Report Card

When George Bush presented his 1990 budget last month, he reaffirmed his pledge to be the "education President." Yet the $36.5 billion he earmarked for education was $200 million less than the amount requested in the last Reagan budget. The decrease points up Bush's central problem in keeping his promise: how to improve education while chopping the deficit. Faced with daunting fiscal constraints, Bush finds choice an ideal program, since it stresses competition without involving major federal funding. So far, however, the President has neither provided strategy for supporting the plan nor suggested what might be done to ease racial and economic inequities.