Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, September 7, 1995                   TAG: 9509070102
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-8   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

BUDGET BATTLE

While education has always been the main means of social and economic mobility, its importance in this regard has never been more critical. It used to be that high school graduates (if they went to work in unionized factories) could hope to earn as much as their college-educated neighbors. No more.

Today, the growing gap between haves and have-nots correlates ever more closely with educational attainment. The typical college graduate earns 74 percent more than a worker with only a high school degree. Schools house the key to rising living standards for families and for the nation.

All the more reason, then, to note the stakes in this fall's congressional budget battles. Republican spending plans would cut education and training funding by $36 billion over the next seven years. To compound this blow against opportunity and mobility, the savings would help fund tax cuts that disproportionately benefit the wealthy.

What a sorry bunch of proposals. The bipartisan Goals 2000, helping schools raise academic standards, would be eliminated. Drug-free school programs would be cut. Head Start funding would be reduced, cutting off hundreds of thousands of disadvantaged children from access to preschool education. Apprenticeship funds would be cut in half.

Even worse are proposals to raise the financial threshold for access to higher education. The cost of student loans would swell tremendously. AmeriCorps, offering help with higher education in return for national service, would be abolished. Pell Grants would be denied to hundreds of thousands of now-eligible students.

By way of contrast, the Clinton administration - while proposing to balance the federal budget within 10 years - is calling for modest increases in funding for most education and training categories. As President Clinton noted in a talk to California middle-school students this week: "Learning has to be something for everyone now."

The GOP proposals would drag America backward in efforts to increase and broaden educational attainments. Funding is not, of course, a measure of academic excellence. But greater investment and wider access, along with institutional reforms, are clearly conditions for competitiveness.

In the global Knowledge Economy, cutting these sorts of investments is stupid, bordering on unpatriotic.