A Simple Government (13 page)

Michelle Rhee, the former chancellor of public schools for the District of Columbia, said, “When I first came here, all the adults [teachers] were fine; they all had satisfactory ratings. But only 8 percent of eighth graders were on grade level for math. How’s that for an accountable system that puts the children first?”

While more than half the states offer some form of merit pay in theory, it’s usually a reality in just a few districts or schools. In their 2010 paper “Blocking, Diluting, and Co-Opting Merit Pay,” Stuart Buck and Jay Greene of the University of Arkansas found that of the 15,200 school districts in the United States, only 528 were using merit pay, which is 3.5 percent of districts. They discovered that where merit pay was enacted, “it often ends up being blocked, co-opted, or diluted by established interests.” For example, it is enacted temporarily and then expires, or it is repealed under the excuse of budget constraints, or unions keep local districts from participating. Buck and Greene reported that of the 360 school districts in Iowa, only three applied for a merit-pay plan that was passed in 2007.

Buck and Greene wrote that merit-pay plans are foiled when pay is determined based on résumé builders like graduate degrees rather than on actual results like test scores or graduation rates. Likewise, they are ineffective when they require a very low standard of actual improvement and when they are used for what is effectively an acrossthe-board raise in which bonuses small and are given to most teachers.

Buck and Greene concluded that merit pay depends on school choice and competition to succeed and defeat the “powers that be”:

That’s an interesting concept—school people versus kid people. Whom do we owe a responsibility to? Our schools or our students?

Buck and Greene went on to argue that schools should adopt merit-pay programs, which would make the teaching profession more competitive and thus attract better candidates.

Some say that merit pay wouldn’t be fair, that some teachers would get more simply because the principal likes them. But isn’t that how life works in the private sector? Don’t some people get promoted because their boss thinks they do a good job? Merit pay at every school in the country would create a system superior overall to what we have now. We hear all this agonizing about the criteria for merit pay, about the difficulty of deciding who deserves more. The truth is that principals know who their best teachers are. Teachers themselves know who the best teachers in their school are, as do the children and their parents.

Of course, it is not easy to establish merit pay and abolish tenure. Take Florida, where the legislature passed both reforms but they fell victim to Governor Charlie Crist’s political ambitions. Having changed his party affiliation to Independent from Republican, he vetoed the bill as part of his strategy of moving leftward to try to win a Senate seat in 2010. But at the end of the day, we need to ask ourselves, who loses when we don’t educate our children? Everyone.

During my decade as governor, there were many situations that confronted me that were not of my own choosing, and the field of education was no exception. It was always easy for some expert from out of state based at a Washington think tank to evaluate the decisions I had to make on the ground. That is the reality of leadership: Every governor in the country has to navigate whatever situation arises.

In December 2002, the Supreme Court of Arkansas finally ruled in a nearly twenty-year-old ongoing lawsuit related to school funding. The justices decided that the state had failed in terms of both educational equity and educational adequacy. The court directed the state to ensure that all students, no matter what their geographical location, be granted access to essentially the same education as all other Arkansas students. This ruling would have several consequences. For one, there would have to be increased spending on a per-pupil basis to deal with the differences in spending between affluent and less well-off communities. For another, objective evaluators would be brought in to determine exactly what was adequate and what was equitable. Arkansas schools spent considerably less per pupil than most states—in some districts, pitifully below others—so there really was no way to argue the propriety of the decision.

This was a very challenging experience. I was confronted with the necessity of getting adequate revenue to comply with the court’s orders and, more important, meet the very real needs of the children of our state. But this could only be achieved if I sailed through some very unfriendly legislative waters. Nor were many people pleased when I suggested that, rather than simply spend more money, we commit to spending it efficiently. Specifically, I argued that we should not raise revenue unless we made the politically tough decision to consolidate many school districts because their separate existence could not be justified financially. Only consolidation, I felt, would produce the economies of scale that needed to be achieved in order to operate an efficient system.

In many cases, my approach was unpopular and would later provide a great deal of political fodder to my opponents in the presidential campaign. They made simplistic charges against me without putting forth any context. Of course, this is one of the most painful realities of today’s politics. If a person has no record at all or, if already in political office, has carefully avoided confrontations and difficult decision making, the voter has no way of knowing what the candidate’s really made of. I have always believed that ultimately, people would rather elect those with the courage to make tough decisions than those who’ve governed so as to preserve their own political future at the expense of a better future for coming generations.

As I’ve recalled for you here, in my experience, educational issues are affected by all levels of government and by the beliefs and convictions of school officials, elected representatives, and outside “experts,” as well as by the legal opinions issued by courts. As I said before, education is a function of state and local governments and was never intended, as evidenced by our Constitution and the words of our Founding Fathers themselves, to be a federal concern. As we look directly into the classroom now, please don’t forget this context. It is complex and can be determinative.

Although I believe education should be left to the states, I fully endorse the new federal program Race to the Top, which has states compete for additional education funds, allowing them to decide what reforms to enact rather than having specific reforms imposed on them from above. Applications are evaluated under a five-hundred-point system, with points awarded based on criteria in several categories. The greatest number of points (138) is allocated to the category of reforms that address tenure and seniority.

It’s a very clever way to prod states to embrace much-needed reform just out of the
hope
of getting federal money, without actually promising any particular state anything. The mere prospect of this money has motivated states to stand up to their teachers’ unions or get unions to agree to reforms they’ve opposed in the past. It’s like getting all five of your children to do a great job on their chores knowing that only the one who does best will get an allowance. For all the criticism of the Obama administration (and I’ve been the source of plenty), this is an area where I give them credit. If we’re going to spend federal money on education and have a federal education department (even though it’s not really a constitutional function of the federal government), then we ought to at least make the money count.

The $4.3 billion allocated is less than 1 percent of the money spent annually on education by government at all levels. But small amounts of money—in fact, just the possibility of small amounts of money—can effect significant change. So far about half the states have passed reforms in their effort to get a share of this money. Forty states and the District of Columbia competed in stage one, which concluded in March 2010 with grants to Delaware and Tennessee.

Besides attracting and keeping better teachers, we have to help our teachers help our children. One of the major reasons for dropping out is simple boredom. I want to transform America’s high schools by putting each student at the center of his education to make his learning personal, relevant, and respectful of his individual learning style. The New Hampshire Vision for Redesign has done impressive work on this concept of “personalized learning” that can serve as a model for our whole country. A close friend of mine, Fred Bramante, owns a chain of music stores along the East Coast and, after serving on the state board of education in New Hampshire, envisioned a different and revolutionary approach that would center on the interests of the student rather than those of the school institution.

With the help of his parents, teachers, and community, each student drafts a learning plan. For part of each day, he studies the core curriculum. But beyond that, he is encouraged to integrate his personal passions and career ambitions into credits toward his high school diploma. What has traditionally been considered extracurricular becomes a source of academic credit. A student who takes karate lessons gets gym credits. A student who plays in a rock band gets music credits. A student who interns for the local newspaper gets English credits. The opportunities are as limitless as our children’s imaginations, dreams, and talents and our communities’ willingness to help them. What’s brilliant is that students are able to integrate what they are studying with real-world experience so that they understand that what they learn has authentic practical value. It exchanges the make-work of many schools for something vibrant. Fred’s vision is catching on, and rightfully so.

Local businesses should participate to ensure that they have homegrown talent to fill their jobs. Community colleges should get involved to encourage students who were at risk of dropping out to see themselves as college material and to ensure that their transition to higher education is seamless and won’t require remedial classes.

Students don’t have to sit in the classroom all day, staring out the window and watching the clock. Let’s take the walls and roof off our classrooms and realize that they should encompass the entire community. In fact, in the age of the Internet, they should encompass the whole world.

We are a nation proud of our respect for the individual, yet for too long our high schools have been cookie cutter, one size fits all. Let’s encourage the individuality of our children; let’s acknowledge that each one has his special God-given gifts, his unique contribution to make to America. One can play the violin like an angel, and another does science experiments that will help us achieve energy independence. Transforming our schools with personalized learning won’t just lift our graduation rates. It will lift our children into more successful and satisfying lives.

The twenty-first century will belong to the creative; they will thrive and prosper, both as individuals and as societies. The creative ones will be the competitive ones. While you can’t teach creativity the way you do state capitals and multiplication tables, you can nurture it by offering art and music to all of our students, all the way through school. I believe that the secret weapons for our remaining creative and competitive in the global economy are art and music, what I call our “weapons of mass instruction.”

Studies have shown a direct correlation between music education and math scores. Music develops both sides of the brain and improves spatial reasoning and the capacity to think in the abstract. Music teaches students how to learn, and that skill is transferable to learning foreign languages, algebra, or history.

Art and music education levels the differences in academic performance among students from different socioeconomic backgrounds and reduces delinquent behavior. Art and music education results in what all parents and school districts are looking to brag about—higher SAT scores.

Some children decide early on that they’re not good at school and they hate it. Art and music can save these children, can keep them in school. For them, biology may be broccoli and Spanish may be spinach, but when they get to art class or band practice, that’s a hot fudge sundae. If it weren’t for these opportunities, where they feel successful and worthwhile, where they’re enthusiastic and engaged, many students would drop out of school. According to research by the Education Commission of the States, there is an established correlation between art and music education and high school drop out rates.

It infuriates me when people, especially my fellow conservatives, dismiss art and music as extracurricular, extraneous, and expendable. To me, they’re essential to a well-rounded education.

In reality, creativity doesn’t really have to be “taught” because it is naturally “caught” by every child. Do you have to beg a three-year-old to sing or a four-year-old to draw pictures or a five-year-old to playact various roles when playing fireman, doctor, or parent? What happens between the naturally creative early years and the bored-to-death teenage years? Those years are spent in a classroom in which students are told to sit down, be quiet, face forward, get your head in the book, and be still. Students today aren’t dumb—the people who run the educational establishment, who want to create a conveyor belt that treats students like parts in a manufacturing plant (like the one in the Pink Floyd videos), are the dumb ones. And there’s no reason to let it stay that way.