During the past couple of weeks, there have been a number of articles and features marking the 25th anniversary of “A Nation at Risk”, the groundbreaking 1983 report on the dismal status of American public education, wherein the most famous line was the one that served as the national wake-up call:  “If an unfriendly power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”  Pretty bracing words, indeed.

Of the half dozen or so of these pieces I have read, interestingly enough, the best is a joint statement from a group of center-left organizations that commends the national commission that authored the report for recognizing that “the twin goals of equity and high-quality schooling have profound and practical meaning for our economy and society, and we cannot permit one to yield to the other either in principle or practice”, while lamenting the fact that “in 25 years, our country hasn’t gotten this part right, not even close.” 

George Will makes the point that in 1976, for the first time in its 119-year history, the National Education Association, the teachers’ union, endorsed a presidential candidate, Jimmy Carter, who repaid it by creating the Department of Education, and education policy has never been the same.  This act has been the bane of most true reformers ever since, which makes it ironic to note that one of the primary planks of the Republican “revolution” of 1994 was to close this department, while the crowning domestic achievement of the administration of George W. Bush has been the No Child Left Behind Act, the most sweeping federal education program since the original Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965!

In fairness to President Bush and my friends who helped him craft this bold experiment in standards and accountability-based reform from the federal level, it has accomplished much in the way of significantly raising the national consciousness that our expectations for all of our children are much too low and that we are not asking nearly enough from either our children or our educators.  It has its flaws in engineering and many more in its implementation, but let’s give credit where it is due, to a bold and warranted effort to shake up the education establishment.  It is now highly unlikely that the NCLB Act will be reauthorized prior to the end of this term, and I don’t hear much from the presidential candidates about their education priorities. 

I am not a big believer in top-down, compliance-based and prescriptive reform, particularly from the federal level, and I was sympathetic with the revolutionary platform of ’94, but it is unrealistic to assume that we can entirely rid ourselves of deep involvement by the federal government in K-12 education.  Let’s just hope that President Bush’s central message of the “soft bigotry of low expectations” has reached the desired audience with enough impact that a new administration can now proceed to re-structure the federal role in the system into one that sets very high standards and accountability with consequences, but with much more flexibility for implementing the standards at the state level.  It remains the central civil rights issue of our time.

Let’s be clear: we know where Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama will take the country in tax policy–roll back the Bush tax rate cuts, restore the death tax, reverse the capital gains and dividend tax cuts, increase the cost of capital, thereby damaging investment, job creation, and prosperity.  It works every time.  It also works in reverse every time, and this is where I get nervous.  We all know that John McCain initially did not support the Bush tax cuts, but since then he has  “grown” into support of them.  But if you read his pronouncements on tax policy, you get the distinct impression that he has bought into the result, but not the theory, at least entirely. 

Memo to McCain:  supply side economics works and it should not require a Ph. D. in economics to explain it; further, you can’t win the tax policy argument by playing on the home field of the Democrats, which is the “static” scoring of tax cuts and the notion that tax cuts have a “cost” that create larger deficits and therefore must be “paid for”.  Federal tax revenues have exploded since the Bush tax cuts of 2003.  All of history is on the side of supply side theory, but McCain needs to buy into the soundness of the theory, not be baited into an argument based on static, non-dynamic scoring or worse, the politics of “fairness” and “envy”, in which case he will lose.

In addition there is another aspect of “tax” policy that matters very much: it is the implications of Federal Reserve monetary policy in the form of the penalty that is tantamount to a tax imposed on average Americans by its failure to protect the value of the dollar.

The Wall Street Journal notes in a recent editorial that since 2003 the dollar price of oil has risen by 273% compared to 146% in euros, meaning that had the dollar maintained the same purchasing power as the euro over this time period, today’s price of oil would be below $70 per barrel.  This is a tax on Americans as surely as the one they pay on April 15.  So clarity in tax policy also means recognition of the importance of the primary responsibilty of the Federal Reserve to protect the value of the dollar.  Again, it should not require a Ph. D. to understand and explain this, and we certainly know who will get the blame come election time, but McCain is strangely silent.

Two recent books to recommend, which have interesting overlaps in the several ways in which they treat the history of liberalism in America:

**Camelot and the Cultural Revolution, by James Piereson.  The subtitle of this book describes it well–”how the assassination of John F. Kennedy shattered American liberalism”.  This is a fascinating and unique treatment of the history of  late 20th and early 21st century American politics, how they have been shaped by the liberal attempt to build and manage the Kennedy myth and legacy since 1963, and how that effort undermined the liberal worldview and helped bring about the cultural upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s.  According to Piereson in well-documented narrative, these developments led directly to the transformation of progressive liberalism to the anti-American tendencies of today’s political left and what he calls “punitive liberalism”, now reaching its peak of influence in the fever swamps of the far left of the Democratic Party.

 **Liberal Fascism, by Jonah Goldberg.  Again, the subtitle is instructive–”the secret history of the American left from Mussolini to the politics of meaning”.  George Orwell once said, “Those who would change a culture corrupt its language, particularly by hiding the reality of an evil they desire behind a less revealing name.”  This observation has probably never been more appropriate than in the use of the word fascism.  Goldberg does a brilliant job in fully documenting the history of this word as it applies to the regimes of the 20th century and, more importantly, the degree to which it has been corrupted by the left to disguise policies they desire while condemning the political right for aiding and abetting fascist tendencies.  His basic argument is that early 20th century progressivism, the forerunner of the liberalism of today, has its emotional and doctrinal roots in European fascism, which is essentially and has always been an ideology of the left, not the right as the mythology has presented it.   After reading this book, I have a much different perspective on the underlying themes of current liberal discourse. 

It comes as a surprise to many that there is currently much more substantive policy work underway in Texas than during the legislative session.  In fact, someone sent me a list that indicated a total of over 20 appointed or elected boards, commissions, and committees, not including the interim legislative committe work, have been authorized by the legislature to strategize on means by which public education policy can be enhanced to impact the quality of student achievement.  I serve on one of those, the High School Completion and Success Initiatives Council, charged with the responsiblity to draft a strategy for the Texas Education Agency to use in allocating resources to the various initiatives designed to improve the post-secondary readiness of our children.

In addition, the organization I chair, the Texas Institute for Education Reform (TIER), www.texaseducationreform.org, is involved with all of the more critical policy issues that are the subject of the other boards and commissions.  Of these, the one that is occupying the most significant part of our time is the Select Committee on Public School Accountability, which has been charged with the responsibility to develop recommendations to the legislature on the restructure of the Texas school accountability system–a pretty hot ticket, needless to say.

In this regard, TIER was asked to submit testimony at the April meeting of the Committee in San Antonio, and I thought my brief remarks preceding a panel discussion might be of interest, since they touch on the critical elements of the issue:

Texas has been a national leader in public school standards and accountability-based reform for over 20 years, and our system has been properly credited for significantly improving student performance and closing the achievement gap between student groups. This system has served us well, but it is now time to step back, take a long look at our needs for the new century, and create the next generation of accountability for Texas that will keep it in the forefront of student achievement growth. We should use this opportunity to strengthen and streamline standards for student learning, student assessments, data systems, school and district ratings, and the rewards, sanctions, and interventions for student, school, and district performance. TIER believes that the benefits of a good public school accountability system break down into three essential components: ·         Transparency – for parents and communities to know in simplest terms how their schools are serving their children so that they can make the right choices for their benefit.·         Diagnostics and tools – for educators so that they can make the necessary adjustments to correct underachievement in student outcomes.·         Consequences – for students in terms of promotion and graduation; for educators in terms of compensation and employment; for schools and districts in terms of accreditation. Various groups and advocates would weight these factors differently.  For TIER, it seems that they should have approximately equal weight.  Some believe that the current system is much too punitive and that high stakes consequences should play a much smaller role.  But we believe that this is a high stakes world, and that without real consequences there is no accountability.  TIER has recently completed a comprehensive paper, now available on our web site, outlining our views on the next generation of accountability for Texas.  Our vision for the next generation of accountability is built upon ten principles explained in our paper.  I won’t cover them all, but will briefly touch on the more important ones.  (1)      Most important and possibly most revolutionary – Make postsecondary readiness for all students the goal of accountability.  Let me make this clear: postsecondary success for all, defined as the range of academic, workforce, and social proficiency that high school students should acquire to successfully transition to skilled employment, advanced military training, an associate’s degree, a bachelor’s degree, or technical certification.  For policy, this means multiple pathways, one standard, equal rigor.   For accountability, it follows that schools and districts should be rated and accredited annually on the basis of increasing the percentage of students progressing toward and reaching this postsecondary readiness standard.  (2)      We must have sound statistical design of our assessments, which means that they must measure the full range of student performance, the value-added to each student’s achievement during the year, and each student’s progress, or growth toward the exit standard of postsecondary success.   (3)      The accountability system must be based on sufficient capacity and resources to enable schools to succeed.  This encompasses, for example, the data system enhancements contemplated by HB 2238 from the 80^th legislative session, but also entails more investment at the district level. And in case you think I am completely out of character, I don’t have in mind across the board formula increases, but rather targeted programmatic funding that is designed to meet the technological and human resource needs of districts as well as enable innovation so that they can meet much higher standards of performance.  (4)      I have already touched on consequences, which are an absolutely essential principle, so I won’t belabor the point, except to add that the consequences we have in mind are not all negative; they emphasize incentive based compensation for the more effective educators based on value-added assessment.  (5)      Accountability must be a state/local partnership. We must have the involvement of all stakeholders because the final implementation will be executed only by the professionals in our school buildings. Finally, although not directly a component of your work, I want to comment on curriculum standards, the enhancement of which is an absolute prerequisite for its success.  Everything we are doing in enhancing accountability systems will be useless if we do not get our Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills standards right.  We all know that they are not nearly rigorous enough, not objective enough, not measurable, and not well aligned from grade to grade.  And they are the platform for the entire edifice—the curriculum, the assessments, the accountability.  So I would simply urge this body to send a message to the current TEKS revision deliberations underway at the State Board of Education to get it right, and very soon; otherwise, very little else matters.