“Before the sun sets on this terrible struggle, our flag will be recognized throughout the world as a symbol of freedom on the one hand, and overwhelming power on the other.”—Gen. George C. Marshall as quoted by Vice President Dick Cheney

Last June I wrote of “the shake up we need” that will prepare us for a fundamentally different kind of warfare, a kind that is in some ways alien to our value systems as they have evolved, a pre-emptive war, a total war, one that results in the complete transformation of the enemy’s society. Well, we’re almost there, but I am shocked that many of our opinion leaders still shrink from this reality.

Saddam Hussein must go. Now. Not after re-instituting United Nations arms inspections (a red herring); not after we prove to an international court of world opinion that he is harboring weapons of mass destruction; not after we or one of our allies has been attacked again; and not after we have commitments from a multinational coalition of allies. Certainly President Bush should make the case, forcefully and with as much candor as prudent, and he should also ask for Congressional approval, not that he needs it except as a politically unifying gesture. But the evidence is in, and I can’t improve on Lady Margaret Thatcher’s words: “His continued survival after comprehensively losing the Gulf War has done untold damage to the West’s standing in a region where the only unforgivable sin is weakness. His flouting of the terms on which hostilities ceased has made a laughingstock of the international community. His appalling mistreatment of his own countrymen continues unabated. It is clear to anyone willing to face reality that the only reason Saddam took the risk of refusing to submit his activities to U. N. inspectors was that he is exerting every muscle to build weapons of mass destruction. To allow this process to continue because the risks of action to arrest it seem too great would be foolish in the extreme.” There is no doubt that we are at the dawn of a transformation in foreign policy, diplomacy, and our role in the world. This should have been obvious since 9-11-01 and the enunciation of the Bush Doctrine. Steve Forbes says we are “at the creation”, no less so than at the end of World War II. The first real test of the new doctrine will come in Iraq.

Unquestionably, President Bush’s use of the word “evil” is unsettling to the sensibilities of the postmodern mind. We’ve grown accustomed to dealing with “root causes” and avoiding absolutes. To Bush, however, evil is not an adjective, it’s a noun, and it exists in objective reality. The use of this terminology shows a profound understanding of how the world works, particularly the Middle Eastern world steeped in Nietzsche’s “will to power”.

What if the U. S. is alone in this campaign? I’ve written before about American exceptionalism and unilateralism and the criticism of these tendencies by our erstwhile friends and allies. In a recent Wall Street Journal essay, Victor Davis Hanson notes that one of the reasons we often must stand alone is that we really are different. Our Constitution alone preserves the sanctity of the individual. And I would add that our Civil War re-founding firmly established the U. S. as a culture built on the idea of the universality of certain self-evident truths about human nature, unqualified by race or nationality. And while the U. S. has interests to protect and citizens to defend, we are never without a sense of idealism and exceptionalism in our foreign policy. Most of the caution and responsible opposition to war with Iraq has come from advocates (Scowcroft, et al) of foreign policy realism, or “realpolitik” as we called it during the Cold War. This was the “balance of power” containment policy without a strong moral component that held sway before Ronald Reagan changed the objective to one of victory.

The Bush Doctrine, taken to its ultimate conclusion, will be messy because it prefers reformation over stability for stability’s sake. But it will transform the Middle East and send the message to the subjects of the authoritarian Islamic regimes that self-determination and assimilation with the modern world are realistic possibilities. Read the President’s June 1 commencement speech at West Point for an indication of how the world has changed. As Michael Ledeen has noted, this is not a manhunt, it is the opening salvo of a great revolutionary war. And remember that there is no peace and no security without victory.

As we begin the new school year and, in Texas, look toward the next level of school performance accountability, I believe it is important that we look beyond the test-driven accountability system, as useful as it has been, for more instructive leading indicators of progress toward excellence in public education. As Texas Education Commissioner Felipe Alanis said in a recent appearance in Houston, “it’s not about where we are, it’s about where we are going”. And I suggest we even look past the new, more rigorous Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) test as such an indicator. As anyone reasonably conversant with education performance knows, the success of the students in the classroom can be directly correlated with the quality of the teacher in the classroom. This has been confirmed by numerous studies, most particularly those that focus on value added for individual students after controlling for background characteristics like socioeconomic status. What this means for those of us who are concerned about “where we are going” is that the quality of our teacher preparation system is the absolutely critical element in the enhancement of the quality of our children’s education.

So what is the quality of our teacher preparation system? For a current status report, I recommend “Meeting the Highly Qualified Teachers Challenge: The Secretary’s Report on Teacher Quality”, recently released by Secretary of Education Rod Paige. To be blunt, it isn’t a pretty picture on a national basis, and Texas is no exception. The report describes teacher preparation generally as “a broken system” that is “failing to produce the types of highly qualified teachers that the No Child Left Behind Act demands”. There are many specific criticisms in the report, the most glaring of which are the very low academic standards for teachers. For example, on one widely used teacher certification test, only one state out of 29 set its passing score near the national average (50th percentile) in reading. This is particularly discouraging when we realize that studies have consistently documented an important correlation between a teacher’s verbal and cognitive skills and student achievement, particularly in the early formative years. In my experience with reading intervention in the Houston area, I have found that almost none of the teacher preparation programs are properly preparing their teachers to teach at-risk children how to read. Over 50% of Houston area fourth graders do not read at grade level and in 129 of the Houston ISD’s 177 elementary schools, the average third grade reading level is below the 50th percentile in national norm-referenced testing. You would think that the curriculum of area colleges of education would be highly focused on the research-based methodologies that have been proven to work with these children, but, sad to say, they remain mired in the constructivist, “reading comes natural” mindset.

The Secretary’s report is especially critical of the present system of teacher certification and the degree to which it is overly beholden to the traditional route to preparation through the colleges of education with their emphasis on pedagogical instruction versus academic content. It applauds the expansion of alternative routes to certification that bypass the traditional system, but laments the fact that often these are still loaded with too many non-academic content requirements.

The No Child Left Behind Act requires that all teachers be “highly qualified” by the end of the 2005-06 school year in order for their schools to continue to qualify for Federal Title I financial assistance. The exact definition of “highly qualified” is still being refined, but there is no doubt that the bar has been raised for teacher preparation programs and, based on the current status of these programs, there is a huge challenge ahead. As a member of the Texas State Board for Educator Certification, I have more than a passing interest in this problem, but anyone who has a stake in public education—parents, taxpayers, employers, public officials—should be asking what we are doing to meet this daunting challenge. We hear a lot about the teacher quantity problem, but not enough about the quality problem. If we fail to meet this challenge, all our progress in public education accountability will have been for naught.