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Bush, Gore compete for top marks on education

WASHINGTON: Republican George W. Bush and his Democratic rival Al Gore competed on Friday for the title of education candidate as both presidential hopefuls took their campaigns back to school.

With education shaping up as one of the key issues of the Nov. 7 White House election, Bush visited Little Rock Central High School, site of a landmark civil rights battle to highlight his policies.

While the Texas governor was in President Bill Clinton's home town in Arkansas, the vice president spent several hours at a high school in Michigan where he taught a civics class, ate lunch with sixth and seventh graders and met parents, teachers and students.

Polls show voters grade Bush and Gore about equally on education, despite their wide philosophical and policy differences on the issue.

Gore favours heavy federal government investment in new schools and technology and to train and hire new teachers, while Bush wants to pass authority back to state and local jurisdictions.

Bush said Gore could go around the country promising more teachers and more money "but it's an impossibility." He called the Clinton administration's record on education one of "mandates and dictates."

"I'm here to learn," Gore said during a visit to the 900-student L'Anse Creuse Middle School in Macomb, Michigan. This was the first of several "School Days" the vice president plans to spend in classrooms across the nation every few weeks leading up to the election and beyond.

"If I'm entrusted with the presidency, my intention would be to do these on a regular basis," Gore said. "The purpose is to learn as much as possible about how we can improve our schools and the most important insights and lessons by far are from the people who are actually doing the hands-on work."

Surveys show education to be among voters' top concerns. It is traditionally an issue that favours Democrats, but Bush has successfully positioned himself as a reformer. Both candidates opened the campaign's head-to-head ad war last week with television spots slamming each other on education.

"For decades in America the great goal of education was to provide access for all ... Now the front doors of our public schools are open to everyone," Bush said on Friday.

"Today we have a great challenge of our own. Access is universal but excellence is not. All can enter our schools but not all are learning," he added.

Bush said later his visit to Central High, the site of one of the most celebrated struggles of the civil rights movement, was meant to send a symbolic message to voters.

In 1957, President Dwight Eisenhower called in the military to force the school to open its doors to nine black students. Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus had mobilised the National Guard to surround the campus and keep the students out and the school racially segregated.

A recent Voter.Com Battleground 2000 Poll found the public split when asked who would do a better job with education. Of the 1,000 people surveyed, 44 percent chose Gore and 42 percent favoured Bush. The poll had a margin of error of 3.1 percentage points.-Reuters