Leadership and Crisis (9 page)

The education establishment cannot rightly expect us to take dollars from taxpayers, who often earn less than the average college professor, and use that money to subsidize courses or research on professors’ esoteric pet topics. The world does not need another scholarly article on something random like “The Embedding of Economic Pressures and Gender Ideals in Postsocialist International Matchmaking.”
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Taxpayers need to know that investing in education has a real purpose—that it will create better lives and more job opportunities for their children and grandchildren.

Anyone looking to reform our education system inevitably runs up against the education establishment, which is utterly opposed to prioritizing how schools and teachers perform. Because the establishment simply does not want to be held accountable, they hide behind the students, claiming some kids just can’t learn, or that other teachers, classes, or schools are not preparing them for success before they arrive on a college campus. This attitude of blaming everyone else for not properly educating our kids is the establishment’s version of “the dog ate my homework” excuse. Too many of these education bureaucrats are more focused on protecting their own jobs and benefits, not looking after the interests of our children.

With that priority, it’s not surprising the education establishment often dismisses the legitimate concerns of parents. In the public school system, when parents are not empowered with choices, officials don’t really need to listen to them. In a 1996 court case in Franklin County, Ohio, involving a parental choice initiative, an
attorney for the American Federation of Teachers actually called parents “inconsequential conduits.”
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I’ve been called worse in my life, but that kind of arrogant disdain for parents makes my blood boil. And it reflects the attitudes of too many education professionals and bureaucrats who believe everything would be perfect if we would just stay out of their way.

Even if you don’t have children in the school system, education should still matter to you. The primary building blocks of the U.S. economy are the skills and capabilities of our people. For more than two centuries, education has been the engine that has propelled us to greatness, but now we are sputtering. A strong country simply can’t be sustained without a strong education system.

With our current dysfunctional education system, we risk being overtaken by other nations. Tests consistently show we are in the middle or near the bottom in academic performance when compared to other major industrialized countries.
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Being average or below average is not acceptable. We’re Americans, after all.

Our Founding Fathers saw a vibrant and effective education system as central to protecting our liberties. Thomas Jefferson warned, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”
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Thus, education has always been at the center of the American experiment in limited self-government. Back in 1647 the Massachusetts Legislature passed a law that required any community with fifty families or more to set up a public grammar school. Every town with one hundred or more families was required to establish a more advanced school to prepare young boys to attend Harvard. The American approach to education, traditionally involving public schools with high standards, worked. America soon developed literacy rates that were the envy of the world. John Adams, who spent
many years in France, pointed out how much more literate Americans were than the French—out of 24 million French citizens, only half a million could read and write.
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Alexis de Tocqueville noted in his book
Democracy in America
that “the American people will appear to be the most enlightened in the world.” Observing that people were expected to be well-informed and well-read, he wrote, “It cannot be doubted that in the United States the instruction of the people powerfully contributes to the support of the democratic republic.”
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Although secularists and others would like to deny it, literacy rates were so high in early America partly due to the early influence of Christianity and the Bible. As Daniel Webster observed, the Scriptures proved to be a great component in literacy, because wherever Americans went “the Bible came with them.” Parents worked hard to get their kids into Harvard—and Harvard was primarily a seminary. Indeed, most of America’s first colleges began as seminaries.

Teachers’ union leaders and other interest groups endlessly complain that our schools lack resources—as if performance would dramatically improve if we would only throw more money into a failing system. History shows otherwise. According to the U.S. Department of Education, by the end of World War II we were spending $1,214 per student in 2001 inflation adjusted dollars. By the fifties that number nearly doubled to $2,345. By 1972 it had nearly doubled again to $4,479. By 2002, more than thirty years later, it had nearly doubled yet again to $8,745 .
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And what has happened to American education? Do I really need to answer that question?

Don’t get me wrong, resources are important. In fact, in my first budget as governor I included enough money to raise the salary of Louisiana teachers to the southern average, and we’ve kept it at that
average ever since. While good teachers should be well-paid, however, right now the U.S. education system pays its highest salaries and best benefits to teachers based simply on longevity in the classroom. One study found a high-quality teacher is only about half as likely to make it to the seven-year mark as a low-quality teacher. What this means is that too many good teachers get pushed out of the system.
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Pay should be tied to performance, not seniority. Is there anywhere in America (outside of government) where your salary is based solely on how long you’ve been there rather than results? If a teacher takes students who are three grades behind in reading and brings them up to their age level, that teacher should be rewarded. Also, we should reward teachers who are teaching a difficult or high-demand subject, or those teaching in an area where it’s hard to recruit teachers.

Let me be crystal clear with regard to my admiration of teachers and the teaching profession. In politics, when you challenge the way our current education system works, you are often attacked by your opponents as “anti-teacher.” That’s politics for you. I am hard pressed to think of a more noble or more important calling in life than being a teacher. They are almost certainly undervalued and underappreciated in our society. In my own experience, it was the patience, thoughtfulness, and determination of teachers that gave me many of the opportunities I have had in life. Without dedicated teachers, America has no chance to thrive.

In my first year as governor, I proposed a flex pay program for teachers so that school districts could pay more to attract the teachers they need. But local school leaders said they couldn’t adopt the program because the unions would make their lives miserable. You see, paying individual teachers for high performance, or because they teach a hard-to-fill subject, disrupts the herd mentality on which the union
leadership thrives; the union’s goal is to convince teachers that seniority is the only fair way to allocate pay. But that’s hardly in the best interests of individual teachers who want to excel; it actually encourages teachers to simply follow the pack and serve out their time.

Flex pay or merit pay may inconvenience union leaders, but it’s a much better model to drive outcomes in our classrooms, as well as a better model for young, motivated teachers and experienced teachers who are achieving impressive results or teaching complex subjects. Young teachers and high-performing teachers need to force their union leaders to truly represent their interests—and the best interests of our children.

In 2010, we passed a value-added teacher evaluation bill geared toward teaching and student achievement. In fact, the
Washington Post
called our education reform agenda “ambitious” because it brings accountability to schools and actually measures teachers and classrooms based on results.
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This legislation assesses teachers fairly, based on a student’s true progress over the course of a year. These data will help to identify the good teachers to reward them, and the struggling teachers to provide them the training they need to become more effective. The result will be better teachers and better student outcomes.

There are countless heroic teachers performing miracles in our schools every day—but too often they succeed despite, not because of, the way they are compensated.

Throwing money at schools has been tried many times. In a famous 1984 court case in Kansas City, Missouri, Judge Russell G. Clark used his powers as a federal judge to take over the Kansas City school district to try to rectify educational inequality. He unilaterally ordered
the near doubling of city property taxes to fund lavish education spending. The school district built swimming pools and TV studios, bought computers and hired a legion of specialists. And what happened? Test scores stayed flat, the dropout rate increased, and attendance dropped. “They had as much money as any school district will ever get,” reported Gary Orfield, a Harvard investigator who tracked the ten-year experiment. “It didn’t do very much.”
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Money is not the problem. The simple fact is the engine of American education is broken because it is badly designed. Our education system doesn’t lack money; it lacks healthy competition, incentives to excel, and high expectations.

Have you ever wondered why our K-12 system is failing our children but our university system is the world’s best? The difference is easy to explain: colleges and universities compete for students, scholars, and grant dollars. Students aren’t required to attend them.

Compare that to elementary and secondary education. If your children, attend public school, their school is probably determined by your address. Why do we allow this local monopoly? Why don’t we force public schools to compete just like private and parochial schools do? Today, if parents don’t like their local public school they have three choices: they can home school or pay for private school tuition—if they can afford it—or they can move.

Imagine for a minute if our universities and colleges operated under the same rules as our elementary schools. If you lived in one part of Louisiana, you could only attend Louisiana State University. If you had a different zip code, your only option would be the University of Louisiana at Monroe. Students from one part of Massachusetts would go to Harvard, those from another to Boston University. In other words, universities would be guaranteed a set number of students
regardless of their performance. And what if research grants were offered to universities not based on what they could do, but based on the simple fact that these schools existed? What would happen to our universities? With no incentive to compete or improve, they would quickly decay.

Competition forces school officials to focus on getting results. During his January 2010 State of the Union address, President Obama said education quality shouldn’t be based on your zip code. Virginia’s Republican governor Bob McDonnell said the same thing in his response. So why can’t we make this a reality?

In my first year in office, we pushed legislation for a student scholarship program in New Orleans. (We also passed a modest tax deduction to help parents who are spending their own dollars for tuition and other education expenses.) The premise was simple: in New Orleans, we spend roughly $8,400 per child. If parents had a child in a failing public school in New Orleans, I proposed letting them take a maximum of 90 percent of those funds and use them to pay tuition at a participating private or parochial school. I called it a student scholarship program. It lets parents, and private and parochial schools, decide if they want to participate, and it has essentially no effect on the budget. Indeed, the average scholarship size has been much less: $4,593. Most importantly, this program targets those parents who need it most. In fact, the average income for the scholarship applications we received was $15,564.

Who in their right mind would oppose giving parents such a choice? The education establishment, of course, because they believe they are entitled to your children and your tax dollars. For trying to give parents a choice in the matter, I was charged with attacking the public schools. Well, despite that nonsense we passed the bill, and I
proudly signed it into law—and the program’s chief supporters have been parents.

Every year, many of these parents take time off from their jobs to tell lawmakers at the Capitol how important this program is to them and their children. You should hear these parents; some of them have tears in their eyes when they relate how they finally feel good about the opportunities they’re giving their kids. They have hope in their eyes. No one should ever think these parents care any less about the quality of their child’s education than more affluent parents do. I can’t imagine why the education establishment refuses to learn from parents like these who are desperate for a choice. Why should wealthy families be the only ones who have choice?