NOTE: The Senate Appropriations Committee is supposed to act today, Wednesday.

President Clinton and dozens of administration officials hopscotched across the country this week, trying to gin up support for federal education spending in the final weeks of the budget showdown in Washington.
The president himself touched down Monday in Carbondale, Ill., for a speech at Southern Illinois University praising his accomplishments in education.
"We should not balance the budget by cutting education because we do not have to cut education to balance the budget," Clinton said, in a fine display of illogic.
He was particularly effusive about Americorps, the so-called "national service" program that enrolled 20,000 participants in its first year. The House of Representatives voted July 31 not to fund the program in the fiscal year starting Oct. 1, and the Senate Appropriations Committee followed suit on Wednesday.
Overall, Clinton said, he wants to increase federal support for education and job training by $40 billion during the next 10 years, he said, while the Republican budget plans would cut it by $36 billion in seven years.
Never mind that fractured and disorganized federal job training programs have demonstrated a complete inability to improve the employability of the people who go through them. Some, in fact, reduce the income of participants compared with non-participants.
The problem even with support for education is that ultimately there is no such thing as "federal" money. There is only the money that the federal government takes from somewhere else. From you and me as individual taxpayers; from the companies that we work for; out of our local and state economies that would otherwise be growing faster and generating more taxes at lower rates to be spent closer to home.
The only dollars that could properly be called federal dollars are the ones created out of nothing by adding to the national debt. But even that all has to be paid back eventually with real money extracted from real people.
Before his speech in Carbondale, Clinton presided at a roundtable for carefully screened students during which he criticized California's declining support for higher education over the last several years. Pretty funny, coming from a former governor of Arkansas, which has never been known for its generosity to higher education.
It's true that the decline in general fund money for higher education in California has been steep: from $5.8 billion in 1990-91 to $4.7 billion in 1993-94, according to a report from the California Higher Education Policy Center in San Jose. But increased income from student fees, much of which is redistributed internally as financial aid, means that the amount available per student has changed much less.
The cost of instruction for students in the state's three systems of public higher education in 1993-94 was $7,500 at the University of California (which has a lot of expensive graduate programs), $4,400 at Cal State campuses, and $1,800 at the community colleges, the policy center's report said.
Although student fees have risen sharply in California since the recession took hold here, those higher fees still cover a smaller part of the cost of instruction than they do in many other states. It costs more than twice as much to attend community college in Arkansas as it does in California, although incomes there are lower, professors are paid far less, and financial aid is less abundant.
So Arkansas is hardly the model California should look to for guidance on how to educate its citizens. But more federal spending would be no improvement, and the $350 million Americorps program illustrates why.
Americorps workers — one can't call them volunteers — receive minimum wage, plus child-care and health-care benefits, plus $4,725 in the form of a grant to use for college expenses.
But the cost to taxpayers is much higher, according to a report prepared by the General Accounting Office, and not yet officially released. In addition to the $17,600 provided by Americorps for each participant, the GAO estimated that other federal agencies contributed an average of $3,200, state and local governments chipped in $4,000 and private sector sources $1,800. That adds up to almost $25,000 for each participant — of which only the $4,725 grant actually goes to education.
Of course, that doesn't take into account the value of whatever the Americorps workers do for the agencies that hire them. I don't doubt that much of it is desirable, though I confess to some puzzlement about whether guiding fall foliage tours is really community service. But are the jobs they are doing really the highest priority for the agencies where they work? Sure, they'll take an extra pair of hands someone else pays for. Why not? But if the agencies were to receive the same amount of money in the form of an unrestricted grant, is this how they would spend it?
There's some legitimate room for debate on whether all the costs charted by the GAO should be charged to Americorps, but everybody agrees it's at least the minimum $17,600 spent directly. In California terms, that would cover the cost of instruction for one student for four years at Cal State, or almost 10 students for one year at the state's community colleges. And the students wouldn't have to defer their education for a year or two while they earn their grants.
If Washington can afford to spend this money on education, it should give the money to the states and let them spend it. Better yet, instead of collecting the taxes and them giving them back with strings attached, just don't collect them in the first place.
The states and their residents will do a much better job of taking care of education if they are spending their own money.