Clinton Urges Passage of Literacy Bill

SALT LAKE CITY — Using his Saturday radio address to promote government and private efforts to improve literacy and education, President Clinton called on the Senate to approve House-passed legislation to fund elementary school reading programs.

“Literacy is the key to all learning,” said Clinton, who was in Utah for a family skiing vacation. “Without it history is a haze, math is a muddle, the Internet is indecipherable, the promise of America is a closed book.”

The Senate’s inaction on the “Reading Excellence Act” means that “$210 million in targeted assistance is now on hold in Washington, not at work in our communities,” Clinton said.

“So today I call on the Senate to pass this legislation without delay. We need it. Our children need it.”

In the Republican response, Rep. Joseph R. Pitts (R-Pa.) said the GOP shares the president’s goal of educational excellence, but he criticized the administration for proposing programs that “create a bigger role for the Washington bureaucracy and less control for parents in local schools.”

“We believe that control must be turned over to the people who know the names of our children,” said Pitts, a former math and science teacher. “Specifically parents, teachers and local educators.”

The GOP-sponsored Dollars to the Classroom Initiative would funnel educational block grants to states with a requirement that 95% of the funds actually “make it into the classrooms of this nation,” Pitts said.

Both Clinton and Pitts expressed alarm over a report earlier this week that showed American high school seniors are lagging well behind their peers in other industrialized nations in math and science performance.

The president also urged parents to participate in Read Across America Day on Monday.