volvement in education, changing it to a local level. He wants to give block grants to the states so that they could do what they want with the money in regards to education. Buchanan does not want to give any money to perpetuate bilingualism (Buchanan 1).Now that it is clear where all the candidates stand, and the type of education reform policies they would initiate, the next part would be to discuss why education has been such a significant issue in the 2000 Election. One reason is that education in the United States has always been on a decline, and improvements have always been necessary. Education in this country has always been poor, and reform has always been necessary. The recently released TIMSS study shows that American 12th graders rank 19th out of twenty-one industrialized nations in mathematics achievement, and 16th out of twenty-one countries in science (DeSchryver 1). A 1992 survey estimated that one-fifth of the adult population has only rudimentary reading and writing skills. On the 1994 NAEP, 25% of 12th graders scored below “basic” in reading (DeSchryver 2). SAT scores in 1995 averaged seventy points lower than those in 1963. According to U.S. manufacturers, 40% of all seventeen-year-olds do not have the math skills and 60% do not have the reading skills to hold down a production job at a manufacturing company (DeSchryver 3). U.S. physics and advanced mathematics students scored last among sixteen nations on the “advanced” portion of the TIMSS test. In 1994, 58% of high school graduates passed Algebra II, 18% passed French I, 25% passed geography, and 16% passed Calculus. In 1996, 64% of high school seniors reported doing less than one hour of homework a night (Deschryver 5). There is such a need for teachers, that forty percent teach subjects that were not even their major or minor. A 1996 report from the GAO, estimates that 14 million children, about a third of the total student ...
