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In separate announcements, President Clinton and Vice-president Gore attached dollar signs to Clinton's call during the State of the Union Address for "a dramatic increase in federal support" for education and information technology.
During a January 24–25 swing through southern California, Gore proposed spending $128 million more in FY2000 on early reading-intervention programs and an additional $366 million on information-technology research. Clinton told a Virginia crowd of IT workers January 28 that he favored adding $190 million to family literacy and adult education programs as part of a $965 million boost to worker retraining programs.
The projected reading-program hikes include $26 million more for the Reading Excellence Act, an extra $10 million for the Even Start Family Literacy Program, and $50 million for a new initiative to help identify literacy-related learning disabilities in 5–9-year-olds. Among the proposed IT projects was one that might give librarians pause: the development of "intelligent agents" that can fetch and summarize online information.
Posted February 1, 1999.
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