Every so often the conservative movement casts up another hero. Sometimes the darling of the moment turns out to be a true hero, like Ward Connerly, the spokesman for the California Civil Rights Initiative. And sometimes the object of our admiration turns out to be Flake-o Supreme — mention the name of ClintonCare fighter Betsy McCaughey in front of a bunch of right-wingers and watch them stare at their shoes and try to change the subject.
At the moment, one of the right-wing poster kids is Lisa Graham Keegan, the Arizona schools chief who has created the most effective charter- school program in the country. Keegan’s praises have been sung by the Wall Street Journal editorial page, Reason magazine, NationaI Review, and other right-thinking organs. This time the news is good. Keegan’s got the charm and intelligence of a budding political star. In fact, if anything, she is more activist in her political style and nuanced in her policy beliefs than some guardians of Conservative Correctness can acknowledge.
In 1993, Keegan was a thirtysomething state legislator in Phoenix pushing a radical school-reform plan that featured vouchers and parental choice. The state education establishment went apoplectic at the mention of vouchers and succeeded in defeating the bill. But when the legislation was reintroduced without the voucher provision, Keegan’s opponents were so busy declaring victory they apparently didn’t notice the radical charter-school language still lurking inside. “To this day,” she says, “I don’t think anybody has read the charter provision to that bill.”
The provision turned out to be a time bomb that would lead to the creation of hundreds of independent public schools. It has two key features. First, there is no limit on the number of charter schools that can be established in Arizona, unlike in many states. Second, you don’t have to get approval from the local school board to set up a charter (a bit like asking your boss if you can set up a competing firm across the street). Instead, the backers of a charter school — educators or parents or developers or whoever they may be — an go to one of several different bodies for approval, including the State Board of Charter Schools and the State Board of Education. Keegan was so happy with the reform potential of the new law, and so concerned about getting the law implemented properly, that she ran for superintendent of public instruction in 1994 and won.
Conservatives love to talk about charter schools, and with good reason. These are public schools that don’t have to kowtow to the big bureaucracies. And while it is early yet, there is already evidence that charter schools significantly improve educational achievement. Moreover, as Lisa Keegan notes, if you want to achieve full school choice eventually, you have to set up charters now. Voters won’t endorse school-voucher plans unless they first see independent public schools operating effectively. Arizona now has more than 250 charter schools, with about 27,000 students. Regular public schools have to step up their performance to meet the competition.
But Lisa Graham Keegan is more than just the leading proponent of charter schools. She’s an odd mixture of Susan Molinari enthusiasm and Margaret Thatcher defiance. Her biological father abandoned her when she was three months old, eventually going off to run a beatnik coffeehouse in Carmel, Calif. Her mother remarried, choosing a no-nonsense business executive who instilled a competitive spirit in his stepdaughter and a love of political debate. Keegan was the national champion sidesaddle rider in 1978, and she did well enough in high school to be admitted to Stanford, where she majored in linguistics with hopes of becoming either a brain surgeon or a speech pathologist. After graduation she moved back to Arizona to get a masters degree in speech pathology at Arizona State University, then went on to do research at a V.A. hospital on Wernicke’s aphasia, a brain disorder that prevents its sufferers from understanding the words that are coming out of their mouths.
You can supply your own joke as to how this research led to a career in politics. During the Evan Mecham scandals, Keegan became interested in, and appalled by, the state legislature. She ran for a seat in 1990, won, and ended up chairing the education committee, which led to her revolutionary bill.
When asked what book most influenced her political outlook, Keegan immediately names Hayek’s Road to Serfdom. She is on the libertarian side of the Republican party. At a recent conservative get-together, the Dark Ages Weekend, she found herself agreeing with the libertarian speakers. “But when Gary Bauer gets up and talks,” she says, “he makes me nervous. I can’t go there. I’m just uncomfortable. It feels invasive.” Keegan is moderately pro-choice and a big fan of Steve Forbes — at least Forbes as he was in 1996.
But Keegan can be awkward company for Republicans and libertarians. She was the first high- ranking Republican to call for the resignation of Arizona governor Fife Symington. According to Phoenix magazine, this meant she was “shunned at Republican functions, tormented by the rumor mill.” Symington resigned last year in disgrace. And Keegan recognizes something many libertarians have been loath to acknowledge: If you really want to dismantle the welfare state, you need a period of activist government; you need to centralize authority in order to bust entrenched interests. Many libertarians would rather preserve an ideologically pure anti-government position, which calls for dismantling power but never using it. That position is fine for those howling at government from the outside. But it doesn’t amount to a governing philosophy, and it isn’t much help if you are trying to modernize government from within. The Republicans’ failure to come up with a governing philosophy explains the party’s stagnation.
Keegan is way ahead of them. For example, she is now waging a frontal assault on the notion of local control of education. Republicans love to talk about local control; it has that comforting populist ring that gets GOP heads bobbing. But it’s also a powerful barrier to education reform. Earlier this month, Keegan was testifying before Congress on school reform when, as she recalls, some of the members “alluded to the argument that the federal government should not try to denigrate local control. I just wanted to come out of my chair. Local control is a monopoly. You should not denigrate parent control, or student equality, or the decisions at a local school, but you absolutely should get in the face of local control. . . . Local control means no change. You eliminate charter schools. You eliminate voucher programs. Because all those things happen in spite of local governing boards, not because of them.”
Keegan is in the midst of a long and strenuous effort to centralize Arizona’s school-funding mechanism. Her goal is to eliminate local property-tax-based bond initiatives and replace the lost revenue from increased state sales taxes. Instead of districts’ raising the money for their own schools, the state would raise money and allocate it to students. State dollars would go to whatever school the child attended. This plan would accomplish two things. First, it would standardize the sum spent on a child’s education. Currently, rich suburbs spend a lot of money per child, while poor districts spend only a little, a pattern that has been declared unconstitutional in Arizona and many other states. Second, the plan would attach money, even for capital expenses, to the child. That ultimately would shift power to parents, who could send their kids to new charter schools, and away from district bureaucracies. “This is the single most important issue. It breaks it open,” Keegan says.
A number of groups are unhappy with Keegan’s ideas. The district bureaucracies, obviously — they’ve taken to labeling her the “superintendent for private instruction” because of her school-choice philosophy. Also, “the bonding houses are just wigging out. They are unhappy in the extreme,” Keegan notes. They’d lose a highly profitable (and some would say corrupting) line of business. Then there are the Republican politicos, who don’t want to do anything that might appear to trampie on the holy notion of local control. ” I’ve sat down with Steve Forbes about this and Dan Quayle,” she says. “I like Steve Forbes very much. His answer to me is the same one. ‘We need local control.’ So far, I just can’t move him.”
Finally — and this might be the real reason for the politicos’ reaction — there are the residents of the rich school districts. Under Keegan’s plan to equalize perpupil spending across the state, spending in the richest districts would go down. Keegan’s father recently gave her a chart that she put up on her wall, showing that the 10 richest districts in Arizona are also the 10 most Republican. During one tussle last summer, Keegan lashed out at critics from the Madison District, calling them a “gang of the rich.”
Keegan insists that equal per- pupil spending is the morally compelling position. It’s the only position consistent with equal opportunity. It’s also politically popular. And not coincidentally, it is a necessary component of a school-choice regime. Yet she watches her fellow Republicans invent high-minded reasons to defend the unequal spending patterns that have been struck down in state after state. In truth, it is odd to see Republicans rising to the defense of unequal spending, since a favorite Republican talking point on education is that there is no relationship between spending and student achievement.
Keegan’s other great activist and centralizing initiative has been to create a set of rigorous statewide academic standards and tests. Before her tenure, Arizona had some vague standards, on the order of “Students shall appreciate literature.” Arizona’s new standards earn A and B marks from the Fordham Foundation, the organization that conducts thorough reviews of state education standards. Tests will start in 2001, and students must pass them in order to get diplomas. The tests have sent a wave of anxiety through the Arizona education community. Keegan insists that all students must take the tests in English. Moreover, the proposed exercises are not easy: “Write a narrative or story that develops complex characters, plot structure, point of view and setting; organizes ideas in meaningful sequence; and includes sensory details and concrete language to advance the story line.” Keegan also says she won’t allow students to use calculators on the math sections.
Keegan is a big believer in standards and tests. “Standards are a nonnegotiable piece on the way to full-out school choice. There’s no reason to have a choice of really lousy schools. We all say the market will drive you to excellence, but it will only drive you to excellence if you know what excellence is.”
In a piece on Keegan in the April 6 National Review, Clint Bolick argued that her strong state standards can be used to head off national standards and tests. But Bolick, who opposes national tests and standards, did not mention that Keegan herself supports them. She points out that right now, state school chiefs, who are political animals, get to create the standards and tests by which their own performance is judged. There has to be a national audit: “The state standards have to be enforced by a national standard,” Keegan argues. “Right now, states can make outrageous claims that are unwarranted. It’s not just a good idea — it’s absolutely essential.” At the same time, Keegan, like all conservative education experts, can see how national tests could be captured and abused. A politically fashionable or easy national test would actually undermine state tests if students who were failing at the state level suddenly passed an easy national exam. “National tests have incredible potential. The fear comes in what’s going to be on them, ” she says.
Lisa Graham Keegan and the handful of top education experts who have served in Republican administrations, such as Bill Bennett, Diane Ravitch, Chester Finn, and Bruno Manno, come from different perspectives — from libertarian to neo-liberal. But they arrive at similar positions: charter schools on the way to school choice; rigorous standards backed up by independently formulated national tests. Yet it’s striking that this consensus of the experts is politically incorrect in lay Republican circles and among many movement conservatives.
Republicans love to talk about the power of the marketplace, but they don’t want to talk about the government activism — which in Arizona involves raising state taxes — that is required to bring about a schoolchoice regime. Republicans have almost religious affection for local control and a sometimes unthinking reverence for the small-scale institutions of civil society. But they don’t have any way to confront the entrenched local associations that are bastions of the status quo.
Some Republicans are so hostile to government they won’t contemplate government action even if it is necessary to bust concentrated power and enhance individual freedom. Finally, many Republicans have retained the defeatist mentality of a minority party. They assume that any reform they set in motion will eventually be taken over by their political rivals. In sum, Republicans say they want to change the education system radically, but their mental habits contribute to the stagnation we have seen, especially in Washington, over the last few years.
Lisa Graham Keegan is a rarity among politicos not only because she has retained a sense of humor about herself, but also because she has created a style of conservativeactivism that actually produces change. Conservatism may have cast up a true hero this time — whether or not it deserves her.
By David Brooks
