For Republican presidential candidates planning to run against Hillary Clinton, the critique of her record these days often begins and ends with Benghazi and her email server. This is partly because these are so damning but partly because there’s a near-universal assumption that Clinton has no domestic record to run against. After all, her health care initiative famously failed.
Like many things that are generally believed, however, this is simply not true. In fact, as chair of the Arkansas Educational Standards Committee, Hillary Clinton undertook one of the most dramatic policy initiatives in America back when she was the state’s first lady. That effort helped push her husband into the front ranks of Democratic governors, paving the way for his presidency.
Hillary’s education plan was not cheap. It called for what Bill Clinton himself admitted was “the biggest tax increase for education in Arkansas history,” a 1 percentage-point increase in the state sales tax. Of course, proportionately this was paid more by the poor than the rich. Understandably, all Hillary Clinton biographies prominently feature her role in enacting the Clintons’ education plan and their claim that they were “keeping faith” with the state’s children.
And Hillary’s role was central. She helped develop the plan, and her personal intervention and testimony before the assembly committee that held the bill up is what pushed it through. That performance led state representative Lloyd George to remark that Arkansas had elected the “wrong Clinton.” It followed on her meetings in each of the state’s 75 counties to drum up support for the bill. Later Hillary’s intense personal lobbying would guide the bill through the legislature’s main session, where it passed by one vote.
That much of the story is Arkansas political legend, and every Hillary biographer, whether of the left or the right, writes about it.
What’s curious is that no biographer or journalist has ever bothered to examine the official data on what resulted. Those records tell a crucial story: one of calamitous failure.
To understand how and why the Clinton education plan proved so flawed, let’s backtrack.
The immediate impetus for the education reform campaign the Clintons announced in 1983 was a state judicial ruling calling for greater equity in spending on primary and secondary schools. That decision, along with two subsequent Arkansas supreme court rulings on the subject, would become the focus of most state education legislation for the next quarter-century.
It’s clear from their statements at the time that the Clintons understood the importance of improving Arkansas schools. Bill Clinton argued that with factory jobs going overseas, the state could no longer rely on manufacturing and needed a more skilled workforce. But Arkansas students were scoring poorly on national exams.
The Clintons’ response focused on spending. That’s perhaps not surprising since it’s what education experts like Jonathan Kozol (a hero then and now to progressive reformers) were emphasizing. That spending on education and performance are not correlated was rarely acknowledged in the early 1980s. And it’s still only grudgingly admitted. When I spoke at length about education reform under the Clintons with Mike Beebe, a later two-term Democratic governor who helped shepherd education bills out of the state senate in the 1980s, he managed to discourse on education for close to half an hour without ever talking about anything except spending.
And in 1983 Arkansas was spending comparatively little on schools. The state ranked 48th of 50 in disbursement of funds for education. Kindergarten was still optional and absent in many rural districts. Moreover, focusing on spending and narrowing the differences in the amounts provided for students was not simply something the state’s high court had called for but was consistent with Hillary Clinton’s ideological background as an adviser to the left-leaning Children’s Defense Fund.
However, increasing spending—especially in poorer areas—was not all that was proposed. The Clintons’ plan also called for increased funding for advanced courses at high schools. A public-school choice system was presented, but genuine charter schools were deliberately left out. Then there was one more thing added for political reasons.
Cleverly realizing that a proposal of a massive tax increase had to be matched to something perceived as adding value and not just cost, the Clintons demanded that all public school teachers in the state take and pass a minimum skills test.
In theory, this was not just sensible but necessary. Arkansas had the same problem most states have. Especially at the elementary school level, while there are some high-IQ instructors fond of reading Jane Austen, there are also teachers who are not much more than functionally literate. In Arkansas the problem was complicated by the fact that a large proportion of the lowest-skill teachers were black.
Thus, if the state were to zealously implement such a policy, it would have to fire hundreds if not thousands of teachers, and easily a third or more of those instructors would be minorities.
In his role as Clinton consigliere, Dick Morris came up with a solution. Since Morris’s polling data indicated that Arkansas voters expected a 10 percent fail rate, the Clintons recalibrated the exam so only that number would flunk. This was well down from initial fail rates above one-third, and that was even when the test was, in the words of University of Arkansas education professor Jay P. Greene, “incredibly minimal.”
Still, the Clintons watered down the requirement further by giving teachers who had failed a chance to retake the test until they passed it, over a period of up to two years. Then the test was put aside and never given again. In the end, only a handful of teachers lost their jobs.
Nonetheless, the test was strongly opposed by the state teachers’ unions, and in both 1984 and 1986 the unions refused to endorse Bill Clinton. That, naturally, made him a hero to moderate Democrats nationally, and it led to Clinton’s selection, along with Republican governor Lamar Alexander, to lead a national panel on education reform.
The Clintons’ path to the White House had been laid out by this brilliant piece of “triangulation.”
But what was happening with educational performance? That few have ever known the results is not surprising. Public school test data are a little like statistics on postal service mail delivery. While they surely exist, they are purposefully made obscure and arcane—then manipulated further.
The extent of the chicanery is hard to exaggerate. Education expert Chester Finn has pointed out that at one time all 50 states were claiming above average student test results.
There are many ways to conceal the truth. First, the data are typically released in limited sets that are sent only to state research libraries. The data are not put online. Then the numbers are arranged so that they cannot be readily compared with earlier numbers. An easy way to do that is by repeatedly changing the test given. Finally, state officials may simply refuse to provide old data sets to researchers, much less journalists.
The Clintons and their successors in Arkansas have used all these tricks. But the data are still out there. I was fortunate in that I began my research on this subject back in 1994. Yet even then, Arkansas officials would not, as I requested, provide me information dating from before 1987, and they would not give me data on anything more than their records of minimum performance tests for the first year they did provide. Arkansas uses two types of statewide student tests: In addition to its minimum performance tests, it also uses academic competency exams.
Let’s look at the minimum performance data first. These tell us whether the number of children reaching the lowest level of intellectual competence has gone up or down. If we take 1988 as our base year, state minimum performance test data show that through the four years 1988-1992 the proportion of Arkansas third-graders failing to meet minimum standards increased in mathematics and held steady but dropped 1 point in reading. Sixth-grade students were doing just as poorly in language arts at the end of the period, and even worse in social studies and math. Eighth-grade students were doing worse in reading and social studies, were just as ineffectual in math, and were improving only slightly in science.
And what of the academic tests? Arkansas changed its academic competency exams during this period, following several years of declining scores. The change from the state’s use of the Metropolitan Achievement Test to the Stanford Achievement Test occurred in 1992 as Bill Clinton was running for president, just when data showing further drops in student performance might have been most damaging to the couple’s political future.
The minimum performance findings cited above, however, are confirmed by the data on academic competency exams. Reading and math scores on the Metropolitan Achievement Tests either did not improve or dropped at both the fourth- and seventh-grade levels. In fact, in only 3 of 12 categories of rankings provided in these grades did Arkansas students actually manage to maintain their prior mediocre level of performance. In the other 9 categories they did worse.
Two years of comparison, 1992 and 1993, were provided me for the state’s results on the Stanford Achievement Test, and here again reading scores were poor and, for younger students, declining. Furthermore, the data on elementary school students showed math scores were falling during the two years for which data were available. Of course, not being an Arkansas education official, I do not know what population of students nationally the children were being “normed” or compared against. As well, I don’t know if the tests were of equal difficulty from year to year or were getting easier. (“Test drift” is a common problem with such tests.)
Who was responsible for this catastrophe? To get some perspective, it’s worth looking at what little federal data on educational outcomes exists from the period before the Clintons gained power in Arkansas. The best generally available federal data on past educational performance are provided by Army induction tests to draftees, the most recent of which were conducted near the end of the Vietnam war.
Tests from the end of that period ranked draftees from 15 states below those from Arkansas on basic skills and intelligence tests. What the figures suggest, in short, is that six years before Clinton became governor, Arkansas was not at the nation’s absolute bottom educationally. Most of the states around it in the deep South and in Appalachia were doing either somewhat or very much worse. By contrast, by the time the first state-by-state federal surveys of math performance were being done during the Bush administration, Arkansas ranked seventh from the bottom.
It is possible, of course, that the largest decline took place during the brief period between the end of American participation in the Vietnam war and Clinton’s first inauguration. There is, however, little or no evidence from national surveys of SAT scores or anything else to suggest this.
What’s more, the failure was compounded by corruption. The Clintons’ last two commissioners of education, Tommy Venters and Burton Elliott, were both indicted in a massive kickback scandal involving payoffs for education department contracts. While neither went to prison, Elliott was forced to pay restitution. Also named in the 133-count federal indictment were 10 Democratic state senators.
When I spoke with the now-retired Elliott, he described Hillary as “hard-driving” and said that “she completed the project” of education reform in Arkansas, noting that he “always enjoyed working with her.” Venters called her “very aggressive” and said she was “very involved.”
When I asked Elliott what tangible results they had accomplished, he mentioned the watered-down teacher testing scheme and then referred to one math and science high school that had been set up in Hot Springs. That was all, it seemed, that he could think of to cite for a doubling of state spending on education. Like many education officials, he did not refer to performance data at all.
When I asked what their accomplishments were, Venters responded by saying “funding and implementing standards.” I was not able to follow up and ask what he meant by standards as moments later he hung up the phone.
Venters’s tenure as commissioner of education was also marked by a successful raid on the state teachers’ retirement fund, which was unlawfully used to provide extra funds for schools on top of what came from the tax increase.
What were Hillary’s and Bill’s own responses to the havoc they had wrought at such great expense? Concerned about their next steps up the political ladder, the couple eventually made peace with the Arkansas branch of the National Education Association, the state’s main teachers’ union. Bill would get their support in his later political runs, and he would tell a national NEA convention in 1992 that were he elected president he would be “their partner.” Here at least he was a man of his word, and there was, naturally, no push for vouchers or charter schools during the Clinton presidency.
Then in 2008, Hillary, not Obama, ran with the unions’ support. When Hillary talks about education as an issue these days, she talks about making changes in policies regarding student loans. Professor Greene says that “since 1993 Hillary has been almost completely absent in educational policy debates.” The result is that the unions are “comfortable with her. They don’t think education will be a priority for her.” He adds: “She’ll do whatever is required to advance herself.”
Jonathan Leaf is a playwright who lives in New York. He was a city school teacher for seven years.
