HOW TO WIN THE EDUCATION FIGHT Minnesota’s Arne Carlson Points the Way

This time, though, Republicans should be ready. They should relish a brawl over education. They can study a game plan executed to perfection by one of their own, a plan that galvanized public support, overwhelmed a Democratic legislature, and defeated the fearsome teachers’ unions.

And it happened in — of all places — Minnesota. Not Alabama, or Montana, or New Hampshire, but a state whose devotion to union-dominated public education is legendary. Republican governor Arne Carlson led a shrewd campaign for reform, inducing the majority Democrats to go along — with union lobbyists screaming in their faces in the hallways.

On June 25 of this year, the legislature approved a two-year package of tax cuts valued at $ 160 million. These breaks will give the poor and middle class more money to spend on private education, home computers, tutors, and summer education camps.

As with many tax plans, this one has a few wrinkles. The essence of it is a $ 1,000 refundable tax credit for families earning less than $ 33,500 per year. The governor originally sought the use of these credits for all education expenses, including private-school tuition. But Democrats refused, and Carlson agreed to exempt tuition from the tax credits.

The governor also more than doubled tax deductions for school-age children. Now parents can claim an annual deduction between $ 1,625 and $ 2,500 each year, depending on the child’s age. These deductions, available to taxpayers of any income bracket, may be used for private-school tuition.

As for that apparent concession on tax credits and tuition, Carlson agreed only after one of his top aides, Todd Johnson, persuaded him that allowing the credits for expenses related to “instructional materials,” transportation, and book purchases could accomplish many of the same goals. In negotiations with Democrats, it was clear they were willing to swallow 90 percent of the governor’s plan, but only if they could save face by preventing those of modest income from using tax credits for tuition.

Johnson showed Carlson how private schools could easily shift their accounting to use the credits for approved purposes, thereby offsetting tuition costs. He knew this because he sat on the board of a Lutheran church whose school his two boys attend.

Democrats comforted themselves by crowing about Carlson’s “retreat” on the issue of tuition. But education lobbyists knew better. “It’s a travesty,” Cheryl Furrer of the Minnesota Education Association told the Minneapolis Star Tribune. “We’ve certainly opened the floodgates on private- and religious-school funding.”

What the education lobby found particularly appalling was that the Carlson plan won the support of a majority of Democrats in both legislative chambers, including House speaker Phil Carruthers and Senate majority leader Roger Moe. “People are becoming discontented with the status quo,” says Republican state representative LeRoy Koppendrayer, the original sponsor of Carlson’s plan. ” The good that is going to come out of this is that the teachers’ unions and the system now must change. The old methods are going to disappear. People used to say, ‘Other school districts are hurting, but mine is okay.’ They’re not saying that anymore.”

“I think the Republican party has a tremendous opportunity to create a new message on education that stresses opportunity,” says Carlson. “We should adopt the philosophy that every child will be given the chance to succeed. I think it is a moral argument. I want to put it on a moral plane.”

Carlson will be in Washington this week to spread the gospel of school choice and rouse Republicans for the coming fight with Clinton and Hill Democrats over federal education funding. Sen. Paul Coverdell, Republican of Georgia, has furthered debate by authoring legislation to create Individual Retirement Accounts for K-12 expenses. His plan would allow parents, grandparents, and scholarship sponsors to save up to $ 2,000 annually in after-tax income in separate accounts. Interest would accrue tax-free as long as the savings were used to defray educational expenses.

Coverdell first proposed this idea in the waning hours of debate on the budget bill. He caught many Democrats off-guard, and the Senate approved the amendment 59-41. With some prodding, House speaker Newt Gingrich and majority leader Trent Lott agreed to keep the Coverdell amendment in the Republican budget set before Clinton as negotiations began on the final product. Only after Clinton signed a letter vowing to veto the entire budget if the Coverdell language remained did GOP leaders relent. Now Gingrich and Lott are co-sponsors of a new version of Coverdell’s bill, which will be introduced and voted on in both chambers before adjournment this fall.

Coverdell concedes that his idea is far less revolutionary than Carlson’s, and he would prefer the more direct financial benefits that tax breaks would provide. The Senate Finance Committee estimates the cost of a nationalized Carlson plan to be $ 25 billion annually. Coverdell’s K-12 IRAs, however, cost just $ 1 billion per year. “It’s strictly the financial pressure and a pragmatic view of what we’ve been up against,” Coverdell says. “We’re doing this to achieve a breakthrough. There is a dose of realism with what we’re trying to do. We can force the status quo a step backwards with this debate. Which is why [the teachers’ unions] are fighting it so viciously.”

A vicious fight is what Republicans must expect. But Carlson’s experience does point the way to victory — provided that those who try to emulate him share his single-minded determination to confront and thwart the teachers’ unions.

In Carlson’s view, “The National Education Association is not an association. It’s a union. It’s really a cartel. They are a monopoly, and we really should not be surprised at the results of a monopoly. Their agenda is not the children’s agenda.” He continues, “When I sought to change the system, they said “We oppose everything.” It was arbitrary and knee-jerk. Everything was nyet, nyet, nyet. Like Khrushchev.”

So, how did he do it? As is often the case — in politics and in life — the seeds of victory were sown in defeat. In 1995, the governor offered a school-voucher plan and saw it smothered in the House. His plan received only one vote, that of its sponsor, Koppendrayer. The vouchers were attacked from the left as an unconstitutional assault on public-education funding and from the right as reckless governmental intrusion into private and home-based education. Voucher plans usually succumb to this left-right pincer attack, and the Minnesota experience was no different.

But Carlson and Koppendrayer were unbowed. The governor sent his staff back to the drawing board, and Koppendrayer promised to carry the next bill as long as he had Carlson’s word that he would fight to the last.

Koppendrayer is an unusual pol. A dairy farmer and international agriculture consultant, he came to the school-choice issue after watching three of his children adapt to Spartan school conditions on the island of Java in Indonesia, where he worked from 1987 to 1989. “There were 50 kids from 13 countries in two rooms that sat on a concrete slab that has paper- thin walls on three sides,” he remembers. “But the students were motivated, the parents were caring, and the teacher was energized. All of my children learned as much as, if not more than, they had in the States. I don’t care if you have a Taj Mahal or a palm tree, education can happen.”

Two of Carlson’s lieutenants, Tim Sullivan and Susan Heegard, crafted the tax-credit and deduction plan. They reasoned that by eliminating vouchers, they could kill opposition on constitutional grounds and mollify home- schooling parents who worried about the heavy hand of government. They also calculated that tax deductions for an array of educational expenses would win over those middle-class voters still content with schools in their areas.

Carlson signed off on the concept in the spring of 1996 and immediately began selling the idea to key players in Minnesota politics. He wooed business groups, and his staff buttered up education-policy experts at the University of Minnesota. Carlson directed Johnson and Sullivan to see whether his plan could win the support of GOP presidential nominee Bob Dole. The two assumed that if the plan could win Dole’s endorsement, they could keep state voters interested in the topic of school choice. They also knew Dole’s support could attract out-of-state money, which they were sure they would need to counter the expected onslaught from the unions.

Johnson and Sullivan had both worked for Vin Weber when he was a member of the House and a key part of Gingrich’s Conservative Opportunity Society. They began working on Weber soon after he became Dole’s domestic-policy adviser. Weber and former education secretary William Bennett, an informal Dole adviser, were adamant about incorporating school choice into Dole’s message and saw Carlson’s plan as an important component of their message.

Dole eventually endorsed the idea and came to De La Salle High School in St. Paul on July 17 to endorse federal legislation providing scholarships and limited school choice using state and federal funds. The standing-room-only crowd thundered its approval, and Dole appeared visibly energized by one of the beststaged events of his otherwise miserable campaign.

Consistent with Dole’s luck, however, news of the event barely made it outside of Minnesota: That very night, TWA flight 800 exploded off the coast of Long Island.

But the experience earned Carlson plaudits from the Dole campaign, and the governor was given a prime-time slot on “Education Night” at the GOP convention in San Diego. There, he met John Walton, son of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton and a member of the American Education Reform Foundation. Walton had bankrolled school-choice efforts in California and Colorado, and he was interested in Carlson’s plans for Minnesota.

These milestones increased voter awareness of Carlson’s intention to push hard for school choice in the coming legislative session. A small, poorly funded umbrella group known as Minnesotans for School Choice commissioned the first poll on the governor’s tax-credit and deduction plan in February 1997. The numbers proved almost too good to be true: 66 percent of those surveyed supported Carlson’s plan, including use of the tax breaks for private-school tuition.

“Unlike vouchers, which divide the Republican party, the tax credit and deduction is universally accepted in the party and has strong appeal with conservative Democrats,” says Brian Tringali, a pollster with the Tarrance Group, which conducted the poll on the Carlson plan. “We had done so much polling on vouchers before, I was surprised by the magnitude of support.”

By now, all of the state’s conservative grass-roots groups were united behind the plan. The roster included the Minnesota Christian Home Educators, the Minnesota Catholic Conference, the MissouriSynod Lutheran Church, and many others. “Our part was to generate and mobilize grass-roots support,” says Kristin Robbins, executive director of Minnesotans for School Choice. ” Early on, we had no Democrats supporting us. But they came around as people made their calls and sent their letters.”

At this point, Carlson and his staff began to think they could win. But members of the American Education Reform Foundation were reluctant to donate more than the $ 100,000 they had already put up for a grass-roots campaign. Once the foundation concluded that Carlson would push the issue to the hilt, however, it provided an additional $ 150,000 for a $ 230,000 media campaign produced by Minnesotans for School Choice, a campaign that coincided with the end of the legislative session.

Minnesotans for School Choice sent 40,000 directmail pieces into districts of key legislators, as did Focus on the Family. The Minnesota Family Council sent out more than 100,000 newsletters on the subject. Together, more than 250,000 pieces of mail highlighting the school-choice issue were mailed during April, May, and June. In addition, the state GOP generated 8,000 calls to undecided legislators.

These efforts softened up the opposition, but not enough for Democrats to budge. Instead, the legislature sent Carlson a $ 6.7 billion K-12 funding bill with no school-choice provisions, daring the governor to veto it.

Amazingly, he did, becoming the first governor in state history to veto a stand-alone K-12 bill. The Democrats accused him of throwing a tantrum. They decided to play rope-a-dope and wait until the end of June, when funding would expire for the state Department of Children. They figured that, by then, school districts would be up in arms, demanding funds to prepare for the coming school year. The Democrats were confident that they had the governor in a box.

But a poll in early June showed sustained support for Carlson’s plan, and Minnesotans for School Choice secured another $ 150,000 from the Reform Foundation, which paid for a second spate of television and radio commercials from June 16 to June 26. About this time, black and Hispanic leaders announced their support for the Carlson plan. For the first time, Carlson could point to strong backing outside the GOP and at the center of the Democratic coalition.

Carlson then added his own brand of brass-knuckle politics by traveling to the districts of Democratic legislators who opposed him but who also sent their children to private schools. Carlson went so far as to speak from the pulpit at Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church in St. Paul, the parish of state representative Carlos Mariani, a liberal Democrat and staunch opponent of school choice who sends his children to private school.

“This issue brings out more hypocrisy than any other issue I know of,” says Carlson. “Why is the opportunity enjoyed by rich liberals denied to poor families? I find that extremely offensive.” Mariani and other Democrats cried foul, accusing the governor of needlessly personalizing a legitimate policy disagreement. But their protests had the lone effect of egging Carlson on. ” The Left, their attitude is they define the debate,” Carlson says. “The personal behavior of conservatives is fair game, but if you talk about them, it’s a low blow. Sometimes you have to take on the bully.”

“Throughout the spring and summer, Carlson and his allies feared a massive counterpunch from the Minnesota Education Association or the National Education Association in Washington. But it never came. “We suspect that they thought they were okay with a Democratically controlled legislature,” Kristin Robbins says. “They underestimated the support for this. It’s a good thing they didn’t [wage a campaign]. We couldn’t have kept up.”

In fact, the lack of a coordinated union response was pivotal to the final outcome. House speaker Carruthers says many Democrats were dismayed by the unions’ apparent surrender: “There were people frustrated by that, there’s no question.”

Four days before many government agencies were set to shut down, for lack of state education funding, the legislature approved much of what Carlson had originally proposed. Democrats who only weeks before had decried the tax credits and deductions as an assault on public education were now celebrating a grand compromise.

Consider the conversion of Speaker Carruthers. In a May interview with THE WEEKLY STANDARD, Carruthers had this to say about Carlson’s school-choice plan: “We didn’t support it because it would mean reducing funding for public education and spending it on private and religious education. . . . It’s a zero-sum game. They are trying to portray this as giving people back tax money. Come on! . . . It’s not about tax breaks, it’s about getting more money to private and religious schools.”

And here is Carruthers’s assessment of the June result: “We feel it was a good, solid compromise. If it’s a good idea, let’s see how it works. There are a lot of very desirable things about it.”

The speaker’s conversion speaks volumes about the success of Carlson’s plan and the degree to which Democrats in his state have, against their own wishes, become shareholders in the nation’s largest schoolchoice program: “This wasn’t our issue as Democrats,” Carruthers says. “We were not pushing this thing. In a vacuum, would we have proposed this? No. The governor vetoed the education bill. It was a reasonable compromise. Would I have supported it on its own? No. Both sides are unhappy. They [the teachers’ union] can afford to be in a vacuum. They can take more of a purist point of view. We did not feel that we could do that. Most members thought that it wasn’t realistic. There was pretty good support for the governor’s program. It was a well-done campaign.”

Carlson’s victory contains many lessons for Republicans. For congressional leaders, the governor’s tactics suggest ways to energize grass-roots activists deadened by a year’s worth of craven compromises with Clinton. For Republican governors, the Minnesota experience reveals the degree of public thirst for the right kind of school-choice package. Carlson’s success would seem easy to duplicate in the 12 states where Republicans control both the governor’s mansion and the legislature. His staff has been besieged with inquiries from legislators in Arizona, Illinois, Nebraska, and Oregon.

“It’s going to inspire people, especially grass-roots activists,” Kristin Robbins says. “People want to know if it’s possible to win with a small budget, skeleton staff. Well, this gives governors and legislators around the country the courage to stand up to the teachers’ unions.”

It should. We’ll see.

Major Garrett, a Washington, D.C., reporter, last wrote for THE WEEKLY STANDARD about campaign-finance reform.