NewsMax.com Wires
Monday, March 19, 2001

The education technology program, known as the "e-rate," gives rural and poor schools discounts of up to 90 percent on the cost of Internet access. The program is administered through the Federal Communications Commission and financed by payments collected from telecommunications companies, which pass the cost on to consumers in small assessments on monthly bills.

Since 1996, the e-rate has provided most of the funds to achieve the near-universal wiring of the nation's schools.

In a proposed and little-understood shift, Bush said during the presidential campaign last year that he would combine the e-rate with other educational technology programs already managed by the Department of Education and other federal agencies, essentially giving the combined funding directly to the states in the form of block grants.

The idea was to eliminate bureaucratic waste and create "greater flexibility," an Education Department spokeswoman said.

That campaign proposal was ignored at the time by all but the most committed telecommunications specialists. But after Bush took office, legislators on Capitol Hill began to pay closer attention and raise objections to an idea that could have had practical effects on their constituents.

Education Secretary Roderick Paige said in an interview Friday that the five-year-old program "is going to stay where it is,'' at least for now.

"This is an example of listening to better ideas, of hearing from people, understanding their passion and being moved by logical arguments,'' Paige said, offering an early illustration of the Bush administration's willingness to accommodate Capitol Hill. "We respected their position and responded. It's an example, I think, of bipartisan thought. That's what we're trying to get at.''

Bush had come under intense pressure from key legislators, particularly Maine Republican senator Olympia Snowe, to abandon his proposal to streamline the funding mechanism and fold it into the Education Department. Rep. Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, also objected fiercely to the measure, which would have greatly altered – and according to Markey, needlessly jeopardized – the program he helped design as part of the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

In one of the more complicated chapters of that bill, telecommunications firms agreed to pay into a special fund to help reduce schools' and libraries' Internet service costs. The fund is kept distinct from the annual federal budget.

According to Markey, Bush's proposal, which he outlined broadly during the campaign, would have given individual states control over whether e-rate money would be spent on connecting schools to the Internet and the related phone bills. He said that change would have potentially jeopardized the universality of the service, especially in states that prohibit using general revenues to assist parochial schools.

"I think it would have been a historic mistake to take something that works ... and scrap it for no good reason,'' Markey said. "The reason we put this on the books in the first place is that most governors hadn't done this themselves four years ago.''

That was the message Markey and other legislators sent to the White House, flooding officials with letters and phone calls asking Bush to leave the current e-rate system in place. And the administration apparently heard it.

Despite support for the Bush proposal from many Republicans on Capitol Hill – who dubbed the program the "Gore tax'' after the former vice president, because he supported its creation – White House officials backed away from the idea of overhauling the e-rate after meeting with several senators in recent weeks, including Snowe, who made an apparently persuasive case that it is effective in its current form, congressional aides said.

Education Department spokeswoman Lindsay Kozberg said the administration still hopes to streamline the program. And in the interview, Paige said some form of change is inevitable, given the rapid advances in wireless technology.

"I think that environment is definitely going to drive some changes in thinking about e-rate,'' Paige said. "And I'm comfortable looking at that, because I think in a very short order, schools are going to wire themselves differently, and it's not going to require as much wiring as it required in the past.''

Seated in his seventh-floor office overlooking the Washington Mall and the Capitol, Paige also touched on other administration priorities, including the education bill now moving through Congress.

Wearing black cowboy boots, leaning forward and gesturing emphatically as he spoke, Paige said he was a firm supporter of public-private sector partnerships to expand after-school programs. Specifically, he called the recent $23 million gift to Boston's after-school programs a "great idea.''

"I applaud that,'' Paige said. "It fills a very important void.''

He also said he hopes to complete work on the education overhaul by the start of June, "so that people can begin to make plans for the coming school year.'' But he said the effort is "a little bit behind that schedule now'' – an early introduction to the bureaucratic obstacles that the former Houston school superintendent faces in Washington.

c.2001 The Boston Globe

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