I have made three trips to Europe in the past six years and have visited a number of the places and viewed many of the structures and artifacts highlighted in the Clark tour.  These are awesome places, with enormous implications for the historical development of Christendom, which was synonymous with Western Civilization.  Many of these places are now mostly museums and tourist stops.  Who will sustain their viability in the story of the development of the greatest civilization in world history in the absence of their grounding in the worldview that produced them?  And, more importantly, who and what will follow in a next phase of civilizational evolution?  I wonder and I worry.

In an essay in The New Criterion, Charles Murray writes that a major stream of human accomplishment is fostered by a culture in which the most talented people believe that life has a purpose (“this is what I was put on this earth to do”) and that the function of life is to fulfill that purpose.  Further to his point, the characteristics of nihilism are at odds with the zest and life-affirming energy necessary to produce great art, architecture, and cultural artifacts, not to mention a broad range of other manifestations of human accomplishment,  the kind that is demonstrated in the tour by Lord Clark.  If life is purposeless, no one kind of project is intrinsically more important than any other kind.  And what is the most direct cause of the belief that one’s life has a purpose?  Belief in a personal God who wants you to use your gifts to the fullest, a belief that has been in constant decline in Europe for about a century.  There is a secular counterpart to this in the form of Aristotle’s pursuit of “the good”, a concept which has also been out of style for many years.

Can we turn around this sense of purposelessness?  Murray is optimistic, probably more than I am.  He believes that humans are ineluctably drawn to fundamental questions of existence and purpose and that the elites that have shaped culture in America and the West have avoided thinking about these fundamental questions for too long and will inevitably return to them.  I hope he is right before it’s too late.

In a recent article in Forbes magazine entitled “The Weak Dollar Caused the Great Recession”, Domitrovic returns to this latter point, explaining very convincingly that the rush to invest oceans of capital in housing, energy, and commodities between 2003 and 2008 was sparked by one thing–people lost trust in the value of the dollar.  And history tells us that when this happens, people rush to hedges against superfluous dollar production, which incidentally is still underway.  Domitrovic describes it in cause/effect terms:  Cause–comprehensive devaluation of the dollar on the part of its government masters (the Fed); effect–major investment shifting into hard assets corresponding to fear for the dollar’s soundness.  And as the flight from the dollar proceeded, the financial sector whiz kids were prevailed upon to provide products to accomodate the new opportunities and niches.

I have been writing about this for several years, and adding that the real problem is that the Federal Reserve has long since abandoned its primary mission, which was the preservation of the value of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

So, what’s new?  Finally, some members of Congress are responding in a realistic way to the underlying problem.  Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX) and Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) have filed counterpart bills in each house that will simply give the Federal Reserve a single mandate: to maintain price stability.  This would eliminate the dual mandate established by Congress during the Carter administration that included maintaining full employment, an unrealistic mission both now and then for an agency whose role was never contemplated to include micromanaging the economy as it has attempted to do in recent years.

More work will be needed, but this legislation will be a good start toward returning the Fed to its historical mission and possibly begin to restore the credibility of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed……….—Second paragraph, The U. S. Declaration of Independence.

The Declaration of Independence discusses the problem of government in terms of a contract.  Government is a relation of give and take, a contract, perforce, if we would follow out of which it grew.  Under such a contract rulers were accorded power, and the people consented to that power on consideration that they be accorded certain rights.  The task of statesmanship has always been  the redefinition of these rights in terms of a changing and growing social order.–Commonwealth Club Address, Franklin D. Roosevelt, September 23, 1932.

Much as Lincoln described in his “house divided” speech of 1858 as it pertained to slavery, the nation cannot continue half under one concept of the derivation of rights and half another, as represented by these two totally opposed interpretations; it will proceed all one or all the other.

FDR compounded the problem with his annual message to Congress in 1944, in which he outlined his “Second Bill of Rights”, adding wide-ranging rights to “security” to the rights of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, which he described as inadequate without the underlying economic security in the new self-evident rights to a job, a home, a fair wage, education, and medical care.

Herein lies the conflict between the negative rights embodied in our Constitution, which prescribes limited and enumerated powers for government, versus the progressive notion of positive rights as expressed by FDR.  This positive rights concept was recently suggested by Alan Blinder in the context of the health care debate when he writes, “Our country was founded on the idea that the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are unalienable.  Access to affordable health care is surely essential to two of these rights, maybe to all three”.  This is the house divided in a nutshell.

The implications of this gross misunderstanding of our grounding reach into every public issue and, as I have previously suggested on this conflict of visions as with many other issues, we cannot be neutral–there is no “moderate”.

I would add that we are certainly seeing serious problems in China as a result of this void in liberty, both in human and economic terms, and the most significant deficiency in the state economic model is the absence of Joseph Schumpeter’s principle of “creative destruction”, the bane of all state capitalistic models, which deprives the system of the natural function of rewarding success and disposing of failure and replacing old technologies with new ones,  thereby rationalizing the allocation of capital.  In fact, The Economist admits this in an indirect way, when it says “By turning companies into organs of the government, state capitalism simultaneously concentrates power and corrupts it.”  A related deficiency is that this concentration severely limits the free flow of ideas which drive innovation.  So as long as China disallows creative destruction to work its will, the days of its economic miracle are numbered, and when the bust comes and its corrupt system of crony capitalism hits the wall, as it most assuredly will, the good news will be the further discrediting of the state capitalism model one more time.

And it will further signal the day when it will no longer be possible to segregate the dynamics of the liberty of markets and human liberty, which is the elephant in the room in our diplomatic relationship with China.  The Chen affair is but the most recent manifestation of their moral dilemma and the trade off between human rights concerns and the need for open U. S. – China diplomatic dialogue.  President Obama says that “human rights are on the table in every conversation” with China.  Yes, but they are not pushed, and the elements of our relationship with China need not be mutually exclusive.  Ronald Reagan advanced both elements of our relationship with the Soviet Union forcefully and vocally–”the evil empire”, “tear down this wall”, etc.  It can and has been done successfully.

The leadership of the Chinese Communist regime has serious legitimacy problems, they know this, and they don’t know how to respond to the human rights issues as framed by a dissident like Chen without further undermining their legitimacy, but it’s only a matter of time until this facade crumbles.

This is one of the most fascinating books I have read.  Most of the ground he covers is of the major historical philosophical ideas I have studied in any number of previous presentations, but this was different.  Luc, who is a philosopher at the University of Paris, takes the reader from the question of what is philosophy, to the Greeks, to the victory of Christianity, to humanism, to postmodernity, and to contemporary philosophy in terms that relate to his concept of the relevance of these ideas to the meaning of life.  I disagree with some of what he has to say and he is not a man of religious faith, but he is not your every day leftist.  He has an engaging presentation style and is convincing that we ignore the prominence of  speculative philosophy in our life to our detriment.

A Skeptic Challenges a Christian: An Honest Conversation About Reasons to Believe, by Dr. David Pendergrass.

I learned of this book when its author, a theologian and philosopher, spoke at our church several months ago.  If you are a Christian and are often challenged by doubts, as most of us are, or if you are of another faith, a  non-believer or an agnostic, this book will be of interest.  It is an engaging conversation between a Christian who has seriously reasoned through the theological and philosophical commitments of his creed and an unbeliever who is at least willing to listen to the rationale for Christian faith while confronting and seriously doubting every proposition of it.  A fascinating presentation.

George F. Kennan: An American Life, by John Lewis Gaddis.

I have often said that, in order to fully understand the 20th century, one needs to read Witness, by Whittaker Chambers, and see the movie Judgment at Nuremberg.  I should probably have added Walter Lippman and the American Century, by Ronald Steel, and now certainly this excellent biography of the man who in various official roles  was either directly or indirectly involved in the development of almost every significant U. S.  foreign policy strategy from the beginning of World War II through the Vietnam War.  Kennan is noted most prominently, of course, for the so-called “long telegram” from Moscow shortly after the end of World War II expounding on the nature of the Soviet Union and the following anonymous “X” essay in Foreign Affairs shortly thereafter, as well as his authorship of the Soviet containment policy that dominated American foreign policy from the Truman administration to the beginning of the Reagan administration.  But he was influential in so many other ways that included his scholarship, his teaching and lectures around the world, his formal and informal advisory role to Presidents from Roosevelt to Clinton, and his influence on opinion leadership as a public intellectual.  This is great history and great insight into the life of an often controversial, but very gifted man who served us well.

To say that the decision on the ObamaCare case will be huge is the mother of all understatements, and I am convinced that the Obama regime will use the decision, if negative for him as I expect, as a platform to launch an all hands attack on the Court as a tool of the right that is obstructing the public interest, much as Franklin Roosevelt did in 1936-7, when the Court blocked his key New Deal legislation.  On the other hand, if the law survives and Obama is reelected, look for the most aggressive attack on constitutional freedoms since the Progressive Era in the early 20th century.

The other, and even more tragic, point that Steele makes is that before the 1960s the black American identity was based on a sense of common humanity and that race was an artificial and exploitative division between people.  Since that period, blacks and their anointed leaders and related race-baiters, aided and abetted by white guilt and an enabling media establishment,  have taken their historical victimization as the central theme of their group identity.  This is the larger disservice to our civic life.

Since the beginning of the Texas commitment to public education standards and accountability based reform in 1993, the state has made remarkable progress in student achievement.  Based on results measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), improvements in accountability have significantly raised achievement in reading and math among all student groups.  In addition, contrary to popular notions,  high school graduation rates have steadily increased over this period and have improved 2% over the past ten years, as recently noted by America’s Promise Alliance.

However, significant problems remain:  51% of students entering Texas community colleges need remediation and, more significantly, based on a recent study sponsored by Houston Endowment, only 20% of Texas students are earning any sort of postsecondary credential within six years of expected high school graduation.  The latter statistic represents the “pipeline” of those ready for college and the 21^st century workplace and is a more realistic measure of educational success and the challenge we face than any “dropout” calculation might indicate.

Our organization has identified the  primary challenge to Texas public education by 2020 to produce 80% postsecondary ready high school graduates without the need for remediation—a very tall order.

How do we do this?  With a serious commitment to the following fundamental points.

First, we must defend and demand accountability.  Postsecondary readiness should be the organizing principle of PreK-12 education and, when fully implemented, House Bill 3 (2009) for the first time makes it so.  The new accountability system shifts the student achievement focus from “passing” to “readiness” for higher education and the 21^st century workplace, a major change from the previous system. As a result, the national organization Achieve, Inc. gave Texas its only top rating in accountability criteria in terms of its inclusion of all four critical college and career readiness indicators.

Accountability must have three components—diagnostics to assist educators in determining the intervention needs of students; transparency for parents and taxpayers; and consequences, for educators in terms of compensation and continuing employment and for students in terms of promotion and graduation.

Postsecondary readiness, in addition to meaning fully qualified for college and/or the workplace without remediation, must also mean “one standard, multiple pathways, equal rigor” in the Texas recommended high school plan, so that students must have multiple pathway choices to college or to a meaningful career represented by industry standards, with equal rigor of curriculum.  The proxy for this standard is community college readiness without the need for remediation.

How do we assess this standard of readiness?  Texas is committed to an assessment that measures student achievement against the standards at each grade level that indicate what students should know and when they should know it, leading to the postsecondary readiness standard at graduation.  In addition, we should have the capability to measure the value-added to each student’s achievement on an annual basis, as a diagnostic measure of annual progress of the student and the effectiveness of educators.

This segues to the debate on testing, and it is difficult to cut through the rhetoric and paranoia on this subject, except to say that every meaningful pursuit in life involves an assessment of achievement related to a standard.  The abuses alleged in the testing process appear to be more a problem related to constant practice and benchmark testing at the school district level than problems with the requirement of the state accountability system, which are benign by comparison. It seems that opponents of high stakes standardized testing are fighting an old war; the old TAKS regime is gone and we should give the new system a chance to work.

Second, we should enhance choice and competition and promote the evolution from a “school system” to “a system of schools”, with robust education choices for parents and students that meet their needs, and with funding that follows the student.  To begin, we should adopt comprehensive public school choice throughout the state, subject to capacity.  But more capacity for choice is needed, and we should expand and improve the charter school system, with more co-location of charters with traditional schools, equalized funding, and a more robust “parent trigger” to authorize parents to change the management of unacceptable schools, and we should provide a state funded scholarship for students in chronically failing schools to transfer to any school of their choice.

Third, we must adopt policies that enable deregulation and innovation in the schools and move away from the top down, compliance and input driven system to one that is output and performance based.  The role of the state beyond accountability should primarily be to enable and encourage new teaching and learning methods through the use of technology and innovations in scheduling and delivery.  Schools should be free from unnecessary state bureaucracy and the time-honored management principle of “authority commensurate with responsibility and accountability” should be the prevailing operational model.  This should include eliminating the role of the state in managing local human resources, including compensation of educators and arbitrary class size restrictions.  And we should expand truly alternative routes to the teaching profession and hold teacher preparation programs accountable for the effectiveness of the product they deliver.

Fourth, we must spend education dollars much more efficiently.  In all of the current litigation on school finance, we must ask ourselves, which is the most important consideration—adequacy, equity, or efficiency?  I submit the following response: (1) aggregate statewide funding is adequate and, in fact, public education funding from all sources over the past 14 years has increased significantly more than the increase in enrollment and inflation combined, even when adding a factor for the increase in special needs students;  (2) equitable funding is questionable in many ways, including between administration  and the classroom, between and among many rural and urban areas, and between traditional and charter schools; (3) the “Robin Hood” finance system is a failed attempt at equity; and (4) the constitutional mandate for school “efficiency” should have priority in driving the school finance debate.

Let’s face it—the current education delivery system is not sustainable.  We cannot continue to finance this top-down, compliance and input driven system.  Only when we replace it with a more competitive, deregulated, and innovative system that incentivizes educators and enables productivity with true financial accountability will we know what funding adequacy and equity really mean.

All four of these areas of reform must “hang together” as a comprehensive whole, but it begins with the state system of accountability for results, for without the infrastructure provided by this system the other pieces have no coherence.

A formidable challenge?  No doubt, but we must get on with our response to it.  Contact us at www.texaseducationreform.org  to learn how you can help.