9-Year Crusade for Schools Urged : America 2000: Education Secretary Alexander supports Bush plan to fund private facilities.

In the week since President Bush unveiled his plan to revitalize American education, the proposal to allow parents to choose among public and private schools has emerged as the most divisive element, Education Secretary Lamar Alexander said Friday.

The call for developing a voluntary system of national examinations will require the most sophistication of any of the proposals, Alexander added in a speech to a national gathering of the Education Writers Assn.

The hardest part of selling the wide-ranging plan will be to “get people to think of this as a nine-year crusade” instead of a quick-fix program, he said.

Bush’s “America 2000” strategy was initially greeted with enthusiasm. It calls for designing innovative new schools with federal funding help, merit pay for outstanding teachers, and urging states and local districts to assess their own progress toward meeting the six national goals set last year by Bush and the nation’s governors.

In the last few days, criticism has grown, especially over the Administration’s push to allow public funding of private schools if those schools are where parents want to send their children.

Critics have said the plan would undermine public schools and leave most disadvantaged students stranded in a weakened system.

But Alexander said it is important to give parents, “especially disadvantaged parents, a broader range of choices.”

He said the current system of requiring students in most cases to attend whatever school the local district dictates represents the most “coercive” aspect of life in America, where the right to choose is taken for granted in everything.

Alexander said he would expect any private school that gets public funding to be held accountable to some public entity, “preferably a local agency.”

Such a system would broaden the definition of a “public” school and could allow any entity that was willing and able to meet the standards--a city, public museum, private institution or corporation--to operate a school with tax money, he said. Alexander acknowledgedhowever, that extending tax money to religious schools could conflict with the constitutional requirement for separation of church and state.

Developing a system of national tests to see what American students are learning in five key subject areas--English, math, science, history and geography--will take time and a “sophisticated” approach, Alexander said.

Those tests also must enable American students to be compared with those in other industrialized nations, he said. The exams will be voluntary, but Alexander said he hopes “most jurisdictions” will use them.