Bush plugs education reform at N.C. middle school

Bush: "We should not be afraid ... to teach the values that have stood the test of time: Don't lie, cheat and steal."

CONCORD, North Carolina (CNN) -- President Bush exited Washington on Wednesday for a day trip to the Tar Heel state of North Carolina, where for the most part he left the travails of international diplomacy and battles with Congress behind to return to his prized education reform agenda.

Speaking to students, parents and administrators at the Concord, North Carolina, Middle School, Bush touted the education overhaul scheme he has promoted since the earliest days of the 2000 presidential campaign.

The president opened his remarks, however, by following up on his early morning statement about the release of the 24 crew members of a disabled naval surveillance plane held for over a week on the Chinese island of Hainan.

Bush said he would head to the home of one of the crew members following his speech to celebrate the release.

"Right after my visit here, I am going to meet with the family of Petty Officer 3rd Class Steven Blocher," Bush told the audience to sustained applause.

"I'm really looking forward to letting Steven's family know we are in the process of bringing their son home," he said.

The Blocher family lives in the metropolitan Charlotte area, close to Concord.

Bush met soon after his address with the petty officer's parents, telling reporters in the Concord Middle School Library that Blocher's parents were "steadfast in their patriotism and loyalty."

"They're thrilled he is coming home," Bush said.

If all goes according to plan, the crew will leave Hainan within hours, ending a diplomatic standoff with the Chinese that Bush alternately described as delicate and difficult in recent days.

In addressing the receptive Concord crowd, Bush sounded every bit the Texas governor he once was, saying Texas under his stewardship and North Carolina both exhibited the sharpest recent increases in student performance.

The statistical jump was significant, he implied, because both states adopted similar systems of measuring student proficiency, and accounting for the job performance of education professionals.

"North Carolina and Texas have made great progress," Bush said, often highlighting the two states as "our states" through the remainder of his speech.

Casting himself as a Washington outsider, Bush insisted that Congress does consider his views as education policy is formulated in Washington.

The House and Senate are each working on education bills that address much of Bush's policy wish-list. The Senate may take up such a bill first, but it is also where Bush suffered a setback last week in his plan for $1.6 trillion worth of tax cuts over 10 years.

A coalition of Democrats and moderate Republicans worked last week to scale back the tax cuts by some $450 billion as the Senate debated then passed its version of the fiscal 2000 budget resolution.

Bush stiffened his resolve Wednesday, saying that education policy should provide terrain for bipartisan cooperation.

"We need less name-calling and finger-pointing and more focus on what is right for America," Bush said.

The Bush education overhaul agenda is based on his insistence on local control over curriculum and spending. The federal government provides some 6 percent of the education funds drawn upon by local school districts, and Bush has called for a spending regime that would allow localities to spend that money as they see fit.

But Bush assigns a price to that freedom, saying that localities must devise tests to determine on a regular basis how individual students are performing.

That data would be compiled to rate school and district performance, and schools found to be deficient would be encouraged to improve, or risk losing federal funds.

"I will not tolerate a solution that accepts failure," Bush said. "I know there are difficult circumstances, but that is not an excuse to lower standards."

Speaking of his formal fiscal 2002 budget request, sent to Congress earlier this week, Bush said the Department of Education receives the highest boost in funding, with new money earmarked for early reading programs and character education efforts.

"We should not be afraid in our society to teach the values that have stood the test of time: Don't lie, cheat and steal," Bush said. "We ought not to be afraid to teach abstinence to our children."

The president avoided any talk of vouchers -- one of the cornerstones of his campaign pledge to overhaul the education system. Vouchers, or cash disbursements to parents of children attending schools rated as failures, could be used to enroll those children in another school, public or private.

Democrats oppose the idea, saying such payments would siphon sorely needed money from the schools that may need it the most.

"If schools are failing, we're going to have to do something," Bush said. "We're having a big debate about what that something should be."

Bush moves on to East Carolina University later in the day before returning to Washington on Wednesday night.

CNN's Ian Christopher McCaleb contributed to this story.

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