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of Congressman Armey's speech |
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This AdTI background paper is adapted and expanded from Mr. Armey's
address at the Odyssey Charter School
"The State of American Education -
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Every February since 1994, the Secretary of Education has made it a practice to deliver an address focused on the "state of education." This year, I've been invited to issue a formal rebuttal. It's my pleasure to take up that challenge and to offer these observations on the state of U.S. education, and on Secretary Riley's own views of it. But first, I think it's only appropriate to pause and acknowledge the positive benefit that comes from this tradition. Although we have many disagreements, it seems to me that these state of education addresses of Mr. Riley's constitute a wholesome practice. I'd like to thank and commend the secretary for this innovation.
A few weeks ago, some of the most respected minds in education to paid tribute to one of Secretary Riley's predecessors - former Education Commissioner Harold Howe II. Commissioner Howe served in the Johnson Administration, and as the proceedings and the speeches made clear, it was really commissioner Howe who in 1965, "ushered in," according to a recent Education Week, "an unprecedented federal role in schools." At that meeting, Commissioner Howe made one comment that strikes me as highly interesting, and I would like to present it here:
"Education comes not just from schooling, but from all kinds of things…. The most overreaching and significant missing of the game by this country about schools…. has been this neglect of the broad definition of education."
Commissioner Howe's remark is not only accurate; it is rich in meaning. As many education experts have told us, it is parents that often make or break their child's academic record in the first few years of life. They do this in many ways: by reading or not reaching; teaching right or wrong; insisting on homework; allowing television. Then there are neighbors, friends, role models; computer programs, books, newspapers, and radio; private charities, literacy volunteers, software training programs; and many others.
Indeed, Commissioner Howe has issued a very telling indictment of the education debate. The very fact that so much expert debate could take place which largely neglects the most important educational institutions of all, raises questions about the whole discussion - and about the educational establishment that has conducted it. Perhaps it really is true that we teach best what we most need to learn.
The education Renaissance and its sources
When we look at the state of American education through Commissioner Howe's lens - viewing it in the broad sense - we see a society teeming with teaching and learning. The statistics, and the human faces behind them, suggest that in fact, there is an education Renaissance taking place in the United States today. In many ways, the more we broaden our definition of "education," the better "education" is doing.
All you need to do is walk into a book shop or a computer software store nowadays to see the force of education in our society. Spilling off the shelves are titles like Reader Rabbit, Math Treasure Mountain, Science Fair 2000 - most of them with highly tailored sub-programs for different age groups and skill levels. The global market for educational software programs is, in fact, dominated by U.S. firms. By one Swiss estimate, more than 90 percent of global computer instruction is conducted using U.S. software.
These programs are supplemented around the country by such informal schools as the Kaplan-Washington Post "SCORE," and the Sylvan Corporation learning centers. For about $80 to $120 a month, parents can make sure their children learn how to read, write, and do math. Many parents, even in affluent school districs, flock to these centers because of their effectiveness.
These programs are not limited to the "high end" of digital and other activity, by the way. Members of the Congressional Black Caucus who were surveyed recently gave private companies high marks for their efforts to bring computer literacy and learning to the inner city. Such firms as Sisco Systems, Microsoft, and Novell offer certification courses that help graduates find jobs earning $30,000 to $50,000 a year and more in the under-manned sectors of software management, hardware repair, and the internet. In addition to these corporate for-profit and non-profit efforts, of course, is the vast generosity of Americans like Bill and Melinda Gates, Bill Cosby, John Walton, Michael Jordan, and others who are pouring literally hundreds of millions of dollars - each - into k-12 and university education.
How are parents, private institutions, and others doing as educators? Very well indeed. A large portion of American boys and girls can read even before they get to school. When an American researcher visited schools in Switzerland, Germany, and France recently, he was regaled with questions about how U.S. parents are able to teach their children how to read so well at such a young age.
Last year, by a conservative estimate, volunteer-run literacy efforts, many of them tuition free, taught more than 100,000 Americans how to read. These efforts have made a real dent in illiteracy over the last 20 years, bringing perhaps two million Americans into the ranks of the reading. It is unfortunate that the public schools failed to teach so many people how to read, but fortunate that popular initiative and effort has rescued them.
Home schools
Every year more and more parents take the pleadings of the education establishment to their logical conclusion and make the decision to school their children at home. This is the ultimate in parental involvement, though somehow one hears little praise coming from educators for these teacher-parents. Whether praised or scorned, however, the home-schoolers, as Dr. Lawrence M. Rudner reports, are working a quiet and successful revolution in education:
"Home school students do exceptionally well when compared with the nationwide average. In every subject and at every grade level home school students scored significantly higher than their public and private school counterparts… Almost one in four home school students (24.5%) is enrolled one or more grades above age level…. On average, home school students in grades 1-4 perform one grade level higher than their public and private school counterparts. By 8th grade the average home school student performs four grade levels above the national average."
Indeed, their success is so great, as The Wall Street Journal noted a few days ago, that it has set off a spirited competition among universities to attract home schoolers. The stone that was rejected by the elders has become the cornerstone of the new foundation.
Where the schools they have don't quite meet their need, Americans start new ones. In cities from Oakland to Chicago to New York, there's been a profusion of new private academies, and an expansion of old ones. Interestingly, some of that expansion is due in turn to the fact of another act of initiative and generosity - the financing of private scholarship programs by corporations, businessmen, and philanthropists like Virginia Gilder in Albany and Larry Smead in Los Angeles. At the center is the institution that catalyzed the new trend, the Bradley Foundation in Milwaukee.
Charter schools
In 1990, the nation had no charter schools; our first appeared, following the passage of pilot legislation, in Minnesota in 1991. By 1993, there were 37, located in multiple states. This grew to 267 charter schools in 1995, 781 in 1997, and 1,682 last year. Today charters instruct an estimated 200,000 students, and they do so as well or better than students in federal- and state-regulated schools according to survey data from California, Minnesota, and Arizona.
"We take children that a lot of people say can't learn and help them learn," as Greg Wilkes, the principal of Right Step Academy in downtown St. Paul and Minneapolis, notes. Indeed, in Minnesota, charter schools serve a higher proportion of students who are poor or have special needs than do the government-regulated schools. More than half of all charter students, for example - 52.5 percent - qualify for free or reduced price lunches. In non-charter public schools, the figure is 26.8 percent. They teach a higher share of students with disabilities, 17.2 percent versus 11.4 percent for other public schools, and a greater number of students with limited English proficiency: 11.2 percent in the charters, only 3.4 percent in other public schools. And as in most other states, charters they do this with less money, not more. Minnesota charter schools receive 20 percent to 35 percent less money per pupil than other schools in the state.
Not far up the coast from where we are today, a few years ago, a group of education entrepreneurs opened up the East Palo Alto Charter School. East Palo Alto is has some of the lowest incomes and the highest rates of crime on either side of the San Francisco Bay. Yet thanks to the implementation of accountability-based reading program, and a dedicated staff that emphasizes teaching over red tape, the school has already achieved substantial gains in reading and math performance on standardized tests. Last year, a volunteer bus driver from the school took a group of the students to the state math and science fair. Not only did the East Palo Alto students, who until a year or two ago were trapped in the area's failing government-regulated schools, perform credibly. They took home state awards in science and math in three different age categories.
Public schools - the lagging sector
There is one segment of American education, unfortunately, that is not working so well - public schools teaching children in grades k-12. We see this in a variety of sad statistics and the uhappy stories behind them.
Last year, America joined several dozen nations in administering standardized math, science, and reading tests to its fourth grade and eighth grade students. Once again, U.S. students did not crack the top ten performers. Our math and science performance regularly trail even such countries as Russia and the Czech Republic - proud nations, in many respects, but hardly nations with the resources to compete with American schools, if what our schools really lacked was money. In 1998, more than forty percent of college and university entrants required remedial reading, writing, or math work just to be ready to take on their regular curriculum.
Perhaps most tragically, there is a sense that our schools, from kindergarten through high school, cannot maintain order, morality, or even physical safety. Less than three years ago, virtually the entire public school system of our nation's capital had to shut down for weeks because a majority of its buildings could not meet basic fire or other safety codes.
Secretary Riley and his team of federal educrats, lobbyists, and statisticians hunt for an occasional test score that ekes in slightly above the low scores that have now prevailed for decades. But even they do not take very seriously the notion that the public school portion of American primary and secondary education are healthy. The bulk of nearly all the secretary's annual addresses, starting from the first, have been devoted to addressing the crisis in public schools - and to blaming opponents for the failure of federally funded and regulated schools.
Most of the secretary's words, it is true, have been devoted to setting forth a fleet of new reforms that will fix them. This is a tacit admission that they are broken. Respectively, and in many cases more than once, Secretary Riley has devoted major sections of those talks to urging each of the following:
- more money for school buildings,
- more money for teacher training,
- more money for teacher standards,
- more money for smaller class size,
- more money to recruit more teachers,
- more money to study student standards,
- more money to implement student standards,
- more money for pre-school children,
- more money for the critical ages of 6-10, when students learn to read,
- more money for the important teen years,
- more money for universities so they can help spur k-12 reforms - - -
And the list goes on.
Why aren't our public schools performing better? The Secretary, implicitly, says it's mainly a matter of money. This is despite the fact that the United States spends relatively large amounts per pupil: more than $10,000 per student in some inner-city districts.
Others blame teachers - teachers aren't trained well enough, teachers can't be fired, teachers can't get merit pay, teachers don't work during the summer. Some blame the students and parents. Too much television; not enough PTA meetings. If only every parent would fill out more forms at the end of each day; if only folks would feed their children a more nutritious breakfast; if only parents made sure their kids did their homework; if only they did the homework with the kids; if only they talked more about drugs, violence, values.
The conventional wisdom, in other words, has been that there is some flaw with one or more of the basic education inputs - parents, administrators, students, teachers, books, buildings. It would be hard to assert that any of those inputs is perfect. Teachers, students, and parents could all do more. The reformist analysis, however, is that none of these inputs is really the crux of the problem. Indeed, my guess would be that the typical American teacher or student is more talented than his counterpart in Europe or Asia. American parents are busy, but not especially more or less distracted from overseeing their children's education than parents in Germany, France, Japan, or elsewhere.
A reformist diagnosis: the system, not the inputs, are to blame
If so, then there must be something in the dynamic of how our parents and teachers and students inter-react that accounts for the unsatisfactory outcome of our schools. We need to look for a systemic flaw - a misalignment not of gross resources but of incentives, responsibility, initiative.
There is an enlightening passage from Leon Trotsky's book, The Revolution Betrayed, where he discusses the Soviet factory and its failures. Trotsky noted all the complaints from Moscow that Russian factories were poorly manned, badly led, underfunded, left ravaged by the war. Yet the same or worse was true of German factories, Trotsky noted. Trotsky insisted the causes must be institutional.
There must be some flaw in the organization of Russian work, he concluded; some blockage to normal advances in productivity and consumer satisfaction. After all, he reported, Russians who emigrated abroad and went to work in American or German or British factories were quickly assimilated and after a period of a few weeks were working at the same basic rate of output as their counterparts. The same was true even of individual managers and administrators.
If you were to transplant all the individual inputs of a Soviet factory to Germany or the United States, and have them operate under our system, Trotsky argued, the whole level of output of the Soviets would double or triple to reach the level of their counterparts.
This is not an idle comparison. John Gardner, the head of the Milwaukee Public Schools school board and a professional labor organizer, argues that "today's public schools recognize nothing so much as a 19th Century sweatshop or the more recent Soviet work system based on them." What do Gardner and I and other critics of the system mean when we say this?
In the late 1970s we created the Department of Education - a chief reason being that it would allegedly allow less federal spending to go farther by "streamlining" administration. Since that time, U.S. federal spending on education has more than doubled after accounting for inflation. The number of pages in the federal register devoted to federal education regulations has surged more than forty percent, and the impact of those regulations is highly burdensome, according to teachers. While the federal government still provides less than 10 percent of the funding for k-12 schools, it requires more than 70 percent of the paperwork, according to one widely cited estimate.
In Nebraska, as Senator Robert Kerrey has noted, state officials maintained a "wall of shame" on which all those federal forms that local schools must send in are kept, stack after stack of trays going on for yard after yard. But the states have not neglected a regulatory explosion of their own. California, New York, Texas, and for all I know most other states now have multiple volumes of regulations for teachers. In this environment, is it any wonder parents and voters regularly lose heart and feel like they want to give up on the public schools altogether?
If a school is not working - and by the way, Secretary Riley proposes vast new initiatives to help us figure that out, too - what should the parents in that district do?
Should they fire the principal? A more aggressive leader can often work wonders, but principals are, by law, supposed to implement the policies of a board; many of the great heroes of public education, the principals who've made their schools effective, basically have done so by violating the rules and working around the system.
You can fire the school board, I suppose - but that takes years, and a series of elections, in most districts. And if you do, you will find that the school set broad policies, but can't intervene day to day with the administration, let alone get rid of a troublesome teacher or a bad federal or state regulation.
You can fire teachers, and a small number deserve to be. But does anyone really think that anything more than a tiny minority of teachers are not working hard, trying to do a good job? Teachers live under the same morass of rules, regulations, bad incentives, and stifled initiative that everyone else does in the U.S. public school system.
To whom, then, should parents and voters look when the public schools fail them? The Washington Post recently editorialized about the mess that now exists in Washington, D.C., where neither the mayor, nor the school board, nor the principals, nor the teachers - and certainly not the parents - have real, unambiguous authority. "This is a guaranteed legislative presecription for problems," the Post wrote of one proposal it judged might add to the confusion. "Once again, the mayor, the school board, and the council would all be able to blame each other, and no one would be in a position to demand success."
In our public school system today, there is, to apply the Post's analysis nationally, "no one who can demand success," and no one to hold accountable, because the Education Blob has rendered the operation of our schools largely opaque. The system is out of reach except for parents who have the time and resources to launch a political crusade every time the system fails.
The heart of our opposition approach
There is a very simple logic to the opposition solution to this unaccountable blob. We want to take the one segment of education that isn't working very well and make it more like the segments that are working well.
The education sectors that are working have choice, consumer sovereignty. They don't necessarily have more money - in fact, they have less. But they do have clear lines of authority, and most important, market incentives. Schools, teachers, and students who fail pay the consequences. Those who succeed are rewarded.
The education sectors that aren't working are bureaucratic in nature. They have money, but they do not have consumer choice, incentives that liberate production and innovation. There are few rewards for effort and few penalties for failure.
When a market is highly thwarted by regulations, taxes, and other burdens, often even tiny increments of relief can produce a great liberation. In New York City, for example, in the late 1970s, schools in Harlem District Four were at about the bottom of the heap. Out of 33 districts, student performance on standard math and reading tests placed them 32nd. In semi-desperation, the district decided to allow parents of high school and later some lower grades to choose between different schools. The choice was limited to regular public schools. Even so, the impact was electric. Within a few years, the system had improved so much that Harlem, one of the poorest districts in the city with a high proportion of Hispanic and other students with English as second language, was up to 17th in the city.
It is almost tempting to say, as some would have it, that by the magic of free enterprise, these education problems will fix themselves. Unfortunately, many families lack the wherewithal to rely on anything but their local, government-regulated school for their child's basic education. Even under the most generous assumptions about the activities of private scholarship and voucher programs, such efforts will never be more than a drop in the bucket of what Merrill Lynch estimates is a $300 billion k-12 school industry.
For many families, education equals the public schools. And public schools are political institutions. If we are going to set education right, we must fix those schools - and that is a political task.
Parental involvement, no; parental sovereignty, yes.
If it is unclear who does run the schools now, perhaps we should start by asking, who ought to run the schools?
Those of us in what may be called the education opposition - a group that includes both Republicans and Democrats - have a plain answer to this question. We think the schools should be run not by experts, not by bureaucrats, and ultimately, not even by elected officials - but by parents themselves.
It's a daunting gamble, this trust in the people. We do it elsewhere in life. We let people buy their own cars - even though they lack the expertise of a mechanic or an engineer. We let people buy their own groceries, even though a nutritionist would be more qualified, and even though studies show the very length of their life may depend on how they eat. But when it comes to our own children, we find this challenge daunting. Perhaps it is the very fact that we know the choices are so important.
Nevertheless, to the question, who should direct the education of our children, reformers have a simple, almost courageous answer: Their parents.
By the way, I have never seen this question - who should run the schools? - put straightforwardly to a member of the administration or the education establishment.
But if the question were put, I think that Secretary Riley, and members of the education blob generally, would be highly uncomfortable. They know what is in their hearts. They know that the true answer is, they think a credentialed elite should run the schools. They also know, however, that does not sound very good in a democracy. In short, they are better men and women than their philosophy, they would look for a way to insinuate an answer without stating it. Still, if you strip away all circumlocution and get to the core of the education debate, it not hard to see that they favor education rule by the education blob - administrators, regulators, and union bosses applying a bewildering array of regulations, rules, strictures, and forms.
To be sure, this group favors a "major role" for parents. This very phrase, however, is revealingly condescending. The role they seek for parents is like the role of the horse in Animal Farm. They want the horse to work, cheer the other animals, even offer ideas now and then - but not complain, and certainly not challenge the right of the emperor and his officials to run the farm their way. They will call on parents to "play a role" in the process. They will appeal, as Secretary Riley has in more than one of his annual addresses, for "parental involvement."
But never will you here them say, parents should be in charge. We say that they should. This, as far as I can tell, is the exact difference between our two schools of thought.
If you look at some of their own initiatives, you will see this lack of faith in parents at work. For example, the administration has, to its credit, supported measures to expose schools that aren't working. The president and Secretary Riley support reading and math testing, and they support making the results public. But when happens when the results of all these initiatives show that a school is not working? What happens when the parents aren't satisfied with the results?
President Clinton, Secretary Riley, and the education blob, as far as I can determine, have no real answer for this. Their only solution is circular: The parents should then "get involved" and complain to the very school management, regulators, and other parts of the system that generated the bad result in the first place. As to what consequences there should be for bad schools, or rewards for good ones, neither Secretary Riley nor the president have much to say. And as to what recourse the parents and children should have, they stand mute.
President Clinton had some wonderful language in his 1996 debate with Robert Dole, and in the 1999 State of the Union address, about trusting parents over elites. The president came right up to the edge of supporting parental sovereignty. But at the end of the day, President Clinton cannot quite bring himself to say - as we in the opposition do -"take the money out of the hands of the regulators and give it to the parents."
Secretary Riley and the education establishment fear this idea, whatever the mechanics, whatever it is called. He attacks the concept nearly every year, even though the idea has only scattered application - so far - in the United States. Ironically he and our friends who oppose parental sovereignty often wonder at the extent to which those of us who favor it are, in their words, "obsessed with vouchers." What they fail to understand is, it is not a term or even a particular institutional arrangement that we think so much about - it is empowering parents. In any case, however "obsessed" we are with providing choices to parents, their side is equally and I would say more "obsessed" with denying choice - and keeping the system under control of the elites.
Milwaukee - the city where schools work
The most curious aspect of the Secretary's annual superficial swipe at vouchers, though, is this: He never mentions the one city in the United States where there is an actual program that allows parents to select public and private schools.
I was so surprised not to find the word "Milwaukee" in skimming through the state of education addresses that I asked the researchers at the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution to do a word search of the speeches, as a double-check to see if the program were referred to indirectly. They reported back that it is not. A Tocqueville staffer even called one of Secretary Riley's chief assistants, who helps edit and construct many of his speeches, to see if we were missing something. No, we were told - not only has the secretary never mentioned Milwaukee in his annual state of education address; his aides at the Department of Education are unaware that he has ever mentioned the Milwaukee voucher program at all.
One would think, given his opposition to school vouchers, that the Secretary would be very familiar with Milwaukee - if only to research, on cynical grounds, any flaws in the program that might be cited in opposing its spread elsewhere. Then again, when one reads the Secretary's criticisms of school vouchers, one realizes, he can't discuss Milwaukee. For the experience proves that all of the fear arguments and theoretical cavils raised by Secretary Riley and the education blob are belied by the cold, hard fact of vouchers in Milwaukee.
Vouchers, the Secretary insists, do nothing to help revitalize the public schools that 90 percent of children attend. In fact, however, school vouchers have revitalized the Milwaukee public schools by giving them a powerful incentive to improve. In 1998, the city's public schools adopted the motto, "we want to be Milwaukee's schools of choice," an implicit acknowledgement that they must become schools of choice - or parents can take their money elsewhere. Mayor John Norquist pledged on behalf of the schools that any student who couldn't read at or reasonably close to grade level would be tutored at the city's expense.
In Milwaukee, it's true, a large number of students used their vouchers to join the private system. These students improved their performance, according to a comparison of before- and after- test scores by a Harvard University professor, by a subsantial margin.
But the really exciting story is that this dynamic of competition and choice has improved education for those who stay in the public schools too. Secretary Riley needn't take my word for it. Here is the testimony of Mayor Norquist, a life-long Democrat and strong supporter of President Clinton in 1992 and 1996:
"Fifteen years ago, I shared the view that vouchers would cripple the public schools and that allowing city students with caring parents to attend the school of their choice would hurt those left behind. Over the years, any discussion about school choice ultimately resulted in a divisive debate over who would benefit - private school children or public school children.
"But today, in Milwaukee at least, the debate about vouchers is over. And in response to the question 'Does school choice help private school children or public school children,' the answer is: 'Yes.' "
Our goal: Choices for every American family
Ultimately we believe that "the best department of education," as my friend Jack Kemp once put it, "is a family." And we mean that not only as a nice-sounding slogan, but as a practical guide to action - the key insight that should animate the whole American educational system.
In short we believe the public education system can be made just as good, or almost as good, as its components - the teachers and students and parents who try every day to make a flawed system work. Through their initiative and heroism, Americans are already managing to make this a learning society. All they need is a little help and they can work the same wonders for the public schools as well.
I believe we should set a national goal that by the year 2005, every family in America will have a real choice between at least three schools for its k-12 children. By a real choice, I mean a public-school-funded choice that everyone can afford: a financially viable alternative.
For this, no great federal program is required. If the Washington and the state capitals merely got out of the way, by reducing regulation, allowing unregulated charter schools to flourish, and ending the federally-funded jihad of the education blob and its pet scholars and elites against school choice, opportunities would expand.
As well, the number three, and the designation of every American family, are perforce arbitrary. Ideally, millions of parents will enjoy dozens of choices - as they do today in our voucherized college and university system, which is the envy of the world. But for many families, if there were two or three choices, we would have experienced a doubling or tripling of the options they have today.
This is a goal, not a rigid definition of a mandate, an entitlement, or a right. But if we were substantially closer to this goal - if many more parents had many more choices - then, to the extent we were closer, we reformers believe American education would be commensurately improved.
We are so confident in the dynamics of markets and choice - and in the wisdom and love of America's mothers and fathers - that we are prepared to say this should be the predominant goal for the new administration and its of federal and state counterparts. I will encourage the Republican Party to commit itself to this goal above all others, and I heartily encourage my friends in the Democratic Party to do the same.
Without a market and choice, there is little we can fix in education; with choice, there is little or nothing we cannot fix.
(This AdTI background paper is adapted and expanded
from Mr. Armey's address at the Odyssey Charter School
on February 22, 2000. Copyright © AdTI, all rights reserved.)