Lamar Alexander's Remarks to the Hoover Institution's Koret Task Force

Lamar Alexander's Remarks
To the Hoover Institution's Koret Task Force
The Willard Hotel, Washington, D.C.

AS DELIVERED
As a freshman Senator, I am in an office that is difficult to find—it's in the basement of the Dirksen Senate Building. I told Vice President Dick Cheney the other day that I believe my office may be one of his "undisclosed locations."

Several freshman Senators are housed in double wide trailers in the Russell Office Building. I don't even have enough seniority to be in a double-wide, so I am certainly honored to be invited to join such distinguished company here today.

First, congratulations to those of you who worked on the Koret Report. It is a timely, well-reasoned piece of work on the most important business our country has before us, quality education.

Some people might ask, what is the value of a report on a report? I would answer that other than teaching one child to read, helping to write such a report is probably the most useful thing one person could do.

Which is why I believe "A Nation at Risk" was the most significant action of the United States Department of Education in its short history. This is because—at the national level—talking, exhorting and encouraging is most of what can be done to improve education in America's decentralized education system.

As Secretary of Education, I believed that a national movement to improve education would be a lot more effective than a federal program. Even as governor, this was true. The reason Minnesota and Iowa have better schools than Tennessee does is because they place a higher value on education, while we place a higher value on fast cars, hunting and football.

I concluded after eight years of enacting programs to improve education quality, that all our talk had done more lasting good than the programs. Talking helps place a higher value on education. It is the main thing that works.

So let's talk.

This morning I want to comment on three of the Koret Report's comments:

First, your suggestion that not very much happened to implement the recommendations of a "Nation at Risk" after 1983. I disagree.

Second, your suggestion that results, after twenty years, are disappointing: I agree with that.

Third, your suggestion that what we should do now is focus on accountability, choice and transparency. I agree, but I think there are more than just those three.

I

Let's take the first point briefly.

I believe that much more happened to implement the 1983 report than the report acknowledges and that the people who were trying to implement it were exactly the people who one would hope would have tried to do it.

I had a front row seat in that.

In 1983, I was beginning my second term as governor. I had learned quite a bit about Tennessee. One of the most important things I learned was that better schools mean better jobs.

Other governors like Bill Clinton in Arkansas, Dick Riley in South Carolina, and Bob Graham in Florida, who were also elected in 1978, had learned the same things. So "A Nation at Risk" was a welcome validation of what we were trying to do.

We knew there had to be real changes. In a private southern governor's meeting at the end of 1981, I asked, "When is one of us going to get up the nerve to take on the teacher's union?"

So, in 1983, I did. At that time, not one state was paying one teacher one penny more for being a good teacher, so I spent a year and a half as governor, devoting 70 percent of my time, putting in a master teacher program which paid 10,000 teachers more for teaching well.

We also raised standards, focused on basic skills and computer skills, raised college admission requirements, created a dozen summer governor's schools, 100 chairs of excellence and spent a year mobilizing 125 Better Schools Task Forces.

And I certainly wasn't alone. Education was the topic of every governor's meeting then. Governor Graham focused on a master teacher program and flew to Nashville to help pass our master teacher program. Governor Clinton focused on teacher testing, and Governor Riley raised sales tax a penny to support his changes.

Then, for the first time governors focused on a single subject, education, for five years with a six-point agenda that challenged major assumptions: standards, time, choice and curriculum.

The emphasis on this "Time for Results" period was moving from social desegregation to what children know and can do. It was old fashioned horse trading—flexibility and money in exchange for results. That was 1985 through 1986.

But it didn't stop there.

In 1989 came the education summit with governors and President George H. W. Bush during which the first national education goals ever were set. He was the first of three presidents to say they wanted to be education presidents.

To follow up, the first President Bush established America 2000, introducing flexibility as well as a GI Bill for Kids, $1 million each for 435 "break the mold" schools, $50 million private dollars for New American Schools Development Corporation and 3,000 monthly community meetings connected by satellite television.

In 1993, President Clinton introduced Goals 2000. Next came a second wave of governors, and some of them got things done. Tommy Thompson, who focused on choice; John Engler and Bill Weld, who pushed charters; Jim Hunt who focused on the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards; George W. Bush with standards; and Jeb Bush, choice and charters.

In 2002, President Bush and Senator Kennedy worked together on No Child Left Behind. Head Start funding rose unchallenged during this period.

Some mayors, specifically in Chicago and New York, were taking responsibility for schools. Federal and state dollars were poured into schools.

So looking at it all from here, during the last twenty years, there has been a hurricane of activity in education, and most of the right people were pushing hard: presidents, governors, mayors, legislators, congress and business people. Lots of money, and it should have worked.

II

Which brings me to point two, it didn't. Not much changed in terms of results. Results should have been better. Why weren't they?

First, as you suggest, top down and DC-led efforts won't cut it. That is why "A Nation at Risk" was the most effective federal action in K-12 education. The National Assessment of Educational Progress is probably the second most important thing the federal government does. Agenda setting comes next as far as choice, flexibility, charters, standards and testing needed, and those things needed a national push. Until teachers and parents buy in to their schools, nothing happens.

Second, in the report I believe you underestimate the effect on schools of a society in pandemonium. Schools are a reflection of the communities in which they exist, and it is hard to teach in the midst of pandemonium.

Look at what was going on during the last twenty years in communities in America. Racial desegregation and court orders were destroying neighborhood schools with cross town busing.

The 1965 immigration law amendments literally changed the face of the country. Children were arriving in October speaking no English and leaving in March.

Also in the sixties, the culture of the time was to challenge authority.

Women went to work outside of the home with few societal adjustments. (In World War II, worksite day care was quickly established in factories for "Rosie the riveter," but there was no such change in the following decades to match that.)

Teachers' unions were all powerful, organizing and striking.

The new federal role meant a lot of new regulations with a trade off of very little money.

World competition in the marketplace raised standards. Jobs at the Saturn auto plant in Tennessee are much harder to do now.

And we forgot one important purpose of public schools. At an education meeting in Rochester in 1988, Notre Dame President Monk Malloy asked, "What is the rationale for the public school?" American Federation of Teaches President, Al Shanker replied, "to teach immigrant children the three R's and what is means to be an American with hope they'll go home and teach their parents." We've forgotten to teach children what it means to be an American.

Since 1983, instead of focusing on the three R's, the focus has been on cross-town busing, equity and discipline problems. Instead of the focus being on what it means to be an American, it has been on bilingualism and multiculturalism.

Will Rogers was once asked about a congressman who people were upset about, and he said, "I know the congressman and I know the district, and the congressman is pretty well representative of most of the people in the district."

Well, schools since 1983 have been pretty well representative of most of the communities they serve.

The third reason for no real change in results during the last twenty years is that real structural change has proved to be virtually impossible. My 1984 speech at the University of the South was titled, "There are seven deep ruts hurting our schools." Those ruts today still run deep. There is no better pay for the best teachers; not much choice for parents; no real autonomy for schools; school facilities are underused; we're still arguing about whether every child can learn; teachers' unions were in charge then and are in charge now. As Ross Perot told me in 1984, "Changing the public schools of Texas was the hardest, meanest, bloodiest thing I've ever tried to do."

Maybe twenty years is not long enough. It is possible that changes we want are happening and it takes longer than we thought. After all, there are now hundreds of charters, choice in a few places, new standards, tests, No Child Left Behind and every one is talking about education.

Education reform is like a big freight train. It takes a long time to get it moving, and once it gets going it's hard to stop.

Finally, not enough money is being spent in the right places. Total education dollars spent on each student is $8,100, and about $650 of that per student is made up of federal dollars. This contravenes gross statistics and conjures images of DC schools overspending with poor results and conventional wisdom.

The report does mention the extra cost of disadvantaged children. IDEA and No Child Left Behind impose a lot of burdens. In Tennessee, over the past 20 years every 50 cents we spent on education then is 27 cents today. Many education activities are underfunded.

III

So what should be done now?

You say accountability and transparency. I agree.

We need to make sure the "No Child Left Behind Act" is well-implemented, not necessarily rapidly implemented. I think it's better to go slowly than to get it wrong.

There are real transition problems with the new law. For example, Nebraska and Louisiana have no state systems, while Iowa and New Hampshire have strong local control traditions.

During two school visits to Tennessee last week, I heard about difficulty with rules established from a distance. What seems simple from up here is sometimes hard to implement down there.

Some concerns I heard were: testing new arrivals from other countries on their first day, in many cases students that don't speak English; limited exemptions for special education students; paper work; sending all middle school teachers back to school to attain different certification; 95 percent testing for subgroups of students; and confusion between state and federal rules. You say choice for parents, and I agree, I suggest the best strategy is what President George H.W. Bush proposed…the GI Bill for Kids. At a speech I gave at Duke last year, I suggested a $250 scholarship for every middle and low income family student, which would be $7 billion new federal dollars. Or combine such new federal scholarships with an emphasis on helping disadvantaged children such as children of prisoners, or children with disabilities.

Public school leaders who oppose such ideas reflexively are damaging our schools and removing prospects for more federal dollars for local schools. They would do well to read a paper by a young Harvard graduate student in the late 1960's, during the Lyndon B. Johnson "power to the people" era, who proposed a "Poor People's Bill of Right" that would give $5,000 to every poor child that each child could spend at any accredited school. That graduate student's name was Ted Sizer.

So I would suggest these other priorities:

1. Increased autonomy—Union rules, court orders, and federal and state regulations have left teachers and principals tied in knots and school boards with very little discretion.

Cross town busing needs to be ended; there needs to be more flexibility in spending federal dollars; every public school should eventually be a charter school; we should encourage the establishment of professional associations as in Georgia and Texas that encourage good teaching instead of taking control of schools like the unions. All of these things create autonomy.

2. Pay good teachers more—Al Shanker once said, "If we can have master plumbers, why not have master teachers?" I agree with that sentiment. We should support the National Board for Teaching Standards to accomplish that. We should support initiatives for good teaching, like Governor's Schools for Teachers of Writing.

3. End the war on parents—Right now parents raising children face: higher taxes; no workplace support; a culture with drugs and trash on television; and there are a limited number of education options for parents. There is a lot of confusion, especially for low income parents.

4. Put the teaching of American History and Civics back in its rightful place in our schools so that our children can grow up learning what it means to be an American.

5. Finally, we need to keep in mind the most successful education model in the world: the American college and university. I know that colleges can be arrogant, uneven, and downright weird sometimes, but the United States still has almost all of the best colleges in the world, and colleges aren't that much different than schools. A major difference, however, is that our colleges focus on autonomy, flexibility, differential pay, and federal dollars follow students to the college of their choice.

I once asked David Gardner why the University of California is such a good system. He answered, because the founders focused on excellence, California's state constitution gave the university autonomy, and the federal government has been generous with funds that follow students to the campus of their choice.

If that model helped create the best colleges in the world, why not use it to help create the best schools?