eorge W. Bush's plan for an energetic new federal role in literacy — "Every child will read by the end of the third grade" — was one of several big proposals that the Texas governor unveiled during a campaign week spent mostly in charter schools and meeting with educators. Education has already surfaced as one of the defining issues in this year's race for the Oval Office. Vice President Gore has been visiting schools, too, pumping out new federal initiatives as he travels.

Why is this happening? As is well known, voters say they're hyper-concerned with education. As is beginning to be well known, this is the first presidential election in memory wherein the Republican candidate knows more about education than the Democrat and is more adept at talking about it. It's a field where Bush is naturally inclined toward activism--and his efforts in the Lone Star State have brought promising results.

Yet education is also a field where the classic Republican response to a problem ran along these lines: "Yes, that's an important concern, but we oughtn't federalize it. States and communities need to solve it for themselves with the help of parents and teachers. This is not something that Washington can really deal with. Federal dollars and rules probably won't help and may well make matters worse."

No more. Goodbye, perhaps forever, to that line of argument. Bill Clinton's programmatic promiscuity has ruined politicians' ability to assert that a given education problem is none of Washington's proper business. Clinton's penchant for throwing a new federal program or guideline at every imaginable concern, from school uniforms to leaky school roofs to the selection of math curricula, has contributed to his political success and his image as a do-something education president. He has, I think, tapped into that vein of American pragmatism summed up in the phrase "Don't just stand there, do something", and into our mounting impatience with public officials who acknowledge that something is awry but then dither about who ought to do what to set matters right.

Al Gore, predictably, is following in his wake. Gore's own list of new education programs resembles that awful film whose racy ads say "bigger, longer, and uncut". It's meant to please parents and teachers alike. Most will never happen, of course, and few would actually solve the problems on which they're ostensibly targeted. Still, he looks like a man of education action.

George Bush must do the same and do it better. (He, at least, has a track record in education.) His federal proposals aren't as costly as Gore's — Republicans never win those bidding wars — and, for the most part, arise from a different sense of where the energy for education change comes from. At the end of the day, the vice president really does seem to think it comes mostly from the top down, from Washington regulators and check-writers. Bush knows it comes from the bottom up, from communities and states, parents and teachers. He's walked that walk and talks the talk. But that doesn't stop him from devising new federal programs meant to focus attention and resources on particular concerns and prod states and communities to do something about them.

Thus the "reading first" initiative, which would spend five billion dollars (over five years), mostly to help young, at-risk children learn to read "through research-based programs such as tutoring, after-school programs or summer school programs". (About ten percent of the money would train kindergarten and first grade teachers in "research based" methods of instruction.)

Like most of the Bush proposals, this one is optional for states and school districts-but those that choose to take the money are obliged to deploy it in specific ways, centered on research by the National Institutes of Health — not the Department of Education — into the most effective methods.

While the word "phonics" oversimplifies the NIH findings, that's the essence of what Bush is pushing. It really does work for most children. It's faithful both to thirty years of sound research in this field (beginning with a 1967 book by the late Jeanne Chall, famed Harvard reading expert) and to Bush's own experience in Texas.

Letting states decide whether to participate and how to spend the federal money, but insisting that can be spent only on proven methods and that its results-student achievement above all-be tracked and reported. That seems to be the Bush formula for federal education programs. And he's got it about right. America's schoolchildren might, in fact, be better off with fewer federal programs, but if we're going to have lots of them-thanks again, Bill Clinton-at least let them be addressed to serious problems with real solutions. Ensuring that little kids learn to read belongs at the top of that list.