GORE CURRICULUM

Turning a non-partisan announcement into a campaign rally would have been an abuse even if the vice president had not misrepresented the data. But he did that, too, claiming big gains in reading scores since 1994, linking the improvement to Clinton administration policies, and drawing wild cheers from the assembled claque. He did not mention that the 1994 scores had shown a precipitous dropoff since the last measures of the Bush administration in 1992, and that the new NAEP ratings remained below their 1992 highs. Once Gore had blown out of the room — without taking a single question — the task of unsaying much of what he had just said fell to Forgione and Mark D. Musick, chairman of the National Assessment Governing Board, which draws up the NAEP tests.

The incident might have ended there, but Musick was infuriated. He wrote a letter to Forgione commiserating over Gore’s hijacking of the NAEP announcement. “We believe,” Musick wrote, “that the format, tone and substance of that event was not consistent with the principle of an independent, non-partisan release of National Assessment data.” Unless such non-partisanship could be assured, Musick wrote, “it eventually won’t matter how much attention is paid to the results; people won’t believe them.”

The letter leaked. In March, Los Angeles Times reporter Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar described Gore’s stunt as symptomatic of two devious tendencies. First, to steal credit for policy initiatives he didn’t develop. Second, to politicize parts of the bureaucracy that have been set up to be beyond partisan politics. Forgione, who had devoted his career to educational testing — as Connecticut’s head of assessment, Delaware’s state schools superintendent, and executive director of the National Education Goals Program–popped off. He told the L.A. writer that interventions such as Gore’s “can cloud the confidence people might have in the independence of the data.” He added, “This should not happen again.” Then he told Education Week that repeating such a charade would damage NAEP’s credibility.

Sayonara, Pascal Forgione. In mid-April, Forgione was told that his four-year appointment, which expires on June 21, would not be renewed. It’s not surprising that he burst into tears when he told his employees he’d be leaving–everyone around him was stunned. Forgione was popular and had upped the NCES’s budget. He had won praise for an extension of the Third International Math and Science Study. The Advisory Council on Education Statistics, an elite group of statisticians that advises the Education Department, recommended that Forgione stay on; Andy Porter, the council’s chairman, called his departure a “tremendous loss.” Education Secretary Richard Riley, too, urged his reappointment. That he was not kept on in the face of such endorsements means the decision to oust him came from the White House. A number of education newsletters, particularly Education Daily, discerned a link between Forgione’s appeal for nonpartisan statistics and his unsuitability for further employment in the Clinton-Gore administration.

But then Forgione’s enemies came forth with what they said was the real explanation for his ouster. For eight consecutive years, it seems, Forgione filed for extensions on his federal income taxes. In seven of those years, he missed the August 15 fallback deadline. He would file his taxes towards the end of the year and collect a refund from the IRS, which he would use to pay his children’s college tuition. Forgione referred to this as forced savings; the White House looked at it as an “appearance of impropriety” that could sidetrack its “commitment to education.”

There are problems with this White House line. First, the Department of Education had been fully aware of the practice when Forgione was nominated and confirmed. Second, none of the Republicans on the House Education and the Workforce committee showed the slightest discomfort with Forgione’s means of paying his taxes. That’s because, while Forgione’s practice may have been eccentric, there was absolutely nothing unethical or illegal about it. It is illegal to pay taxes late; but as long as the government owes the taxpayer money, there’s no crime in filing for your refund late. Nobody interviewed for this article–Republican or Democrat; in Congress or the Ed Department or the private sector–believes Forgione was fired for his tax problem.

Forgione did not return calls for this article, but he told Jonathan Fox of Education Daily, “I’ve been doing this my whole life. It’s bad behavior, but it’s my money I’m getting back.” He is said to have received a six-month consulting contract with the Education Department. (Strange treatment if he were really departing under an ethical cloud.) He appeared last week at oversight hearings of the House Education and Workforce committee. Republicans–like Mike Castle of Delaware and Peter Hoekstra of Michigan–used the occasion to argue that stricter statutory independence be given to the NCES. Congressional Democrats–Harold Ford of Tennessee, Bobby Scott of Virginia, Tim Roemer of Indiana–again proved themselves formidable presidential historians, alluding to an incident in 1992 when President Bush prematurely revealed some statistics. They stressed that the vice president’s statistical interest reflects nothing more than his high degree of commitment to education. Republicans are less bothered by this line of thinking than one would imagine. “Bringing attention to education issues is not a bad thing,” says Republican committee staffer Vic Klatt. “What bothers us more is that the vice president manipulated the data and then tried to claim credit for it.”

But two disturbing aspects of this seemingly minor incident show Gore to be truly Clinton’s heir. The first is the elevation of public relations over public service. Gore is flinging around rhetoric about how much he cares about education, but he is unwilling to countenance a bureaucrat who wants to match that rhetoric to reality. The NCES is a key federal education body, and no one has been nominated to head it once Forgione goes. So the “education vice president” has shown himself perfectly willing to leave the program rudderless for months.

Second is the need he feels to cloak brass-knuckles politics with trumped-up, post-facto “moral” justifications. Of course, low-ranking administration officials, if they don’t toe the line, will always be prey to high-ranking administration officials–and may pay with their jobs. Of course the White House will try to disguise its Machiavellian motives from the public. But corruption is one thing and delusions of moral grandeur are another. The Forgione case makes us worry about Gore in much the way Travelgate made us worry about the Clintons. It’s the sign of a bizarre need on Gore’s part to disguise his Machiavellian motives from himself.

Christopher Caldwell is senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.