ederal News Service:What we need, I think, is a realistic sense of what the federal role should be, what Washington can reasonably do to help education reform along and also a recognition that Washington can't and should not be expected to do everything. Many of our state budgets are overflowing with surpluses themselves. And while President Clinton has done a great deal to raise people's consciousness about the importance of education and being well educated for the jobs and the opportunities in the country today and in the future, he's also come out with a plethora of programs. And it seems sometimes as though he's a school superintendent. There's almost nothing you can think of connected to a school that has not become a proposal coming from the Department of Education or President Clinton. He's prepared to have federally funded preschool programs, not preschool but early morning programs, afternoon programs, and tutoring programs. He's made pronouncements on all sorts of things that, where, as one state superintendent said to me, when you heard a governor give his state of the state address and the President talk about education, you couldn't tell which was the governor and which was the president.Disabled students must be educated in the "least restrictive environment", which means placed whenever possible in regular classrooms. Such "inclusion" works well for some (especially those with physical handicaps) but can lead to chaos when a teacher must cope with youngsters who have severe emotional and behavioral problems. Yet the teacher does not have much say. Parents have sweeping "due process" rights to shape their disabled child's educational program, and a thriving legal practice is keen to help them exploit those rights. (Since the school system must pay parents' legal fees, it's no surprise that administrators are apt to cave quickly to their demands by parents and their attorneys' threats.) A double standard applies to discipl...
