W ASHINGTON
Just for the fun of confusing a current presidential campaign topic, consider two contrasting proposals for dealing with public schools that are failing in their solemn purpose.
Plan A is tough as nails. Any failing school should be shut down at the end of the semester in which it is found to be failing. The summer would be spent redesigning the place with a new principal, a fixed-up physical plant, smaller class sizes, tutoring programs, and extended school days or years for every child who is at risk or behind. The school would reopen in the fall, but every parent would have guaranteed access for his kid to any other public school in the system.
Plan B is mush. The first year after a public school was officially labeled failing, nothing would happen. Nor would anything happen in the second year. Only after a third year would an undetermined percentage of lucky parent get a voucher, worth a puny $1,500, which states could match if they chose, that would be good at any private school he might be fortunate enough to get his kid accepted at. Meanwhile, life at the ''failed'' public school would go on.
Plan A was advanced recently by Sandra Feldman, the president of the American Federation of Teachers and a supposed guardian of the status quo.
Plan B's mush was concocted for George W. Bush. Go figure.
And for what it's worth, the odds of the current Republican Congress going along with the big, city-based American Federation of Teachers are a lot better than those for Bush's Rube Goldberg concoction.
In fact, the evidence is already in on that point. When few were noticing last October, and when the Texas governor was still being hailed as both our inevitable next president and a ''compassionate conservative,'' Bush's thinking was being laughed out of the House of Representatives.
In committee, a version of the Bush idea that would shift a per-pupil chunk of each system's basic federal assistance to private school tuition went down by more than 2-to-1. And on the floor, a 10-state test of the Bush voucher idea was crunched in a 271-153 vote, with 66 Republicans voting no.
To his left, his thinking is opposed as a pointless, further drain on resources for the public schools. To his right, Bush gets guff for his heretical fondness for federal intrusion. And there is no cheering middle for the governor, either.
The truth is that the shouting match over ''choice'' and vouchers engages people in small ideological salons far more than it does parents or voters, and for good reason.
As a careful study of the opinions of moderate voters for the moderately inclined, Democrat-oriented Center for National Policy makes clear, people are likely to have more basic and pragmatic sets of concerns. Above all, their focus is less on test scores and ideology and more on secure learning environments for hopefully happy, well-adjusted kids in public schools that are worth the effort it takes to help them succe ed.
The study's opinion research was based on a series of focus group discussions in Richmond and a suburb of Chicago (Oak Park) with people who described themselves as independents or ''weak'' Republicans and Democrats to the polling team of Democrat Celinda Lake and Republican John Deardourff. It was supported by a poll Lake's firm did for the American Association of School Administrators.
To what ought to be the surprise of no one, the center's chairman, Leon Panetta (ex-congressman and Clinton White House chief of staff), summed up a portrait of voters who ''are seriously worried about kids and likely to see schools as a key issue in races for national office, but this is not about reform. The public believes all American children deserve access to good, safe public schools. They are saying, make targeted improvements and do no harm.''
This is not the first time reasonable people have popped up to point out that the noise that engages political junkies is of limited concern to the public and that polarized debates turn more people off than on.
The fundamentals are what matters, and politicians will do well in direct proportion to their acceptance of that. The reason Democrats have done much better with the issue until now (meaning, until Bush) is that they have come across more as problem-solvers than as revolutionaries.
And the reason Bush will probably not do as well as he thinks is that he has mistaken a few trees (failing schools and reading scores, for example) for a much larger forest. Education is both a bigger and a less sexy topic than he realizes.
Thomas Oliphant is a Globe columnist.
