There's been much discussion among conservatives (how sad that it should be limited thusly) about Kerry's recent dissembling. And indeed, character does count (except in Democratic candidates, apparently).

But what about Kerry's actual promises? This is a huge subject to mine, but I just want to take a quick look at Kerry's educational promises. What we find there is more scary than heartening.

For one, Kerry increase federal education funding from Bush's already-whopping $23.8 billion to $35 billion. Good enough; but let's not speak as though we're voting for a deficit hawk here!

Next, Kerry would use an additional $50 billion (!!) dollars in federal funds to fill in for state cutbacks. Correct me if I'm wrong, but won't this create an incredibly perverse incentive for states: If their education will be funded at the same level regardless of their own monetary commitment, it seems to me they'd try to withdraw as much of their own funds as possible! Talk about rewarding the states themselves for their own fiscal irresponsibility!

Currently, NCLB attempts to grade school districts by using standardized tests to measure progress. Kerry's going to "improve" this situation by adding more critera, which the states themselves get to choose.

Well, if the states are so good at picking the right criteria, then why is the federal government involved in the first place? And Kerry's suggested critera are alarming enough: Instead of just measuring what children are learning, he wants to dilute that number amongst other criteria such as "graduation rates, teacher attendance, parental satisfaction, and student attendance."

Wow! Graduation rates! Those are really hard to fake! (Indeed, they can be set to nearly any desired level just by changing graduation criteria or course difficulty.) Why not thow in GPA and student satisfaction? Oh wait, we haven't ruled those out yet.

Next, in the list of perverse incentives, Kerry proposes:

In order to equip low-performing schools with the tools and incentives to improve, John Kerry will provide a $10,000 tax deduction for teachers, principals, and paraprofessionals in low-performing schools. Personnel will be eligible for this refundable tax deduction for five years after the school is no longer considered low performing.

I understand this is intended to give teachers incentives to move to poorly performing districts, but it occurs to me that you're also telling a teach who earns $35,000 that they'll eventually lose about $3,000 in income if their school district starts performing too well.

And there's lots of money for training educators: Kerry wants to fund career development for teachers and create $120,000,000 in training courses for principals.

Next, comes discipline: Kerry wants to create alternative "second chance" schools in every district for kids with discipline problems:

Kerry will ensure that all chronically disruptive or violence students removed from classrooms will be placed in alternative learning environments, “second-chance schools” where they can receive the intensive help and service they need to excel.

While it seems to me this would most likely improve discipline in classrooms, it would certainly also cost a bundle to create a parallel school system in every area with the commensurately lower student-to-teacher ratios.

I would only add that Kerry should plainly state what cost he expects to incur to complete this nationwide parallel school system, so that we can make an informed decision.

Next, Kerry will have the federal government issue an additional $24.8 billion in school modernization bonds! Wow, the construction industry is gonna love this guy!

Looks like anothe perverse incentive, since states that withhold repair funds and let their schools decay will save money and increase their chance of obtaining federal monies to fix the problems.

Although there are some truly worthy cases out there, I wasn't aware that the prime problem with American education today was insufficiently modern schools, and it's not clear to me how newer scoreboards and bleachers, fresher carpeting, and remodeled rooms will produce better-educated students.

But I'll get we'll get a lot of it for $24.8 billion.

And Kerry wants to further subsidize after-school programs for latch-key children.

Perhaps some of these ideas will be truly useful. But I suspect a lot of them will be of minimal utility, like the $120 million for more courses for principals. I'm not sure you can make a good principal through training, and I wonder how much of the money might go to travel or Las Vegas or Miami Beach hotel accomodations.

But the one thing that is clear is that this is an enormous federal spending increase, and many of these expenditures appear to be backhanded gifts to states which have already mismanaged their own fiscal responsibilities. (I am reminded somewhat of the great Japanese bank bailout, and the US S&L scandal.)

Last, Kerry wants to "fully fund" special education from federal sources. Certainly it would sound heartless to argue against such, but let's just note that he's promising Iowa an additional $1.2 billion in federal funds. Assuming all 50 states were that simple, that spell another $60 billion dollars in outlay. (Of course, that's probably low, considering Iowa is hardly as pricey as Illinois, California, Florida, or New York.)

Remember, we're discussing an educational budget which started at $14.1 billion in 1980, grew to $37 billion under Clinton in 1999, and skyrocketed to $63.2 billion.

I don't think I need to explain what kind of cost increase the addition $96 billion I see explicitly mentioned here represents, much less the costs he's not elaborating such as the construction of special schools for children with discipline problems.

Education funding has increased continually since I was as child. In this time, our children's actual performance has continued to decline. Perhaps this time everything will be different. But it seems like a pricey bet to place on a set of proposals that has to do with so many other things than actually making sure your child is learning in school.

Good luck, America!