that effective reading programs, especially for kids living in poverty, required phonic-based instruction," wrote Stern.

Within a week of taking his seat in the Oval Office, Bush put a $6 billion Reading First phonics program in the balance. This led to a boom in national education since federal funds could be turned down - but if they were accepted, the schools were held accountable for higher performance.

The plan worked. Between 2003 and 2005, fourth-graders posted the best reading and math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress in the test's history. Minority children, especially, are closing the performance gap.

President Bush may take a hard paddling in history for his handling of the war in Iraq, the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, the eavesdropping on American citizens, and what some consider the worst examples of cronyism since Grant was President. But like the dung hosed off of a man dipped in sewage, his record on education could clean him up and make him one of the most important and forward-thinking Presidents in our history.

Originally published on January 29, 2006