NIVERSITY CITY, Mo. - Bill Bradley, who has been criticized for weeks over his lack of a comprehensive education plan, yesterday proposed nearly $14 billion a year in new federal spending to improve schools. He also ridiculed Vice President Al Gore's education record as mediocre.
Gore, in turn, said that Bradley had been absent from the education debate for months, and that Bradley had effectively stolen some of his core initiatives.
Bradley, speaking to several hundred students and teachers in a St. Louis suburb, not far from his boyhood home in Crystal City, Mo., said his plan would require teachers to be fully qualified, would hold schools accountable for meeting performance standards, and would grant parents access to information about a school's performance.
In his riskiest move, Bradley called for permitting parents to withdraw their children from substandard public schools and enroll them in better ones.
But he stopped short of endorsing vouchers to permit public school students to attend private schools. Gore has criticized Bradley for supporting the plan on an experimental basis.
''During the past seven years, we've heard a lot of talk about education, but too often the rhetoric hasn't been backed up by action,'' Bradley told the audience at University City High School. ''In far too many schools in this country, there is what amounts to educational malpractice.''
Gore responded from Southfield, Mich., where he visited a preschool and filled in the details of his plan to offer families help in paying college tuition as part of his previously announced $115 billion, 10-year education plan.
Gore's plan, called the National Tuition Savings Program, would allow individuals to buy an ''insurance policy'' that would lock in tomorrow's college tuition costs at today's prices. Many states already have such tuition savings programs, but Gore's plan would make the accounts portable or interchangeable from state to state, and would cover tuition at any participating public or private college or university.
''We need to make it easier for parents to pay college tuition,'' Gore told a couple of dozen parents, teachers, and preschoolers at the Bussey Center for Early Childhood Education.
Gore was acerbic about Bradley's education initiative. ''Fourteen months have passed in this presidential campaign and three states have had elections now, and only today, for the first time in 14 months has Senator Bradley made his first speech on education,'' he said.
Bradley, in a news conference after his speech, denied that he had unveiled the education plan in response to Iowa and New Hampshire exit polls that showed voters consider education to be a top priority and Gore to be better able to address it. Bradley said he had ''planned all along'' to stake out several major policy positions in the five weeks between the New Hampshire primary and the 15-state ''national primary'' on March 7.
''This is when the country is actually paying attention to what someone who would be president would do,'' Bradley said. ''This is the best time to do it.''
Bradley reiterated his criticism of Gore for proposing greater increases for the Pentagon than the federal education budget, and said Clinton-Gore administration had a lackluster record on the issue.
''The last seven years haven't exactly brought revolutionary changes to education,'' Bradley said. ''When you look at the cold hard results, we still have too much mediocrity, too much failure, and too much status quo in our schools.''
The centerpiece of Bradley's plan calls for doubling funding for Title I aid to low-income schools to $16 billion to $8 billion. Under the plan, schools that receive the funding must raise student testing standards and close the achievement gap between whites and minorities within 10 years.
Each school would be required to provide parents with a ''report card'' on its performance and the qualifications of its faculty. And parents whose children attend poorly ranked schools would be permitted to transfer to other public schools of their choice.
Bradley said some of the students who leave inadequate public schools could transfer to public charter schools, for which he proposed $500 million, more than triple the current budget of $145 million.
Bradley did not advocate vouchers. Gore, who has the support of the nation's two largest teachers unions, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, again criticized Bradley yesterday for voting for experiments with school vouchers, an anathema to teachers' unions.
The record shows that Gore indeed opposed school vouchers as a member of Congress, while Bradley supported them seven times in votes that always failed.
But though Gore champions himself as leader on education in Congress, only four of the 300 pieces of legislation he introduced in his 16 years in the House and Senate concerned education.
By contrast, Bradley sponsored 37 pieces of education legislation among his 563 measures over the course of 18 years in the Senate. Bradley repeatedly proposed resolutions and amendments to increase the amount of Pell Grants awards to poor college students and to restore cuts in education spending. Gore signed on as a co-sponsor for two of Bradley's measures.
Hohler reported from Missouri, Scales from Michigan.
