What on earth has gotten into the liberals and the media? Perhaps affected by some sort of post-Palm Beach stress disorder, reporters and activists on the left have depicted George W. Bush as the leader of some sort of arch-conservative jihad. They’ve portrayed his tax plan as dangerously radical, some of his nominees as Confederacy-loving loons, and his voucher plan as a menace to the future of public education. To put it bluntly, this is all deranged. You get the impression that the left has actually started believing its own direct-mail fund-raising letters.
Over the past few weeks, George W. Bush has made it abundantly clear that he is who he has been telling us he is. From his first campaign speech in Iowa, through his national convention in Philadelphia, up to his inaugural address in Washington, Bush has been consistent: He has portrayed himself as an inclusive, not-particularly ideological compassionate conservative. He admires the nurturing caregiver rather than the rugged individualist or the entrepreneurial wealth creator. He prides himself on his ability to work across party lines. He has shown in a thousand and one ways that while he values responsibility and discipline, he is not a culture warrior.
Many in the media and on the left seem to regard all this as some sort of show, as a slick and palatable front designed to mask the right-wing bogeyman underneath. But now President Bush is translating his campaign into policy proposals, and it is clear that he has been straight-forward with the American people.
He placed his signature issue, education, at the top of the agenda. The plan he released last week should permanently dispel all notions that George W. Bush is an orthodox conservative. For over twenty years, conservatives have argued that the federal government should get out of the business of education policy; it should leave all that to states and localities. It’s only five years since the Republican establishment was committed to eliminating the Department of Education. The Bush administration rejects all that. “Change will not come by disdaining or dismantling the federal role of education,” Bush declared in his prepared remarks on Tuesday. The plan he is sending up to Congress transforms the federal role in education, but it does not reduce federal power.
For at least a quarter century, the conservative policy establishment has developed a coherent critique of American public education. The argument, which has been worked out over millions of think tank man hours, is that the central problem with our educational system is that it is a public monopoly. Power resides in an entrenched bureaucracy, which, Soviet-style, serves its own interests, not the interests of students and parents. Conservatives have argued that the system must be transformed to give consumers — students and their parents — more power. With more competition and more choice, the schools will have to improve.
The Bush administration doesn’t reject this argument, but it doesn’t embrace it either. It sort of gives it a pat on the back and moves on.
For the fact is, the Bush plan does little to move the education system toward a more market-oriented model. True, there is a useful provision to help generate startup capital for charter schools. And true, there is a voucher provision, which has caused the Democratic party and the education establishment to go into collective hysterics. But this provision is a minuscule part of the Bush program. Bush offers exit vouchers, the kind that give students the ability to leave the extremely rare schools that are incorrigibly awful. The plan is modeled after a provision Jeb Bush pushed through in Florida. During the first year of that plan, students in only two schools qualified for the vouchers. This year, no new students qualify.
In other words, the voucher provision is not the main course in the Bush meal, which is the impression you’d get from watching all the coverage. It’s not even the dessert. It’s the after-dinner mint. President Bush is not opposed to efforts to increase consumer power, but he is not pushing them aggressively. There is no indication that at any time in the campaign he considered pushing them aggressively.
Far from revolutionizing the education system, the Bush program is more like a corporate restructuring. It takes what was an old fashioned hierarchy, and it decentralizes it. The middle managers at the branch offices will be given greater flexibility to meet their production goals. The streamlined head office in Washington, D.C., will mostly measure outputs and reward or punish divisions depending on whether they are meeting their targets. We still have a public monopoly, but with much greater accountability. This is perestroika, not revolution.
The Bush plan would mandate that students take assessment tests each year between grades 3 and 8. Bush is opposed to national tests, but the federal Department of Education would have to review the states’ tests to make sure they are providing accurate measures of student achievement. States’ results would also be compared to the national results, as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, tests, to make sure that states don’t just make their tests easier in order to show student gains. This is the first time the NAEP tests have been used not only for information, but as enforcement mechanisms. It’s not quite the national testing that some conservatives have feared, but it does give the federal government more influence over state tests.
Parents and educators would have a lot more information, and more reliable information, about how well their kids, schools, and states are doing. States would gain or lose federal money depending on how they performed. Schools that performed badly would be more likely to be identified and would receive special aid for improvements. Principals and staff at schools that performed badly over time could lose their jobs. Those at schools that succeeded would be able to point to concrete accomplishments, which would presumably put them in line for better posts and promotions. This plan is similar to the accountability plan that was enacted in Texas, with impressive results. The difference is that Texas has direct control over its standards and tests, whereas the federal government exercises indirect influence, so it has to rely on states and localities to actually go in and reform failing schools.
While each school district would have this imposing federal enforcer looking over its shoulder, it would also be given a lot more freedom. The Bush plan consolidates the infinitude of federal subsidy programs into a few large grants (the administration hasn’t released exactly which programs will be consolidated). Along the way, a lot of the strings attached to those subsidies will be cut.
For example, federal subsidies designed to reduce class size mandate that districts hire more teachers. But suppose a district would rather use the money to retrain its current teachers than have smaller classes? Under the Bush plan, it looks like the district will be given that choice. Federal programs restrict how much bilingual education money can be spent on English immersion. Under the Bush plan, it looks like districts will be able to make their own decisions about bilingualed. In other words, the Bush administration is willing to use federal power aggressively, but mostly in a specific area, in measurement and enforcement. The Bush plan would devolve more pedagogical power to the states and localities.
If you don’t want to transform education along market lines — and the body politic seems not to be ready for that — then the Bush approach is a sensible way to go. Still, it’s hard to be confident that this will dramatically improve schooling for America’s underprivileged kids, let alone for middle-class kids who will be largely untouched by this program. It’s been three decades since the public education monopoly first promised to, in effect, leave no child behind. Uncle Sam has spent over $ 120 billion in Title I money over those years in an effort to close the achievement gap between underprivileged kids and the rest of the population. All that money hasn’t closed the gap. It hasn’t even narrowed it.
Which is why it would have been nice if Bush had at least laid the groundwork for more dramatic market-based reform down the road, if that becomes necessary. Thirty years of failed pseudo-reforms and painful experience have certainly indicated that the problem with public education is not ultimately that the public monopoly has insufficient accountability mechanisms. The problem is that it is a public monopoly. If education is ever going to be radically improved for all students, it will most likely be because power will have been vested in parents, and schools will have been forced to compete to show results.
Of course, Bush can still educate the public about the possible need for fundamental reform later on. He can do it by fighting hard for his small voucher provision, even if he has to compromise it away at the end. After all, look at what the Democrats are favoring when they oppose this voucher plan. They are supporting the idea that students must remain trapped in failing schools. They must remain trapped in schools that have not improved even after heroic efforts have been made to turn them around. They must remain trapped in schools that are hopeless. And they must remain trapped in those schools because the education elites are dogmatically opposed to anything that goes by the name vouchers. The Bush administration ought to at least force the education elites to explain why they are sentencing kids — actual kids, who only get to grow up once — to failure.
But the larger point is that with this education plan, George W. Bush has given us a pretty good indication of what sort of president he will be. He will not be the orthodox conservative that many conservatives hoped for and many liberals feared. He will be a pragmatic and compassionate manager. It’s amazing, after eight years of Clintonism: a president who tells us who he is, who sticks to his approach, and who then carries through on his ideas when in office. That’s something.
David Brooks, for the Editors
