WASHINGTON

SNOW SAYS PRIVATE ACCOUNTS WOULD FIX SOCIAL SECURITY

Treasury Secretary Snow said creating private investment accounts within the Social Security system would help the federal program avoid “deep cuts” in benefits or “huge” increases in payroll taxes.

Mr. Snow, interviewed on “Fox News Sunday,” said President Bush is committed to holding Social Security payroll tax rates at the existing level, though he didn’t rule out raising the amount of income taxed. Employees and employers each now pay a payroll tax of 6.2% of the employee’s first $87,900 in annual earnings.

“What the president said was no increase in rates,” Mr. Snow said, adding that Mr. Bush plans to recommend program changes to Congress next year. “We don’t have a detailed plan yet.”

Mr. Bush made as one of his second-term priorities allowing younger workers to divert part of their Social Security taxes into private investment accounts that are expected to yield a higher return. Social Security relies on current taxes to pay today’s benefits. The government would have to fund the gap during the transition as taxes from younger workers move into private accounts rather than into the pay-as-you-go system. White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card said that, when fixing Social Security, Mr. Bush “doesn’t want to impact those people who are at or near retirement” and he “doesn’t want to increase the payroll taxes that people pay every single pay period.”

Mr. Bush “has said that we should address this problem now,” Mr. Card said today on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.” “We have a responsibility not to pass problems that we know about onto future generations.”

– Bloomberg News

SOUTH

PAPER: EVIDENCE OF WIDESPREAD CHEATING IN TEXAS SCHOOLS

DALLAS – Dozens of Texas schools appear to have cheated on the state’s redesigned academic achievement test, casting doubt on whether the accountability system can reliably measure how schools are performing, a newspaper found.

An analysis uncovered strong evidence of organized, educator-led cheating on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills at schools in Houston and Dallas, along with suspicious scores in hundreds of other schools, the Dallas Morning News reported.

Texas education policies on student accountability became the model for the federal No Child Left Behind law enacted after President Bush’s election in 2000.

The newspaper analyzed scores from 7,700 Texas schools, searching for ones with unusual gaps in performance between grades or subjects. It said research has shown that schools that are weak in one subject or grade are typically weak in others.

More than 200 schools had large, unexplained score gaps between grades or between the TAKS and other standardized tests, such as the Stanford Achievement Test. It found, for example, that the fourth-graders at Sanderson Elementary School in the Houston Independent School District scored extremely poorly on the math TAKS test this year, rating the school in the bottom 2% of the state.

However, the school’s fifth-graders ended up with the highest scale scores on the math TAKS of any school in Texas, with more than 90% of the students getting perfect or near-perfect scores. A Dallas district spokesman, Donald Claxton, said officials there plan a thorough investigation. “If there’s cheating going on, we want to stop it,” he said.

– Associated Press

MIDWEST

MASSIVE 80-VEHICLE CRASH CLOSES I-80 IN WESTERN PA.

MERCER, Pa. – A tractor-trailer traveling an estimated 55 mph in whiteout conditions jackknifed across Interstate 80 yesterday, setting off a chain-reaction pileup that wrecked up to 80 vehicles.

No deaths or critical injuries were reported, but the late-morning crash blocked the westbound lanes in western Pennsylvania for more than eight hours, state police said.

State police Trooper Ted Hunt said he was attending to disabled vehicles on the side of the highway in blowing snow when he heard a truck quickly pull into the passing lane and jackknife. He said two other rigs skidded sideways, blocking both lanes, and oncoming vehicles began crashing into them. Mr. Hunt said the truck driver who started the crash was cited for driving at an unsafe speed.

“I could hear the cars piling into each other for a good 10 minutes,” Mr. Hunt, who ran into the woods to avoid the crashing cars and trucks, told The Herald of Sharon, Pa. Mr. Hunt said at one point he saw a man lying in the snow narrowly hurdled by a truck that went airborne and left the road.

The crash site is 60 miles northwest of Pittsburgh and about eight miles from the Ohio border. About a dozen people were taken to United Community Hospital in Grove City and treated for broken bones, cuts and bruises, said Fran Mc-Cleary, nursing supervisor. The hospital admitted one person and sent three others to Pittsburgh hospitals.

Lori Braun, nursing supervisor at Sharon Regional Hospital, said one person was admitted and 11 were treated for minor injuries and released. Another 77 people declined treatment at a triage center set up at a hotel, Ms. Braun said.

– Associated Press