EDUCATION AS A NATIONAL ISSUE

A solitary sentence like that makes just a little ping when it hits the ground, but don’t underestimate its significance. The Republicans have been tremendously frustrated by their inability to make hay on education and are casting about for a different approach. Some are looking at the example set by Virginia governor-elect James Gilmore, who essentially erased the gender gap by promising to pay for more teachers. But others are considering a more radical change. They are thinking of moving beyond the old Republican idea that there should be no federal role in education. The party started winning presidential elections in 1968 when it took the crime issue national (while the Democrats pleaded it was a local issue). Some Republicans may finally be realizing that presidential victories in the future depend on doing the same thing with education.

It’s obvious enough that the slash-and-decentralize approach that Republicans have recently relied on has been a failure. When they took over Congress in 1995, they succumbed to temptation and declared war on the nearest bureaucracy, the Department of Education. But their effort to close the department failed, and many voters decided the GOP’s education policy was negative, crude, and cheap. As Republican National Committee chairman Haley Barbour told his troops in 1996, women voters in particular came to believe that Republicans don’t care about quality education for other people’s kids. Ever since that debacle, congressional Republicans have bent over backwards to show they do care. In the current budget, a Republican Congress is bestowing big spending boosts on all the worst programs of the last thirty years.

Republicans no longer challenge the education establishment head on; they merely hope to reduce its influence around the edges through small voucher programs and tax breaks. Moreover, handcuffed by local-control orthodoxy, Republicans sometimes sound like wonks at a Federalist Society conference when they speak on the subject. Parents want to talk about curriculum, Republicans talk about devolution. Parents want to talk about values, Republicans talk about vouchers. Meanwhile, the Democrats charge ahead as the champions of school reform. Clinton campaigns for high standards, touting a version of the national-test idea that was first proposed by the Bush administration. He crusades for charter schools, a concept propagated by conservative think tanks. The Democrats didn’t have to fight Republicans for ownership of these issues. On education, the Republicans simply abandoned the national field.

If Republicans are to reverse this sorry record, they’ll have to face the implications of Gingrich’s statement. They must accept the fact that the education debate has become a national one, whether Republicans like it or not, and that the problems have to be addressed with vigorous national policies. Maybe in an ideal world education policy would be local. But in recent decades, the education establishment has nationalized it. The big teachers’ unions, the administrators’ unions, the schools of education, the networks of bureaucrats, and the textbook companies have come together to exert a pervasive influence that makes a mockery of local control. No charter school or lone district can realistically hope to set its own, say, history curriculum if the entire apparatus of the education establishment favors social-science mush — if all the teachers themselves were nourished on soft- core sociology, and the textbooks recycle it, and the conference circuit promotes it. To challenge the education establishment, you have to take it on at the center.

That means not settling for a policy that merely seeks to contain the education establishment. To fight the establishment only at the margins is like fighting the Cold War only by funding the Afghan rebels — without an Evil Empire speech to deny the legitimacy of the regime and without a military build-up or SDI to threaten the essential viability of the nomenklatura.

The alternative to containment is, of course, rollback. There are two avenues for pursuing that, perestroika and glasnost. Perestroika means restructuring the education bureaucracy. Glasnost means toppling the ideological hegemony of the old regime. There are national policies that can contribute to each.

A handy way to begin restructuring the bureaucracy is the expansion of charter schools. The early evidence suggests that these tax-supported independent schools, run by their own boards within the public system, raise student achievement. Moreover, if the country is going to shift eventually to a voucher system, it will first have to pass through a charter phase, so that when choice prevails there will be a variety of independent schools to choose from. Charters can prove to the public that alternatives exist to a centralized system and so lay the intellectual groundwork for vouchers.

But 68 percent of charter-school operators say the lack of start-up funds is a barrier to the creation of more such schools. It costs about $ 1.5 million to start a school — to lease space, buy equipment and furniture, and lay in initial supplies. In some cases private industries — like developers hoping to make their real estate more attractive — step in and supply the capital. But in the current climate there won’t be enough private capital to turbocharge the charter movement, and the states are providing little help. The Clinton administration has sensibly set up a federal program, which it hopes to expand to $ 100 million in 1998, to offer startup grants to charter schools.

This is essentially a Homestead Act for charters. It provides capital for education entrepreneurs who are willing to work hard and build new institutions. In the 19th century, the Republican party set aside just such startup capital for the pioneers when it decided that settling the West was an urgent national priority. Now the Republican party should see breaking up the education monopoly as equally urgent. But either from failure of imagination or from self-destructive anti-government dogmatism, the party refuses to assist the independent-school pioneers. Even the expanded Clinton plan would provide only about $ 85,000 per school. Republicans should be thinking bigger and spending much more. This is a historic opportunity to undermine the centralized bureaucracies that control the schools.

Some conservatives blanch at using the federal purse aggressively, even dictating policy preferences to the states. But conservatives should see that assisting the formation of charter schools isn’t meddling in school management. It’s using national power to curb district, state, and federal meddling in school management. Bureaucrats already impose myriad rules prescribing how and what schools teach. Strong charter laws of the sort that national Homestead legislation would favor liberate schools from many of those rules. In this regard, Republicans should take a page from Margaret Thatcher, who knew that when you confront a sclerotic centralized system, you have to use national power to break up old arrangements and so liberate individuals and families.

The second national task is glasnost, destroying the education estabishment’s near-monopoly control of the curriculum. There’s no need to be shy about what this means: It means ousting the multicultural pablum that is popular in the education schools and replacing it with a rigorous curriculum that teaches American history, American values, and American culture first. This does not mean hiding the country’s blemishes or pretending the United States is only an Anglo-Saxon emanation from Europe. But there is a crying need to confront the prevailing ethos in schools, which has students hopping from one ethnic experience to another without learning much about any of them while absorbing lots of vague self-congratulation about openness and diversity. Real reform means insisting that the education debate be not only a quarrel about funding streams and bureaucratic structures but, centrally, a values debate between multiculturalism and Americanization.

The two handiest mechanisms for cutting through the culture of low expectations and reestablishing civilian control of the schools are standards and testing. The procedure here is to set up independent boards to oversee the development of voluntary national curriculum standards and tests. We already have such a board when it comes to testing, the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees a set of tests called NAEP. But the education establishment, in league with conservatives who oppose anything national, has barred the effective use of its test results. These results are released only state by state, so that parents cannot find out how their particular schools and children are doing.

The purpose of setting up such boards, or expanding the functions of the board we have, is to broaden the pool of people who set basic expectations for the country’s schools. At the moment, members of the education establishment — that is to say, progressives — have almost total control over school curricula. An independent board appointed by both parties and insulated from daily politics would allow our conservative elites and moderate elites to help shape education goals. The resulting curricula would better represent the views of the nation. Effective national tests, meanwhile, if their results were fully public, would enable parents under a school- choice regime to make informed decisions when shopping for schools.

Many conservatives object to national boards on the grounds that state governments make wiser decisions than anybody located in Washington. This hallowed assumption is not borne out by the facts. Our current national tests are more rigorous than those of any state except Delaware, New Hampshire, and Kentucky. They expose the low expectations underlying many state tests and the false comfort held out by students’ scores. As Bush education official Diane Ravitch points out, 80 percent of Louisiana students passed the latest seventh-grade state test in math but only 10 percent met the expectations of the national NAEP tests. In Wisconsin, 88 percent of students met the state reading standard, but only 35 percent satisfied NAEP. Results like these are replicated in state after state. The NAEP tests demonstrate that high expectations can best be upheld at the national level.

Anybody who has romantic notions about state curricula should read a new report from the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. Sandra Stotsky of Harvard and Boston University surveyed English standards in 28 states. Her work is nuanced and scholarly, and she found some states with relatively high standards — Arizona, Virginia, Massachusetts, and Illinois. But overall her study makes depressing reading. Most of the standards are faddish, jargon ridden, and predictably ideological. We learn, for example, that on the title page of its standards, Kansas no longer calls the subject “English” so as not to give ethnocentric preference to any single language or tradition. English teachers are “communications arts teachers.” Many states seem more intent on giving kids a dumbed-down course in advanced linguistics (words are signifiers without fixed meanings) than on introducing them to the fundamental works of American literature.

Obviously, national standards and tests can go astray. If you’ve watched the leading education experts from the Reagan and Bush administrations over the past year, you’ve seen them engaged in a tortuous dance. They support national tests and standards in principle, but they find themselves walking away from national efforts coopted and perverted by the forces of the status quo. They know that it is worse to have bad national tests and standards than to have none at all.

But that is no reason to give up and conclude that the struggle should not be waged in the national arena. On the contrary, the national arena is the best place for reformers. The education establishment is a huge and tireless network that is most successful when it operates below the media’s radar. Conservative reformers can hope to win education battles only if they can attract the attention of people without any professional interest in education policy. Conservatives can do this in Washington, where they have built a think-tank and media network far more sophisticated than they enjoy in most state capitals.

A few years ago, former head of the National Endowment for the Humanities Lynne Cheney started a furor when she described the awful national history standards then being devised by Gary Nash and other history professors under the abortive Bush-administration push for standards. Her op-ed in the Wall Street Journal was picked up in the conservative media and led to a resolution in the Senate that effectively quashed those standards. One might see that episode as proof that national-standard setting is hopeless. Or one might notice that mainstream Americans were able to block bad standards — which, at the state level, might very well have sailed through. The Fordham Institute report makes clear that similar standards have been adopted in state after state.

In 1995, Republicans took over as the majority party in Congress insisting that Americans wanted government to leave them alone. But in 1997, the people who are being left most alone by the Republicans are the educrats at the Department of Education and the National Education Association. If Republicans want to break up the public-sector education trust, if they want to replace multicultural faddism with a serious American curriculum, they need limited but energetic national policies. They have to defeat the opposition where it is, not where they would like it to be.

Beyond that, Republicans should acknowledge that it’s not good enough for a few parents to create high-quality havens for their kids by home schooling or finding the right private schools. It matters how the rest of the nation is taught. It matters whether the nation’s workforce is well or poorly educated and whether voters have a grounding in American history. It matters whether the children of the nation’s immigrants speak English and are inculcated with American values. A nation as heterogeneous as ours suffers if no shared body of knowledge and beliefs is passed from generation to generation through the nation’s schools. A national debate about education might remind Republicans of something they seem to have forsaken since Ronald Reagan left office. We are not just atomized actors but are rather American citizens, and our fates and the fates of our children are linked. It would be calamitous if, either in the multicultural fog or in the formless isolation of untrammeled individualism, that sense of nationhood were lost. ,

David Brooks is a senior editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.