Vice President Al Gore has been a loyal backer of President Clinton's education programs - from opposing school vouchers to making plans that would link every school to the Internet.
Gore is also the Democratic Party's front-runner for president in 2000. Since the federal government now spends more than $100 billion a year on education programs, how might President Gore use that money?
Environmental education may well top Gore's agenda. For more than a decade, Gore has been best known for his environmental views - pushing dire forecasts of global warming and criticizing the impacts of industrial society on the ecosystem.
As vice president, Gore and his allies in the adminstration have also given the Environmental Protection Agency and other federal bodies money to push those views by funding green education programs.
Expanding our knowledge of the environment is important. But many of Gore's critics fear that a Gore administration would shunt facts and sound science aside and instead look for crises that demand ''solutions,'' including higher taxes and more regulations.
Of course, even if Gore gets his party's nomination, it's far from certain that he'll win the White House. A January Los Angeles Times poll shows that Gore turns off lots of voters. Among independent voters polled, 45% gave him an unfavorable rating, compared with only 44% who viewed him favorably.
The same poll showed Gore doing poorly against two prominent - if undeclared - Republican hopefuls. Registered voters picked Texas Gov. George W. Bush over Gore, 57% to 39%. Former American Red Cross President Elizabeth Dole also bested Gore, 50% to 42%.
Like most of the Democratic Party establishment, Gore opposes school vouchers. He's called them ''wrong- headed'' and said they ''would drain precious resources from our public schools, and would barely benefit the students who need help the most.''
But Gore and his wife, Tipper, went to private prep schools and graduated from private colleges. Two of their children go to private schools, as did two others who are now in elite private colleges.
''Al Gore carries on (Clinton's) hypocrisy,'' said William ''Chip'' Mellor, president of the Institute for Justice, a Washington, D.C.-based law firm that defends voucher plans in court. ''He refuses to make it possible for others to have the choice that he believes is essential for his own children's well-being - the chance for a decent education.''
The Education Department will spend $34 billion this fiscal year. Clinton wants almost $35 billion for fiscal year 2000 and nearly $40 billion for 2001. This doesn't include the estimated $70 billion already being spent every year on education by 39 other federal agencies.
In this age of budget surpluses, though, some Republicans don't want to be outdone.
Senate Budget Committee Chairman Pete Domenici, R-N.M., says he wants at least $40 billion for the Education Department in fiscal year 2000. Domenici hasn't spelled out exactly how he'd like to have the money spent.
Gore's goals are pretty clear, however.
For one, he wants kids to stay in government- run schools longer. ''The time has come to make two years of education after high school, 13th and 14th grade, just as universal and commonplace in matter of course as a high school education is today,'' Gore told the American Federation of Teachers last year.
''Parents need an ally - an active government . . . giving them the tools they need to raise happy, healthy, thriving children,'' he said at the 1998 National PTA Legislative Conference.
''Teaching values to our children has not become any easier since Moses,'' he said. ''That's why it's more important than ever that we have an active government working with parents.''
Still, Gore will likely give environmental programs a boost. The EPA's education and grants programs run about $10 million each year.
That may not sound like much in a $1.77-trillion budget. But Gore wants more.
Gore's 1992 book ''Earth in the Balance'' called for a ''Global Marshall Plan,'' along the scale of the economic program the U.S. took on to rebuild Europe after World War II.
The plan would include ''a worldwide educational program to promote a more complete understanding of the (global) crisis.'' It would also ''promote a new way of thinking about the current relationship between human civilization and the Earth.''
Gore would push this ''new way of thinking,'' he wrote, through a ''Mission to Planet Earth,'' using teachers, students, scientists, satellites and other tools to gather, analyze and exchange information about the Earth.
Part of the ''mission'' is already under way. In 1994, Gore unveiled the Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment (GLOBE) plan. It involves more than 4,000 schools in 76 countries. It operates in grades K through 12 and promotes green goals like ''global community.''
That's just the beginning.
''Gore sees the world through green glasses and sees himself as anointed to save the world from destruction by industrial society,'' said Bonner Cohen, senior fellow at the Arlington, Va.-based Lexington Institute and editor of the newsletter EPA Watch.
In the book, Gore advocated big cuts in human population growth and phasing out the internal- combustion engine. He blamed industrial civilization for all sorts of societal ills, including mental illness, ''drug- and alcohol-related accidents, suicide and homicide.''
These views don't cheer those who back limited government and free markets.
''Alarmists like Gore are often seen as crisis entrepreneurs who cook data to manipulate opinion to justify regulation,'' said John Baden, an environmental economist and chairman of the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment in Seattle, Wash.
Some who have watched Gore closely over the years say he's not interested in finding out the facts about the environment, especially if they conflict with his agenda.
''Anyone who disagrees with him is smeared as either an idiot or a liar,'' said Richard Stroup, an economics professor at Montana State University at Bozeman.
As an Interior Department official during the Reagan years, Stroup testified at a global-warming hearing chaired by Gore when he was a U.S. senator from Tennessee.
''Gore and his friends are true believers,'' Stroup said. ''They're on a quasi-religious mission. It's scary.''
There are now many political appointees who share Gore's views, Cohen of EPA Watch says, such as Carol Browner, head of the EPA.
Browner and others use the EPA and its Office of Environmental Education to advance Gore's green views, Cohen says, especially on global warming.
''What goes into our schools (and teacher-training programs) bears the stamp of people appointed by Gore,'' Cohen said.
''This is part of a broader effort by them and Gore to engage in 'public education' at all levels - (meaning) indoctrinate school kids into the green agenda through environmental education,'' he added.
This agenda carries over into college environmental studies by professors and departments that receive grants from the EPA, Cohen says. Only those who support the administration's views get the money.
''In Washington, this is known as fund your friends,'' he said.
''Gore's environmental views pop up in textbooks and other educational materials,'' said Lynn Scarlett, executive director of the Reason Public Policy Institute in Los Angeles.
She says ''Earth in the Balance'' is used in high school and college courses, and environmentalists use Gore's writings for their own work.
Michael Sanera, co-author with Jane Shaw of ''Facts Not Fear: A Parent's Guide to Teaching Children About the Environment'' (Regnery Publishing, 1996), agrees. Textbooks have a one-sided, pro-environmentalist view, he says.
The EPA is granting money to national and state groups, which then lobby state and federal bodies for more money. ''They're training kids for political activism,'' said Sanera. ''The environmental movement has targeted classrooms and Gore is reaping the benefits.''
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