Molly Ivins October 15

AUSTIN, Texas — Still futzing around in D.C., getting nothing done. Hung up on education, the census and contraception. Let's see if we can help these folks out here — a little citizen-legislature exercise.

Here's the state of play: President Clinton has been pushing education issues, and lo and behold, it turns out to be something the people actually care about. Amazing, isn't it? Clinton can't get his scheme to rebuild dilapidated schools passed, but he's sticking to his plan to hire 100,000 more teachers across the country.

The goal is to reduce class size around the nation to 18 students, as there is general agreement by educators of all stripes that class size is a crucial element in learning. (There is debate about whether class size is actually more important than high standards or better teacher training, but at least there's agreement on the premise.)

For political reasons involving the upcoming elections, the Republicans — who normally oppose federal initiatives on education — do not want to look as though they don't care about education, so they have agreed to spend $1 billion. (Quite a bit less than advanced fighter planes cost, but who's counting?) But they want to the money to go to local school districts with no strings so the districts can use it for whatever they want to.

Good arguments on both sides. The R's claim that "Beltway bureaucrats" shouldn't be deciding how to spend the money — the districts may want computers instead, for example. Personally, I'm not that big a fan of local control, the sacred mantra of many conservatives when it comes to education. It's a matter of experience.

In Texas, where the best route to becoming a high school principal is still to be the football coach, I have known many an example over the years of money that should have gone to educating kids going to the football team or to pave the school parking lot and paint nice, neat stripes on it instead. (If you don't believe me, check with Ross Perot on this one.)

Many years of covering school issues have also convinced me that locally elected school board members are not necessarily wise and just. If a local school board decides to buy computers instead of hiring teachers, the first thing you should do is find out how big a kickback from the computer companies some board members may be getting. Or whose brother-in-law got the supply contract. Sorry, that's experience.

Although we may want to be wary of federalizing the school system in other regards — communities do differ in their values and needs, and schools need to be tailored accordingly — I'd say this is an easy call.

The census: a very inside-baseball fistfight.

The census helps determine how political power is apportioned because congressional and legislative districts are based on population. With reapportionment coming up in 2001, both parties want it their way. It's a fact that the census as it is now run undercounts by a considerable margin, and because the margins tend to be in the poor sections of big cities, where most citizens vote Democratic, you see the problem.

The D's want to make up for the annual undercount by using statistical methods to estimate how many people have been missed. The statistical projections are universally accepted in the field as accurate, perhaps even close to infallible, and certainly more accurate than the current method. So the D's are in the right, but the R's have the majority in both chambers of Congress.

Best bet? Postpone the fight until January by funding the Commerce Department, which runs the census, short term until then. See how easy this is?

Contraception: Now here's a lulu. The D's want federal health insurance policies to cover contraception; the Republican red-hots are opposed. This became an issue last summer when people noticed that health insurance policies cover Viagra (the Pentagon will be spending $60 million a year to cover Viagra for soldiers, current and former) but not birth control. As The New York Times headlined at the time, in what we must assume to be a rare moment of humor, "Even Legislators Note Inequity."

Rep. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., is dead set against allowing two specific methods of birth control — Depo-Provera and IUDs — because he claims they are abortifacients. Great — here's a party so sensitive to local control that it doesn't want to tell school districts to hire desperately needed teachers, but it's willing to tell women what kind of birth control they can use. Since many women can't take the pill for assorted health reasons, how about we leave this up to the women and their doctors?

Coburn's other problem is that he wants health insurance companies to be able to refuse to cover birth control on moral grounds. Both chambers of Congress have already passed amendments to allow health plans with religious affiliations to decline to cover birth control if they want to. Coburn insists that "moral" as well as religious grounds be included. This caused Rep. Nita Lowey, D-N.Y., to observe that health plans base their decisions about what to offer on profits, not morals.

Solution? Tell Coburn to go soak his head, and the rest of you do the right thing.

Isn't this simple? Now they can all go home and start bombing us with negative ads about one another.

Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. To find out more about Molly Ivins and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

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